u/Acceptable_Target627

I’ve been thinking back over the last 5-6 years of my life. During this period, I’ve had to end 3 relationships with people I considered important.

2 of them were just friends.

What I noticed is that, in all three cases, the rupture happened when I pointed out that something they had done had hurt me.

And that really pissed me off, because I certainly hadn’t raised the issue to say: “Go away, I never want to see you again!” And yet, after I did, it seems like nobody wants to do a damn thing to repair things. They’d rather disappear than even consider the idea.

So here are my questions:

1. What the hell is people’s problem with repair?

2. Why does it seem like relationships only last as long as I’m the one making the effort to justify other people’s failures? I’m sick of it.

...did you ever reply: “Yeah, I agree”?

I’m just curious.

Hi everyone. Today was a strange day because exactly one month has passed since I started no contact. A lot of things today reminded me of the day of the breakup, partly because, by coincidence, I had to take the same routes I took that day, but whatever, it is what it is. I thought I’d write a sort of recap of how these 30 days have gone. Basically, I want to talk about my healing process.

I’ll start from the first day, obviously :)

Day 1: shock at his DARVO response, self-regulation, my exit response: start of NC.

Day 2-17: period of intense cognitive processing.

– I thought over and over again about the whole arc of our relationship from the very beginning, looking for an interpretive paradigm that could hold all the data together with the smallest possible number of local explanations

– I went through several before finding the “avoidant” paradigm.

– Intensive research on avoidant attachment style, and also on AvPD, just to be safe.

– At that point, I began rereading past episodes through that paradigm to see whether they made more sense that way. They did. Everything fit.

During these 15 days, most of my mental energy was absorbed by these reflections. In fact, I temporarily interrupted several of my routines, such as reading, writing, going out with friends, etc., and I had to postpone some tasks because I couldn’t concentrate. The things I did manage to do, I did, so to speak, on reserve energy. In the meantime, I kept “checking” his social media profiles, even though I had no intention of saying anything to him if I caught him online. Inside, I was tormented by the question: “Does he rationally realize he behaved like an asshole? Or does he genuinely think I deserved that response?” I can’t say I ever gave myself a definitive answer. At some point, as the days passed, it simply stopped being such an important question to me.

Day 18-20: slowing down of the cognitive work and beginning of detox.

– I started feeling that there was nothing left to analyze. Every episode had already been sifted through. The paradigm held up; there was no need to keep trying to falsify it. The cognitive sphere was at peace.

– I looked into the potential biochemical dependency triggered by intermittent reinforcement and decided to commit to no longer giving in to the impulse to “check his profile,” so as not to slow down the detox process. I also muted his profile to avoid accidentally seeing him online.

Day 21-25: additional strategies.

– I joined the dedicated subreddit. There, through reading similar experiences, I discovered the possibility of treating the issue as a kind of collective experience rather than a personal drama. This encouraged intellectualization and depersonalization of the problem, and also allowed me to pick up new nuances of the “avoidant” paradigm, which became more and more a useful body of knowledge in general rather than something tied only to one specific person. It also worked as a kind of “methadone” against the infamous impulse to check his profile.

– I noticed that, in my head, there are still two versions of him: on one hand, the version explained by the paradigm and supported by the totality of his actual behavior; on the other, the version I projected onto him because of my benevolent interpretations, mostly supported by the initial phase of our connection. The second version lived in my head for a long time, even while its correspondence with reality was beginning to wobble, and it is the version I had feelings for. I still sometimes think of it with tenderness. So, in order to avoid falling into the trap of “hoping” to find that second version again in the real person, I mentally gave it another name and allowed it to remain alive for a while as a separate entity.

Day 25-30: return to routine, reallocation of energy.

– To speed up my exit from the residual and now useless rumination, I started doing grounding exercises, especially the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise. I found it incredibly useful, honestly!

– I’ve resumed a good part of my routine and concentration, honestly. These past few days have been going well.

And that’s it. So how am I now?

Obviously, not everything is resolved. I still have negative thoughts related to him throughout the day. Every morning, before getting out of bed, I feel anger and disbelief simmering inside me, like: “Why the hell did he have to behave like that? Everything was fine.” I swear, there was no real problem. It wasn’t one of those relationships requiring any particular or demanding kind of planning for the future. I was only asking him for a minimum of vulnerability and emotional reciprocity. That shouldn’t be difficult. And even if he had wanted to slow things down, there were dozens of ways to do that gently and without drama, while staying on good terms. Instead, he did it in the crudest possible way, for no reason at all. It’s clear that there’s still a part of my brain that can’t believe it and thinks he deliberately wanted to hurt me without any valid reason.

But then I get out of bed, and that anger stays muted in the background, almost disappearing. In the end, whatever the reason, he chose to behave exactly like that. What can you do about it? Ultimately, I’ll get over the pain and move on. I know I can build nourishing, happy bonds. He, on the other hand, will remain stuck in his defense mechanisms, perhaps forever. In some moments, I feel pity for him.

Hi everyone. Today I’d like to hear your experiences on this topic.

I’ll start from my own experience.

When I met this man more than a year ago (someone I only later understood to be avoidant) there was one thing about him that unsettled me and set off an alarm bell, although I ignored it at the time.

It was the fact that I had the impression he never expressed his real personality in an authentic way, but instead seemed to mirror the attitudes, tastes, and behaviors of someone else (maybe someone in our shared social circle, maybe someone outside it).

It wasn’t blatant mirroring. It was a subtle feeling he left me with, and I never knew how seriously to take it or whether to dismiss it as mere suggestion. The fact remains that every time I thought I had discovered something new about him (for example, an interest in a certain social issue or a particular taste in music) I would later start to suspect I had been mistaken, because it didn’t seem to be something that was truly “his”, but rather something he had absorbed performatively from someone around him.

It was a very frustrating feeling, because I was genuinely trying to get to know him better. So every time, it felt like I had hit a dead end, as if I had been chasing a mirage. Still, jumping to the conclusion that it was a form of mirroring felt excessive at the time. I told myself that maybe he was just very open to what he could learn from others, someone who didn’t rigidly cling to his own tastes. This was especially true because he didn’t seem to me then (and still doesn’t seem to me now) to have any narcissistic traits. In the past, I had experienced mirroring, but only in connection with that specific kind of personality structure.

Looking back, though, I now think my impression was probably correct, and that it wasn’t a coincidence that I kept feeling that frustration. My goal was to get to know him better; I had the feeling I wasn’t managing to do that; and that feeling was probably accurate. His “core” (the part of him I wanted to see) was completely shielded by defensive mechanisms and games of mirrors. At this point, I think I may never have seen anything of him except the armor.

My current conclusion is that this alarm bell was probably something I should have taken much more seriously, instead of letting myself be distracted by the fact that he didn’t have narcissistic traits, as if that alone were enough to make the signal harmless.

I’d really like to hear your experiences with this. Thanks to anyone who feels like replying.

Hi everyone.

I’m working through the process of getting over a relationship with someone with an avoidant attachment style and trying to feel okay again.

One of the things that worries me right now is that the dynamics I experienced may leave toxic aftereffects in my psyche, and maybe create problems for me in the future.

I thought that talking about this together and comparing our experiences could be a way to prevent this baggage from going unnoticed, and to monitor it so it doesn’t just settle in our heads unchecked.

Have you ever thought about this issue? Are there any long-term effects you fear might change you for the worse?

Examples:

• The feeling that showing affection, attention, care, and esteem (things that are usually appreciated and work as relational fuel) is actually threatening or suspicious, because we spent a long time dealing with someone who reacted by withdrawing or acting as if they were annoyed by it.

• The feeling that expecting reciprocity in a relationship is illegitimate, because we invested a lot in someone and were then treated as “needy” when it became clear that we also wanted investment in return.

And so on.

I’d also like you to add your own examples.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I may have found an approach that could be useful to others too.

Usually, before gradually revealing themselves as emotionally abusive, a person presents in a way that encourages you to form a very positive internal image of them. And it’s that internal image that you end up caring about. That’s also the trap, because even when the relationship becomes unbearable, you keep hoping the “old version” will come back. You start telling yourself things like: “Deep down, they’re a good person,” or “Things will go back to how they were.”

You might think the solution is to erase that false image and just stop caring about them overnight, like flipping a switch. But that often doesn’t work, because the brain doesn’t function that way.

I’ve been trying something different. Not erasing, not forgetting. Separating. I took the image of the “good person” I thought I knew and gave it a different name. Now the real person is called X, and the one that lives in my imagination is called Y. I’m also separating my memories: all the shitty things the real person did (things the imagined version would never have done) go into folder X; all the good behaviors I expected but never actually got go into folder Y.

Basically, I’m giving myself permission not to suppress either the affection or the false memory overnight. The goal is for it to fade into a mild, harmless warmth, no longer attached to any real person, but more like the kind of fondness you feel for a fictional character. Like the protagonist of a novel who left such a strong impression on you that “it almost feels like you know them.”

Let me know if this makes sense to you. Or if you’ve tried something similar.