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Healed Avoidant Reveals When an Avoidant Regrets Losing You (Actual Timeline) – Transcript
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- Robert shares the avoidant regret timeline from his own experience as someone with avoidant attachment patterns.
- During the recovery stage after a breakup, the avoidant experiences an intense relief phase and distracts themselves through work, hobbies, and sports.
- Actual regret typically occurs after a year if enough time has passed for the avoidant to feel fully safe again from a distance.
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What do you think? How long does it take until an avoidant feels actual regret? 1 week? 30 days? 2 months? Well, if you're still waiting after 6 months of no contact, that's not a rare scenario. And in this video today, I want to share with you the actual avoidant regret timeline, but not from a theoretical perspective, but
from someone who actually lived through that as a real avoidant, me. And if you're new to my channel, my name is Robert, and in the past years, I worked with four different therapists to work on my own avoidant attachment patterns, and I went from breaking up five long-term relationships to now finally being in a multi-year happy relationship. So, I know my personally, myself, from my own experience, how it
feels like to break up, to pull away from someone. And yes, I'm aware that I caused a lot of heartbreak here in those relationships, and I don't want to repeat that. So, this is why I went to therapy, why I do these videos here, and why I share that with the world, because I think the only thing that keeps an avoidant from actually destroying relationships, and also sabotaging
themselves constantly again and again and again, is creating awareness for their patterns and behaviors. But what if an avoidant is not aware of what they're doing? Here is the avoidant regret timeline, but we start with stage number zero before the breakup. So, this is month zero. Hey, sorry to interrupt, but I have to share something that might really help you. If you had an amazing
weekend together, and then Monday, they're all distant, barely responding, while you're hurt in bed wondering what you did wrong, here is what I built for you. An AI that gives you direct access to the avoidant mind, built on 4 years of therapy work by an actual avoidant.
It helps you understand why they go cold and what to do next. We had a fight and they went distant again. I'm just so hurt. >> The again says a lot. Your hurt makes complete sense. What feels like rejection is usually their system shutting down, not a decision about you.
>> Get the answers they won't give you themselves at understandable.net. Before the breakup and throughout the relationship, so way before the avoidant would ever feel regret of losing someone, the avoidant is in a relationship constantly busy with trying to regulate themselves.
As we all know, and if you watch my previous videos, I talked about that quite a lot, the avoidant has immense difficulties to be in an intimate and close relationship because they are highly afraid of showing of vulnerable of certain parts of themselves that come up and need to be shown in relationship, of certain feelings, different needs,
specific boundaries. As children, they learned, "When I show up as I am with all of my needs, with all of my feelings, then I'll be met with hostility, with rejection, with criticism." Therefore, in a relationship, whenever closeness and intimacy increase, their alarm system is activated again, their amygdala, where those emotional patterns are stored in
the brain, is triggered, and their operating system is working. And this operating system is working, first of all, really hard to get out of that relationship and to do anything they can to push the other person away because being in that relationship and that usually does not have to do anything with the person they're in a relationship with. So, if you are calmly seeing that and you're dating an
avoidant or on a relationship with someone who has avoidant tendencies, this is not about you as a person. This is their old attachment system being triggered. They deactivate. They have intensely high cortisol level because it stresses them out. It's like a tiger is in their neck when they're on a relationship.
They show things like going numb emotionally, going cold, becoming distant suddenly. Don't reply to your messages. They react annoyed in your relationship. They might be irritated, easily irritated. Whenever you ask them for a favor, they react irritated or they react with anger. And it feels like they push you away as things get more serious. And even though
right in the beginning of your relationship, they might have been in this really exciting and loving energy. They truly showed you affection and connection and they were open and they talked to you and they were loving. And all of those things did disappear as soon as things became more real in your relationship or the dating phase. So, fast forward, they break up because they
are in this overly stressed, highly dysregulated state because they never learned how to show up vulnerable, they never learned how to resolve conflict, how to express emotions, how to coregulate in a relationship and talk about needs, boundaries, future, etc. So, they only see a way out through ending the relationship and through breaking up because they can't take any more
closeness. And it might also lead them to intense anxiety reactions, to panic attacks. So, they have this drive coming out of this attachment pattern that they need to get out of the relationship because, of course, they want to feel like themselves again. They want to feel calm again, feel regulated again, feel
good again, feel independent again, feel safe again. This is what you have to understand here. It's always about the feeling of safety. So, when you break it down to the level of the central nervous system, it's about safety, and they only feel safe because they learned that when they are single, when they are not in an intimate and close relationship. Meaning, as long as they are in a relationship, they
don't feel safe because they don't have the resources. And I talk a lot about that, building safety, because it's a huge part of therapy and of multiple therapies that I did myself, psychoneurotic therapy, NARM therapy, so a somatic approach, hypnotherapy. I talk a lot about my experiences and how I personally build intrinsic safety in my premium courses. So, if you're interested in that, definitely check
them out at understandable.net. We have a membership where I share those things directly from therapy. When they don't have that feeling of safety yet, because it's a process, the securely attached person, they build the basic inner trust and sensation of safety early on in those first four years, the avoidantly attached person never build that feeling of safety and trust through their caregivers'
relationships. So, they do have the ability to build that afterwards. Also, as grown-up beings, that's called earned attachment then. But, if they don't have that, they break up because they only feel safe when they are single. And then, we are on stage number one here on the avoidant regret timeline. In stage number one, there's no regret present, of course. This one
is about the relief and recovery stage. So, I personally, when I remember right after breakup when this first grief which decreased pretty quickly was over, there was this intense relief phase.
I was just feeling incredibly relieved and light. And it felt like a like a hangover from constantly repressing myself in the relationship. To put that in simple words, whenever I broke up afterwards I just felt this lightness of being myself again. And I always thought this is a normal thing.
But it is is not a normal thing, of course. It is just, and I learned that through therapy it is just the reality of someone who never learned to be safe in a close relationship. And therefore, I always had to put a mask on, to play a role, to repress myself in a relationship because I was so deeply believing that how I am
and how I appear is massively wrong. When that mask is taken down after the breakup there's suddenly no more expectations anymore for the avoidant. They feel light.
They also feel validated in their decision because on an emotional level it just feels right. It just How could a thing be wrong if it feels so relieving and so freeing? Right? This is what the avoidant thinks then.
And of course, there's also grief present in that stage. but the avoidant is really good in distracting themselves from that breakup pain. So, they start to work a lot, become workaholics. They practice a lot of their hobbies, do a lot of sports.
You know these memes? I think when I was 16, 17, I saw those first memes on Instagram back then, and it was like a man post-breakup and a woman post-breakup. And it's not funny, but this is what people did back then. They represented the man as someone after breakup became super strong, went to the gym five times a week, made a lot of money, and they represented the woman as eating
chocolate ice cream and becoming fat. If you have an avoidant man, this is what they have in their mind after a breakup. Probably not all of them. It's stereotypical here, and I don't want to categorize anyone. But, this is usually this image of an avoidant high performer becoming single again, prioritizing and over-prioritizing themselves,
becoming a hyper-independent person, highly successful, um highly sporty, okay, looking fit, making a lot of money, solely focusing on themselves and their independent social relationships.
They might also have rebound relationships forming. So, this is also something that distracts them from that real breakup pain. And again, all of those things that look good to the outside are based on overcompensation here. So, they do that to reconnect with themselves, to feel strong again, to feel like themselves, to show the world that they are so independent and so strong. I also
remember when I was in that stage, I felt so, so oversaturated and full by real closeness and commitment. I was so filled with that feeling of being in a committed close relationship which was just too much because it was too much to handle for me within the relationship.