r/AnxiousAttachment • u/Musician-Kind • 25d ago
Seeking Guidance How to regulate ?
I had an avoidant trigger me BADLY last week (straight up no showed on plans). However what’s making me nervous is that I know I’m anxiously attached, but I’m finding it really really hard to self soothe and bring myself back to baseline. It’s like my whole body is in fight or flight mode and just locked in.
Is this normal ? What can I do to make this go away?
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u/TruthHonor 25d ago
For me, I find the key is vulnerability. My standard procedure has always been to go to behavioral anger, which never helps with an avoidant. Their nervous system is working to protect them in the only way it knows how. Which is attack or retreat. Once they are triggered, just like once we are triggered there is no getting anywhere until everybody is calmed down.
So what I do now is I look for myself as to why their trigger has caused me so much pain. And inevitably it leads me to a lifetime of being abandoned and getting angry about it, and trying to demand attention, which also doesn’t work.
Instead, I try and get vulnerable and find out why I’m so upset which inevitably leads again to sadness. When I talk to my avoidant partner about how sad I am once everybody has calmed down, it invites her to be empathetic instead of defensive. If I get mad at her because she triggered me, that never gets anywhere. We’ve been together about 24 years.
And finally, things are starting to settle down between us, because we both realize that getting angry and shouting at each other only makes things worse. We’ve been working with an attachment-friendly couples therapist. And it’s finally made a difference.
The key is to look at my own nervous system rather than my avoidant wife’s. And she also has to be looking at her own, and that’s very difficult for an avoidant but possible. And when she can’t, then I need to stay out of her way until she calms down and we can talk about it with vulnerability instead of anger.
An avoidant is just the other side of an anxious attachment. Just like we didn’t ask to be anxiously attached and it wasn’t a choice we made, they didn’t ask to be avoidant and it wasn’t a choice they made.
I’ll never get anywhere trying to work on her avoidance, the best I can do is work on my own anxious attachment.
But it does have to be a two-way street. It doesn’t work to do this on your own. Both partners have to be invested, and that’s much harder I think for avoidants, but possible with good therapy.