#114: Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Q&A (feat. my partner Joel)

And when I think back to our relationship then, and our relationship now and everything that we've been through it feels like it's high time that we do a refresher on this episode and answering questions about how we navigate things, how we have navigated things, our approach to relationships.

And hopefully that will give you a bit of insight and maybe some cause for optimism if you are in an anxious, avoidant kind of dynamic yourself and you're feeling really stuck and overwhelmed and exasperated as can often be the case. Knowing that there are ways to do this that don't have to feel so kind of frustrating and um, like a dead end or, or feeling like you're really powerless against this, this dynamic that can get quite overwhelming.

So this episode is not to put ourselves on a pedestal or to suggest that our relationship is perfect. It absolutely is not. We go through all of the, regular, boring, mundane couple stuff that most everyone else does but really just to, as I said, give some insight and vulnerability into the ways we have waded through the mess of all of that and found our way to a foundation that's pretty solid.

And when we do fight, as we do, when we do have challenging things arise individually or relationally we have found a way to navigate that stuff with kind of a bedrock of love and respect and care, and I really think that makes a world of difference.

So we're gonna be answering some questions today that were submitted on Instagram covering, you know, how we approach, the work, quote unquote in our relationship, how we've created safety, how we navigate things like differing needs and lots of stuff in that category. So hopefully it will be helpful for many of you.

Before we dive into all of that, I just wanted to remind you that the new course that we are creating Secure Together is coming out in a couple of weeks time, which is very exciting. There are already about 250 of you on the wait list, which is just awesome. And if you would like to join the wait list for that, the link is in the show notes or via my website, you should be able to find that quite easily.

Secure Together is going to be a course primarily designed for couples, but also one that you could certainly do individually while in a relationship, and it's really designed to be a deep dive on all of this stuff, on navigating these anxious avoidant dynamics and really understanding how we can shift those patterns in a meaningful way. How we can create safety and how we can really start to do things differently.

And obviously the really interesting and novel thing about this course compared to any of my others that you might've done is that Joel is gonna be joining me and providing the more avoidant perspective, which I think is far more powerful and interesting than just having me speak to a perspective that I don't know firsthand. I only know as an observer, and so my hope in.

Having Joel along for parts of that course to speak firsthand to that perspective is that it will not only provide a much richer insight into what that can look and feel like, but if you are going through the course as someone who is more avoidant or if you're listening to this and you are more anxious and you're going through that with your partner, that'll feel really Hopefully disarming.

And, it won't feel like an avoidant person being lectured to by an anxious person, which I think can be part of the dynamic that can exist in, in this space a lot. So I'm very excited about that course. As I said, launching in a couple of weeks time. And if you would like to join the wait list, do jump on that list in the show notes. And that will get you first access and exclusive discounts. Okay. With that out of the way, we're gonna jump into these questions now.

So the first few questions are around the work in relationships, and we got quite a few of these. We clumped them together. But the first question is, Did Joel do the work too, or just you As in me. And if he did, what led him to it and what has Joel been doing as someone who leans more avoidant to be where he's now? Okay. I think I can take this one. Did Joel do the work? Yes, I have done the work.

And I'll kind of describe what I thought the work was previous to this relationship, I have definitely probably been involved and interested in personal development since my early twenties. And a lot of it has been very self-serving. I think that I never really considered the relationship as its own work. So I was definitely doing the work, but I wasn't doing the work of, or inside a relationship.

When Steph and I got together even beforehand, we had talked a lot about, certain philosophies and our ideas of our own development. But it probably wasn't until I was in In a very serious and loving relationship. I was like, oh, okay, this, I need to tend to this garden as its own thing. No matter how much personal self-development work that I do, it's not gonna contribute to anything unless I take it holistically as a part of this relationship.

And I think it's I think it's so important when we're talking about this to say like the, it's not a past tense thing of I have done the work and now I have arrived at a place where I no longer have to do the work and everything's happy days, right? I think that makes it sound too neat.

And really it's an ongoing everyday moment to moment conversation to conversation practice of slowing down of checking yourself, of going, okay, what stories am I making up about, who my partner is or what their agenda is in this moment, or the ways in which they might be trying to undermine me or hurt me, or all of those things that we know in the vast majority of cases are coming from a wounded place. And yeah, it is, it's so ongoing. It's it's tending to the garden every day.

It's not just Oh, I do this for a period of three months and now I'm healed. That is sadly just it's so much messier and, and more ongoing than that. And I think the other thing I would say is when we speak about it in retrospect, that probably makes it sound quite, like there weren't that many bumps in the road. The start of our relationship was pretty bumpy. Oh yeah.

It's not like we were having, you know, horrible fights all the time, but there was, I would say there was a, a fair amount of insecurity there on both sides.

Yeah, because I think we had, we'd been friends before we started dating and then when we crossed that line into being together romantically, I think we had really idealistic conceptions of how seamless that transition would be and what it would be like, and oh, we are gonna be in this amazing, perfect relationship because we have the same values around these things and we want similar things from a relationship I. and I think when we found ourselves in it, all of the stuff comes up.

The wheels can come off pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think we're both we have very strong values and a bit we can be a bit, have our ideals of what a relationship can and should be. And the first. I'd say the first few months because we went from a friendship into quite an intense uh, romantic relationship. Yeah. We've moved in together very, very quickly. So it was like we were right into the pressure cooker. Yeah. We did everything you know, They say you shouldn't Yeah.

I would not recommend. Um, we, We tested ourselves and the wheels had come off a couple of times. But I think it was also like testing our standards, you know, testing our values. It's like you, you say these things are important to you, then we are gonna test you out how important they are. But in, in saying that, yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to gloss over. We don't want to retrospectively, seem like it was easy sailing because it wasn't.

No. But we learned more and more over time that we could come back to connection and we could find it in ourselves to just come back, to come back to the love and create over time, a safe and secure relationship in which I could start letting down defenses, and I'm still working, I'm still working through that. I'm not speaking in a Yeah. As a as healed person. Healed person. Yeah. Because yeah it's ongoing work for me.

Yeah. And I think, for you more so than me, this was certainly your most serious relationship that you'd been in. Correct. And so it was it was big and it activated all of the things you would expect it to activate in someone with more avoidant patterns, let's put it that way. And so you definitely had the impulse to just kind of shut down and, and withdraw and run and all of those things that we know are, kind of Go-to coping strategies for people with more avoidant patterns.

It's oh, this is too much. What have I gotten myself into? Get me outta here. And you know, that evoked all of the responses that you would expect it to evoke in someone such as myself who has more anxious patterns of like, oh no, what's happened? What's changed? And how do I fix it? How do I kind of take responsibility and find a way to solve this?

So I, I do just wanna emphasize that like we've been through all of that and it was only from both of us being, committed enough to stay in it in those more challenging seasons. And as you say, like keep coming back to our love for each other, which, you know, sometimes was easier than others. But that was, I think, really what got us through those early periods and some challenging periods since.

The other thing that I'll say about no, two things that I'll say about the work in terms of the actual, how or what does that look like for us? We have mostly solo or like d i y, the work. We haven't worked with, you know, a couples coach or counselor or anything, although I think that would still definitely be something that would be useful to us and we may well explore in our commitment to going deeper and, continuing to nurture the relationship.

But something that we have found helpful along the way is having structures around the work. So we have I've spoken about this before on the podcast, but we have a regular check-in most of the time. It's weekly. We've been a little slack recently, but a weekly check-in where we sit down and we just talk about how we're feeling. Anything that is on our mind around the relationship. Having that kind of structure has been helpful.

We also like to listen to, books about relationships or podcasts together, and I found that to be really helpful, I think because, due to the nature of my work, it's not always well received when, the insight so to speak, is coming from me. I think that has been challenging for you at times to feel like I am, like teaching you or lecturing you about relationship dynamics because it's just too close.

Yeah. So I think sometimes having, and I think this is good advice for most people, I know a lot of you listen to this podcast with your partner for that reason. Having it come from someone else can take the sting out a little and can create one step removed from any dynamics of one person kind of lecturing the other.

And I think that's certainly been helpful in our relationship, whether it's like doing an online course together and working through that or having some kind of like third party symbolic or real to be the voice of some of this work has certainly been helpful. The last question on the work is, do you think without Joel's willingness, your own inner work would've been enough? Frankly, no. And maybe more than the fact that it wouldn't have been enough.

That just would've been for me, like a real point of misalignment from a values point of view. Having a partner who is committed to doing the work and that doesn't have to look exactly the same as me, but who has a level of openness to examine these things, to talk about them to really be proactive about nurturing the relationship. That's kind of a non-negotiable for me. So, uh, It's not even so much like, could I have done it? By just like white knuckling it solo, I wouldn't have wanted to.

And so it's just not really something that I would've sought to do alone. And that's just for me that I know that, having a partner who I can do that with is, is an non-negotiable for me. Okay. The next question, what helped J to feel safe to open up And let me in? I'd love to say it was clean and easy and it happened within, a couple of months of being in a relationship. But I think know, it's still something that we work on.

And I think more than anything, as an avoidant, we, there has to be a responsibility taken from our side for our reactivity. And we find it really hard to respond when we are in a heightened state. Whether our nervous system is in a heightened state, we want to flee It's our responsibility to also regulate ourselves to, come back to connection. What Steph has done has really met me with a lot of patience.

And that's not saying, that she's just kind of taken all my nonsense but I think more than anything, just giving me indications that no matter reasons why I choose to be avoidant and the things that I'm trying to hide which is the I feel the non desirable parts of myself. Over time, you've allowed me to really express them and explore them. And it's, you've expressed that it's okay everything, everything is okay. I know as avoidance, we have a lot of fear around failure and be seen as a failure.

And we often... I think the shame runs pretty deep, right? The shame runs pretty deep. Yeah. And allowing a space in which that shame can at least have some light shed on it. And, just expressed openly and honestly that it may not be as bad as you've made it out to be. Yeah. I think that a lot of us, whether avoidant or not, can have things about us that we are so convinced no one could ever see that and still love us. Mm-hmm. Right? It's no way.

And for people with more avoidant patterns, it's like, and so I bury that and I do not let anyone see it. And that's not something you can force open. Right. And you, you wouldn't want to because that that protective shield's in place for a reason. And so it really does happen organically. It's like peeling layers of an onion and certain topics that are more sensitive. Things like sex and money and all of those like hot button issues that can carry a lot of shame.

Those are things that we've really like, they've been layers, we've gotten to incrementally. That was not stuff that like straight out the gate we were talking about comfortably and easefully and you really had a lot of struggle initially opening up particularly about some of those more sensitive things. Yeah we lock it down. I've done i f s therapy in the past, and I guess I'd use that framework. We're using parts to control other parts, Yeah.

So we sometimes ourselves don't even realize the, the depth of, of how how solid a defense is. So it does, this is not gonna be solved overnight. I wouldn't advise people to try pry it open in their partner. I think it requires it requires a lot of love, requires a lot of safety and, and trust. I think trust and time. Yeah. But I think, you know, that might feel like a big abstract answer that's like, okay, well what do I do today? And I think it's I don't know.

You can probably speak to this more personally than I can Joely, but I think you've trusted me with those parts of you because I didn't force you to and I kind of was firm enough to say it's important to me that we can talk about these things. Mm-hmm. Without looming over you and saying like, tell me what you're feeling right now. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. I have never felt forced or when it has been, it's just my kind of like natural defense. To feel like I'm being controlled.

But if I really did have a sense of someone is trying to pry me open, there was, there would be there'd be two results. I'd either lie, I'd be dishonest, not dishonest in a way that I would intentionally lie in that moment, but I'd, I'd say whatever needed to be said in the past to get out of that conversation. If I'm feeling forced. Otherwise, I just feel like running. But yes, it's a willingness to allow me autonomy to open up has been very important.

Yeah. And I think on your side, enough commitment to the relationship to kind of know that you were gonna have to face the discomfort of that sooner or later. Yes. Whereas I think you know, in a less serious relationship, you or another person with avoidant patterns might just go not worth the risk. Not worth the risk. It's not worth the risk of opening no. R o i Yeah. When it's just like the stakes are so high. Yeah. For your own sense of self and safety.

That. Yeah, I think there does have to be a real level of investment and that's probably just true because that's maybe what tips the scales in favor of willing to face that discomfort. Yeah. For the sake of the relationship, I had to have something to gain and to lose. Okay. Next question. Were there times in your relationship that you felt you were incompatible? Yes. Yeah. Joel answers this much more quickly and directly than I would, but Go on. You speak first.

I hard answer this question without being honest about probably the frame of mind that I was in during those times. I was looking for problems. Mm. I was looking for incompatibilities and I think that comes from relationship anxiety rather than a rational kind of response to the situation at hand. But yeah I think I've done this so many times in my past where I would often look for incompatibilities and would have a negative bias. But also I just came back to reality for myself.

I was like, Don't be an idiot. Like just have a look at how much shared value that you have. Shared values, sorry. So yeah, there was definitely times where I thought we were incompatible. But I honestly, I think it was coming outta my own fears rather than, yeah. Yeah. I think that, I would agree with that.

And that's probably why I wouldn't answer the question in the same way, just because I think that I think that not so quickly from coming from a different angle is like people with more avoidant patterns, people who struggle with relationship anxiety as distinct from anxious attachment. It's like you can absolutely look for imperfections and incompatibilities as an exit.

And when things feel tough or overwhelming, or maybe you're kind of on the brink of a new level of depth in the relationship, or a new level of commitment, all of the anxieties can come up and be like, oh wait, is this a good idea? And you know, all of those parts of you that are like Oh risky, are you sure you wanna share this part of yourself? Are you sure you want to commit to this?

Yeah. And so looking for incompatibilities, looking for reasons why it's not, I think it can also tie in with the not wanting to feel like a failure. So if things feel hard, then calling it an incompatibility and just being like I was powerless, we were incompatible. Nothing I could have done. And that kind of, absolves us of feeling like a failure. Yes. Because it's like out of our hands. Right? It's bigger than us.

Yes. And so I think all of that really makes sense in the context of someone with more avoidant patterns to lean on incompatibility as the reason Yes. Rather than, oh, I, I need to maybe show up more in a more committed way, or really get honest with myself or look in the mirror, those sorts of things, it can feel really challenging and intimidating. So yeah, I, I think that makes sense. I think for me, incompatibility, less so.

I think that I certainly felt there were times where it was challenging and I didn't know if we were gonna find our way through it but less from an incompatibility point of view and more just are we gonna be able to make this work? Yes. Yeah. I think the yeah, just going back to those who have more avoidant patterns, we do tend to look for the perfect solution, and that is like the perfect relationships and the perfect decision in work.

The, we fear a future that we are out of control 'cause we didn't make the right decision. And so that's where a lot of the incompatible the fears come up. Yeah. But yeah, it's a sense of I'm gonna make the wrong decision and then I'm going to be trapped. Right? Yeah. And I'm gonna fail, and I'm, yes I'm trapped in a room and yeah, it's, there's no exit. I'm powerless and all of those things, right? Which feel like these really big fears that are very real.

Okay, we're gonna talk about needs now. So how do we navigate different needs for explicit affection? How do we navigate different needs for explicit affection? I dunno that we navigate it all that well. Right. We just, we have different needs for affection. I definitely have more, a much higher baseline need for affection and just I am more affectionate, probably much more comfortably and naturally than you are. Yes. I think that you've definitely gotten more comfortable with that.

Yes. But even still, when we're definitely not at the same baseline. No, we're not at the same baseline. Which also doesn't mean it has to be, again, going back to incompatibility, it doesn't have to be a red flag. It's oh no, we're not the same level of intimacy. Or, or, Or uh, same needs for affection. Yeah. I have tried to uh, uncover this a lot in my own work, like where this comes from. And I've kind of got to the point where I'm like, okay I can't really work it out.

I can't find an origin story for it, but there is a, I have to meet you somewhere. Mm-hmm. And I am, I feel like I'm learning. I might be a, a slow mule but yeah, I am definitely getting better with accepting Yeah. Accepting affection. Yeah and giving affection as well.

I think that, again, it's finding that middle ground between forcing it, which we don't want to do because forcing someone to do something that's uncomfortable and particularly something physical, can just feel so, overwhelming and will often, almost always, probably evoke quite a automatic defensive, protective response while also not swinging to the extreme of, okay, well I'll just pretend I have no needs. So it's oh, how can I advocate for myself without making you wrong?

I. And that, goes for most everything that we could talk about in relationships. How can I, how can we create space for both of us to thrive here and to be recognized and, without either of us being wrong or needing to even have a concept of, right or wrong, or who's winning, who's losing mm-hmm. Uh, So I think for me, in, in obviously articulating to you that, that's important to me and that I value that without, getting angry at you for not doing that in the way that I would.

Yeah. And you know, just again, kind of trusting that over time we move in the right direction. And I think also, expressing gratitude or appreciation when someone does get it right rather than just always pointing out where they don't. Because again, going back to that sensitivity around failure and blame and defensiveness, if you're just always telling someone that they're not doing something enough or in the right way. It's not really motivating for the vast majority of people.

Yeah. I'll say on that as well. I think what has really helped is having a sense of play to affection. That actually segues nicely. I don't know if you meant to do that into the next question, professional broadcaster, which we might make the final question because this is getting lengthy. How do you have the improving our relationship conversations without it feeling like a chore to the avoidant partner? I think that, again, this is not something we've done perfectly.

There've definitely been periods where you absolutely felt like it was a chore. Mm-hmm. And you felt a lot of resistance to those conversations. I'm reflecting on periods of our relationship where things felt pretty hard and we were having a lot of those conversations, several times a week and they'd stretch out and I'd be upset or whatever. And I think you definitely felt like you were being kind of called into the principal's office every time I wanted to have a conversation.

Yeah. Which is, it's not too dissimilar to my experience as a kid, I'm like, oh, I'm in trouble again. You know, I'm being like called up for being disruptive or I'm not doing things right. I'm a failure. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, again, it's a hard one because it's how do we find space for both? Because we don't want to go well, we just won't have the conversations 'because they're hard for you. Because not having the conversations would've been really hard for me at that time.

So I think, as I mentioned before, we do more structured check-ins. I think that can be really helpful. Just to normalize talking about the relationship without waiting until things get really bad. Mm-hmm. Because I think if you don't talk about things in a proactive kind of maintenance way, and you only talk about things when it is really tense or fraught, or there's been some sort of big rupture.

Then those conversations are always going to be heavy and bogged down with probably 10 other issues that you haven't been addressing. And so there's just gonna be a real imprint of negativity around the conversations. That will almost certainly feel like a chore to the avoidant partner, particularly if the anxious partner has been burying a lot of stuff. So the avoidant partner might be chugging along thinking everything's mostly fine, 'cause nothing's being talked about, nothing's being raised.

And then like you know, one thing happens, there's a conversation, and then there's 10 other issues that are thrown at them, and it feels like this kind of torrent of all of the things that you've been doing wrong that I haven't been raising and that's going to feel pretty overwhelming and threatening to someone with more avoidant patterns as it would if it were coming the other way. I think that's not a nice experience for anyone.

So I think shifting into a, can we just check in with each other regularly and kind of clean up the, the space between us and make sure everything's kind of looking and feeling good for us both, Mm-hmm. um, and having a kind of maintenance mindset rather than an emergency response one allows the relationship to feel Yeah.

Like kind of more balanced and, and steady rather than feeling like you're having these big you know, spikes in stress and those conversations that can just feel so ineffective and really drag on and just a lot of the time I think be like a bit of an emotional vent for the anxious partner who's been holding a lot of stuff in.

Yeah. Yeah, I think like generally anywhere in life, you're doing maintenance check-ins whether it's your community sports, you know, whether it's uh, you know, it's at work. So it's not really that abstract to think about, Hey, maybe we should sit down on a Saturday morning and have a check-in if you need to add a little, some pastries in there. So you feel like it's a reward day. Yeah. You don't have to make it serious. So serious, but it does get serious if you don't do it.

And everything is an emergency meeting. Yeah, because that is just a massive spike. And if you're only having those types of conversations, I can probably guarantee that they're not that constructive. Yeah. Uh, You're not thinking your best when, when you're that heightened. So to kind of avoid that I do think often, You know, mixing in a bit of a fun play coming to the table often to do check-ins. Yeah. Having some sort of, as you say, like a ritual around it that isn't Heavy and serious.

Like, Oh, we go for a walk on a Sunday morning and we have a chat. It could be we have pasta on a Monday night and we have a chat about our relationship, whatever. But it just doesn't have to be like, Can you please come into the living room? I need to talk to you about something very serious. 'cause that feels ominous, right? It feels heavy uh, from the outset and it's probably going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'cause both of your energies are gonna be in that defensive.

Yeah, totally. Like guards up. Oh no, I'm in trouble. As you say, John, it's oh, you're gonna come to it. Oh no. Oh, she said my middle name. I'm in big trouble. So yeah, I think that the more often you have them, the more kind of structured it is the less you'll need to get really serious all the time. And you know, probably then the more open you are to hearing about things, you know, getting feedback.

I've said a few times on the podcast that for us now, and again, it's not perfect, but for the most part, like if something's bothering you that I've been doing or something's bothering me that you've been doing, we kind of want to know about it. That's just feels like an important part of the emotional like, hygiene of our relationship. Yeah. That I think we're on the same page around that.

That it's not in the interest of either of us individually or, or our relationship for us to be harboring stuff. So I think creating that kind of culture where, you know, we do talk about things proactively not as an attack, but just because it's part of our mutual commitment to what we're building here. Yes. we don't find things that linger, that constructive. Yeah. It's just, it's, you can feel the difference, right? When there's a lot of unsaid stuff.

I think it really, it's very disconnected very quickly. Yeah. You can feel the difference. Okay, I think we're gonna leave it there. There were so many more questions, so maybe we'll do a part two of this at some point. But we'll leave it there so we don't drag on too long. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope that this has been really helpful. And as I said, if you wanna go deeper on all of this stuff, definitely check out the new course. Secure Together.

It'll be All of this stuff and a lot more and in a way that's, you know, both a mix of teaching and, you know, exercises for you to do with your partner. And as I said, for us doing courses and stuff together has been really, really helpful in just creating that little bit of distance, that little bit of like impartiality, not having it all come from one person to the other. I guess that can create some funky dynamics that don't always land well.

So it might be a really nice thing for you to explore with your partner. If you're listening to this and feeling seen and that you maybe struggle with some of the things that we have struggled with and that you'd like to find your way to a place of a bit more security and safety and, and trust in one another. Thank you so much for joining us, and I hope to see you again next time.