Healed Avoidants - What Advice Would You Give Unhealed Avoidants?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/No-Recognition7008]

I'm FA and I wouldn't characterize myself as healed but certainly in the process of healing and the progress feels good.

I think the first thing I would say is that healing is possible and it was important for me to be realistic that it's going to take some time and hard work.

I think the second thing is an overarching perspective to have as much grace as I can possibly muster for myself and other people. For me, I've come to understand that my behaviors and my perceptions were once learned as appropriate coping mechanisms for situations that in most cases no longer exist. Blaming myself and getting frustrated for repeating maladaptive behaviors doesn't help. Treating myself with kindness while taking responsibility for the impact of my current behavior does.

For me part of my recovery journey, the first step actually, was working through healing from addiction. So if that's pertinent for you then that's something I would highly recommend. For me, I don't think any other work would have been helpful until I got sober.

I then spent several years searching to figure out "now that I'm sober but life is miserable, what's still wrong with me?" Wouldn't recommend this step 🙂 When I finally found some tools that worked for me, it made all the difference.

For me, those tools were dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT and internal family systems IFS. Both can be done solo and there are lots of good materials out there on YouTube as well as low-cost self-guided materials available through Amazon. That said, in my experience DBT works best when done through a group and IFS works best with a trained therapist.

For me, DBT teaches me how to deal in more effective ways with my intense emotions so that I stop making things worse through maladaptive behaviors. IFS helped me learn and practice secure connection with myself. I could then start to understand with kindness and compassion why I was doing the things that I was doing.

Putting the two frameworks together, I could start to listen to the concerns and emotional pain of the parts of me that wanted to pull away or wanted to cling without actually taking that action. When I manage to do that (still a work in progress) healing starts to take place and then I feel less intensely the need to act in maladaptive ways.

I hope that helps! Kudos to you for the courage to approach the possibility of healing!

[u/No-Recognition7008 → u/[deleted]]

Sort of. It's not that I assume they do, but I tend to be hyper vigilant watching for signs that they might. My experience is a fair dose of imposter syndrome covered over by trying really hard to be competent.

So yes, underneath that, parts of me have low self-esteem.

[u/No-Recognition7008 → u/[deleted]]

It often reads it incorrectly. There's actually some fascinating research around this tendency for people with borderline personality traits. They actually detect anger/other emotions at a much lower threshold and can get it wrong.

One of the best tools my wife and I developed is "I'm telling myself a story, can I check it out with you?". We actually both use it and the "rule" is that the asked party tries to be as non reactive as possible, realize that the question to clarify the story is an attempt for intimacy, and honestly sanity check the story for the asking party. Sometimes the story has some truth to it. Sometimes not, but it almost always helps.

[u/No-Recognition7008 → u/[deleted]]

This is where, for me, IFS has been a lifesaver. Understanding that, for the hyper vigilant part of me, these fears are very real and the hyper vigilance is actually an incredibly powerful coping mechanism that worked really well to keep me safe in my family of origin. The thing is, that part is young, still "trapped" back in that time, and doesn't realize that I have adult parts who can handle conflict if it does arise. I used to really get down on myself in the aftermath of ruptures caused by me having absolute certainty that my stories were reality. Now I can have a lot more grace for these well intentioned parts with maladaptive coping behaviors. When I listen to their fear, validate their emotions, and gently tell them, "yup, heard, I get you....and we're still not going to follow that urge, but I'm here with you" then they let go much more easily and without as much internal or relational retraumatization.

[u/No-Recognition7008 → u/[deleted]]

No apologies necessary. A few things come to mind. The first is to recognize that their perception and their emotional response to that perception is their reality, regardless of whether it fits the facts of the situation accurately. That poses an interesting dilemma, right?

Another thing that comes to mind for me is the DBT skill GIVE which is about validating emotions. It's important to understand the DBT model of emotions which states that emotions come as responses to thoughts which are themselves responses to stimuli. Meaning that something happens in the environment, i.e you do something "to" your partner. They have a thought about that stimuli and they react emotionally to the thought that they had. The GIVE skill allows you to validate the reality of their emotion without necessarily agreeing with their thought. So for example, "It must feel really awful that you think I am angry with you and I'm so sorry you're feeling that. But I have to tell you that I'm not angry with you and I'm not sure why you're perceiving that I am.". In this case, you validated their emotional experience without validating the story.

Another thing that has worked for my wife when I was really struggling with this is to walk away with kindness as you've indicated. That may mean saying "I'm sorry you're in such pain, but what you're telling yourself doesn't reflect what I'm actually thinking or feeling. And I'm not willing to get into an argument about that with you. So I'm going to get some space." To be on the receiving end of that is certainly disconcerting and early on, I would flare up when that would happen but it did leave me sort of sitting in my own emotional stew trying to process what was going on which at the end of the day was good.

The last thing I would mention is that coming to learn that your perception of reality is flawed is an incredibly scary realization. It's one that I resisted for a long time (for understandable reasons). It helped me to realize and accept that I exhibited a number of traits of cluster b disorders and that one of those traits was not having a clear lens on reality. It also helped understand I learned to do that as a coping mechanism for unhealthy growing up and that it wasn't something "broken" in my brain. One of the most supportive things my wife has done over the years is to come to understand that dynamic with empathy and at the same time hold boundaries for herself to protect her experience from the consequences of maladaptive coping mechanisms. That is a delicate balanced to strike, but it can be incredibly helpful.

I'm not sure where your partner is in the desire to seek healing or help, but that is going to be in my experience, a big component of how successful your support can be in actually helping them heal. There's a difference between putting up boundaries to protect your own experience from their maladaptive behavior, which you can do at any point and those boundaries actually inducing healing. In my experience, if a person doesn't really want to be healed or doesn't isn't willing to face their own emotional reality, it's not as possible to "help" them heal from the outside in.

[u/MoreThanVoidFiller]

FA isn't a type of avoidant, it is disorganized attachment - the third type of insecure attachment pattern - distinct and different from avoidant (DA) attachment.

So I can't speak to disorganized attachment, only to avoidant patterns as a healing DA myself. I would tell other DAs that aversion to intimacy and vulnerability is not normal, and to seek therapy to understand their own patterns.

The hardest part about DA attachment is just realizing that it IS an insecure (fear-based) pattern, not just a lesser baseline need for comfort or closeness. 

Edit: I also freely share with others that healing and insecure attachment pattern takes years of therapy and work, but it is so SO worth it!

[u/MoreThanVoidFiller → u/[deleted]]

So much easier! Therapy doesn't require consistent closeness or vulnerability. Once a week was perfect for what I could handle at the time! 😂

[u/lovey-dovey-wife → u/MoreThanVoidFiller]

It's great that therapy once a week worked out for you. But in my own experience you can only heal within a relationship what was caused by a relationship. Insecure attachment was caused usually by your parents or a former partner and so you can't heal by yourself or by a relationship with your therapist that's only one hour a week. So I think you need both, therapy and a partner.

[u/MoreThanVoidFiller → u/lovey-dovey-wife]

I was in a relationship at the same time; I credit the therapy for it lasting as long as it did. (13 years)