Anxious/Avoidant Relationships: Why They Only Heal Through Shadow Work

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we are talking about a topic that I have been wanting to touch on forever but it kind of feels like such a big can of worms that I haven't been sure if I even want to open it in the first place and that topic is healing the Dynamics of an anxious avoidant attachment relationship so most often where you see this showing up is romantic Partnerships people with anxious attachment Styles tend to gravitate towards

those with avoidant attachment Styles and because these relationships are made up of two people who are largely psychologically one-sided and we'll talk about what that means in a minute what tends to happen is that a lot of conflict comes up and it can feel really difficult to resolve so wear a lot of anxious avoidant couples end up is in this place where they're both trying to change the relationship Dynamic through convincing their partner to try to change themselves or their attachment issues and in this video what we're going to go over is one why that

approach is absolutely not going to work and two why a lot of the more conventional approaches that I see people taking towards healing avoidant anxious Dynamics also tend to not work at least Beyond a kind of surface level so let's say you have an anxious avoidant couple they both think the other one is the problem but they want to work on their relationship and so they decide to let's say go to couples counseling the approach that I often see used when it comes to Healing anxious avoidant Dynamics is actually an approach that pushes each person

further into their own wounding so you might have an avoidant partner being encouraged to hold more space for the anxious partner's emotions and you might have the anxious partner being encouraged to give the avoidant more space to do their own thing and lick their own wounds and while this might kind of work on a surface level it might get you a relationship where you're not triggering each other as actively that's not the same thing as healing the relational Dynamic to heal the relational Dynamic on a deep level what needs to happen is both parties need

to do significant Shadow work so before we get into what that looks like interpersonally I'm going to talk about what the shadow looks like for each of the people in this scenario as well as how that shadow can actually get in the way of doing the deep healing work that would be required to actually fix the relational Dynamic on a deep level so really quickly if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say terms like the Shadow or Shadow work I do have a video explaining that terminology that I will link in the

description of this video as well as a video series that goes over the biggest blind spot which kind of covers the shadow of each attachment style specifically so you can check those out and then come back here when you're kind of up to date on the terminology but for those who are familiar with what I mean when I say the term Shadow let's talk about what is in the shadow for the different ends of the attachment Spectrum so quick recap our psychological Shadows are comprised of the behaviors the impulses the needs the feelings the thoughts

that we learn to systematically suppress at a very early age because they were non-adaptive in the caregiving environment that we grew up in so we learned to maximum is what gets us care protection and safety in the world and to minimize what is going to threaten our safety whether that's literal safety or interpersonal safety an anxious and avoidant attachment Styles tend to have directly opposite things in their Shadows so those who lean more avoidant learned early on if I show my true needs and my true vulnerabilities and my true pain I will be relatively consistently

met with disgust or rejection so their strategy for staying in connection becomes self-reliance and making sure that they're monitoring their own emotional experience and not putting their needs too heavily on other people what goes in the shadow is their vulnerability and need so those are the things that they start repressing even from their own conscious awareness so it's not that they're walking around with all of these needs and vulnerabilities at the surface that they're consciously deciding not to express most of the time they aren't even consciously aware of having those needs and then on the

flip side you have the anxious strategy so those who air more anxious on the attachment Spectrum learned and internalized from a young age if I don't make my needs very loudly and consistently known I will be abandoned so the connection strategy that gets developed for those who have anxious patterning is to keep their emotional needs right at the surface of their own conscious awareness and make them known to other people anytime they start to feel as though distance is developing between themselves and someone else so this is a proximity seeking strategy it's oriented around keeping

capable others close to them so that they can get help having their needs fulfilled and what goes in the shadow when you develop this type of strategy is your own self-reliance because if you feel like solving your own problems will cause you to get abandoned and be alone in life your mind is going to start naturally repressing information about how to solve your problems and become independent now here's where we get into trouble a secure relationship is a relationship in which self-reliance and vulnerability and proximity seeking are held in balance and in a relationship where

both people are secure both people have a good balance of each skill so they're able to be open and vulnerable and to seek out proximity to their partner when that's what's needed for the connection but they're also very capable of solving their own problems taking space and behaving independently when that's what's healthy for themselves in the partnership in a relationship where you have one person who leans more anxious and another who leans more avoidant both is going to start over functioning in their area of comfort so the anxious party is probably going to be providing

most if not all of the proximity seeking behaviors in the relationship and the avoidant partner is likely going to be providing most if not all of the emotional self-containment behaviors in the relationship so both people are psychologically one-sided at least when it comes to their emotional development they can only really do half of the secure thing and the other person represents their own shadow so for the avoidant person dating an anxious person who has all of that need and vulnerability right on the surface represents the parts of themselves that they naturally learn to repress very

early on and saying goes in the opposite direction for the anxious party the avoidant other represents the traits of stoicism and calm and emotional containment that they learn to repress in themselves early on so it's like you have two people who are living literally with their own shadow and this Dynamic is chronically reaffirming each of their respective worldviews so the avoidant has that world view of I'm okay I can take care of myself I can meet my own needs I'm psychologically regulated but you are not okay so there's this belief that others are incompetent unable

to take care of themselves unable to meet their needs and will always be looking for something or needing something from the avoidant and on the other side of things you have the anxious worldview of I'm not okay you're okay so it's this idea of I can't take care of myself I am not capable of navigating the world without a protective well-regulated other but you're okay so other people are intelligent and well regulated and capable of consistently providing me with the protection that I need and of course both of these things are happening unconsciously we're not

going around actively having these thoughts but they probably are showing up relatively consistently in our partner choices and we're going to talk a lot more about why that's important and what those World Views mean when they start to shift as this video goes on so it might feel really easy to go well why not just let each person play to their strength and in some relationships I want to be clear this actually works so it's really difficult to paint avoidant and anxious attachment with broad Strokes because you can have someone who's just a little bit

reserved on the avoidant side of the attachment Spectrum or you can have someone who is severely avoidantly attached and those things are going to look very different same with the anxious side of things you can have someone who's just a little bit clingy when they get into a relationship or you can have someone who is very severely anxiously attached and again those two things are going to look very different so in a situation where you're dealing with just a little bit of avoidance or anxiety on either side of the spectrum you might actually never need

to do the work it might just be that if you're a little bit needy you find someone who's a little bit reserved or vice versa and you actually have a reasonably stable life together but if you find yourself further down that attachment Spectrum you're likely to have these Dynamics where humongous wounds are present in both parties and each one starts to look at the other as the sole cause of the problems in the relationship the reason why this ironically works so well is because both people are right when they're pointing at the other and saying

you're the problem it's almost poetic because both people are psychologically one-sided and so they're truly able to see the flaws in the other but each one is unable to see the flaws in their own behavior so again I have that video on blind spots that you can check out below that gives a little bit more information on what this process looks like but the Trap that most people get stuck in when they want to heal their anxious avoidant relationship is the Trap of believing that their partner needs to change in order for the relationship to

get better and maybe they pay some kind of lip service to the idea that oh we both need to change and get better but because the partner's flaws are so much more apparent than your own if you're in one of these Dynamics you're probably going to have this idea that your partner needs to change like 80 percent and you need to change like 25 percent and in the rest of this video we are going to talk about how that logic is absolutely flawed because not only do you both need to do Shadow work in order

to change this Dynamic but your partner changing is likely to be highly triggering for you in ways you do not expect if you are not also doing that change work in equal magnitude and this is something I see getting discussed almost nowhere so we're going to go into discussing it right now when we think about getting our partner to change whether that means we are anxious and we're wanting our partner to become more emotionally available or whether we are avoidant and we're wanting our partner to become more emotionally regulated and independent we tend to imagine

that our partner is going to retain all of the qualities we already like about them but just take away the things we don't like and add in some traits that we want them to have in reality this is not at all how attachment healing works when you're in a partnership or a family system of any sort when one person changes everybody else has to make compensatory changes in order for the system to remain in equilibrium so the first thing I rarely see talked about but that I believe has to be at the core of our

awareness if we want to heal avoid an anxious relational Dynamics is the fact that your partner ceasing to over function in the way that they have been over functioning in your relationship so again that example of the anxious person providing all or most of the proximity seeking behaviors or the avoidant party providing all or most of the emotional regulation skills if either one stops over functioning in that area the other one is going to be forced to step up and start doing something that they have never learned to do before which is going to mean

confronting your own shadow and that might be deeply uncomfortable for you so you might have an avoidant person going I want my partner to become more independent and to stop looking to me to solve all of their emotional issues okay if they do that and they truly become more independent and more self-regulated it means that you are probably going to have to be responsible for much more of the proximity seeking behaviors in your relationship so instead of waiting for them to come to you and to provide the warmth and attention and structure for how your

emotional lives will function as a couple you're going to have to learn to approach them in equal measure and this guarantees that at some point you're going to need to feel vulnerable and put your pride down and explain to them that you feel either neglected vulnerable in need of something or any other host of emotions you're not used to having to express because if you're used to being smothered you don't have those needs all you need to do when your anxious partner is over functioning in the proximity seeking category is do what you're already comfortable

with which is pulling back and asking for space asking for connection if your partner becomes someone who who has a thriving Act of social life outside of the relationship and who stops needing you to regulate them as much at some point or another will become very vulnerable which might cause you to feel disgust with yourself because again that vulnerability that need for closeness and intimacy that need for co-regulation has always been in you but you've shoved it into your Shadow so if your partner stops over functioning in that way you're going to now need to

start pulling things out of your Shadow and integrating them in order to keep the relationship functional and the same is true in the opposite direction so if you have an anxious attachment style and you really want your partner to be more emotionally available what that means is not just that your partner is going to start sharing their emotions with you in a self-contained way it also means that your partner is going to start being genuinely vulnerable which might feel like neediness to you and you might feel disgusted by that because if you're partner is showing

their vulnerabilities and their neediness and keep in mind that because this is likely a new skill for them as someone with an avoidant attachment style it's actually going to be a very clumsy and undignified expression of vulnerability most of the time that forces you to be in your own adult self and to serve as that secure base for your dysregulated partner and the problem here is that if you have an I'm not okay you're okay worldview and that's what you are secretly the most comfortable with is feeling like you're not okay but someone else is

capable and taking care of you it is going to feel very threatening to temporarily have that reversed when in reality secure relationships function like this all of the time so Partners trade off acting as the secure base for one another and each one is comfortable letting the other one be a little bit dysregulated and stepping into the adult role and then letting those roles shift so both Partners know how to be in their own self-responsibility as well as in their own vulnerability but again if you are anxious and you have this negative view of yourself

that you are so pathetic and incompetent the only thing worse than being you as far as your unconscious mind is concerned is being someone who needs you if you're down here that must make them way way down there and so it's highly likely that you're going to get a little bit triggered if your partner truly does start becoming vulnerable with you and I have to say as someone who has been healing from the more avoidant side of the spectrum this has absolutely happened to me more than once in Intimate Relationships where I've been kind of

sloppily learning my needs and how to express them and my vulnerabilities and I've been met with contempt and discussed by more anxious leaning Intimates and ideally that's something that you can work through right the anxious partner can and if they want the relationship to work has to learn to work through feelings of disgust that arise when their partner starts needing them the same way that they need their partner because secure relationships do involve healthy forms of dependency but this is the first thing that we need to be aware of if we want to start healing

anxious avoidant Dynamics if our partner starts to truly heal it's going to force us to reach into our shadow and start developing the traits that we were once putting entirely on our partner to provide in the relational Dynamic so the avoidant partner is going to need to learn to do those proximity seeking behaviors and be vulnerable and emotionally open and direct about their needs and the anxious party is going to need to learn to be secure enough in themselves to act as that secure base without feeling panicked or disgusted when their avoidant partner needs them

for emotional co-regulation now the second reason why this kind of classic approach of I'll just get my partner to change and then our relationship will heal does not work is because if your partner were to go and do that deep healing work where they're able to integrate their Shadow and become a psychologically balanced person with clear access to both reason and self-reliance and emotional vulnerability it's likely that they would not want to be with someone who hasn't done that same work so if your partner is severely anxiously attached and they truly develop their more rational

side they're going to realize that it's not rational to be in a close intimate relationship with someone who isn't emotionally available and so the likelihood of them wanting to stay in that relationship goes down and the same is true in the opposite perspective if you have an anxious attachment style and you want your partner to become more emotionally aware what's going to happen is not that they're just going to share their positive feelings towards you with you they're also going to share what hurts them about the dynamic with you and if you're not prepared to

hear that and to absorb that feedback and respond to it maturely and take responsibility for the ways in which you are hurting your partner that relationship probably is not going to last very long so again unless both parties are doing the Deep Shadow work here and both are working in real time to up their skill set to compensate for the ways in which their partner was previously over functioning it's likely that this is not going to end well now the third and last reason why this traditional route of just trying to force our partners to

change does not work and once we talk about this we will get into what to do instead is that it can feel deeply psychologically threatening to have that external representation of our own shadow disappear and so we might start unconsciously without realizing that we are doing this trying to force our partner back into the role that we're more comfortable with them playing if your subconscious mind is only deeply comfortable feeling like I am not okay and somebody else is and will take care of me your partner healing and admitting to you and themselves all of

the ways in which they're not okay is likely to make you feel panicked subconsciously so what you're going to need to give up in this process is the fantasy of never having to grow up and instead just finding a perfect savior who can fix the way you're feeling forever it's also going to force you to confront the fantasy that you are eternally innocent and never do anything wrong or never do anything to hurt other people because again the more you're avoiding partner gets in touch with their own raw emotions the the more they're going to

feel the pain of the ways that you have rejected or hurt them it's going to take a lot of emotional maturity skills to handle that and on the other side of things if you are the avoidant partner and your anxious partner starts getting more in touch with their independence and their self-reliance and their capability you're going to have to actively stop the part of your programming that is probably going to come online and start derogating or thinking down on all of these positive changes that your partner is making because that puts you back in the

I'm okay they're not okay worldview and this is going to force you to face the reality that the reason why you've had so much trouble forming and maintaining healthy relationships is not just because you keep dating emotionally disregulated people it's predominantly because you lack the vulnerability and the proximity seeking skills that would be required for you to be in a healthy relationship with someone who is both rational and emotionally balanced so in each of these cases the short version is if you are in an anxious avoidant Dynamic your partner's healing is likely in some small

or large way to be triggering for you you and you are going to need to learn how to confront what comes up through your partner's healing work by looking at your own shadow and being willing to integrate the things that normally your partner has been holding on to and representing for you so instead of asking yourself the question how do I get my partner to change here are five questions I recommend you ask yourself instead in order to get down to the actual deep work that is going to start shifting your relationship in a positive

direction if it's something that you're both willing to work on question one am I ready for the power dynamic in this relationship to drastically shift so am I ready either for my partner to develop more Independence and to stop needing me in many of the ways in which they currently need me or am I ready for my partner to start needing me and becoming dependent on me in ways that they currently are not either of those shifts are going to cause major waves in the power dynamic as it currently stands in your relationship so the

question on either side of the equation is not how do I get my partner to do more of what I want it's am I willing to give up the main source of power that I currently have in this relationship in order to allow my partner the space they need to change get in touch with their own shadow and heal their relationship to themselves that's a very drastic change for both of you but in my opinion that's kind of the number one agreement people need to make if they want to start changing their anxious avoidant relationship

are we both willing to give up to a certain extent the major sources of power and control that we feel inside of this relationship question two how am I going to deal with the insecurity that will arise when I finally start look looking at my partner as my true equal so this might mean as the avoidant party recognizing that you are not trapped in this relationship you are choosing to be there intentionally if you always kind of feel like you're better than your partner in certain ways and they're lucky to be with you you pretty

much never have to feel vulnerable if you were to date someone who you were conceding to see as a true equal which does not mean that you have all the same skills all it means is that you are finally stepping into the self-responsibility of acknowledging I am choosing to be with this person Ergo we are equal in the responsibility that gets taken for this relationship that is going to once again force you to deal with the feelings of Shame and disgust and vulnerability that you repressed at a very young age on the flip side if

you are the anxiously attached party and you are willing to truly see your partner as someone who needs emotional comfort and protection to the same degree that you do it's going to force you to deal with that feeling of absolute fear that there is not a strong capable competent savior out there who can come along and always be okay enough themselves in order to care for and protect you both of these acknowledgments require giving up a certain degree of safety that we feel in the world question three and this one's a tricky One how can

I proactively work to stop triggering my own shadow traits in my partner now again this is something we do not do consciously but that comes up unconsciously all of the time so in my video attachment healing and The Dark Night of the Soul which I will once again Link in the description of this video I go into in more detail how we often unconsciously elicit traits in others that we find unbearable to to deal with in ourselves so the avoidant partner without realizing it might actually be eliciting more neediness and more proximity seeking from their

anxious partner because they are unable to embody those traits in themselves and the same is true in the opposite direction the anxious party might be triggering more self-reliance and Independence in their avoidant partner because they find it too threatening to embody those traits in themselves so in this process we have to learn to step into the parts of ourselves that are in our shadow so if you have an avoidant attachment style you are going to have to learn to embody proximity seeking behaviors vulnerable emotional expression and dependency in appropriate ways and this is risky not

just for you in your own self-image but it's risky for the relationship because again your partner might feel disgusted by those behaviors and not want to be with you anymore that is a very real threat that I am absolutely not going to sugarcoat for us any time we start showing up differently in any sort of relational system the entire system is going to have to learn to adjust or try to push you back into your regular role through subtle forms of shaming or whatever it is so that's something to be aware of once again am

I willing to embody the traits that my partner usually holds within this Dynamic and withstand potential rejection in the face of me doing so same is true in the opposite direction if you are anxiously attached are you willing to develop your Independence and autonomy and self-regulation even in the face of subtle pushback or subtle shaming from the other party in the relationship again it's risky because it might lead to forms of rejection that your partner is not even aware they're doing and this is absolutely true for both parties in this Dynamic so again am I

willing to proactively work to embody my shadow traits so that I'm not subconsciously triggering my partner to over embody them and am I willing to face the fact that I might get rejected in the process and have to deal with a lot of Shame which is often what comes up when we're doing that shadow work question number four to ask yourself in this process and this is one that might arise once you've already done a significant amount of healing work on both ends of the spectrum am I willing to take a sober look at this

relationship and be realistic about the ways in which we are and are not compatible so a lot of the time when anxious and avoidant individuals get together the main thing they have in common is their shared world view of who is okay and who is not so the anxious party goes I'm not okay but you're okay and the avoiding party goes that's right I'm okay and you're not okay and so they have this very compatible way of experiencing relational Dynamics but if they both heal themselves into secure people who are able to function independently now

what happens is you have to look at the relationship and go okay do we like each other now that the main purpose of being together is not us projecting our deep psychological wounds onto each other do we like hanging out do we enjoy what we talk about when we're sitting around talking do we want the same lifestyle do we have aligned goals do we share a sense of humor all of these things that are the first things secure couples tend to look at are probably only going to be things that are brought into your screaming

awareness once you've started to do enough healing work because before that point your attachment issues are probably going to be the main source of conflict in your relationship you're not even going to get down to those compatibility issues and something I also rarely see being brought up but that I think is fairly prevalent is that attachment wounding very often causes us to seek out Partners who are not that compatible with because there's no risk of true intimacy on either side if both people kind of no in an intuitive way this person just isn't really going

to get me even if we were both fully healed and okay because we're just not that similar we just perceive the world in drastically different ways and that serves both parties in being able to perpetually feel misunderstood and keep blaming their partner for all of their problems in the relationship so I look at Mutual Shadow work or healing work in relationships as the process of kind of sobering up after being really drunk in a relationship potentially for many years it's like waking up the next morning and actually looking at the person in bed next to

you and going is this a person who I want to keep seeing and the answer might be no and that's okay too it doesn't mean that your relationship didn't matter or was a waste if anything a relationship that brought you into mutual healing and growth and left you both more secure than where you started is a fantastically successful relationship but it doesn't mean you're going to want to stay together once the healing has happened and I think that's something that it's actually really important to ignore knowledge and to be aware of as you're going into

that healing process at the end of it we might have less anger towards each other because we're no longer projecting everything onto each other but we might also have less attraction towards each other because maybe we just learned that the secure versions of ourselves don't have that much in common and again that is totally and completely okay it's just something you're going to want to ask yourself about and be aware of going into it and Fifth and final question we're going to talk about today when it comes to getting down to what actually makes an

avoidant anxious Dynamic heal is the question am I willing to focus at least five times harder on my own change in growth than on my partners again it is so much clearer to us to see what our partners are doing wrong than it is to see what we're doing wrong so for every one thing we see our partners doing wrong we might have to acknowledge it's now time to dig five times as deeply inside of our ourselves to unearth the one thing that we're doing wrong that we're struggling to see it is going to feel

like our partners are most of the problem if our own negative contributions to the relationship Dynamic are in our blind spots now what I'm not saying here is that if you're in some sort of emotionally abusive Dynamic the solution is to work five times harder on yourself in that case healing work and Shadow work is actually going to make you much better equipped to leave the relationship with a low risk of returning to it okay so that work is still important the work of making yourself more self-sufficient and independent or interdependent on healthy support networks

is still going to be the skill that's going to help you out of your current situation and the kind of asterisks that I want to put on this point is that it doesn't count as real Growth work if what you are doing is just becoming more and more one-sided so I've kind of seen this trap that both sides of the spectrum can fall into where let's say the avoidantly attached partner starts learning different lingo for communication skills and then they use that lingo to just become more rigid and more demanding about the exact logical sequence

that everything has to follow in the relationship like okay now that I know about non-violent communication every time you're not using non-violent communication I don't have to listen or take you seriously right that's not healing work that's just one more way of being rigid and one-sided and dismissive of emotions that are not expressed perfectly and on the flip side I've seen anxious people get really into let's say attachment healing work and what they're doing is just getting more and more and more fixated on their partner's behavior and how they can use attachment Theory to manipulate

their partner and this is also not healing again you're just further repressing the Shadow and doubling down on what you already know and calling it healing that's not going to get you anywhere in order to heal an anxious avoidant relationship dynamic or in order to heal your own attachment wounding whether you are in a relationship or not the only way to really do it to really get down to the core of it is to confront the wounding that originally created the attachment patterning you have been in for the majority of your life you need to

do that work of uncovering and becoming aware of your own blind spots deeply grieving the pain of what caused you to develop that sort of one-sidedness and then be willing to bring into your conscious awareness and start working with that which you have systematically suppressed throughout the majority of your life that is the only way deep healing work actually happens and that is the only way deep healing work actually happens inside of a relationship you cannot deeply and sustainably heal something by just using little tricks to make your woundings more compatible again maybe that works

if you're only a little bit wounded and it doesn't cost that much to make those tiny concessions for the rest of your life but if you are deeply wounded that is not going to cut it you have to do the work of becoming more psychologically balanced figuring out what's in your Shadow bringing it into your conscious awareness and being willing to integrate it and become a version of yourself that doesn't need another person to hold and represent that shadow for you that's the only real way healing these types of relationships works so on that note

I will leave a ton of videos in the description of this one that can get you kind of started on that path if it's something you want to take on as always I'm very curious about where you're all finding yourself in this process as well as what's coming up for you as we talk about this let me know in the comments what you're thinking feeling experiencing wanting to work on in this department I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon

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