this is Sarah now she got her avoidant ex back twice and this was despite the fact that he said I don't love you anymore you're just like you're too much like we're never going to be together again I heard all those things and again he did this twice I interviewed Sarah to learn exactly what traits her avoidant ex found attractive and I learned that she unknowingly exhibited six specific characteristics that likely attracted her of void an ex back to her now Sarah started this journey trying and failing for months then she learned a fundamental secret
about avoidance and did one thing that would change everything the biggest thing that helped was honestly it really was the best thing that I could have done let's start first though at the beginning trait number one the unconscious draw to anxious partners because my biggest thing is that I'm not a very mellow person I'm very high strung and so I'm I actually go to a therapist to kind of help me like with my own problems and he's working on his so we're doing really really well actually like cuz I mean I I hate to say
it but I think the breakup was the best thing for us now you're probably sitting here and thinking this is a really odd trait to start with after all don't avoid and hate High strong or anxious people well when I say that their relationship with anxious individuals is a love hate relationship I mean it literally look at this this is an excerpt from an article from Psychology today written by Stephanie a sarcus she says that the attraction between these two attachment Styles can stem from their unconscious desire to fulfill unmet emotional needs from childhood now
we know from attachment theory that typically from a young age individuals who develop an avoidant attachment style often experience rejection of their emotional needs by caregivers and this can manifest in various different ways such as a parent dismissing a child's tears with remarks like Boys Don't Cry man up or it can be even more subtle by not responding adequately to the child's emotional expressions or sadness or need now here's the wild part according to the National Library of Medicine genetic Research indicates that up to 45% of the variability in anxious and 39% in avoidant adult
attachment style can be explained by genetic causes so while some avoidant attachment style can be chocked up to genetics most avoidance in adults is the result of circumstance I say this because a huge indicator of what your attachment style will be is going to be result of your actual relationship with your caregiver and part of why this is is because the insecurely attached caregiver reinforces the wrong types of behavior for example a parent with an avoidant attachment style might give positive attention when their child is happy but withdraw or try to change the child's mood
during very vulnerable moments now this avoidance stems from the parents own internal discomfort with their own vulnerable emotions which ultimately leads them to reject similar emotions in their child as a result the child learns to associate vulnerability and emotional needs with a negative response like disgust now this response becomes an unconscious part of their psyche which leads them to feel a self-disgust whenever they start to experience their own vulnerabilities later in life they are essentially conditioned to believe that showing vulnerability will lead to rejection or disgust a belief that deeply influences their emotional interactions and
attachment Style again in adulthood yet deep down the avoidant knows that they're missing something let's go back once more to that psychology today article an avoidant partner May seek the need for intimacy their partner possesses because they think they are missing out on a crucial part of intimate relationships and they're kind of right the avoidant is seeking what was denied them in childhood but again as the psychology today article points out what each partner seeks can also cause their undoing what attracts us to another person also tends to gnaw at us over time which is
why I say anxious and avoidant relationships is literally a LoveHate relationship the avoidant individual is unconscious ly drawn to the anxious individual and it's all because they know that the anxious individual has something that they're lacking it's the intimacy that they were denied as a child by their caregivers but the problem is that an avoidant person's conditioning never allows them to get close enough to experience true intimacy trait number two having a partner willing to respect Independence I actually bought my first house at 20 all by myself and luckily his name wasn't on it yes
it was just but um we bought a dog together and literally went the whole nine yards we've been together for 2 and a half years and all a sudden like we just moved into this house like three months ago and he's like I'm not happy I'm leaving so the thing that really struck me about my interview with Sarah she said that it was only after buying a house and moving in together that her avoidant ex freaked out now I've talked at length about this idea of insecure core wounds the tldr though is that every single
insecure attack M has what I consider a core wound that triggers them now a core wound is essentially something that will trigger an insecure attachment core coping mechanisms for an anxious person it's the fear of being abandoned for an avoidant person it's the fear of losing Independence for a fearful avoidant person they have both core wounds but here's where some Nuance comes into play with the core wound concept every single avoidant has a different threshold of what they're willing to endure before they get triggered look at this this this is a list of some of
the most common trigger points that I can think of texting romantically talking on the phone romantically going on a date asking to be official getting a dog together moving in together getting engaged getting married buying a house having children do you notice a trend here they all revolve around commitment of some form which is a direct assault on an avoidance core wound of losing their independence so in Sarah's case she got about right here before her ex gets triggered this is her X's threshold every avoidant has their trigger limit for some they can maybe make
it to the having children phase before they get triggered for others they maybe get triggered when you ask them to be official in a relationship now the obvious question here is when you look at this gigantic list how the heck do you get through it all without triggering them well I think that's answered by looking at the old parable of how you boil a frog see the story goes like this if a chef puts a frog in boiling water then the Frog will detect the heat and immediately jump out of the pot but if the
chef puts the frog in the water that isn't boiling but slowly turns the heat up the Frog won't detect it and voila you've got yourself a cooked frog just one problem scientifically this isn't true no matter what the frog will jump out of the pot but for the sake of this discussion let's pretend that it is because this concept Works incredibly well on humans the problem Sarah had with her avoidant was she moved through this list way too quickly if she had just slowed down to convince her avoidant that he wasn't going to lose his
independence she might have seen better results trait number three avoidance want what they can't have you or whatever is going on there's always still hope because let's face it guys want what they can't have now in addition to interviewing Sarah I also interviewed Dr John Paul Garrison who is a clinical and forensic psychologist based out of Georgia he also runs the very popular YouTube channel Dr G explains where he basically dissects the body language of all sorts of bad people anyways he said something really interesting in our interview we may discuss this a little bit
more as we go when you think about avoidant avoidant is anxiety really because anxiety is built around the concept of avoidance we can't be anxious and not avoid it just comes with a territory so his argument which I think is correct is that avoidance have all these coping mechanisms in place to deal with anxiety and in fact pretty much every insecure attachment style does it's just that avoidants have all this Machinery in place to keep people at an arms length they've basically built up this wall to keep people from getting close to them and we've
already talked a little bit about why that is their caregivers but what Sarah hits on here they want what they can't have is a lot more profound than you might initially believe take a look at this this is the book attached definition of the Phantom x one of the consequences of devaluing your romantic relationship is that you often wake up long after the relationship has gone stale having forgotten all the negative things that annoyed you about your partner wondering what went wrong and reminiscing longingly about your long lost love we call this the Phantom X
phenomenon so let's play a little game an avoidant is given two options a relationship with a human being who wants a deeper commitment or a fantasy with a human being they used to be with but asks no deeper commitment of them which do they prefer obviously they're going to prefer the fantasy not only is it unattainable which helps them keep their independence but this constant yearning for the Phantom X forms the foundation for the wall they're going to put up to guard their heart it's all part of that coping strategy that Dr Garrison mentioned trait
number four the contrast effect I went out bought new clothes I I actually dyed my hair put in extensions and like he noticed me right off the bat because I was posting pictures and that's so you're doing it on like Facebook or social media or things like that Facebook Instagram Snapchat like I was po I was posting this stuff all the time and he was noticing it now Sarah hits on something here that isn't talked about a lot and that is the contrast effect now I see a lot of breakups in my line of work
and a lot of times you hear the same types of phrases being thrown around by ex's as the cause of the breakup boring too stable complacent let me decode what's really happening here look at this this is my stability and mystery scale you see we human beings are quite complicated individuals on the one hand we want stability and on the other hand we want mystery yet these two qualities are completely opposites from one another what often happens in relationships is that at the beginning of a relationship an avoidant falls in love with someone based on
the stability and mystery ratio for example maybe you have a 60/40 ratio 60% mystery and 40% stability another person they could fall for has a 5050 ratio 50% mystery and of course 50% stability whatever the ratio is doesn't really matter because from what I've observed the same phenomenon ultimately occurs the fluid nature of the stability and mystery scale naturally causes the ratio to change over time so maybe what started out as a 50/50 split slowly starts to tip in favor of stability so that by the end of a relationship things might look like this 70%
stability and 30% mystery and the avoidant when this happens internally is going wait wait hold up here this is not what I signed up for this is not the person that I fell in love with and this actually contributes to the avoidance overall perception of you and here's where we come back to that clip I played of Sarah she says she went out and and bought new clothes I I actually dyed my hair put in extensions and like he noticed me right off the bat because I was posting pictures bought new clothes dyed her hair
put new extensions in all of this creates a type of contrast but as I was listening to her talk an alarming thought came to mind few weeks ago I filmed a video on narcissism and in that video I asked one simple question are all avoidance narcissists the the answer of course was very nuanced but here's where I landed grandiose narcissism will be a stronger predictor of the avoidant attachment dimension in relationship to vulnerable narcissism now if you want to look at what the difference is between grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism I highly recommend you check
out that video but here's the important bit for this discussion there is a definite link between narcissism and avoidant behavior however I would say that most avoidants aren't full-blown narcissists rather they just exhibit some narcissistic traits and one of those traits might actually explain what was happening to Sarah here okay so check this out this is the narcissistic abuse cycle and as you can see narcissistic relationships often follow a pattern of idealization followed by devaluation this of course LED Sarah's avoidant ex to eventually discard her what I think happened here is that Sarah's transformation makes
her appear new or improved and her avoidant ex who exhibit some some narcissistic traits might experience a rekindling of the idealization phase seeing Sarah as desirable and perfect again and that is why he's all of a sudden interest again the contrast is so obvious that he's just pulled in like a moth to Flame trait number five competition I was posting this stuff all the time and he was noticing it and it wasn't until I started hanging out with other guys and like actually attempting to date other people that I got a reaction from I also
noticed Sarah said something particularly interesting about dating other people she actually dated her avoidant ex's best friend before him his best friend was like oh he always had like a thing for you or something no to be honest I actually dated his best friend before now why does this work why do avoidance find this attractive well I think it's the interplay between three things safety and unavailability fear of intimacy and the challenge in competition let's tackle safety in unavailability first check this out according to free to attach avoidance are free to long for an X
once that person is unavailable out of a relationship and typically out of context so they are Untouched by the actual engagement and their deactivation systems aren't triggered gosh I'm so tired of saying that but it's true for avoidant individuals attraction to someone unavailable provides a safe distance they're Untouched by true intimacy we actually covered this in that Fant pH X phenomenon already anyway since the person they're not attracted to isn't available anymore there's this built-in barrier that prevents them from getting too close which aligns with the avoidance insatiable need to maintain distance now let's talk
about fear of intimacy avoidant individuals obviously fear intimacy and the vulnerability that it brings being attracted to someone who is taken means there's less risk of a deep intimate connection developing which can feel safer for someone with an avoidant attachment style it's all there and the Machinery remember you can explain most of an avoidant Behavior by simply looking at their core wound their insatiable need for Independence and their protection of that concept unconsciously they are attracted to individuals for which they know the relationship is doomed this keeps them safe and then of course we have
Challenge and competition some avoidant individuals will be drawn to someone for the challenge of it for the thrill of the chase and it's even better if they're competing against someone they see it more as a game of Conquest rather than seeking a genuine connection but why compete well we kind of alluded to it already The Thrill of the chase when I was in high school I had a friend who was obsessed with the thrill of the Chase and quite frankly he was a combination of the two worst factors you could imagine he was avoidant and
goodlooking which means he unknowingly and maybe a little bit knowingly victimize girls it was always the same pattern he'd get obsessed with the girl chase after them win their hearts bask in a mini honeymoon period and then the moment that honeymoon period wore off he drop the girl and move on to the next one I never asked him why he was doing this but I didn't have to one day he just volunteered it he said and I quote there's nothing like that moment in time at the beginning of a relationship before it gets too serious
now I've often accused avoidance from jumping from one relationship to another simply for the honeymoon period and it seems that was what my friend was doing as early as high school but there's another layer here I haven't really covered my friend would actually like it if we both liked the same girl I didn't of course because the girls always chose him but he reveled in it to the point that I wouldn't tell him when I'd like a girl but this goes directly into that challenge and competition aspect trait number six space I don't know I
just the biggest thing that helped was honestly the no contact role it really was the best thing that I could have done from Sarah's lips to your ears in my opinion this is the one thing that she did that changed everything for her she did a no contact rule she gave her avoidant space it seems so simple right well it's actually not more on that in a moment now this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone I've made countless videos on on this topic on my YouTube channel and kind of explained why avoidance find it
so attractive ultimately though it boils down to one simple fact the most common pairing we see is an anxious and an avoidant getting into a relationship together actually wait a minute let's visualize this a little bit differently imagine you have two people in a relationship one that's avoidant one that's anxious now each of these people has a battery when the battery is full they're feeling great when it's low they don't feel so great so you have these two people in relationships but what fills their batteries up are two different things for the avoidant they need
space to recharge and feel that they still have their independence for an anxious partner they need reassurance to feel that they aren't going to be abandoned notice how each of these battery fill-ups have a lot to do with their core wounds anyways at first everything is great the honeymon period is going strong the avoidant is giving some reassurance the anxious person isn't being overbearing because they are getting reassurance but just like I said earlier once the honeymoon period wears off that's when things begin to go downhill the avoidant partner's battery begins to dissipate first they
usually start to nitpick at something the anxious person did this causes the anxious partner's battery to begin to deplete which in turn causes the anxious partner to naturally search for the one thing it knows is going to replenish their battery reassurance of course every time that the anxious person seeks reassurance the avoidant person's battery depletes so that in the end you have both partners with depleted batteries now let's compare that to what Sarah did she labels herself as an anxious individual you can see that here because my biggest thing is that I'm not a very
mellow person I'm very high strung and so I'm I actually go to a therapist to kind of help me however she goes against what her anxiety is telling her to do she gives her avoidant X space this allows his battery to fill back up which is why she starts getting these types of results cly that was when he was FaceTiming me that was when like my phone was constantly getting blown up second day he called me six times literally called me six times and I didn't answer left me voicemails pick up your phone and space
is the single most important thing to give to an avoidant it's the single most important thing that they think is attractive and a lot of times they don't even know why it's attractive but let's Hold Up For a Moment here I've is taking you through the six major traits that avoidance find attractive but there's something really bothering me about this why are these people even worth attracting after all I did end up interviewing Sarah a second time and guess what this was after the avoidant ex that I interviewed her the first time on had broken
up with her again of course she moved on to someone else which of course drove her avoidant X even crazier and he was begging for her back once more but that that's beside the point should you care about attracting these individuals or as many people in the comments section of my YouTube channel say should you avoid them like the plague I think the most important question to answer here is why why do you want an avoidant ex back is it because you're afraid of being alone is it because you believe that the relationship can improve
if you have a better understanding of what each person needs to be honest with you I'm not sure that I can give you any kind of answer in this video that is going to satisfy you here's what I'll say the most important thing to give to an avoidant is space but it's how you use that space that time away that matters most what you should be doing is finding something that you care about just as much as the avoidant so you can have your own contrast effect so you can actually take off the rose-colored glasses
and look at the avoidant and ask yourself why and it's in that frame of mind that you can actually make an educated decision
