I’ve learned that healing avoidance requires us to grow along two dimensions: inner and outer. Both are essential.
The inner dimension involves creating a secure, loving relationship with our self.
This means learning to respect and honor our emotions, our thoughts, opinions, and ideas. It means learning to embrace and honor our emotional needs and our unique interests, talents, drives and abilities. It means learning to live our life in a way that reflects and expresses who we are.
In short, it involves learning to be a respectful, understanding, kind and loving presence to ourselves, to our inner world and our inner child.
And then there is the outer dimension.
This dimension involves learning to create secure, loving relationships with other people, especially our significant other(s).
This requires that we learn to share and express our feelings and needs in loving vulnerable ways, that we learn to listen to and respect the feelings and needs and inner world of others with love, empathy and kindness, that we learn to be there for others in their time of need and ask for help and support in our time of need, that we resist the urge to disconnect and disengage from our relationships in favor of actions that foster trust and stability and safety and connection.
In short, it involves learning to be a stable, respectful, understanding, kind and loving presence to our significant others. It involves learning to love others fully and with maturity, which in turn requires that we be mostly free of the chronic impulse to self-protect.
My experience is that both dimensions are fundamentally entwined and inseparable. We can’t actually fully grow along one dimension without intentionally working on both.
In my 20s and 30s, for example, I did a lot of personal development work focused on myself – my state of spiritual progression, my limiting beliefs and core wounds, and so on.
This work was meaningful and important, but it did little to alter my avoidance. I bounced in and out of relationships the whole time, telling myself I just hadn’t found the right person.
In my late 30s, though, I wanted to break through my resistance to deeper intimacy and somehow build a committed relationship. Only then, after my dating got more intentional and serious, did I start coming up against the core wounds and patterns driving my avoidance.
Despite years of therapy before this point, there was an enormous amount of unprocessed emotion from my childhood that only truly surfaced in the process of trying to create a secure, stable relationship.
This was really surprising to me, in part, I think because we’re immersed in a self-help culture that emphasizes self-improvement, self-empowerment, inner work and loving ourselves.
All of that is helpful to a degree but it is also incomplete.
Attachment theory teaches us that human beings are fundamentally relational in our core essence.
As children, much of our sense of self is shaped and constructed in and through relationship. There are aspects of ourselves that can only fully develop in and through the experience of belonging, community, intimacy. It is how we are made.
The development of self and relationship are in essence one and the same, entwined and inseparable.
As avoidants, we experienced a rupture in our capacity to belong and be intimate and thus a rupture in the full development of our relational self.
To survive and adapt, we disconnected from important parts of ourselves and an important parts of others.
And to fully repair and heal, we must reconnect with both.