How and why you overcompensate in a relationship with avoidants

They withhold affection, and you overcompensate. Is this familiar? If it is, then you might be in a relationship with an avoidant person.

It is so much better to understand what you are navigating here right from the beginning, if it is new. Equally, if this is the pattern you have been struggling with for a long time, rather than find yourself feeling awful, because things might have either flipped or suddenly changed if you are in a new relationship.

Here I mean any kind of relationship, whether romantic or a friendship, because in this understanding and the information I will give you, you will be saved from endless rumination and sleepless nights, feeling bewildered, abandoned and foolish by your self-appraisal of being a bad judge of people, doing this time and time again.

Here, we unpack the dynamics of the avoidant and the empath. This is because in my practice, I am mostly approached by either anxiously attached empathetic people, being in a perpetual state of never being able to enjoy a sustainable level of connection with a partner who is, by and large, avoidant.

In fairness, I am also approached from the other side of the fence, by those who are avoidant, using a dynamic of distance and control that thwarts their belonging and connection and ultimately their chance of happiness, when they have had enough of their running away and hiding.

There is usually an escalation of the feeling of emptiness and loneliness that precedes their reaching out. Maybe through one too many unhappy endings, which have resulted from their need for control and distance. The unhappiness is not only on one side of the fence, so to speak, but actually on both. That is the prevalence of the paradox. The wound is the same. Fear of abandonment, which stimulates our primal need to survive.

Two different experiences

Absence can become in itself a canvas upon which two entirely different pictures can be painted. The silence and lack of knowing and/or understanding of its cause and origin becomes a lens through which the avoidant resolves and unpacks meaning and measure of value, and the other enters a variant of insecurities that try to provide the answer to why, because the brain also wants to know why.

Two entirely different things are going on here. For the avoidant, the distance allows space equivalent to oxygen for them to process without feeling overwhelmed by their own vulnerability and for the empathetic or anxiously attached person, the panic of abandonment becomes almost unbearable; they fall into a web of overthinking, rumination and constant angst they just cannot seem to quieten.

This usually occurs after a break-up or on the brink of being in one. Or in the case of the anxiously attached person, the fear can even precede the actuation and become fully kicked in when childhood feelings of abandonment are triggered by even a whisper of possible re-enactment.

Firstly, let me say something I found important to both be aware of and to remember: patterns only exist until you become aware of them. It is here that you have to change your volume to match theirs and take control of the pacing away from them. It is also here that the avoidant needs to take inventory of their own closing down to intimacy when the safety achieved is felt as hollow.

This is not about winning but more about being done with losing on both sides.

You cannot and should not negotiate your standards if you are endlessly giving, waiting and longing for what is appropriately mutual. If it is not, it is far better called out and grieved than lived with to uphold what is emotionally unsustainable.

Here, use your perception to see their strategy, as well as your own likelihood to stay where there is no mutuality. It is not your job to overcompensate to belong, because this is counterfeit and has the hallmark of low self-worth as its driver. This is not love. Those of us who love deeply are often those who tend to detach cleanly when our empathy and kindness is perpetually being taken for granted.

When every reaction of yours becomes data

If they withhold, do you overcompensate? If they text less, do you double-text? If they withhold affection, do you try to understand and give them space? Eventually, you realise that you cannot make a meal out of breadcrumbs and you decide to leave.

What is the possible resolution to living in an emotional desert with someone? Working on your core wounds rather than choosing someone who echoes them. Better honest communication. Lowering fear around employing boundaries. Negotiating mutuality as a deserved basic need.

Change is always possible through awareness.