“Why do I keep attracting avoidant men?”
I get asked this question all the time in my private practice, and to be honest I ask this question to myself all the time – because I can still find myself attracted to avoidant men as well.
It seems like attracting avoidant people is, from my perspective, one of the ways we heal, just like an avoidant person attracting an anxious person is a way they heal. Both of these attachment styles need to be shown by the other where their wounds are still needing to be healed.
Consciously, avoidant people need to learn to come into connection with others more securely, whereas anxious people need to learn to come into connection with themselves more securely. Subconsciously, I believe avoidant people also need to learn to come into connection emotionally with themselves more securely, and anxious people need to learn to come into connection emotionally with others more securely. There is a fine line between the insecurity of anxious and avoidant people when talking about subconscious fears and comfort zones. Both anxious and avoidant people tend to fear intimacy and abandonment due to unresolved relational core wounds. One just happens to display fear overtly (anxious), whereas one tends to internalize their fear and not share it (avoidant).
Ok, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a deeper dive into why we may be attracting people who are emotionally avoidant…
From my perspective, it is an opportunity to go within and look at how we are showing up for ourselves or not showing up for ourselves. Interacting with an avoidant person will often highlight for us the ways in which we’re being avoidant to ourselves.
Avoidant people give us the opportunity to feel the pain of our unmet needs.
This may be an all too familiar feeling, especially if you grew up with an emotionally unavailable parent. The unmet needs might be so painful to experience, but if it’s familiar to us, it might be our subconscious comfort zone and why we keep attracting it. To the subconscious mind it might feel safe to be with someone who is unavailable, or it may be giving the illusion of an opportunity to finally capture the love, attention, validation (unmet needs) that we’re all too familiar growing up. So, we keep going back as a subconscious attempt to reconcile our past (romanticizing the avoidant person and hoping that one day they might finally realize your worth and start showing up for you). This is how we play out mother/father wounds in our current relationships – we attempt to get our past unmet needs met in our current relationships, but we are often leading with our wounds (insecure attachment).
Attracting avoidant people can also show us our relationship shadow aspects, which I like to call our subconscious comfort zones. What we are really wanting in one part of us, another part of us might be afraid of it. There might be a part of you that really wants intimacy, love, connection and companionship, AND there might also be a part of you that is really scared of being hurt by it. And the part that’s scared is usually more subconscious, lurking in the background waiting to sabotage you.
Consciously we may want a relationship, but there may be a subconscious part that is scared of having it, so we continue to attract avoidant people because they are safe to the subconscious part of us that is scared of being hurt.
This might explain why when I work with people in my private practice with anxious or disorganized attachment, they usually have to go through their own avoidance to get to secure attachment. It is the healing process meeting their subconscious part that is scared of having love because they often fear not being worthy of it, being abandoned, betrayed, hurt, etc.
As long as the subconscious part is running the show, you will likely keep attracting avoidant people. The work begins when we start working with the parts of us that are scared of being hurt by a relationship.
If you are only working with the conscious part (the part that wants a relationship but has not acknowledged the fear) then you will remain in the victim story of “I keep attracting avoidant people”. A person who is healing to become more secure will not stick around for avoidant behaviour because they see their value and feel worthy of love. Secure people simply won’t waste their time with people who cannot show up for them and meet their relational needs.
In short,
the subconscious part that fears love is the part of us that is repelling secure/available people, and attracting avoidant/unavailable people.
Simply attracting avoidant people is not a good measurement of where you’re at on your healing journey towards secure attachment, however, sticking around for avoidant behaviour once it has been recognized is.
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Lift your cheekbones,
Matt