Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Q&A (feat. my partner Joel)
In today's episode, I'm joined by my partner Joel and we're answering your questions about how we've navigated aspects of the anxious-avoidant dynamic in our relationship.
We'll cover:
Doing "the work" individually and as a couple
How we've built trust and safety over time
How we manage conflict and have hard conversations
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Join the waitlist for my new couples course, Secure Together
Save $150 on my Higher Love break-up course with the code PHOENIX
Follow me on Youtube
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
In today's episode, I'm joined by my partner Joel, and we are answering your questions about our relationship. We actually did one of these episodes a little over a year ago, and it's funny to reflect back on that. It's probably not discernible from your perspective as a listener, but certainly for me, and I assume for you as well, Joel. It feels like a long time ago.
[00:00:56]:
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 like a dead end or feeling like you're really powerless against 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.
[00:02:29]:
So we're going to be answering some questions today that were submitted on Instagram covering 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 Waitlist, which is just awesome. And if you would like to join the Waitlist 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 is 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.
[00:03:41]:
And obviously, the really interesting and novel thing about this course, compared to any of my others that you might have done, is that Joel is going to 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're more anxious and you're going through that with your partner, that 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 dynamics that can exist 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 waitlist, do jump on that list in the show note and that will get you first access and exclusive discounts. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to jump into these questions now. So the first few questions are around the work in relationships.
[00:04:56]:
We got quite a few of these. We've clumped them together. But the first question is, did Joel do the work too, or just you, as in me? If he did, what led him to it? And what has Joel been doing as someone who leans more avoidant to be where he is 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 twenty s, 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 a very serious and loving relationship that I was like, oh, okay, 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 going to contribute to anything unless I take it holistically as a part of this relationship.
[00:06:31]:
And I think it's so important when we're talking about this to say, like, it's not a past tense thing if 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 practise, 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 it is it's so ongoing. 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 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.
[00:07:39]:
Oh, yeah. It's not like we were having horrible fights all the time, but I would say there was a fair amount of insecurity there on both sides, 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're going to be in this amazing, perfect relationship because we have the same values around these things and we want similar things from a relationship. And I think when we found ourselves in it, all of the stuff comes on. The wheels can come off pretty quickly. Yeah, I think we're both we have very strong values and we can be a bit have our ideals of what a relationship can and should be. And I'd say the first few months, because we went from a friendship into quite an intense romantic relationship, we moved in together very, very quickly. So it was like we were right into the pressure cooker. Yeah.
[00:08:54]:
We did everything they say you should not recommend. We tested ourselves and the wheels had come off a couple of times, but I think it was also like testing our standards, testing our values. It's like you say these things are important to you, then we're going to test you out how important they are. I mean, in saying that, yeah, we don't want to gloss over, we don't want to retrospectively seem like it was easy sailing, because it wasn't. 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 the love and create, over time, a safe and secure relationship in which I could start letting down defences. And I'm still working through that. I'm not speaking as a person, a healed person, because it's ongoing work for me. Yeah.
[00:09:56]:
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 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 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 like, oh, this is too much. What have I gotten myself into? Get me out of here. And 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 do just want to emphasise that 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, keep coming back to our love for each other, which sometimes was easier than others. But that was, I think, really what got us through those earlier periods and some challenging periods since. The other thing that I'll say about, two things that I'll say about the work in terms of the actual how or what does that looks like for us, we have mostly solo or like DIY the work.
[00:11:30]:
We haven't worked with a couple's coach or counsellor 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 cheque in most of the time it's weekly. We've been a little slack recently, but a weekly cheque 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 teaching you or lecturing you about a relationship dynamics because it's just too close. 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 remove from any dynamics of one person kind of lecturing the other.
[00:12:55]:
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 third party, symbolic or real, to be the voice of some of this work can certainly been helpful. The last question on the work is do you think without Joel's willingness, your own inner work would have been enough? Frankly, no. And maybe more than the fact that it wouldn't have been enough. That just would have 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 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 have sought to do alone.
[00:14:02]:
And that's just for me, that I know that having a partner who I can do that with is a non negotiable for me. Okay, the next question what helped Joel 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 it's still something that we work on. And I think more than anything, as an avoidant, there has to be a responsibility taken from our side for our reactivity. And we find it really hard to respond when we're in a heightened state. Whether our nervous system is in a heightened state and 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 know that she's just kind of taken all my nonsense. But I think more than anything, just giving me indications that no matter the reasons why I choose to be avoidant and the things that I'm trying to hide, which is I feel the non desirable parts of myself over time, you've allowed me to really express them and explore them. And you've expressed that it's okay, everything is okay.
[00:15:36]:
I know as avoidance, we have a lot of fear around failure and be seen as a failure. And we often the shame runs pretty deep. 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. Right.
[00:16:15]:
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 wouldn't want to, because that protective shields in place for a reason. And so it really does happen organically. It's kind of like peeling layers of an onion and certain topics that are more sensitive. Things like sex and money and all of those hot button issues that can carry a lot of shame.
[00:16:44]:
Those are things that we've really like. They've been layers we've gotten to incrementally. That was not stuff that straight out the gate. We were talking about comfortably and easefully. 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 ifs therapy in the past and I guess I'd use that framework. We're using parts to control other parts, so we sometimes ourselves don't even realise the depth of how solid a defence is.
[00:17:20]:
So this is not going to be solved overnight. I wouldn't advise people to try pride open in their partner. I think it requires it requires a lot of love, requires a lot of safety, trust and 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 Jolie, 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 without looming over you and saying, like, tell me what you're feeling right now. Yeah, correct. I have never felt forced or when it has been. It's just my kind of like, natural defence to feel like I'm being controlled.
[00:18:15]:
But if I really did have a sense of someone is trying to pry me open, 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 say whatever need 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 are going to have to face the discomfort of that sooner or later. Yes. Whereas I think in a less serious relationship, you or another person with avoidant patents might just go not worth the risk. Not worth the risk.
[00:19:04]:
Not worth the risk of opening no ROI. Yeah. When it's just like, the stakes are so high for your own sense of self and safety that 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 favour of willing to face that discomfort 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. Joel answers this much more quickly and directly than I would, but go on.
[00:19:41]:
You speak first. It's hard to answer this question without being honest about probably the frame of mind that I was in during those times. I was looking for problems, 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, just have a look at how much shared value that you have. Shared values.
[00:20:26]:
Sorry. So, yeah, there was definitely times where I thought we were incompatible, but honestly, I think it was coming out of my own fears rather than, 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 coming from a different angle is, like, people with more avoidant patterns, people who struggle with relationship anxiety as distinct from anxious attachment, is 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 all of those parts of you that are like, oh, risky, are you sure you want to share this part of yourself? Are you sure you want to commit to this? And so looking for incompatibilities, looking for reasons why it's not, I think it can also tie in with 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, because it's like, out of our hands. Right. It's bigger than us.
[00:21:44]:
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, rather than, oh, 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 think that 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 going to find our way through it, but less from an incompatibility point of view and more just are we going to be able to make this work? Yes. 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. We fear a future that we are out of control because we didn't make the right decision. And so that's where a lot of the incompatible fears come up. Sense of I'm going to make the wrong decision and then I'm going to be trapped and I'm going to fail and I'm trapped in a room, I'm powerless, and all of those things right.
[00:22:57]:
Which feel like these really big fears that are very real. Okay, we're going to talk about needs now. So how do we navigate different needs for explicit affection? How do we navigate different needs for explicit I don't know that we navigate it all that well. Right. We have different needs for affection. I definitely have more 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.
[00:23:31]:
Yes. But even still, 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 same needs for affection. I have tried to 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 I have to meet you somewhere. And I feel like I'm learning. I might be a slow mule, but I am definitely getting better with accepting affection.
[00:24:23]:
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 an automatic defensive protective response while also not swinging to the extreme of okay, well, I'll just pretend I have no need. So it's like, how can I advocate for myself without making you wrong? And that goes for most everything that we could talk about in relationships. How can we create space for both of us to thrive here and to be recognised 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? So I think for me, 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. And 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 very motivating for the vast majority.
[00:25:49]:
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, 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 have definitely been periods where you absolutely felt like it was a chore. I mean, 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, which is it's not too dissimilar to my experience as a kid.
[00:26:48]:
I'm like, oh, I'm in trouble again, I'm being called up for being disruptive, I'm not doing things right, I'm a failure. Yeah. And I think, 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 have been really hard for me at that time. So I think, as I mentioned before, we do more structured cheque ins, I think that can be really helpful just to normalise talking about the relationship without waiting until things get really bad. 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 ten other issues that you haven't been addressing. And so there's just going to 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 because nothing's being talked about, nothing's being raised, and then one thing happens, there's a conversation, and then there's ten other issues that are thrown at them.
[00:28:02]:
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 cheque in with each other regularly and kind of clean up the space between us and make sure everything's kind of looking and feeling good for us both and having a kind of maintenance mindset rather than an emergency response. One allows the relationship to feel kind of more balanced and steady, rather than feeling like you're having these big 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. I think generally, anywhere in life, you're doing maintenance, cheque ins, whether it's your community sports, whether it's at work.
[00:29:11]:
So it's not really that abstract to think about. Hey, maybe we should sit down on a Saturday morning and have a cheque in. If you need to add a Little some pastries in there so You Feel Like it's reward, you don't have to make It oh so serious. But it does get serious if you don't do it and everything is an emergency meeting 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. You're not thinking your best when you're that heightened. So to kind of avoid that, I do think often mixing in a bit of a fun play, coming to the table often to do cheque 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.
[00:30:05]:
It could be we have pastor 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 because that feels ominous, right? It feels heavy from the outset and it's probably going to become a. Self fulfilling prophecy because both of your energies are going to be in that defensive. Yeah, totally. Like, guards up. Oh, no. I'm in trouble, as you say, john, you're going to come to it? Oh, no, 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 probably then the more open you are to hearing about things, getting feedback.
[00:30:48]:
I've said a few times on the podcast that for us, now and again, it's not perfect, but for the most part, 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 just feels like an important part of the emotional hygiene of our relationship, that I think we're on the same page around that. That it's not in the interests of either of us individually or our relationship for us to be harbouring stuff. So I think creating that kind of culture where 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. You can feel the difference, right. When there's a lot of unsaid stuff, I think it's very disconnective.
[00:31:39]:
Very quickly, you can feel the difference. Okay, I think we're going to 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 want to go deeper on all of this stuff, definitely cheque out the new course, secure together, it'll be all of this stuff and a lot more. And in a way, that's both a mix of teaching and 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 impartiality, not having it all come from one person to the other, because that can create some funky dynamics that don't always land well.
[00:32:29]:
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 trust in one another. Thank you so much for joining us and I hope to see you again next time. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.