Ending The Anxious/Avoidant Relational Deathtrap
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All right, team, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here. Imagine a relationship, just for a moment, imagine a relationship that is a constant roller coaster of highs and lows, leaving you emotionally exhausted, but for some reason, you're hooked. You're in. It's almost like you are addicted. You love them so much and you're so connected and then there's massive disconnection.

Likely the sex is great, or even if it's not, you just can't seem to pull away. This is the classic avoidant, anxious, push, pull. And it is usually more defined by the duality and the dual experience, the juxtaposition of massive affection, getting what you want, feeling close, feeling desired, feeling loved,

and then withdrawal, affection, and withdrawal, affection, and withdrawal. And you go through this cycle over and over and over again. What I'm going to talk to you about in this video is not only learning how to identify it, but learning what to do with this cycle and how to get out of it regardless of where you're on the spectrum. Maybe you're not an avoidant person. Maybe you're not an anxious person. Maybe it's just like this dynamic that shows up in your relationship. So let's dive into it.

A couple of things. Number one, what contributes to this dynamic are oftentimes the attachment styles of the two people. There's almost always a pattern that's showing up in your life that is familiar to something in your past, right? This doesn't occur in a vacuum. This is something that you have either experienced before or it's something that a part of you wanted. So what do I mean by that? Well,

If you are the person who has the affection and you feel the closeness and then you start to withdraw, it's very likely that you grew up in an environment where love and affection and praise was given to you and then taken away, given to you and then taken away. Or that love and affection and praise or validation, closeness was something that you deeply craved. And so when it shows up, it feels foreign and your system doesn't know what to do with it and you start to withdraw and pull away.

The other version of this is usually a little bit more of the anxious side, which is that when the love and affection starts to show up, it feels so good. You love it. You really start to kind of bask in it. And all of a sudden, very quickly sometimes for some of you, you shift into this space of, I don't want this to go away.

I never want this to stop. This closeness, this connection, this affection, this love, this care, this embrace that I feel right now, I don't want it to leave. And so what do you do? You start to squeeze time.

tighter. You start to text more. You feel your energy starts to get a little on edge. You're like a little too close to that person and you won't pull yourself away. And you know that every part of you is saying,

just relax, just calm down, just take a breath, give them some space. But for some reason, you just find yourself curled up in their lap and you won't let go. I've seen this happen for men and women. I've worked with tons of clients that are guys where they're just like, she starts to give me some love and affection and I can feel every part of me. It's almost like I want to bear hug her and never let go.

And as soon as that comes online, as soon as I act in that way, I can feel her wanting to run. So your attachment style plays into this. If you're more anxious, then you're contributing to the affection and withdraw likely by being over affectionate, being over communicative, love bombing that person. When there's a nice amount of affection and connection and closeness that starts to happen,

You start to cling on. You start to say things like, I never want this to stop. And you can tell that the other person is like, just enjoy this and stop talking about how you never want this to end. Like, relax.

It's that type of commentary that starts to show up from the anxious side. And again, that has roots in your past. And for the avoidant person, it's the threat of closeness. The hard part, I know you avoidants get a hard time. You get a hard rap out there, man. But for the avoidants that are out there, the things that I think most people miss is that the closeness and the connection that

Avoidance, desire, right? The people that are avoidant but that really want a relationship to work. The closeness and the connection that you desire is simultaneously the threat. And so the closer you get to love and affection and closeness and connection and ease, the more threatening it feels in your system and the harder you're going to have to work for a period of time

to remind your body, your mind, your heart, your soul, whatever it is you want to say, that it's safe and it's okay. So your attachment style can contribute to this affection withdrawal cycle that plays out. If you have trauma, it can play into that. If you have a fear of intimacy and vulnerability,

It can also play into that. Now, what are the signs that this is happening? There's some very clear signs that this cycle is playing out in your relationship. The main one being the fluctuating levels of affection and attention.

There's hot and there's cold. And the extreme version of this is like, you know, maybe you've heard the term trauma bond online, but the extreme version of this is like your trauma meets their trauma and gets hooked in. And usually it's wild and it's passionate, but it's explosive, right? And so it's like, you know, two magnets coming together and there's sparks everywhere and

And then it's pushed into the other corner. And for some reason, you keep coming back into the middle of the ring and you can't stop. But fluctuating levels of affection and attention are one of the main things, right? You might feel like you love being around that person and you spend a date or two dates or a day or two and all of a sudden you find yourself like, get away from me, give me some space.

and then a day or two goes by or three or four days go by and all of a sudden you're like, I really want to be around them again. And then the whole cycle plays out again, right? This, I want to be close to you, get away from me. I want to be close to you, get away from me. And on the other side, it's usually, I want to be close to you. I am close to you. I never want this to stop. I am close to you. I never want this to stop. And then the pain of

the separation and the space. And there's this kind of constant push and pull. So the last piece is the emotional stability. I've kind of been hinting at that, maybe you've noticed, but there's a big amount of emotional instability that coincides with this push and pull dynamic, with this affection and withdraw dynamic. So those are some of the main signs of the cycle.

How you start to break the cycle is as follows. Number one, you need to gain some self-awareness of identifying the patterns that you are embodying that are contributing to this push-pull dynamic. You need to identify your patterns that are contributing to this push-pull dynamic, this affection and withdrawal dynamic. What are you specifically doing? What are those patterns?

And the second part of it, right? So what are the patterns? Are you love bombing them, you know, love texting them, constantly telling them like, I never want this to stop. If only we could just stay in bed forever. And, you know, this sort of like Romeo and Juliet overly romanticized,

gushing as soon as you get any sign of affection. I'm being very dramatic here for a reason, but I think some of you will get it and hopefully it's not pissing too many of you off. You're like, okay, Connor, we got it. I got it. Are you contributing that or are you contributing the deep fear of the intimacy that as soon as closeness happens, your body wants to run. You want to pull away. You don't want any type of like

cuddling and snuggling or you're hypervigilant to anything that they're saying that has to do with, I don't know, commitment or intimacy or really being known at a deep level. So notice your side of the cycle. So bring some awareness to your side of the cycle. Part two of that is what are the origins of that pattern within you? Where did it actually come from? Be brutally honest with yourself. And a great question to ask is,

with who does this pattern feel familiar? With who does this pattern feel familiar? So once you get clear on some of the pattern of either love bombing, of being overly affectionate, or once the affection is there, you never want to let it go, or once the affection is there, you start to pull away, get very clear on what are the roots of that pattern, what are the origins, and who

who did that pattern originate with? Did you have that experience with mom, right? Was mom this like stage five clinger that just gave you so much love and affection and attention? You're like, get away from me, right? You're invasive. You're constantly intruding into my boundaries. You come into my room unannounced. And so intimacy and closeness and being known became a threat,

Or are you the person who experienced the opposite of that, right? Maybe what you experienced was a parent, a mom or a dad only giving you love and affection under very specific circumstances. And so you were constantly trying to please them and appease them and get them to say, we're proud of you or get them to say, good job, give me the pat on the head, et cetera. So start to get very clear on what your contribution to the pattern is and where it

it originated. Next is beginning to communicate full transparency of where you're at. So ideally, you have a person that you can go through this with, but you can say, look, I've noticed that we go through this cycle of being affectionate and having a lot of closeness and connection and some intimacy, and then it's like ice cold.

Have you noticed that too? Have you felt that? And start to get a sense of, can you meet in the same plane? Can the other person acknowledge that that's true as well? Yeah, I've noticed that as well. Every single time we get close, you pull away, right? So start to acknowledge, hey, I've noticed this pattern. Have you noticed it as well? That's part one. Part two is, are you open to working on that together?

Are you open to breaking that cycle together? Now, this is an important part of this because number one, it's very beneficial for your attachment style to heal, heal through, work on some of these things

in relationship with somebody else because you're going to have to go through some hardship with them. Number two, they're also contributing to the pattern. So they have their own part that's likely contributing to the cycle that's playing out between the two of you. And if there's going to be any hope in hell, and this is super clear, this is super direct, of you breaking that cycle with that person, they have to be willing to engage in this process with you. And if they are not, they might not be the right person

for you to break this cycle because it's likely a cycle that you've experienced in one way or another in past relationships. And if you want to break the cycle, you need to have somebody else that is willing to do that with you. Super, super important.

If you don't, you can still do some of the stuff that I'm about to tell you, but no guarantee that it's going to go anywhere because they're likely contributing to the cycle and you can only undo your part and they will still have theirs. So communicate, get buy-in, ask them if they're willing to do this with you, and then radical transparency on both your parts.

about what you are contributing to the cycle. How do you cling? How do you become over-affectionate? How do you shut down affection? How do you pull away from affection? How do you strangle affection? That's kind of what anxious people do. They get a little bit of affection and then it's like straight into the chokehold, you know, and it's like suffocate the living crap. I never want you to leave.

I think it was like, what is it? Wedding Crashers, like, don't leave me, I'll find you. So that's the classic one. And then the last piece about breaking this cycle is you either have to learn to lean more deeply into yourself or more deeply into the relationship. So if you are the anxious person, you have to begin to learn to trust and rely more on, not more on yourself, but more in yourself

that you're lovable, that you can be grounded, that that other person is somebody that's going to lean into the relationship, that you can start to trust the relationship a little bit more. And you start to develop other relationships outside of that main one, because another big one for generally anxious people that are not

needing a lot of that affection from the relationship is that their external relationships from that intimate one are usually lacking, right? So if you're a highly anxious person, it's very likely that your external relationships outside of that

are either a little too surface level or you're lacking in some deeper relationships that can sort of hold you accountable, that you feel safe with, et cetera. So if you're the anxious person, self-reliance. You need to be able to soothe yourself. You need to be able to down-regulate your nervous system. You need to be able to start to develop a sense of I'm okay even if they're not.

I'm okay, even if you're not. And it's something you might actually need to say in your head and practice. I'm okay. I'm all right if you're shutting down right now. And it might be something that you start to say in your relationship. You know what? It feels like you're shutting down. That's okay. I'm actually still okay. I'm okay with that, right? It seems like you're pulling away.

I haven't heard from you in a couple of days. It seems like you're pulling away. I'm okay. I don't like it, but I'm actually okay. Because what you need to start to signal to the other person that's a part of this affection and withdraw cycle with you is,

you are all right even though the affection has started to be withdrawn. What happens in these cycles is affection starts to get pulled away and the anxious person just like goes into like DEFCON 5, you know, and all of a sudden all the alarm bells in your body goes off, your mind starts to go to all kinds of like terrible heinous crap. It's like WebMD, right? It's like, oh, I have a cough or my throat's itching. You go online and it's like, ah, it's throat cancer. No, it's not that bad.

So you have to start to soothe the part of you that wants to suffocate affection, closeness, and intimacy. On the opposite side, the avoidant person or the person that does more of the pulling away, you need to begin to lean into the relationship and start to rely on

the relationship a little bit more. And what this looks like specifically is more transparency about what you don't like in the relationship. Well, actually, maybe not that one so much because sometimes avoidant people are very willing to talk a lot about what they don't like, but more willing to communicate what you love

about that person, what you are enjoying about the relationship, more willing to talk about your personal process, what's happening inside of you as you go through the relationship, right? And sometimes that's going to mean communicating, you know, I felt a little shut down yesterday, or I can feel that part of me wanting to close off

and not communicate, I'd like to have an hour to myself today to just like do my own thing. Or you know what? I'd like to just take the next 12 hours and have some space. Are you cool with that? So start to communicate more transparently about what's happening inside of you. I'm going to break this down into one key phrase that I think every avoidant needs to know. Expression is the antidote to avoidant attachment.

Expression is the antidote to avoidant attachment. If you are an avoidant attached person, it's very likely that you are avoidant about expressing what's happening inside of you. There's a fear of being transparent. There's a fear of being really known. There's a fear of relying on somebody else. And there's a fear of allowing yourself to step more fully into a relationship.

So for the avoidant person, you actually need to start to express a little bit more than what you are comfortable with, probably a lot more than what you're comfortable with, right? If you feel embarrassed in certain conversations or you're afraid of certain things that are all locked up and bottled up in your head or your heart, you have to start to communicate those things. It's hard. You're going to be afraid of rejection. It's going to feel uncomfortable for you. You're going to feel like

you know, this person's probably going to leave me when I tell them this thing, even though it's like 99% likely that they are going to feel closer to you, but inside of your system is going to feel like I'm definitely going to push this person away by expressing this. So expression is the antidote to that part.

And that can be as simple as owning when you are feeling that pull out of the relationship. Owning, ah, I can feel myself shutting down. You know, I can feel myself shutting down. I can feel myself pulling away.

Sometimes that expression is the first step in breaking your pattern and your cycle. So I hope that you guys found this valuable. Send this to your partner, man it forward. This is definitely something that, you know, if you're in a relationship, you should listen to with your partner. If you are in that affection and withdraw cycle, this can be very, very helpful for the two of you to break that. So as always, share your comments below, man it forward. Connor Beaton signing off. See you next week.

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