Dismissive avoidant attachment: why you shut down

What does dismissive avoidant attachment look like?

It usually looks like competence, which is what makes it hard to spot. You manage on your own, you prefer fixing a problem to talking about it, and you are often the calmest person in a crisis.

• Going flat in an argument. Within a minute you are somewhere else, answering in short sentences and waiting for it to be over.
• No words afterwards. You are able to say what was unreasonable about their tone, and unable to say what you felt.
• Closeness as obligation. Someone asks how you feel and the honest answer is that you do not know.
• The urge to leave the room. A conversation about the relationship makes you want to go, although nothing terrible has been said.
• Deactivating strategies. Mikulincer, Shaver and Pereg describe active inattention to what is threatening, and suppression of the thoughts and memories that would bring the need for closeness back.

Is withdrawing the same as not caring?

No, going quiet is what a person does when feeling has been unhelpful before. In my clinical view, needing something once got them criticised, met with nothing, or made them look weak.

• What your partner hears. Even when you are trying to stop the argument from getting worse, your partner experiences the silence as rejection, punishment or proof that you do not care.
• What the silence holds. Silence in a withdrawing partner is often the way they protect themselves when the emotional pressure becomes too much.
• One explanation among several. Nothing on this page tells you which explanation fits the person you live with.
• Willing or overwhelmed. Whether somebody is willing to take part is a separate question from whether they are overwhelmed.

Read more about why a partner runs hot and cold.

What is the withdrawing protecting?

Most of the time it protects autonomy, competence or the relationship itself.

• Autonomy. Being managed, improved or negotiated with feels worse than being alone, so distance restores a sense of being your own person.
• Competence. If you do not know what you feel, being asked to say it is a test you are about to fail in front of someone who matters.
• The relationship. Some people withdraw because they do not want to say the cruel thing that is available to them.
• The limit of that reading. Nobody knows it from the outside, and withdrawal that goes on for months is doing something to the other person whatever it is protecting.

What does the distance cost?

Distance protects one person and costs 2.

• Lower satisfaction. A meta-analysis of 132 studies found that both kinds of attachment insecurity go with lower relationship satisfaction.
• The insecure person pays more. In the same analysis, the effect on the insecure person was stronger than the effect on their partner.
• Feeling unknown. People describe being in a long relationship and still feeling unknown in it, which differs from loneliness and is harder to explain.
• The chase. Your partner pursues harder, you retreat further, and each move confirms the other’s fear.

Does dismissive avoidant attachment change?

Yes, and being told to feel more does not change it.

• Stable, and movable. Fraley and Hudson describe attachment patterns as more stable in adulthood than in childhood, and still responsive to what happens in a relationship.
• Different with different people. Plenty of people are avoidant in one relationship and not in another.
• What the shift looks like. It looks small from outside: one true sentence said during an argument and not after it.
• No timetable. Feelings become accessible again often, not always, and not on a schedule.

How do I stop shutting down, or reach a partner who does?

The one who withdraws says what is happening and when they will return, and the other lowers the pressure without dropping the subject. Overall, Simpson and Struthers recorded 180 couples discussing a conflict; when a partner respected the other’s autonomy and made clear they were still valued, the avoidant partner’s anger and withdrawal were lower.

• If you go quiet: say the smallest true thing. “I have gone blank, I am not walking out, give me a short break” changes what your silence means to the other person.
• If you go quiet: name the return. You do not have to speak while overwhelmed, and you do have to ask for a pause and say when you will come back to the conversation.
• If your partner withdraws: ask smaller. “How do you feel about us?” is too big; “what was the worst part of today?” has an answer, and answering it is the practice.
• Agree the exit in advance. Either of you may pause a conversation, and both of you come back to it.
• Soften and stay on the subject. Take their view seriously, keep the problem its real size, and say plainly that you still want them.
• Space with a return. Giving space lowers the pressure enough for both of you to come back and speak honestly, and the issue stays on the table.

None of this is your job to do indefinitely. If you do all of it and nothing moves, that is information about the relationship.

These steps fail when the shutdown arrives before either of you has words, or when the pause never ends in a return. That is what the session is for.

Questions people ask

Is dismissive avoidant attachment the same as being emotionally unavailable?

They overlap, and they describe different things. Emotionally unavailable describes the effect on other people, and dismissive avoidant attachment describes the mechanism: a learned reduction of the need for closeness.

Do dismissive avoidant partners actually want a relationship?

Usually yes, and often a long one. What they resist is being depended on in a way that leaves no room to be separate.

Why does my partner go quiet instead of arguing?

Quiet ends the pressure quickly and arguing does not. If they are unable to name what they feel at speed, silence is the only move available that does not make things worse.

Does chasing an avoidant partner ever work?

Rarely for long. Pressure raises the very feeling they are managing, so they withdraw further.

Do 2 avoidant people manage a relationship together?

Yes, and it is often calm for years. The difficulty tends to arrive with something that will not be handled separately, such as illness, a child or a move abroad.

Sources

• Mikulincer, Shaver and Pereg, Attachment theory and affect regulation, Motivation and Emotion, 2003
• Overall, Simpson and Struthers, Buffering attachment-related avoidance: softening emotional and behavioral defenses during conflict discussions, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013
• Candel and Turliuc, Insecure attachment and relationship satisfaction: a meta-analysis of actor and partner associations, Personality and Individual Differences, 2019
• Fraley and Hudson, The development of attachment styles, in Personality Development Across the Lifespan, 2017

How this article was written. I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. Nothing is published until I have read it, corrected it and stood behind every clinical statement in it. The professional and clinical judgement is mine and mine alone.