Why Dismissive Avoidants Rewrite the Entire Relationship Before They Leave – Transcript

00:00One of the most traumatizing things about an avoidant discard isn't simply that they left. That's traumatizing enough. It's that they rewrite the entire history of the relationship after they [clears throat] leave. The person who once said that you were everything to them now acts like they were never happy. The needs they once gladly met are now being labeled as unreasonable.

00:25The qualities they loved about you are now qualities that they can't stand about you. And the qualities they loved are now labeled as the reasons they had to leave. And somehow after everything you gave to them, you became the problem. You were blamed. And now you're questioning your reality. But here's the thing. They're not necessarily giving an objective history of the relationship.

00:51They're constructing an emotional justification for leaving it, for discarding you, because they do not want to be accountable for how they shattered your heart. You know, dismissive avoidance often need the relationship to become bad in their mind before they can leave because that way they don't have to confront their fear of intimacy. They don't have to confront their fear of accountability. They don't have to confront their inability to sustain

01:18emotional closeness. They don't have to confront their um you know difficulties in any normal aspect of the relationship. They don't have to confront themselves at all. It's how it's all about avoidance of self, not really anything about you as a [clears throat] person because this is more of their defense mechanism to insulate themselves from themselves.

01:43Now they don't want to confront the possibility that the problem exists within them. So they have to make you the problem because in reality, you know, the relationship wasn't always terrible, right? They pursued you. They they chose the relationship, too. It wasn't just you forcing them to be your partner. You know, they talked about a future because they actively thought they wanted that with you. And they told

02:10you how different you were, that no one ever made them feel the way that you do. And you know, they accepted your love, your loyalty, and your support. They accepted your emotional availability.

02:23They certainly didn't deny access to your body. They seem to like that a lot, especially in the beginning. That can change when intimacy forms. But they certainly were very eager to receive access to you in many ways, shapes, and forms. And they may have genuinely appeared happy for months or sometimes even years. But here's the thing, the relationship becomes more demanding because it becomes more real, right?

02:50Every relationship becomes more real. There's more on the line. There's more intimacy, shared history, expectations, right? It becomes more real. But then the story changes. You know, you you didn't suddenly become incompatible. The relationship simply exceeded their emotional capacity. And dismissive avoidance have a severe capacity issue.

03:14In a nutshell, this is a person that never developed emotionally. They are in a state of arrested development, a childlike emotional state. Your body can age, you can intellectually grow up, but emotionally they experience arrested development. And it goes back to their childhood because capacity is either formed or not formed in childhood.

03:37Typically, adults don't just lose capacity. It's a it's a childhood attachment wound that creates dismissive avoidance. Now, this is a person that was emotionally neglected in a profound way, a profound way. Their emotional needs were not met at all in childhood.

03:53They grew up in a household where you don't talk about feelings. Now, many of them don't realize that they had childhood emotional neglect because their basic needs were met, food, clothing, shelter, things like that, but their emotional needs were literally never met. You know, in the household, you don't talk about feelings and their feelings were rejected and dismissed.

04:14This is a critical component of it. It wasn't safe for them to have feelings. Sometimes, in some cases, it was outright brutal rejection and shaming for having feelings. In some cases, it was subtle. Oh, you're sad. You know, go be sad in your room and come back down when you're happy. The message is sent.

04:32Your emotions are for you to deal with. Don't burden anybody else with your feelings. So what they learned to do is to suppress their emotions, distract themselves, and escape from their emotions because they were never shown how to deal with emotions. It wasn't safe to communicate about them. So they stuff it down, suppress, suppress, suppress. And suppression only goes so far. That's why they are constantly distracting themselves, diving all into work, into hobbies, you know, an escape

05:00here, escape there, because it helps them avoid those emotions. And they personalized that neglect in childhood growing up to feel defective and unlovable like there's just something wrong with them. And this is why emotional intimacy, closeness, and everything that promotes closeness feels so dangerous to them because their nervous system and their subconscious tells them if I lower my walls and I let my partner in and they see the real me, they're going to see that I'm defective.

05:27I'm going to disappoint them. I will not meet their expectations. I can never meet expectations and I will be rejected. I will be shamed. So emotional closeness to them feels like exposure, shame, rejection. Emotional distance feels safe because if you're at an emotional distance, you won't be able to figure out that they're defective. Now, this is what drives all of it. This there's a lack of capacity in the beginning. It's it's the shared fantasy

05:54stage. The early dating phase, the honeymoon phase is the shared fantasy. And the reason it's called a shared fantasy is because it is a fantasy to the dismissive avoidant. Their fears haven't been triggered yet. There's no real intimacy. You're still getting to know each other. There's no deep expectations or deep accountability.

06:12It's still new. You are a novelty. You're a new shiny toy. You're a new source of validation. And you're giving them lots of dopamine, the reward hormone. So, they are feeling good. and their nervous system has not tied you in with those wounds yet. But once their nervous system ties you in with the wounds, game over, that early dating version is never fully coming back.

06:34Maybe in snippets, but never in full because now you're ner you're a source of danger. Their nervous system registers you as a threat, a threat of exposure, right? Because you're close. You're starting to see the real them and that feels dangerous to them. So deactivation really changes their p perception. You know, deactivation doesn't just change how they feel, it changes how they interpret the past.

07:02Deactivation is when they start to suppress their emotions. They start to detach from their feelings and suppress them. So, when their nervous system is really registering you and the and the relationship as a danger, well, they start to take their romantic feelings for you, they stop them from growing.

07:19And they never really let them develop into deep feelings because love isn't just a feeling. It's also a choice. The choice you make to choose your person every single day, to choose to love them, prioritize them, put your effort into them, empathize with them to choose to love them. Unhealed dismissive avoidance don't have the capacity to choose somebody. So love to them is really more infatuationbased, feeling based, how you make them feel in the moment. But they take those feelings and they suppress them and they do not let

07:47them grow deeper once deactivation starts. And they take all of their feelings for you and they completely detach. So what happens is you essentially get locked away. They are no longer accessing romantic feelings for you. This is how they feel safe. It creates distance and now any kind of affection or attention from you feels suffocating.

08:10You know questions even normal questions feels like interrogation like an attack. Your needs feel like control. You know accountability feels like criticism. And normal conflict to them feels like proof of incompatibility.

08:26Incompatibility is the dismiss of avoidance favorite excuse for a discard because it's a way of avoiding their own accountability. Oh, we're just incompatible. See, not my fault. I can't help it. We're just incompatible. And they'll find the most nonsensical reasons like, "Oh, well, you like Chinese food and I don't. We're incompatible."

08:44But that way, it's avoidance of accountability. And accountability to them feels like death. That is so painful for them. So they avoid accountability because accountability to them is like the emotional confirmation of that defectiveness wound, that wound of shame. I did this wrong. It's proof I'm defective. Too painful. So they have to make you the bad guy. They have to rewrite the relationship history because if you're the bad guy, they get to

09:10escape all those wounds of shame. They don't have to feel them. It's all about avoiding looking inward. And if they don't have to look inward, they don't have to face their shame because that shame to them is truly devastating.

09:24So now they begin to collect evidence that's uh supports the notion of I need to get away. They're in fault finding phase. They are looking for any faults that they can find in you because nobody's perfect. It's easy to find faults in somebody if you look hard enough. And in many cases, they manufacture the faults. Either way, they are on a mission to find fault with you to protect themselves from accountability. Again, accountability is

09:52kryptonite to an unhealed dismissive avoidant. You know, once their nervous system decides that intimacy is dangerous, the conscious mind begins building a case against the relationship. And that's what's going on inside the head of a dismissive avoidant. So, your strengths start to become your flaws. You know the things they initially loved like your affection, it becomes you're too needy.

10:16Your consistency becomes you're too predictable. Your desire for communication becomes you always want to argue. Your loyalty becomes you're too dependent on me. Your emotional openness becomes you're too sensitive. Your standards becomes nothing I ever do is enough. Your desire for commitment becomes you're putting pressure on me.

10:37Everything gets rewritten. The things that are good become bad. And the things that were bad, of course, stay bad. The good, the bad things, your flaws don't get rewritten in a positive way. It's all just everything being twisted to the negative. It's not because you're doing anything wrong. It's because an unhealed dismissive avoidant cannot do a healthy relationship. They can't. The only path to a healthy relationship with the

11:02dismissive avoidant requires them to no longer be a dismissive avoidant. they have to heal. But as long as they are an unhealed, dismissive avoidant, they are emotionally unavailable and therefore unable to do intimacy. So they rewrite your reactions, too. And and but they erase their own behavior. This is the thing. They erase their own negative behaviors. So, what they'll remember is