You’ve hit the crossroads again.
You thought you found the right relationship for you, but suddenly you don’t feel the way you did weeks or months ago.
Everything in your mind is telling you to walk away and start over.
If you know about your attachment style, you can be dealing with the ruffling thoughts of the dismissive-avoidant.
I am losing my freedom and feel tied down.
It is all too emotionally charged and dramatic for me.
My effort goes unnoticed.
You are sabotaging your relationships due to subconscious beliefs that have caused you to project your fears onto your relationships.
You must learn to navigate these waves of emotions, build a process of understanding, and finally defeat your mental roadblocks.
Let’s create change!
Change your thoughts about vulnerability.
As a Dismissive avoidant, you struggle with the idea of long-term connections.
You have a subconscious fear that being emotionally expressive will lead to rejection.
You will see this in your day-to-day relationships where you might have a network but few people with whom you have a deep emotional connection.
The same actions will play out in your relationships.
- Your fear trusting in vulnerability results in becoming less connected and tightly bonded with your partner.
- You think about how expressing yourself will make you feel weak rather than empowered.
- The resulting issue is that you will go on to have a belief that you are the only person who can meet your need for expression.
- The final result is that you will become closed off and have no outlet to express your thoughts. So why have this other person around?
The process of converting your thoughts around vulnerability is to create a system to share and express.
Creating change in this area begins with…
Creating change in this area begins with allowing your partner into your vulnerable space. Easier said than done, I know.
You fear that allowing someone into your personal space will create a new view in their mind of who you are.
You then build a barrier for how much access you allow your partner to have into your life.
The reality is that you have built this subconscious belief system, projected it onto yourself, and believed this will be a universal belief, if anyone knew.
- Start by journaling when you are troubled with overwhelming emotions. Start with what created the feeling, not who.
- Doing this creates an avenue to accept your emotions as rational, and your subconscious mind will not block them off.
- You will also avoid the pitfall of shifting the blame onto yourself or your partner. It is simply a way to get emotions on paper.
You are often overvaluing or undervaluing emotions. Without finding a way to process your feelings, you won’t self-soothe.
If you cannot self-soothe, you will think that there is one central issue, and you will correlate that issue with a person, your partner.
Reach the mountaintop
The next task is to maintain the balance in expressing your emotions and self-soothing.
Create a weekly check-in system where you talk to your partner about “the what” that you have seen cause issues in your relationships.
Avoiding the immediate use of the word you will help avoid the feelings weighing you down and also prevent blame-shifting to your partner.
I felt anxious this week.
As a dismissive-avoidant, you distance yourself when you create the answers. The cycle works where you are triggered, overwhelmed by emotion, and feel the need to shut down if you cannot eliminate it.
- Stating an emotion without attributing it to a direct source will help you understand what triggered you.
- You will work through the issue and the root of what is affecting you emotionally, and the reason often won’t be directly from your relationship.
You tend to isolate as a protection mechanism, and a piece of that is to reason and express with yourself instead of external sources.
Your partner is your source; stop denying them their opportunity.
Wrap up
These changes all snowball into each other, and you will discover a solution.
Think back to all the times that simple gaps in communication have caused explosive issues in your relationships.
Your fear of facing your feelings comes from being scared of how you view yourself after discovering your emotion.
You might feel weak or that you are making a big deal of a nonissue.
By suppressing your emotions, you are creating more distance between yourself and expressing them.
You are also creating a ticking timebomb for an angry release or expression as a way to cure them.
Take the first step and write down an emotion you feel this week. Start a dialogue, and have a conversation without using the word you.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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