Why Avoidant Partners Pull Away — And What Individual Therapy Can Teach You About Reconnection
When you’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t seem fully committed, who runs hot and cold, and who downplays the need to invest in your relationship, it can feel pretty disorienting. Your partner probably doesn’t fully understand why they pull away, and that means they can’t give you an answer when you ask why.
The reality is, there’s a high probability your partner experiences avoidant attachment, and this shows up in your relationship with a pursuer-withdrawer dynamic that can feel disorienting and erode emotional safety in your relationship for both partners.
Why do avoidant partners pull away?
Avoidant attachment is an expression of early childhood connections (or lack thereof) that play out in relationships in adulthood. Caregivers who are emotionally distant or withholding—who actively or passively punish or ignore their children for having emotional needs—create an environment where closeness feels unsafe. When caregivers also often display avoidant behaviors, a person can grow up having no idea what secure, healthy closeness looks like.
For avoidant partners, emotional distance feels like home, and closeness and connection can feel overwhelming, sometimes even threatening. Pulling away helps avoidant partners feel normal and safe again, even if they’re craving closeness. It also, unfortunately, weakens relationships and escalates conflict cycles.
Are you wondering if your partner has avoidant attachment? Or if you, yourself, are avoidant? When your partner seeks closeness, signs of avoidant attachment and pulling away can include:
Literally leaving the room
Shutting down during conflict
Refusing to have conversations about the relationship
Not fully acknowledging your relationship or what you mean to them
Downplaying the seriousness of a partner’s feelings or needs
Refusing to talk about or express their emotions
Mockery or insults toward a partner who is expressing a need for closeness
Inconsistent behavior, e.g., communication followed by silence
Not spending as much time with you
If you’re dating an avoidant partner, or you’re avoidant yourself, thankfully, you aren’t stuck pulling away from closeness forever. You or your partner were taught that attachment was unsafe, but learning about safe connection is possible, even in adulthood, and even in your current relationship. Individual relationship therapy is a great starting point to breaking pursuer-withdrawer cycles in your relationship, and can help both avoidant partners and the ones who crave closeness with them.
What individual relationship therapy can teach you about reconnection: for the avoidant partner
In individual relationship therapy, you can learn more about your attachment style and how it impacts your life. You and your therapist can explore your reactions to your partner’s attempts at connection, helping you see your own patterns of pulling away.
The goal of individual relationship therapy isn’t to give your partner everything they want, nor is it to totally remodel who you are. The goal is to help you understand yourself better and to help you learn new ways to respond to both your partner and your own emotions and needs.
Sometimes, this means changing how you express your needs, like instead of downplaying your partner’s desire to connect and brushing them off, you can let them know you are feeling overwhelmed and need to slow down, creating connection with your vulnerability while also giving yourself space.
Sometimes, this means pursuing closeness with your partner in ways that are slightly beyond your comfort zone (but still align with your ultimate relationship goals), so you can learn the difference between the unsafe connections of your childhood and safe connections in adulthood. You weren’t given a chance to learn how to have secure attachments when you were young, but individual relationship therapy gives you a space to learn how to connect to others in ways that feel safe, not overwhelming.
Your relationship with your therapist can help you let go of avoidant behaviors
Avoidant partner therapy also creates an opportunity to explore vulnerability, honesty, and communication of your emotions with your therapist. For someone who was taught early on that connection isn’t safe, the therapy room can be a place to learn that being open with another person isn’t always unsafe. As you develop your capacity for connection in therapy, you also expand your capacity for connection outside of the therapy room.
What avoidant partner therapy can teach you about reconnection: for people with avoidant partners
When your partner pulls away from connection, it can feel very disorienting. It can push you to try to over-function emotionally, attempting to put enough effort into your relationship to make up for a lack of participation from your partner. It takes two people to build a relationship, and avoidant partner therapy can help you see where you’re trying to compensate for rejection, instead of creating emotional safety for yourself and your partner.
Avoidants often attract anxiously attached partners, so you may be struggling with your own attachment challenges that play out in your relationship. Avoidant partner therapy can help you spot patterns of perfectionism, rigidity, insistence on solving issues immediately, and pushing for connection beyond what’s reasonable. The goal of individual relationship therapy for people partnered with avoidants isn’t to figure out how to change your partner, or to miraculously fix your relationship. Instead, it’s a space to look at what you can actually control in your relationship.
Partners of avoidants can learn to make different choices in individual relationship therapy
Understanding your own dysfunctional patterns in relationships can help you stop the pursuer-withdrawer cycle and choose responses that prioritize your emotional safety in a more secure way. When your partner pulls away, instead of chasing, demanding, and overwhelming, you can do something different.
This might be stating the pattern you’re noticing, and asking for time to connect (that fits in with both your and your partner’s needs, so they aren’t overwhelmed and you aren’t left wondering if you’ll ever have the discussions you need). It might mean stating your needs simply and allowing your partner to make choices on how to fulfill them, on their own timeline. It might mean recognizing your partner isn’t invested in your relationship in the ways you need them to be, leading you to pursue couples therapy, or taking time to consider ending the relationship altogether.
Working with a therapist who understands the pursue-withdraw cycle can help you see more clearly how insecure attachment is disrupting your relationship, and what you can do to shift to secure attachment behaviors that prioritize your own needs while respecting the needs of your partner.
Individual relationship therapy with a couples therapist in Houston can help you feel safe with connection in your relationship
Individual relationship therapy at Heights Couples Therapy can help you understand the roots of avoidant attachment, learn new ways to seek connection, and express your feelings in ways that feel more secure and safe. If you have avoidant attachment, you can learn how to have tough conversations and how to connect without wanting to run and hide. If your partner is avoidant, you can learn how to stop over-functioning emotionally, learning how to set boundaries and seek connection without reaching beyond your own relationship responsibilities.
To get started on individual relationship therapy with an experienced, empathetic couples therapist in Houston, book a free consultation with us today.