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Why Dismissive Avoidants Often Discard You During Stress or Crisis – Transcript
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- Dismissive avoidants often leave or discard their partners during times of high stress, crisis, illness, or job loss.
- Being in a relationship creates a baseline of stress and pressure for dismissive avoidants due to childhood emotional neglect and core wounds.
- Dismissive avoidants regulate through emotional distance and view normal relationship needs as excessive demands to avoid accountability and shame.
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Dismissive avoidants will often leave when you need them the most. They'll leave when you're sick. They'll leave when a parent dies. They'll leave when you lose your job. They'll leave when you're in the hospital. They'll leave when there's a financial stress.
They'll leave when there's any kind of work stress. They will leave when times are tough. And there is a reason for this. >> [snorts] >> You see, it can feel unbelievably cruel when you're going through this because this is the person that's supposed to be there for you. This is the person that is supposed to love you and support you when you need them and vice versa.
But when you need them, they are gone and you're picking up the pieces during a difficult time of your life where you need them most. You see, being in a relationship actually causes dismissive avoidants a baseline of stress. They feel stressed just by being in the relationship itself because there's pressures on them.
Pressures to be emotionally intimate, pressures to be vulnerable, pressures pressures to show up for you, pressures to meet your needs, pressures to give something of themselves to you to meet your expectations. This all gives them stress because of their core wounds, that's why. Dismissive avoidants were emotionally neglected in childhood in a very profound way. Their emotional needs weren't met at all and their feelings
brutally rejected and dismissed at the hands of a very critical, controlling, often narcissistic parent. They learned to suppress their emotions. They learned that any expectations are insurmountable because they they couldn't meet the expectations of this demanding parent.
The only time they got love and affection as a kid was exceeding those expectations and they struggled to meet those. So any expectations, even the bare minimum, gives them a ton of stress. They feel like they'll inevitably disappoint their partner. And they personalize that neglect growing up to feel defective and unlovable like there's just something wrong with them.
And emotional intimacy, closeness, accountability, expectations, all the normal parts that go along with a relationship trigger those wounds in them because their nervous system, their subconscious, and sometimes conscious mind tells them that if I lower my walls and I let my partner in and I really try, I'm going to be exposed as being defective, I'm going to fail to meet their expectations, and I will
inevitably disappoint them. So, what do they do? They create the disappointment. They leave to give themselves a stress relief when there is extra pressure on them. Because, again, being in the relationship gives them a baseline source of stress. So, when life events happen, like a stress [snorts] in the workplace or health scare or death of a family member, loss of a job, things like that, well, that compounds
on top of the pre-existing stress that they already feel just by being in the relationship. So, now there's a boatload of stress that they're feeling. They look to relieve themselves of stress. Well, typically can't cut out their finances, can't cut out their job, they can't cut out their health, so the most disposable item in their life becomes a relationship. So, they discard their partner.
Now, the discard happens and they're feeling stress relief. There's pressure removed from them because they no longer have to meet your expectations during this time of need. So, it feels like such a massive relief to them. There you are, you're in this really painful time of crisis. They just ditched you, you're in a world of pain, but they're feeling relief right now because they no longer have to show up for you.
Now, they get their emotional distance, too. And emotional distance is how they regulate. They don't regulate through closeness, they regulate through distance. You see, a crisis it requires vulnerability, it requires emotional availability, it requires consistency, empathy, and support. These are things that trigger them.
See, dismissive avoidants have the subconscious belief that disappointment is inevitable. If they really open up and they really try and they expose themselves to you, you're going to reject them. You're going to be disappointed by them. They will fail to meet your expectations and it will be so painful, especially if they really tried and got vulnerable and opened up.
So, it feels easier and safer for them to be in control of the disappointment. Because yes, they know that they're disappointing you by discarding you and running away and going cold, but they're in control of the disappointment. It's controlled disappointment. It feels safer to their nervous system because they don't feel exposed because it is far more exposing and painful in their subconscious if
they were to really try to meet your needs and fail and fall short. When they don't try, well, they get to be in control of that disappointment and go out on their terms without feeling like they really got exposed for being defective.
And they experience your needs as being pressure. You see, one of the most misunderstood things about dismissive avoidants is they often interpret normal relationship needs as excessive demands.
And this is because accountability is incredibly painful for them. You see, for a healthier person, they would recognize that these are basic needs, but for a dismissive avoidant, it feels like pressure because of their fears and wounds, but they don't want to take accountability for not meeting the bare minimum. So, what they do is they flip the script in their script in their mind. They do the Olympic grade mental gymnastics to make it not their fault.
Because if your basic normal needs are too needy or too much, they don't have to feel the wound of defectiveness because emotionally to an unhealed dismissive avoidant, accountability is like confirmation of that wound of shame, the wound of defectiveness. See, I did this wrong. I hurt my partner. It's proof I'm defective. It's proof I'm worthless.
It's too painful for them. So, they don't want to feel that shame. Their entire nervous system is wired around avoiding any internal discomfort, avoiding feeling their shame, and avoiding exposing their shame. Accountability is very shame producing for a dismissive avoidant.
So, in order to shield themselves, they have to reframe your basic needs as pressures, as demanding, as being just completely completely excessive and unreasonable. Because that way when they don't meet your needs, they get to feel like they're not the problem. But, this is also why they don't learn anything from these events.
They don't learn anything because they don't take accountability, and that's why the pattern tends to repeat every time that there's a time of crisis or stress. Yes, they often come back, but then the next moment that things are hard, they exit again. They repeat the pattern. People only learn when they take accountability, and accountability, again, is just kryptonite to them.
And keep in mind, their core survival strategy is self-reliance. They have this mindset that I can't rely on anybody. Nobody's coming to save me. You know, they learned as a child that vulnerability isn't safe. It wasn't safe to have needs. And they very quickly learned that the only person that would look out for them and meet their needs is them. So, they become very singularly self-focused. What do I feel? What do I need? Me, me, me. They develop tunnel vision.
And no, believe it or not, they don't do these things intentionally with the goal of hurting you. They just don't consider you. Because they were programmed from a very young age to really only focus on themselves and their own needs. So, your needs, even the fact that you have needs and feelings about them discarding you in a time of crisis doesn't even occur to them. They quite frankly do not have the capacity to consider your needs or feelings, and they really can't even acknowledge
that as anything other than unreasonable pressure. So, they develop that mindset of I'll take care of myself. I don't need to rely on anybody, and they project that mindset onto other people, too. So, for having basic needs of connection, um intimacy, emotional availability, uh you know, support, they can label that as clinginess. They will say, "I don't need that, so this person shouldn't need that, either." But, in
reality, their lack of {quote} "unquote" needs is really uh insecurity because they had that critical, controlling, narcissistic parent that was very demanding and also had heavy expectations on them, so they learned that closeness equals getting smothered and controlled. That's where that wound of hyper-independence comes from.
Anybody I get too close to is going to take my independence away, and then I'll be exposed as being defective, and I'll get rejected. So, you know, supporting you really requires them to access emotions that they suppress themselves. And suppression and avoidance is how they learn to survive.
And that hyper-reliance self-reliance that hyper-independence is really a method of avoiding dealing anything that's uncomfortable to them. And in reality, crisis just exposes their limitations. It exposes their emotional capacity. And dismissive avoidants run from anything that feels like exposure.
You know, because they don't have conflict resolution skills. They don't have, you know, very high limits of empathy. They don't have that emotional availability, and the crisis exposes that. So again, rather than disappointing their partner, it's easier to be in control of that disappointment than feeling exposed.
So, when the crisis happens, you're expecting them to be there for you, but they They deactivating. They start creating emotional distance between you and them, even disappearing, ghosting, things like that, because that's how they regulate. It's all about them. They are hyper-focused on meeting their own needs, whatever it is that they perceive that they need or feel in the moment.
And in reality, instead of saying, "I'm overwhelmed because I don't know how to show up." The it becomes, "I don't think we're right for each other. Something feels off. I just need space. Or you're being too demanding. You're being too much."
It helps them avoid facing themselves. Reality is though, this discard is not about your worth. It's not about you or anything you did wrong. It's about their lack of capacity, their inability to do intimacy, their inability to handle stress. Nobody ever showed them how to process emotions or deal with stress as a child. They have no capacity for it.