We’ve been together for 3 years and things have always been great.
6 months ago our relationship hit a bad place and it’s been rocky since then, although we’ve been working on these issues to get better.
My partner has always been avoidant and I have always been anxious but it was never a real problem until we hit this place and it made all of our bad patterns affect the relationship in a toxic way that has never happened before, we were never in a situation that exposed those traits so much.
I have acknowledged how much my anxiety affects us and I’ve been working on it, but after everything my partner is still emotionally distant and he seems to not notice that. I know everything that happened pushed him away and made him distant, but even now that we’re better he seems distant and apparently he doesn’t notice that, he says nothing is wrong although I can very clearly feel it, there is something missing.
While reading into this topic I started to point out things that have happened in the last years and have been intensified in the last months (avoiding conflicts, withdrawing, taking a long time to acknowledge his feelings, pushing problems away, not allowing himself to feel, etc).
The big issue here is that being an avoidant person he is probably very disconnected from his own emotions and he uses avoidance as a way to protect himself from dealing with them. He might as well don’t even see this as a problem bc it’s how he has always been. I’m afraid I would mess this up by trying to talk to him about it and making him withdraw while denying the clear signs I want him to be aware of.
How can I approach this topic without making him feel completely uncomfortable and withdraw even more? I know it won’t be easy and I don’t want him to feel bad about it. Also, it took us a long time to be able to connect emotionally and these last months made him go into his shell again and since that’s his natural response, apparently he doesn’t see the bad in it.
As an anxious person I have tried to pull him back in many ways that I now know were not good and were only pushing him away, the famous anxious-avoidant trap. Now I wanna be able to work on these things together but it’s hard if he can’t even see his own unhealthy patterns.
tl;dr: How can I talk to my avoidant partner about how his behavior is prejudicial for our relationship without making him withdraw?
1 comment
This is very vague. How is he distant? What specific sorts of actions is he doing or not doing that you have an issue with? Even if he wanted to, there is no way for him to work on anything from your post, because it is rather vague and general. So, figuring out details is useful if you want to discuss them with him.