attachment styles Archives - The Relationship School®

Why Do I Withdraw from My Partner?

Are you a distancer in your relationship? You know—are you someone who pulls away or withdraws when things get emotionally intense?

If that very question made you want to retreat, don’t panic. Being a distancer doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or anything like that. But whether you’re the person who pulls away or you’ve been with someone who has, this is something important to recognize, and acknowledging it will help your current and future relationships.

Most likely, you’re not pulling away from your partner in an effort to hurt that person. In fact, you probably aren’t even thinking about the effect your withdrawal has on them.

So, then, why do I withdraw from my partner?

Reasons Distancers Pull Away

You might be a distancer because withdrawing has worked for you in the past. For some, the easiest thing to do in a situation where you’re unsure is nothing. You may not be trying to run away, but you’re not putting out the effort to stay where you usually are, either.

Maybe you became a distancer because no one else was around to help you when things got tough in your relationship. You encountered a situation, felt paralyzed, and had nowhere to turn, so you got used to dealing with things on your own. This type of behavior stems from the way your caregivers treated you when you were a child and usually indicates the avoidant attachment style. You probably feel that you’re a pretty self-reliant person because you got used to being on your own.

Another reason you might pull away in a relationship is that being alone and figuring things out for yourself feels like the right thing to do. Maybe you feel instinctively that you need to “think through things” and not communicate with anyone else until you have.

How Withdrawing Affects Your Relationship

Going back to where your focus is when you withdraw…it’s probably not on your partner, is it? Most likely, it’s on your feelings or the problem itself. Or maybe you’re someone who tends to immerse themselves in some type of escape to avoid focusing on the issue.

The truth is, your withdrawal may be causing your partner stress or anxiety, especially if you end up pulling away for long periods of time or on a regular basis. If you look at the situation from your partner’s perspective, they may not understand what’s going on or even know the reason you’ve distanced yourself. They might feel really scared or angry or alone.

Withdrawal can affect you, too—both emotionally and physically. If you’re avoiding dealing with issues, that means they’re stuffed down inside you somewhere, and that can get unhealthy for you as well. Besides, you now have a double issue—the original plus the ones withdrawing has caused.

Here’s a video with some advice for distancers:

People Are Meant for Relationships

If we’re meant for relationships, what do you do? On some level, you want to be in a relationship—you see value in it—and yet you have this desire to withdraw at times. So what’s your best option moving forward?

Well, you don’t have to try to revamp your entire persona. In fact, you can take some pressure off yourself right now and work with small changes.

Even just a little bit of communication, a small effort, will make a big difference. Try talking to your partner, telling them how you feel, and if you need some space, let them know! You’ll have a much better chance of them respecting your need if you approach it up front and honestly. But like everything, you have to put in a little work in order to get the benefits.

So next time you feel like pulling away in your relationship, no matter the reason, stay aware of your feelings—and your partner’s. It’ll improve both sides now and in the long run.

For three tips on getting a man’s heart back after he’s pulled away, check out this free training.

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Photo Credit: Andrew Neel – Unsplash

What Are the Two Main Insecure Attachment Styles?

Relationships are complicated—but they’re not impossible to navigate with some effort. When you and your partner take the time to learn about yourselves and each other, it can make a world of difference in the way you relate to and communicate with each other.

One of the things you can study and learn about is our attachment styles—the relational blueprint that we learned growing up. It’s essentially the template for the way we approach relationships in our adult lives. Many of us don’t have too much specific memory of that, but it’s hardwired into us by our caregivers and our experiences with them.

There are a few categories of attachment styles, but here are the two main insecure types. First, let’s take a look at exactly what “insecure attachment” means.

What Is Insecure Attachment?

Having an insecure attachment style means that you feel insecure in some way in your relationship. Insecure relationships are characterized by anxiety, a lack of trust, and a lot of fighting or distance. Maybe you worry that your partner is going to abandon you; maybe you’re afraid they will judge you, condemn you, or be unaccepting of you; maybe you feel like they might suffocate you and take over your space or try to control you. Whatever the cause for anxiety, it comes from the way you attached to your primary caregivers growing up.

Here’s a quick video about insecure attachment styles:

Insecure Ambivalent

Psychotherapist Stan Tatkin categorizes the insecure ambivalent attachment style as the “wave,” because it can be very up and down. Waves tend to feel lots of emotions and maybe express themselves quite a bit.

The insecure ambivalent “wave” style comes from a history of inconsistent attachments as a child. That could mean that maybe a parent was physically there only part of the time and you never knew whether you could count on them. You probably felt anxious when they weren’t around. It could also mean that maybe the parent or caregiver wasn’t always emotionally available to be there for you and you probably felt rejected by them. What made it confusing was that they were there some of the time too.

In your adult relationships, you probably feel anxiety when your partner withdraws—maybe you feel somewhat needy or helpless when that happens.

Insecure Avoidant

Insecure avoidant, or in Dr. Tatkin’s terms, an “island,” is someone who grew up in a family that didn’t place a lot of emphasis or value on relationships in general. Your caregivers probably didn’t take a lot of time and effort to build a relationship with you, and you were on your own quite a bit. As a result, you learned self-preservation as opposed to relying on others.

In this environment, you learned that relationships weren’t going to help meet your needs, so you withdrew to deal with stress and issues on your own. You probably told yourself that you couldn’t rely on anyone else and that you could only trust yourself.

This can get complicated because in adult relationships, you typically end up with a wave, an insecure ambivalent. They just want a connection with you, but your style is to withdraw because that’s what you’ve always done. You might even get irritated with them when they approach you, but it makes you anxious because you don’t feel you can rely on them. That leads you to avoid the one thing that would actually lead to connection with your partner—talking and working through the issue. Since you haven’t yet experienced a relationship where you can rely on someone, it can feel scary (or annoying) to you when your partner asks you to.

Take a Risk

If you identify with either insecure attachment style, you might feel like it’s just easier to be single. But most of us would rather have a partner in life, to experience connection and to be known. When you take the risk of allowing the other person to know you and face them to work through issues (or give them a little space if they withdraw), it leads to a fulfilling and secure relationship. Don’t get me wrong—it’s going to take some work. But once you know how you’re wired, you can be sensitive to your partner’s style and learn how to communicate and be a team by balancing each other out.

If you’re in a relationship with a man who withdraws, check out this free training for three secrets to pull him back.

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Photo Credit: Everton Vila – Unsplash

Attachment Styles and Romantic Relationships

No intimate partnership is free of problems—they’re unavoidable. In fact, any relationship is subject to issues, but it’s even more noticeable in your closest partnership since that’s where you spend most of your time.

It’s completely normal to go through the “honeymoon phase”—however short or long that may be—and suddenly you start to see some patterns emerging in your partner that you hadn’t seen before. This may be the point you wonder whether you know the person at all, or they may wonder the same about you—but all of this is normal as well. Essentially, it all has to do with attachment styles and the way you were raised. What are attachment styles and what do they have to do with your adult romantic relationships?

Childhood Shapes Your Life

There are a few different ways to categorize attachment styles, but first, it’s important to remember that everyone experienced some type of relational challenges in their childhood. No one is perfect, so you can expect to look at yourself, your past, and your partner and see some type of issue because we’re all human.

And partnering with someone as an adult will wake up past issues that you maybe thought you left behind, but they’re still there because they were engrained into you. If you spent a minimum of 18 years with your parents or other caregivers, that’s quite a long time to learn from them and adopt what I call the “relational blueprint”—the foundation for any relationships in your life from that point forward.

With that in mind, understanding attachment styles is key because it will benefit you in relation to your own behavior and emotions as well as in your relationships.

Here’s a short video on attachment styles and relationships:

Attachment Styles: Seek and Avoid

To break it down as simply as possible, there are two main insecure attachment styles: the type who seek and the type who avoid. Seekers would be someone who, as a kid, would go to a parent or even a sibling in times of difficulty to talk or work through a problem. A person who seeks probably experienced a childhood where family relationships were sometimes good and sometimes bad.

Avoiders would be someone who avoids when under stress because they felt that their relationships were not supportive. Maybe the parent or sibling didn’t want to deal with things or left the child alone to figure stuff out, so that person learned that “going it alone” was the best thing to do.

Attachment Styles: Islands, Anchors, and Waves

Psychotherapist, relationship expert, and author Stan Tatkin has created his own categories for attachment styles, and he discusses three main types:

Islands, which are the avoiders and like to be left alone. Islands process emotions internally and tend to find ways to self-soothe rather than asking for help from others.
Anchors, which are the seekers who look for justice and fairness—most likely because that’s what they experienced in family relationships growing up. Anchors are skilled at tuning in to the other person’s tone and expression.
Waves, which are in between islands and anchors. Waves may have experienced inconsistent attachments in childhood, varying from neglect or complacency to focused attention at times. Waves tend to rely on others for help when they need soothing.

Attachment in Adult Relationships

Being able to categorize your own attachment style and your partner’s can go a long way in your relationship. It can help you understand behavior and the reasons behind actions rather than judging your partner or writing them off as either too needy/clingy or too withdrawn.

So, the best way to avoid more sabotaging behaviors? Understand your attachment style. Even better news is, once you understand attachment styles, you can create a secure attachment together in a relationship when you’re both willing to work on yourselves and your styles. Learning and effort in this area will help set you up for a successful relationship and give you a strong relational foundation to build upon.

If you’d like to learn three keys to communication and conflict, check out this free training.

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Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema – Unsplash

How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Adult Relationships

If you’re unfamiliar with attachment styles, it refers to the way you relate to someone in a relationship—essentially, the blueprint for relationships that you learned as you were growing up. The way you were raised affects your adult relationships—a lot.

Your attachment style was taught to you from a very young age by your primary caregivers—and for most of us, for a number of years. The way your family dynamics worked plays a big part in the way your adult relationships work even if you don’t realize it.

So it’s important to take a look at a few things to determine your attachment style and see—just what does it mean for you now?

Main Attachment Style One: Avoidant

Thinking about your childhood, what was the environment like? If your family shamed you, neglected you, told you you were “wrong” all the time…or maybe they were controlling and always in your space…you probably learned to fend for yourself. That means you fall into the avoidant attachment style category.

Most likely, relationships in your family weren’t valued or seen as a resource for needs, so you learned early on not to rely on them. If something stressful or problematic happened, it probably never got dealt with or fixed.

Avoidant Adult

As an adult, you most likely find yourself withdrawing when you and your partner have a fight or if things get stressful. You retreat in order to protect yourself and aren’t thinking of the other person. Psychotherapist Stan Tatkin calls this style the “island,” the person who pulls away and wants distance. You probably feel like you don’t need anyone else, even though you do, and you tell yourself you’re good alone.

Main Attachment Style Two: Ambivalent

If you had a caregiver who was inconsistent—present and available sometimes and not others—you probably felt insecure and anxious. This attachment style is called the ambivalent style, the one Dr. Tatkin calls the “wave” style, because you’re up and down like a wave. When your caregiver was there, you were okay. But you knew at some point they would vanish again.

Ambivalent Adult

As an adult, you may have a fear of abandonment and feel anxious if your partner pulls away when you want to talk. You probably feel secure when your partner is available, but the moment they pull away, you worry that they’ll leave or that something is really wrong.

Here’s a short video on attachment style in relationships:

Notice Your Style

If you’re not sure of your style, think about your gut instinct when you and your partner fight. Is it to talk it out or to run away? Do you seek or avoid?

Typically, we attract a partner who is the opposite of us, so it should be pretty easy to determine which style each of you has adopted. It can be pretty frustrating if you aren’t aware of how to deal with it in your relationship. Not having the tools and skills to navigate it, in fact, can sabotage what otherwise is a good relationship.

But once you determine your style and your partner’s, that’s the first step to figuring out how to work through the differences as a team. When you’re aware of the dynamic, it’s important not to expect your partner to simply reverse the style that’s been present and instinctual to them for years. Change can happen—on both individuals’ parts—but it’s slow and steady, not a sprint. When you’re both willing to learn and work together, you can function and communicate successfully regardless of your contradictory styles.

If you’d like to learn more about your relationship now, take this free test.

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Photo Credit: Dimitri – Unsplash