hey guys Heidi prep here welcome back to my Channel today we are talking about fearful avoidance and on-again off-again relationships so those of you who know a fearful avoidant have dated a fearful avoidant or are a fearful avoidant probably know that this type has an extreme tendency to get into a relationship then kind of panic and get out of it and then spend a little bit of time out of it and then go back in and repeat this process over and over and over now this won't be the case for all fearful avoidance but it is a strong pattern that I've noticed so in this video I want to talk both about why this happens the way it does and also how you can break this cycle if it is you who is the fearful avoidant in question and you would like to stop going back again and again and again to the same relationships that you know in your gut aren't actually working out for you so first of all why does this pattern happen keep in mind that fearful avoidance have a negative view of themselves and an negative view of other people and this makes dating as well as being single really difficult for people with this patterning because it tends to create this kind of pendulum swing right so you'll get into a relationship as a fearful avoidant and start feeling really good and feeling really connected and then as soon as it gets really intimate and really vulnerable something inside you kind of panics right and you want out you feel smothered maybe you're starting to feel that engulfment that enmeshment you're worried that you're not going to be able to set boundaries you're thinking about all the limits that are going to be placed on you if you're in this relationship long term and because you never really learn to interpersonally address those worries and concerns and to set healthy boundaries in relationships your instinct is to swing the pendulum in the other direction and get out of the relationship so I think that very often this is the case when we see fearful avoidance getting into relationships particularly with people who are a little bit more anxious than they are their fears are likely to get activated once the relationship goes beyond the kind of initial fun flirting getting to know each other phases and starts to feel more like a real commitment that's likely to be the time when they're going to have that fear of intimacy triggered and potentially initiate the relationship's first breakup so this breakup often happens because of that negative view of others right the closer the fearful avoidance gets to someone else and the more they become intimately connected to someone the more that kind of disgust response that comes online for avoidant types around emotional intimacy gets activated and the more they want out the problem is that once they are out fearful avoidance often doesn't properly grieve the relationship what they do instead is go into avoidant mode so they convince themselves I feel perfectly fine that relationship didn't mean anything to me it was the wrong relationship I can go it alone I'm strong I'm capable I don't need a relationship I think there's also a strong pattern of a lot of fearful avoidance believing themselves to be avoidant so the there's this total lack of awareness around the fact that they are kind of chronically seeking out intimate relationships and the reason they're doing that is because they have this repressed need for comfort for intimacy for closeness and when they are single the story they're often telling themselves is I don't need anybody I don't need any comfort I am tough I'm strong I'm capable I don't need to grieve or mourn relationships and then the second they get triggered the second they get to a point whether it's two weeks three months a year down the line that they really need comfort that they really do encounter their own vulnerability they don't have the coping skills to handle that internally and often they don't have the close intimate Connections in the form of friendships or family relationships to find people they can go to for True deep Comfort around those wounds so the first thing that comes to mind is well who is the last person who gave me Comfort attentiveness who didn't judge me when I showed vulner ability and they're likely to go right back into their last relationship and this is one of the biggest distinguishing factors between fearful avoidance and secure attachment so people with secure attachment Styles tend to have a lot of connections that they maintain whether they are in or out of a relationship where the people in their lives actually know them they know their fears their vulnerabilities the things they struggle with and they can go to those people for support whether they're in or out of a romantic relationship with fearful avoidance often what you'll see is this kind of bravado socially so you'll see someone who kind of Prides themselves on being too cool for feelings or for being so fast paced and fast-moving and having this really exciting and interesting life or someone who is really into let's say psychology or the human mind and who wants to intellectualize their feelings to act socially as though they are above them but because the fearful avoidance doesn't let a lot of people actually get really close and get to know their true vulnerabilities they don't have a lot of places they can go to for support when they need their vulnerabilities to be seen but often because Partnerships become a lot more intimate and a lot more deep for them than their other relationships this is usually the first place they think of going back to instinctually when they need to feel like they will be supported and cared for without being judged now there is a true barrier here that I want to address which is that if you have a fearful attachment style it's because of early wounding and often it's because there's a lot of trauma in your history so it's not your fault it's not particularly uncommon that you struggle to connect with people deeply the reason you struggle to connect with people deeply is often because the average person has led a very different life than you've LED they have dealt with a lot less trauma a lot less wounding and a lot less of the kind of secondary issues that come up when you have something like complex trauma that inhibit your ability to live in the world in a more I don't want to say normal but more kind of socially linear fashion like I find you rarely find fearful avoidance on that kind of straightforward like school and then get a career and then have a family there isn't that same sort of straight narrow progression that you see with a lot of other people so a lot of the time people struggle to understand people with fearful avoidant patterning because they have been through so much they have often also found very um creative and alternative ways to make a living to form relationships to get by in life and it's difficult for them to find other people who can understand why they're doing things the way they're doing them so when the fearful avoidance does find someone who understands them or who takes the time to get to know them really deeply and understand their ins and outs it is really hard to let go of that person because often it's really difficult to find people you can connect with that deeply as a fearful avoidance who can understand you on that level so I want to bring some kind of humanity into this and say that it makes sense if you have fearful avoidant patterning that the connections you form that are really really deep and strong you're actually going to be a little bit more incentivized than the average person I'm going to say a lot more incentivized than the average person to hold on to those connections it's hard to let them go because it's hard to find them because you are in a bit of a unique situation but then the problem is that as a fearful avoid the more intimate you get with someone the more stormy and intense the relationship is likely to get because all of these wounds come up all of these triggers come up all of these unprocessed traumas get brought to the surface in a way that normally doesn't happen when you're alone and you're living in a more avoidant way where you're not actively confronting your own wounding which is why one of the key differences between let's say the anxious style and the fearful avoidance style is that the fearful avoidance style often feels a lot more calm and a lot more centered when they're single versus when they're in a relationship because all of that wounding is being brought to the surface and the anxious style feels a lot more calm when they're in a relationship versus when they're alone because when they're alone is when all of that wounding tends to get brought to the surface so when you're fearful avoidant you break up with someone it often feels good for a little bit until it doesn't right until something happens until some sort of Crisis comes up until you need support on something or maybe until you run into the person again and you see them and all of these emotions that you were repressing about the breakup about the things that that person used to bring to your life almost arrive back in your body in a way that can be very surprising and when I was really deep and fearful avoidant patterning I remember this happening to me like I would run into someone who I hadn't seen in six months and all of a sudden it was like I would be flooded with these emotions that seemed to come out of nowhere like in my head I'd be thinking I don't miss that person I haven't really thought about them that much since we broke up and then as soon as I was in their presence again it was like I could feel it all all of the things that my body had been numbing out while I'd been in my avoidant patterning so there are different things that can kind of happen here if you're fearful avoidant that can trigger you wanting to get back into the dynamic but without going too much more into that I want to start talking about how you can break this cycle because having on-again off-again relationships is really taxing on the emotional system on the nervous system it's emotionally exhausting for for both people and a lot of the time I think that people don't realize how deeply fearful avoidance don't want to be in their own patterning right it's not fun and exciting drama it's exhausting and it's disheartening and it's really painful so we're going to talk about some things you can do if you are fearful avoidant and you recognize that you have a tendency to go in and out of on-again off-again relationships what you can do to break those patterns and start to move in the direction of secure attachment which is the direct inverse of that I'm not okay you're not okay negative view of self negative view of others pattern that the fearful avoidant has people with secure attachment Styles believe I'm okay you're okay so there's a positive view of self positive view of others and this is a very long road but let's talk about how we can tackle this particular obstacle as we are walking along that road so I think that the number one thing that I had to learn about breakups when I was deep in my own fearful avoidant patterning was that it was not time to break up unless I was ready to commit to going no contact with that person so in my younger years particularly in my early and mid-20s I had this pattern of chronically breaking up with people but wanting to stay in so going let's still be friends though or let's hang out once in a while so I would get into a relationship feel overwhelmed by the intimacy but not actually feel ready to lose that person so I would break off the relationship but ask if we could still be friends and still keep talking to them and still keep going to each other for support and eventually we would end up right back in a relationship in not too long and the reason why this happens is because when you have fearful avoidant patterning you often don't think that you can set boundaries so you didn't really learn proper boundary settings inside Intimate Relationships when you were a child so now you think if I'm in a relationship I have to have no boundaries be completely enmeshed I can't ask for space I can't ask for time for myself I can't ask for anything to be different than the way that the other person wants it to be in the relationship and so the only way I'll get time space alone time boundaries is if I break up with the person but the key to this is learning you can set boundaries in relationships so if you're not ready to stop talking to a person if you're not ready to have them out of your life and you actually still want them as a very consistent part of your life chances are you're probably not ready to break up with that person you are just feeling overwhelmed and this is what your attachment system is screaming at you to do but in that case the actual solution is to learn to set boundaries inside the relationship is to learn to ask directly for what you want to tell the other person when you're uncomfortable with something to ask for alone time to ask for more autonomy or space whatever it is that you need to feel comfortable within the relationship if you are feeling that urge to break things off but stay friends it's possible you need to just spend some time sitting with the needs that are going unmet for you in your relationship and thinking about whether you can bring them up and change the relationship in a way that doesn't not require you to break it off now on the flip side of this if you feel quite sure you're in the wrong relationship and you want to break it off and your reasons for wanting to break it off are completely legitimate it's not about not having boundaries or whatever it is you just truly think you're incompatible with that person I highly recommend you do not try to stay friends staying friends with an ex without crossing boundaries or backsliding is a difficult thing to do it requires a lot of self boundaries and the people who are best at doing this are probably secure people right so unless you are a hundred percent sure that you have Rock Solid self boundaries that you will not turn to that person on a night when you're feeling lonely and look to them for some sort of comfort and try to bring them back into this net or try to keep leaning on them as though they are an attachment figure you're just not sleeping with them anymore or whatever it is do not stay friends with that person that is unkind to them it's unkind to your inner child and it just indicates you're not actually ready to break up so when you go into a breakup as a fearful avoidant be ready to have no more contact with that person I would recommend for a period of minimum six months and this is going to be kind of the key that helps you understand whether you're truly ready to break up with someone or whether you're just freaking out because you don't know how to set boundaries and you're trying to take steps back and you haven't really learned how to do that while staying in the relationship now tip number two for ending the pattern of on-again off-again relationships as a fearful avoidant is you have to actually mourn the relationship when it ends and this can be a frustrating thing to hear because for the majority of my life I literally didn't know what people were talking about when they talked about morning relationships which sounds ridiculous and like sociopathic but it's true I would leave a relationship and just feel nothing like feel completely numbed out emotionally feel if anything like a little bit empowered and like I'm better off without this I don't need relationships I'd be very in my ego right and what I didn't know how to do was actually sit and feel and experience the loss of someone that I had loved I had no ability to stay regulated enough to be present with my own pain and so what I recommend if you're trying to break this patterning is commit after a relationship ends to a minimum again of about six months of being alone of not only not going back to your ex but not covering that wound up with any new relationship because any new relationship you go into in that time is kind of like putting a Band-Aid over an unhealed wound but like a Band-Aid that doesn't actually allow something to heal so that when you take the Band-Aid off the wound is still there you need to give yourself time and space to notice what you're missing to wake up in the morning and remember the way that your ex would bring you coffee in bed and you have nobody to bring you coffee in bed and to feel those moments where you really miss that person and if it doesn't happen day to day it will happen this is why I recommend about six months six months is a long enough period of time that you will go through a lot of things that trigger memories of your ex so you might feel fine for like two months and then on month three it is your birthday and you wish that they were there to come celebrate with you and to make your day super special or maybe there is a new album that comes out from an artist that you and your ex used to love and you're gonna wish you could text them and moving through all of those moments without covering up or distracting yourself from the pain means that you are actually allowing that person to leave your system you aren't keeping them kind of compartmentalized in this little box that as soon as it opens back up inside of you because you see them or something that reminds you of them triggers that place you suddenly just feel the overwhelming need to go back to them right you have to create a period of time where you intentionally interact with those tiny triggers with those tiny moments where you really deeply desperately want them back and you have to let yourself feel that and watch yourself get over that feeling and only then will you be safeguarding yourself against those future situations where you run into them or where something reminds you of them and suddenly all of the memories that are good come flooding back right you will be stealing yourself for those moments by conscious and intentionally encountering them little by little over time so something I did after leaving my last long-term relationship was I opened a Google doc and I filled it up with things I wanted to tell them and things that I wished I could thank them for things I still felt mad at them for things that happened to me that I wished I could tell them but I knew that I didn't want to disturb their Peace by calling them up and telling them and I still go open that Google doc and fill out more things and it's really sad and I usually cry while writing in that Google doc and it also allows me to process those emotions without disturbing someone else's piece and drawing someone else back into this web because I'm having a difficult moment that I don't know how to cope with right so finding some sort of practice like that writing a letter or journaling or going to a therapist or a close friend and talking about those times when you miss them is how you move on and how you grieve relationships and I'm going to make a whole video about this I'm sure but I think that a really big problem with fearful avoidance is that when we have this patterning it's because we didn't learn to grieve properly because the source of our pain was often our attachment figures and so we had to hide our pain from them in order to stay close to them and it created this kind of impossible scenario internally where no one was ever around to help us process the pain and the emotional chaos that came from the environments we were in early on and so we didn't learn how to grieve and let go and allow ourselves to be supported in that process and this might be your opportunity to learn that skill which very naturally leads me to tip number three which is work as hard as you possibly can and it will be work on developing close intimate relationships with other people who are not romantic Partners this in my opinion is maybe the most important step of healing as a fearful avoidant period because remember the fearful avoidant wound is the wound of needing comfort from the person who hurt you because when you were a child your attachment figure was often inconsistent and they would be maybe scary abusive dangerous towards you in one moment and yet you had nowhere to go for Comfort but but that very same attachment figure and so in your mind this kind of idea started forming that the person who hurt me is the only person who can help me heal from that hurt and if you can learn to break this thought pattern this is probably the single biggest hack you can possibly do on your own attachment system is learning to seek support not from the attachment figure who the issue is related to so if you have a fight with your partner and you can learn to seek healthy secure support which by the way is different than let's say emotionally venting to your friend about your partner and just painting them as this horrible person and getting your friend to go yeah yeah they're terrible you should leave them you need to be able to express your true vulnerabilities to other people that means going to someone and going I feel like I don't know how to make my relationship work I'm really struggling and I'm afraid that if I tell anyone what's actually going on they're just going to tell me to leave but I know I'm not ready to leave because that's usually the truth right when we're in these really high conflict scenarios and we think that the only person who can fix it is our partner it's often because our partner is the only person who has the full context because there is a lot of Shame and embarrassment that comes with having fearful avoidant patterning and having these relationships that were worried other people will judge is being really messed up If we're honest with them about what's happening within them but I think that the work really gets done here when we find ways to seek secure support outside of the relationship so for me this has looked like finding an attachment therapist so someone I can speak to who is a professional who understands the ins and outs of fearful patterning and of insecure attachment relationships and who I know is not judging me and is not just going to tell me get out and who's not going to believe my ego stories when I go in with a whole bunch of ego but who's actually going to meet me where I'm at emotionally and help me sort things out from my side of the offense it's meant joining groups like codependents Anonymous and adult children of Alcoholics and dysfunctional families where the whole purpose of the group is to unpack the patterning that you have and to listen without giving advice to other people's experiences in similar situations it's meant over time deepening the friendships I have to include more of my vulnerable self and less of my ego self so instead of acting like this person who never feels anything who is above all of that and who never gets disregulated I now have at least one friend I can go to and cry in front of I can go to and admit I don't know what I'm thinking or feeling and that it's going to take me some time to figure it out and the more relationships or the more situations we can put ourselves in that allow us that space to be vulnerable in a way that we normally only are with our partners the less dependent we're going to be on any one particular partner right so then if we leave the relationship now our need to have someone we can be vulnerable and share with is no longer completely gone and cut off from us it's now diffused we have all of these support systems that we've been slowly building over time so it's no longer this pendulum swing where okay our needs for vulnerability and intimacy were getting met and now none of them are getting met and we have to completely detach from them it's more of a centered process where in a relationship we can be vulnerable and share and be open with our partner and out of a relationship we have other support systems that allow us that same space and again this is a really big part of giving yourself time to be alone if you intentionally choose to be alone for let's say six months to a year things will come up in that time that you will need support for and that you will need real support for real vulnerable dysregulated support and in that time if you don't allow yourself to go back to an old partner or to find a new one you will have to reach out to other people and start finding support in other ways it will force you to do that and you probably will not do it unless you are forced step four do trauma work if you have fearful avoidant patterning there is an almost 100 chance that you have some sort of trauma in your past that is unresolved and that you are trying to resolve through having these very volatile intense relationships and the only thing that's truly going to get you out of that cycle is addressing the root problems at the core so addressing why you have this intense fear of intimacy and looking at how and when and why it gets triggered and what you can start working on doing when you feel triggered other than reacting or shutting down and I think that the thing that makes trauma work extra brilliant for fearful avoidance is that it also gives you new language to describe yourself to other people in a way that isn't overwhelming for them so again I think a really big problem that a lot of fearful avoidance have is that they can't connect very deeply to other people because they have so much trauma and and such an intense history of not only what happened to them but all of the kind of secondary coping mechanisms that they learned to navigate the world in a way that is different than other people because of that trauma that they feel very othered in their lives so again when you feel very othered and then you meet someone who you feel really connected to and like they get you and they're able to understand you it's like a drug right and it's so hard to let go of that person even if the relationship is not working but if you start developing the language and the capacity to contain your own emotional experience and understand your own trauma and your own trauma responses in a way that allows you to communicate it to other people without feeling like your soul is bared and you are completely vulnerable in that moment you're going to be able to start forming more and more connections even with people who don't have the same kind of intense volatile history as you do so this opens the door to you feeling more comfortable and relaxed in the World At Large and the more comfortable and relaxed you are in the World At Large and the more you feel like you're able to show up as your authentic self in a way that doesn't scare off other people that doesn't overwhelm other people because you've learned the skills of containing your own experience and Bridging the gaps between yourself and people with let's say more traditional backgrounds the more connections you're going to be able to form and the more connections you form the more at home you will feel in the world and so the less Refuge you will be chronically seeking in relationships when I was deep in my own fearful avoidant patterning I used to feel like being in a close intimate romantic relationship was like being in a warm cozy home and being out of a relationship was like being outside in the cold but I would get this ego about like oh I am a Wilderness survival person I can withstand the cold like nobody's business right and then one day I would like look down and have frostbite emotionally and be like oh my God I need to get inside somewhere or I'm gonna die and the process that I am suggesting here is metaphorically the process of making the outside world warmer so when you are not in a relationship feeling like you are still at home in the world you still have places you can go where you can bring your whole self you aren't kind of grinning and bearing it until finally you have someone who you're trauma bonded enough with that you can allow yourself to be vulnerable this is the process of making the world a place that you belong in so you can go inside of houses when you want to because the house looks really nice but when you're outside you're pretty comfortable there too you don't need this huge ass ego to survive it so the last point I'll kind of rest on for today is that this on-again off-again cycle truthfully will not end until you like yourself and I don't mean like yourself like take pride in how much pain you can withstand take pride in how needless you are take pride in how much you can take care of yourselves and other people without ever asking for anything or needing any help or support or Comfort I mean until you like yourself enough to accept that you are a human being who needs all of those things who needs care support Comfort support networks who needs to be seen for who they truly are not just in their romantic relationships but in their friendships in their work if possible like y'all if you had told me five years ago I would be making a YouTube channel where I talk chronically about my own attachment wounding and about experiences I've had I would tell you there was no way in hell I would ever become that comfortable in the world there was no way in hell and here we are so there is a way in hell for you to get there and it truly does require Going Through Hell at certain points but the other side of it is a place where you can just be who you are in the world probably for the first time breaking fearful avoidant patterning means breaking the cycle of feeling like the only place you can go for Relief is the same place that is the source of your anguish and guess what if you can break that pattern it also becomes a lot easier to stay in relationships because when you have a fight or an attachment rupture with your partner you're no longer desperate to fix it desperate to get it back to normal right away because now you have friends you can go to who you can share your vulnerabilities and your true feelings with you have support groups you can go to to get second opinions and to take support from when you are in a period where you need a little bit more of it so all of these very intense expectations that you normally put on a partner you're now going to have a diffuse experience of outside of the relationship which makes it easier to both be in a partnership because problems do not feel as drastic and as heavily weighted as well as to leave a partnership if it's not working because you have that love support and warmth all around you when you step outside of that house alright I think I'm going to leave it there for today when it comes to fearful avoidance and on-again off-again relationships let me know in the comments what about this resonated for you what you would still like to see discussed about fearful avoidance and I will do my best to answer as many questions in future videos or in the comments as I possibly can as always I love you guys I hope that you are taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]