Coach Ryan · Transcript · · Updated
The Avoidant Says One Thing… Then Does the Opposite – Transcript
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Summary
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- Dismissive avoidants experience an internal conflict because they want love and connection while simultaneously fearing it.
- The emotional immaturity and lack of emotional capacity in dismissive avoidants stems from childhood emotional neglect.
- Emotional closeness triggers cortisol and a feeling of danger in dismissive avoidants because they fear rejection due to perceived defectiveness.
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One day, they're acting like you're the love of their life. The next day, they're acting like they're bothered by your very existence. They're telling you that they miss you, then they ghost you for days. They're saying they want commitment, but then they freak out when the relationship becomes close and real. Welcome to the world of mixed messages with dismissive avoidants. Because if they didn't send mixed messages, they probably wouldn't send you any messages at all. So, what
is going on? There's so many mixed messages that you don't know what's real and what's not. Well, there's an internal conflict within the dismissive avoidant. On one hand, they want love and connection. It's a normal human need. On the other hand, they deeply fear that love and connection that they want.
And they also struggle to look inward. They struggle with impulse control. They're emotionally immature. There's arrested development at play. You're dealing with a person who physically and intellectually is an adult, but emotionally is an impulsive, scared little child. It all goes back to their childhood and their lack of emotional capacity. They have the emotional capacity of a garden snail, and that's being generous and maybe being unkind to
garden snails. Now, they were emotionally neglected in childhood. They grew up in a household where you don't talk about feelings, and their own feelings were rejected and dismissed. It wasn't safe to have needs. It wasn't safe to have feelings. They were taught that their emotions are a burden.
Well, they also personalize that neglect growing up to feel defective and unlovable, like there's just something wrong with them. Nobody ever showed them how to process stress. No one ever showed them how to deal with life challenges. All they learned to do is escape them, numb out, distract themselves, and suppress. So, they don't develop emotionally. That wound of defectiveness is really at the core of it, too. It's why they struggle to look
inward, and it's why they struggle to maintain connections. You see their nervous system tells them if I lower my walls and I let my partner in, my partner's going to figure out that I'm defective and they're going to reject me. Closeness to them means emotional exposure, shame, rejection. It feels like danger. Their entire nervous system, their limbic system is on fire with cortisol, the stress hormone, whenever there's emotional closeness.
Now, that wound of shame, that defectiveness is why they struggle to look inward because that's how we grow as people, self-reflection, saying, "Hey, I have this shortcoming. This is how I can do better. I did this wrong.
This is how I can improve." But to them, it's the emotional equivalent of confirming that defectiveness. So instead, they don't look inward and project everything outward because if it's always somebody else's fault, there's no reason to look inward. So they stay stuck at a childlike age. So it's all impulsive based on whatever they're feeling in the moment. That's why there's mixed signals. It's because they're emotionally children.