The Real Reason Why Most Anxious-Avoidant Relationships Fail (And How To Combat It)

hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we're talking about neuroticism and today in particular I want to talk about a neurotic Dynamic that tends to underly anxious avoidant relationship Dynamics so anxious avoidant relationships are essentially any relationship where one partner has and is expressing more anxious attachment wounds and the other partner has or is expressing more avoid ID attachment wounds and very often when we get into these relationships what it feels like is we just can't seem to find Common Ground we

just can't seem to make sense of why these conflicts go on and on and don't get resolved why it feels like we're not seeing eye to eye and what I want to talk about today is the underlying reason why that often is so anytime we are having an argument we are generally having a couple arguments at once one is the kind of top layer surface level argument so you didn't do the dishes or you never text me back on time or I know you don't like your sister-in-law just admit it to me I already know

it when in reality we're having a conflict that's actually a lot deeper than that under the surface now what's distinct between anxious avoidant or insecurely attached Dynamics and secure Dynamics is that in Secure Dynamics what's under the surface is generally not that deeply obscured from the people having the argument so securely attached people tend to have less blind spots that are guiding their behavior and causing them to go into conflict somewhat blind to their true intentions whereas when you have anxious avoidant couples or mutually insecurely attached couples of any attachment orientation what often happens is

you have two people who are very frequently arguing from their unconscious blind spots so what they're saying the problem is is truly consciously what they believe the problem is but there's very often a deeper subconscious wound that's being expressed or that's being avoided through the argument that's more indicative of the real reason why they're in Conflict so today what we're going to talk about is how to start becoming more aware of what it is that you're actually arguing about if you're in one of these anxious avoidant or insecurely attached relations ships as well as how

we can start moving to a more secure style of conflict so very often what I believe is going on under the surface of these anxious avoidant Dynamics is that there's a fundamental mismatch in each party's premise about what the relationship is and what purpose they want it to serve in their lives but very often both people in the partnership have the same conscious or explicit relationship intention so they might both come in going yeah I want a partner to spend my life with and they might think that they're aligned on what it is they're looking

for in a relationship when in reality these unconscious wounds are actually driving them to look at the relationship very differently and the problem is that when we're triggered when we are in Conflict when we are under threat those unconscious wounds start arguing on our behalf so we are no longer operating from the rational part of our brains that no knows consciously and explicitly what we want out of our Partnerships we're now arguing from the part of ourselves that has partnership as a concept represented in a way that is actually quite different from our conscious or

explicitly stated views of what a partnership is and what role we want it to fill in our lives so if you're insecurely attached it's highly likely that your own conscious and unconscious ideas about what you want out of your relationship Are Not Alone mind and then when you get into conflict with your partner if you're both insecurely attached you're probably arguing unconscious to unconscious rather than conscious integrated mind to conscious integrated mind in a relationship where two people are securely attached the premise is generally I know who I am I know what matters to me

and what my priorities are and I want to find someone whose company I enjoy and who has similar values and priorities to me so that we can make a life work together long term and this is both their explicit conscious premise for the relationship but also their implicit unconscious premise because when we're raised securely attached we learn to prioritize both how we feel about people when we're getting close to them in relationships as well as the Practical aspects of how a life with them would function however when we are insecurely attached we unconsciously tend to

learn to prioritize only one of those two things so those who air more anxiously attached tend to place a very high value on how they feel in the presence of their partner they want to feel secure cared about loved cherished but they're not always particularly practical about making sure that their partner fits the criteria that it would be logical for them to look for in a partner for example you often have people who are anxiously attached saying they want a committed long-term respectful relationship explicitly but then they go ahead and choose partner after partner who

is completely emotionally unavailable and this is not particularly logical right so a securely attached person if they met someone they really liked and enjoyed being around but they could tell that that person didn't really have the communication skills the desire to commit to something long term for the capacity to be vulnerable and open with them they probably wouldn't consider that person a good match for a long-term partnership they might keep them as a friend instead and on the flip side of things you often have people with avoidant attachment Styles looking at The Logical criteria around

who would fit inside of the lives that they've created for themselves but not paying all that much attention to the vulnerability and the emotional availability that needs to be present for them in order to make a partnership work long term so both of these things looking at the logic of which people actually meet the criteria that is relative to what I say I want longterm as well as who do I feel like I'm willing to be vulnerable and honest and close with are needed in order to have a healthy long-term relationship but because some part

of that is probably in a blind spot for you if you are not securely attached what happens is you end up having what I call an accidental bad faith Rel relationship now the term bad faith is one that comes up quite often in business contexts in legal contexts when debates are happening a bad faith argument is essentially an argument where there's a mismatch between what someone is saying they want or are arguing for and what they are actually wanting or arguing for so one or both parties in a bad faith discussion has a covert agenda

that they are trying to push so they're trying to get something or they are trying to convince someone of something that is not the truth about what they want or are trying to get under the surface now there's one distinction that I want to make clear off the bat which is that in this context in business or law or debate bad faith is generally considered to be a situation where the person knows that the argument they are presenting is not the full truth so where someone is actually consciously aware that they are obscuring some aspect

of what they want or trying to argue for so this could be something as simple as I'm telling you that I'm coming on your podcast to talk about this issue but really my secret hidden motive is to make you look stupid and to make myself look really good and that is going to take precedence over actually getting down to the truth about this issue that I claim I'm here to debate I'm actually here to push an agenda potentially at the expense of the truth now this is not necessarily the same thing that's happening in insecurely

attached Dynamics often when we're going into conflict and we have an insecure attachment style our real wants or needs are obscured from ourselves which is why I call this an accidental bad faith argument it doesn't technically meet the definition of bad faith in that we aren't aware that we're obscuring an important piece of information that is guiding our decision- making but it's functionally a bad faith disagreement and what I mean mean by that is that it sort of operates in the same way as a bad faith argument or disagreement operates which is that the issue

being argued about often gets completely obscured or goes unsolved because both people are pushing covert agendas the only difference is that in this case they don't know they're doing that so what would an example of this look like let's say you have an anxious avoidant pairing who is locked in a conflict so something has happened in their lives that they can't see eye on and they have now taken space and temporarily separated from each other in order to Think Through what's going on and very often what happens in this scenario is the person who leans

more avoidant is going to feel kind of contemptuous about the argument and go I just don't want to deal with this drama and they might feel themselves kind of shutting down around it and feeling frustrated or contemptuous towards their partner and when they're saying that when they're making that claim to themselves or their partner I just don't want drama what might actually be happening under the surface is that they don't want to deal with the vulnerability that would arise for them if they were to go to their partner and tell them what they actually want

and need in a way that would truly resolve the conflict on a deep level those with avoidant attachment Styles often have their vulnerabilities particularly their relational vulnerabilities hidden not only from their Partners but from themselves and so the more work I've done on healing from my avoidant wounds The more I've unfortunately had to look at feelings of contempt and foler than thess as signs that there's some vulnerability my ego is protecting me from maybe there's a desire to stay in control at play because I intentionally choose Partners who I think would never be capable of

fully understanding me so of course if I give up control my needs are going to go unmet because my partners aren't aware of what my vulnerabilities are and so when I say I just want to avoid drama what I might actually be trying to avoid is being vulnerable showing someone else what my needs are and reaching some sort of compromise that would require me to give up a little bit of the control I have in a relationship because again maybe I've picked a partner who I don't really trust is capable of meeting my needs because

that feels unthreatening and on the other side of things you often have the anxious party in an anxious avoidant Dynamic going I just want us to be okay I just want to get back in the same room and talk things out because I really care about the Health and Longevity of this relationship and that might be true right it might be true in the same way that the avoidant saying they don't like drama is also true it's just not necessarily the most true thing in that instance the most true thing in this instance if you

are anxiously attached might be that you struggle to self-regulate and so you're pretty dependent on your partner for co-regulation because it's the main way that you keep yourself feeling okay in the world and when you and your partner are in Conflict you might be highly distressed because you don't know how to regulate yourself in their absence and so well it might technically be true that you want to patch things up and you want the relationship to be healthy what might be more true is that you're actually willing to sacrifice some of the health of the

relationship if it means that you and your partner can just get back to a place where you are co-regulating so that you can feel okay and not distressed again and the reason this is a bad faith argument on both sides is because the thing that is being explicitly stated is usually something that if you're really honest with yourself you're willing to sacrifice if it means your underlying need gets met but you're often not willing to explicitly State what your underlying need is so the avoidant might actually be causing a lot of drama in their relationship

that could be avoided if they would simply be vulnerable and learn to depend on their partner a little bit now of course that's an incredibly difficult thing to learn to do it's not going to happen overnight but the point is if they're saying I don't want drama but really they're willing to cause drama in order to get their underlying need of avoiding vulnerability met it's not a good faith argument the same is true on the opposite side of things if the anxiously attached person is saying I just care about the relationship and want it to

be healthy but they're actually willing to let the relationship get a little bit too codependent and unhealthy if it means that they get that consistent co-regulation from their partner what they're saying and what's true is not necessarily matched up but again both parties are not doing this consciously so what needs to happen in order for us to be in good faith relationships we need to be willing to start uncovering what's in our blind spots that's driving our Behavior without us being consciously aware of it and the good news is that this is what attachment healing

is it is the art of making the unconscious conscious and then taking more direct and honest rots to getting our needs met which might mean that certain things we've been looking for exclusively inside of romantic relationships we learn to get satisfied outside of romantic relationships or vice versa certain things that we think we could never have inside of romantic relationships we might learn is actually possible so what we're going to move into next is how to move from a bad faith into a good faith relationship Dynamic one of the first things we want to try

to get really clear on is what our unconscious relationship premise looks like so when I think of a romantic relationship what am I actually thinking of what deep needs do I assume is either definitely going to get fulfilled through this relationship or which parts of myself do I feel like I always need to leave out in order to have a romantic relationship so both anxious and avoidant people alike are likely to give you the statement I want a healthy long-term romantic relationship there's a stereotype that avoidance don't want relationships but in reality a lot of

the time what you hear is avoidant saying and truly believing I absolutely want a healthy long-term relationship for whatever reason I just haven't found my person yet but we're going to go under the surface here so in those with anxious attachment wounds say the statement I want a healthy long-term relationship they often do absolutely mean that explicitly and consciously but when we go a little bit deeper and look at what does that statement really mean to the person saying it it's often the case for those with more anxious wounding that they have a blind spot

in the area of self- protection so what they are unconsciously Outsourcing and looking for in a partner is someone who is going to make them feel protected stable and secure as well as to make them feel good enough and like they are finally worthy of love all of those things are areas where we really need to be fulfilling those needs outside of our partnership it's not that a partnership can contribute to them but if we are hinging all of those wounds onto a single person it is going to put way too much pressure on the

partnership because as soon as we get into conflict with a partner in that case we're no longer going to be fighting to preserve the partnership we're going to be fighting to preserve those feelings of being taken care of kept safe in the world and feeling worthy of being loved and so the need to feel all of those things is going to automatically kick in and start obscuring the argument we believe that we are having so we're going to be immediately in a bad faith argument if we have anxious attachment wounds that get triggered and come

online during the argument so the difference between this and a secure or a good faith relationship premise is that secure people don't look at relationships as the answer to the problems they feel around insecurities they look at relationships as places where they can go to commiserate and receive support as they find ways to make themselves feel more stable and secure and worthy and proud of themselves in the world so your partner is someone who you go to to share your vulnerabilities with but you don't expect your partner to solve those problems for you you assume

that you are responsible for solving them and your partner can serve as a secure base for you to share that Journey with now we're going to look at the opposite side of things with avoidant attachment once again you usually get that explicit relationship premise of I just want a healthy relationship with someone who I like but often what's happening below the surface is that a relationship kind of looks like one of the many checklist items you think you should cross off your list in order to have a meaningful and full life so rather than really

honing in on how a given relationship makes you feel and how you and your partner can contribute equally to each other's lives you might design your own life exactly how you like it and then go searching for someone who you think would fit easily into that life without you having to change or compromise too much which often looks like someone who is a lot more passive than you are about what they want out of their own lives but then when conflict starts rearing its head and your attachment system is telling you things like you are

only a worthy and acceptable person in the world if everything in your life is functioning a certain way and you have all of these checklist items checked off now you're not going to be fighting to preserve the relationship itself you're going to be fighting to preserve that checklist and to preserve your idea of yourself as a worthwhile person who you can be proud of and the difference between this way of operating and a more secure relationship premise is that secure individuals absolutely want to find someone who's compatible with their Lifestyles but they do not go

out searching for someone unconsciously who they have an inherent position of power over because they want to be challenged by their partner in real ways which means they're also willing to take their partner seriously during conflict because they believe that their partner's perspectives are valuable and are likely to add incredible value to their lives if they're to integrate what their partner needs and wants so this is about learning to choose relationships where you feel like your partner is your true equal rather than relationships where you feel as though secretly you have an inherent upper hand

because you believe that your partner could never really know or see you completely which by the way may or may not be true you may genuinely have picked someone who has very little capacity to fully understand you but also because a lot of parts of yourself are hidden from you from your conscious awareness your vulnerabilities your needs your wounds and pains of course whoever you pick it's never going to be able to properly meet your needs because you're not showing them what those are and so this can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy so just like

the anxious party has to shift their definition of a healthy relationship to include one where they are independent and not looking to their partner to fulfill all of their needs on their behalf the avoidant definition of a healthy relationship has to be one where they truly see their partner as an equal in the ways that matter to them so no BS around oh well you know I bring this but they bring this and the this that they bring you secretly think is way less important than the this that you bring you have to start working

on seeking out Partnerships where you consider your partner your true equal air go it actually makes sense for you to be vulnerable with them and to compromise for them and then of course we have fearful avoidance for fearful avoidance often that statement I just want a healthy relationship under the surface looks like I want a deep passionate relationship with someone who only sees the vulnerabilities that I want them to see in me so fearful avoidance often have these wounds that are very on the surface consciously that they want a lot of co-regulation and support around

but their really deep wounds are ones that they want to keep hidden forever and that often are hidden even to them the same way that's true of those who air more dismissive avoidant and so the fearful avoidant idea of a healthy relationship is often one where they can have really deep and intimate connection without ever touching their own shame and in reality unfortunately the things that we are ashamed of are the things that create real intimacy so if you want to have a truly intimate relationship of equals as a fearful avoidant you can't do that

without going into that deep dark place inside of yourself where your shame lives and this is something that I'm going to get more into to in future videos because it can be so challenging for those who a fearful avoidant because they often struggle with toxic shame to understand why on Earth it would possibly be helpful for a relationship to share those parts of themselves but essentially what we want to get clear on here is that if your idea of a healthy relationship means a relationship where you get to be selective about which vulnerabilities you share

with another person you are probably not operating in good faith as soon as you get triggered because once you're triggered or your attachment wounding is online what you're going to be fighting to preserve is your pride and self-respect rather than the relationship so what do we do about all of this we're going to quickly go over five questions you can start asking yourself in order to start making your unconscious relationship premises more conscious as well as to start recognizing when you are stuck in a bad faith disagreement or when you are stuck in a bad

faith relationship where the explicit premise that you have given to the other person about why you want to be in the relationship is not entirely truthful and I want to encourage everybody not to shame themselves around this not to get too hung up on oh my god I've lied to my partner I'm a terrible person all of that stuff and instead to take this as an opportunity to learn in really concrete ways so question number one I encourage us to ask ourselves if we're questioning how much of our relationship ship is happening in good versus

bad faith is what do my friends know about this relationship and what I think about it that my partner does not know so very often in mutually insecure Dynamics we find that the people around the individual so friends or family members actually know quite a bit more about what the person's frustrations inside of the relationship are than the person's partner knows and this is one of the Key signs that a lot of the relationship is happening in bad faith are there ways in which you secretly believe that you and your partner are not compatible long

term that you know and that your friends might know but your partner does not know are there ways in which you judge your partner's moral character behind their back are there names that you call them or are there things you diagnose them with that your friends know about but that you would never say to your partner again that might be a sign that there are some bad faith elements here in a relationship the person who knows the most information about what you think and feel towards your partner as well as what you think and feel

about the conflicts that you're having is your partner in a bad faith relationship often your partner knows significantly less about what you truly think and feel about them as well as what you truly think and feel about your conflicts than your inner circle does so this is the first thing we want to check in on is my partner the the person who knows the most about my feelings towards my partner and our relationship or are there other people who know the more honest stuff and if that's the case how do I start bringing that more

honest stuff into my relationship so that I'm having more good faith conversations with my partner and if the stuff that my friends know would be too hurtful or too insulting to possibly bring to my partner that probably doesn't Point towards the direction of good faith for the relation reltionship because presumably your partner believes that you do respect them and want to be with them and if you're holding on to opinions that are so insulting that it would likely cause them to leave the relationship if they were to find out that's a pretty strong indication of

bad faith which blends very naturally into question number two which is is my partner someone who I have genuine respect for do I think that they more or less share my values and moral code which includes values around how to treat other people including how to treat me so am I generally a fan of how my partner treats me do I think this is a good egg this is a good person I found or do I secretly think that my partner is a terrible person who I would never recommend to anybody else to date that's

a pretty strong sign that I might not have respect for their moral character and then on the flip side of things do I believe believe that my partner is truly my intellectual equal so that doesn't necessarily mean that we're in the same field and know all of the same things but do I really trust and feel proud of my partner's ability to reason do I respect that when they are making an argument to me they are making a valid and rational argument that I feel comfortable taking at face value or do I secretly think that

in most areas I'm able to reason a lot better than my partner and I don't really have to respect their point of view in either case if you believe that you are either of significantly higher moral character than your partner or of significantly higher intellectual character than your partner you are probably not operating in good faith if you are claiming that what you want is a secure relationship secure relationships happen between two people who see each other as equals in those two categories the third question I encourage us all to ask ourselves when we are

in conflict is what am I actually arguing for here and to be really ruthlessly and brutally honest with yourself about the answer to that question so start getting really clear with yourself on what is so important to you under the surface that you are actually willing to either abandon your partner or abandon yourself in the process process of getting it so maybe I believe that if my partner sees me as a bad person in any way they will stop wanting to be with me so now when we're in a conflict I'm actually fighting to preserve

their idea of me as a good person more than I'm fighting to fix whatever issue it is that we're arguing about maybe I kind of know if I'm incredibly honest with myself that there's a way in which I messed up and I need to apologize but I'm so afraid that that means my partner will think that I'm bad and stop loving me that I'm willing to slightly twist and bend my arguments in order to make myself seem perfectly innocent so I'm having a bad faith argument and again it's motivated by a very real fear but

what I say I'm arguing about and what I'm actually fighting for are two different things or is the basis of my argument secretly under the surface that I want to stay in the position of control in this relationship because maybe I don't trust what decisions my partner would make if they were to Take Over Control maybe I feel like my needs would not get seen and met and so am I arguing one thing on the surface when under the surface what I'm actually fighting for is to stay in the dominant position where I get to

make the majority of the major decisions that matter about this relationship again as soon as that's the case unless I am explicitly stating that that's what I'm doing so unless we are explicitly saying things like I am fighting to get you to see me as a good person or I am fighting in order to regain control because I don't trust what would happen if I lost it we are having a bad faith disagreement if either of those things are in fact what we're fighting for under the surface and as much as that sounds really funny

when I say it right like most of us can't imagine going to our partner and saying Hey I want you to allow me to stay in control all of the time in the relationship or hey I want you to always think of me as a good person and completely not notice any of the things that I do wrong it sounds ridiculous to ask for those things but I want you to consider that you probably are asking for those things all of the time just not overtly so this is the process of making the unconscious conscious

so that we can find healthier ways to talk to our partners about what our vulnerabilities are in inside of the relationship and very often nobody likes to hear this but this actually is the truth a lot of the time in insecurely attached relationships we have found Partners who unconsciously like that we have suppressed the things we have suppressed so we might find that as we make our relationship premises more explicit our partners might genuinely be turned off or want no part in the relationship and part of becoming more secure is learning that if I bring

the true premise my true wants in a relationship to someone else and they say absolutely not I don't want that that's not the partner for me or if I'm absolutely sure it is the partner for me but they look at me and say absolutely not you cannot have full control over this relationship then what comes next maybe it's time to do some changing and compromising to stay in the relationship but we're never going to know what situation we're in until we first make those unconscious premises conscious for ourselves so that we can become aware of

and when it applies start asking directly for what our needs actually are fourth question I encourage you to ask yourself especially in the moment of conflict is am I taking my partner at face value here and am I presenting my own argument at face value or are there things that I know I'm not saying because I don't want to upset my partner because I think that they'll get mad if I say that because I think that they'll think poorly of me if I say that so again the point here isn't to shame ourselves it's just

to get aware of when we're in a bad faith disagreement because often it's very confusing when we're in a bad faith argument and it just keeps going on and on and on or the same relationship issues come up again and again and again and we don't know why this is the process of figuring out what is going on in those recurring conflict situations that make them feel so confusing this is something that's kind of hard to hear but being securely attached means if you feel like the only way to get your needs seen and met

in your partnership are to lie manipulate your partner or force them in some other dishonest way to care about your needs the secure thing to do is to not be particularly close to that person when a secure person is making evaluations about a potential partnership what they do is try expressing their needs directly and noticing whether their partner cares about those needs and takes them at face value and if they don't they take it as a sign that this probably isn't the best person to get into a serious relationship with and on the flip side

of things when secure people go into relationships if they feel as though they have to treat their partner with kid gloves during arguments because their partners are either too fragile or too unintelligent for them to share the full truth with that's also going to be assigned to them that this person isn't someone they can have a truly equal partnership with airo it's not someone that they would necessarily choose to be in a romantic relationship with so I just want us to pause on that and really integrate that point if I feel like the only way

to get my needs met are to obscure information lie to my partner exaggerate my position or manipulate my partner into meeting my needs I'm probably not operating in good faith if what I say is that I want a secure partnership a secure partnership means I walk away if that's the only way I know how to get my needs met and again that's not to shame anybody for where they're at it's just to offer a bit of a reality check the last question I would encourage you to ask yourself if you're trying to root out how

to have more good faith relationships is what qualities are really important for me in a partnership and how has that worked out for me in the past and what I want to really make clear here is that I don't want you to think about your ideals here I want you to look at your relationship history and what your past partners have had in common so the reason why I encourage you to look at history not ideals is because your history is more indicative of what you are unconsciously looking for in Partners so I remember when

I was in my early 20s I worked at this online magazine and we used to send out surveys relatively frequently that would ask people what types of articles are you interested in and these surveys were completely Anonymous so people could fill out whatever they wanted and people often reported that they wanted to see these kind of highlevel balance point of view articles but in reality the data from those same users did not reflect that at all what people claimed they wanted to click on was very different than what they actually clicked on because what we

actually click on or who we actually date is often a product of our subconscious or our unconscious ious Minds versus what we say we want is a product of our conscious Minds so what I want to encourage us all to look at is which traits have my past partners all had in common and is that the same or different from what I think that I want in a partner so do I say that I want a really emotionally available person but I repeatedly choose Partners who are not emotionally available and what might be happening in

my unconscious or in my blind spot that is driving me towards those people maybe when I'm picturing an emotionally available person I'm picturing them being really attentive to my needs but I'm not picturing me having to attend to theirs and maybe that situation actually kind of freaks me out because unconsciously I'm looking for someone who's more of a parent figure and so the work that might need to get done there is how do I build myself into the type of person who doesn't want someone who's this idealized parent figure who I think is going to

swoop in and save me from myself and all of my problems but rather how do I build myself into someone who's really comfortable trading off that secure base role and sometimes being the one who is the strong competent in control one in the relationship and sometimes letting my partner Take the Lead depending on when it makes sense for each of us to play those roles or on the flip side of things do I say I want an equal but in all of my past relationships I've gone for partners who I don't really see as my

equal and if that's the case how do I work myself into a position where my own vulnerabilities are more conscious for me so that I don't have to worry that if I let my partner take some of the control in the relationship they're going to run it into the ground because they don't actually know what my deeper needs and vulnerabilities are and this is the way that we slowly work ourselves towards that more secure Dynamic where the things under the surface and the things that we State and put on the table in the relationship are

for the most part the same thing and once again don't beat yourself up too heavily in this process the things that go into our blind spots when we are young go there because they were very adaptive for us early on in life so this process of uncovering our blind spots and figuring out what we once internalized that we no longer need to have internalized is actually a really empowering one and it's one that can lead us to some really incredible healing opportunities if we stay open to it all right that's all I have to say

for today on this topic as always let me know in the comments any thoughts feelings questions you have arising for you as you go through this video as always 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 [Music]