Escaping the Anxious/Avoidant Trap
"We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love." — Sigmund Freud
Defining the Trap
Most marriages incorporate a dynamic where one partner tries to soothe anxiety by seeking emotional and physical closeness, while the other tries to soothe anxiety by seeking emotional and physical distance Each partner's behavior intensifies and reinforces the other’s. This is called the anxious-avoidant or pursuer-distancer dynamic. I’ll use the second term here because both sides of the dynamic are equally anxious.
From the pursuer’s point of view, the distancer seems to want to not participate in the relationship. From the distancer’s point of view, the pursuer isn’t capable of calming down without help. The truth is that neither of the two are capable of holding onto their sense of self while maintaining a healthy emotional and romantic connection.
Childhood Roots
Pursuers fear abandonment, and distancers fear engulfment. Both of these fears are appropriate for children, but are not applicable to adults, because adults can take care of themselves so well that they can’t really be abandoned or engulfed. Pursuers were usually raised by distancing parents who were busy, unavailable, checked-out or avoidant. Distancers were usually raised by pursuing parents who were overbearing, hovering, and relentless. Parent-child relationships require a balance of togetherness and separateness, just like marriage. Children have no choice but to balance out their parents: if you have a pursuer parent or primary caregiver, you learn to be distancer, and if you have a distancer parent, you learn to be pursuers. As adults, we have the ability to grow out of these dynamics.
Escaping the Trap
Pursuing and distancing are ways of managing anxiety and avoiding intimacy. The pursuer thinks he is seeking intimacy, but he is actually just trying to get his partner to help him calm down. True intimacy comes from togetherness combined with self-soothing, not from getting your partner to calm you down. The distancer calms their anxiety by checking out of the relationship entirely, and then relying on their pursuing partner to maintain some kind of unhealthy connection.
The cycle ends when the pursuer stops pursuing and the distancer stops distancing. You can start the process of healing by admitting that your partner is not the cause of your distress, and they will not be the solution to your distress. Each person’s anxiety is their own responsibility. Pursuing and distancing are two sides of the same coin, ways of managing one’s own anxiety by means of another person. Both partners must begin to take full responsibility for their own distress, and figure out how to feel better without placing that responsibility on their partner’s shoulders.
For the distancer, this means self-soothing while maintaining connection. For the pursuer, this means self-soothing instead of using connection to calm down. Both partners can improve their relationship by saying “I’m going to leave the room and calm down. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” For the pursuer, this means not relying on his partner for anxiety management. For the distancer, this means stepping back into connection after self-calming.
Seven Steps for Self-Soothing
Here’s what you do during those twenty minutes:
Scan your body. Figure out where you feel your emotional discomfort on a physical level
Focus your attention gently on that place in your body, the place that doesn’t feel good. Usually this is somewhere in the chest/abdomen area.
Imagine holding that sensation gently and kindly, like you would cradle a kitten or a baby. This is how you self-sooth.
Give the unpleasant sensation permission to stay as long as it needs to stay. This is self-acceptance.
Realize that you will be OK even if the unpleasant sensation stays for a long time. When you were a child, you could not have handled such intensity. As an adult, you totally can.
Take a deep breath in through the nose. Fill your lungs up all the way. Then, once they are completely full, suck in a bit more air through your nose. Hold for a second, and then let it all out through your mouth. This is called a “physiological sigh,” you can look it up on YouTube. It’s been shown to decrease anxiety.
Every time you self-soothe, your body becomes less afraid of its own intense sensations. You become less afraid of your own intense emotions, and of your partner’s intense emotions. You become more capable of experience a calm, healthy connection with the person you love. You are becoming more capable of love.
