Being Well - Episode Transcript
Anxious and Avoidant in Relationship: The Pursuer-Distancer Dynamic
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[Intro music]
Forrest Hanson: [00:00:07] Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. We all have different needs for closeness and distance, for intimacy and independence. Some of us tend to reach for more connection, while others prioritize having plenty of space. You might have heard terms like anxious or avoidant attachment to describe this, but there are plenty of other ways of thinking about it as well, and we'll be talking about some of those today. And these tendencies don't just appear in our romantic relationships, they have an enormous impact on our lives as a whole. In this episode, we're going to be exploring these different ways of relating the challenging patterns that can appear when more avoidant and more anxious people try to relate to each other, and most importantly, what anyone can do to work with their own tendencies in healthier ways. So, to help me do that, I'm joined today, as usual, by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson. So, Dad, how are you doing today?
Dr. Rick Hanson [00:01:03]: I'm happy, I'm good, and I'm really glad that we're doing a topic that is squarely in my own wheelhouse, clinically and also personally.
Forrest Hanson: [00:01:12] Yeah, this is like right in your area of expertise here.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:01:15] That's right.
Forrest Hanson: [00:01:15] Which I think is totally great when we get to do those, that are located that way, in part because you've spent so much time as a couples and family therapist.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:01:22] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:01:22] Before we get into the episode today, I do want to give people a quick reminder about Rick's Foundations of Well-Being 2.0 program, which is currently on sale, it's Rick's flagship online program, and it's a year-long science backed journey through developing 12 key inner strengths, like mindfulness, motivation, and confidence, and I collaborated with Rick on this version of the program, there are some short intro videos to each section from the two of us, if you like Being Well, I think that you'll really love it, I've included a link to it in the description for this episode in your podcast player, and the holiday special is running right now for it, I think it's something like 40% off, then you can get an additional 20% off with coupon code 'BEINGWELL20'. Dad, I would love it if you could start by describing some of the key characteristics of the two personality types that we're going to be focusing on today.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:02:06] So, we're going to be focusing on people who tend to, tend toward withdrawal and avoidance, and on the other hand, people who tend toward pursuing, approaching, and let's say even clinging.
Forrest Hanson: [00:02:23] Yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:02:24] Before we get into those, I want to broaden this out a little bit, and Forrest was not prepared for me to say this, so if his head explodes, that's why [laughter]. I was just reflecting, Forrest, about the usefulness here in distinguishing between the dynamics of these two personality types that get caught up often in escalating loops with each other for reasons we'll get into, I want to distinguish that between we sometimes want something from other people. I can say that for myself. So, I'm probably more of a distancer than a pursuer in my core psychology, more introverted, more avoidantly attached to my childhood. All right. On the other hand, I confess, I have more than once wanted another person to see the world the way I do, to agree with me about something, or to become motivated about something, and I, because I'm a determined person, will try to get that going inside the black box of their mind, [sigh], to no avail, and the more that they experience me as trying to get something to budge inside them, the more they don't like that, so the more they tend to put up their walls or step back, and then the more I get caught up in pursuing that change inside them.
Forrest Hanson: [00:03:43] Yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:03:43] Round and round we go. So too, that would be another common situation, I think, you know, apart from these two very clear personality types.
Forrest Hanson: [00:03:51] Yeah. So, you're essentially describing what sometimes called the pursuer-distancer dynamic here, Dad, somebody takes a step in, this is the more pursuing person, that leads to the other person taking a step back, so they take a larger step in, there's a larger step back, and you can really view your relationship sometimes through that lens, like who's the person who's walking in, who's the person who's stepping back here? Is there anything else that you want to do to kind of lay a foundation here, Dad, talking about some of the characteristics of these two different personality types?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:04:17] Yeah. You know, as you know, Forrest, there are these two personality styles or types that are well described in Attachment Theory. One type is, let's say, anxious approaching, or clinging, and the other is more avoidant, distancing, dismissing, and both of them are grounded in anxiety, which we'll get to a little bit later. The child who is more approaching-oriented tends to have a sense of fear of abandonment, and craves closeness and intimacy, they tend to be clinging, dependent, maybe emotionally volatile, with difficulties in being alone, and around them you often have a sense that they're drawing you in and they want more, and sometimes there's a sense that they want more and whatever you're doing is not enough, and they want more than that even [laughs]. Then we have the other type, more avoidant and dismissing, and this maps loosely to schizoid or avoidant personality types in the extreme. There's often a fear of entanglement, and dependance, and control, being controlled by the attachment figure, they tend to be there for looking continually for optimal distance. These are modes of relationships, it's a way of having a relationship at arm's length. And so, in all that, there can be a tendency to withdraw from others, to be emotionally distant. Around them you have this sense of they're keeping you at arm's length, if not [rrr] withdrawing entirely from you.
Forrest Hanson: [00:06:01] Yeah, I think it's helpful for people to know that whether it's an Attachment Theory or just how we talk about it generally, we have these two words that we tend to use, more anxious, more avoidant, as you already did. But it's helpful to know that they're both actually motivated by anxiety. The full name of these styles from Attachment Theory is more like anxious-preoccupied, is sometimes what it's called, or anxious-ambivalent for the more pursuing person, and then anxious-avoidant for the more distancing person. So, they're both motivated by a fear fundamentally. The pursuer has this more anxious need for emotional soothing, they typically have a difficult time regulating their own emotions, in other words, they can't self-soothe, and this means that they need a lot of reassurance from whoever's going around in the system, maybe this is their friend, maybe this is their romantic partner, maybe it's a boss at work, they needed a lot of understanding from them that they really did do okay on the project, whatever it was that was going on for them.
Then on the other hand, there's the distancer, and they also have an anxious need to avoid the risks of intimacy. This tends to make them more autonomous and leads to, as you said, Dad, optimal distancing, so they're really, really good at finding the distance from which they can kind of orbit another emotional body to keep them safe, to keep them feeling like - "I'm close enough to get my closeness needs met, but I'm far enough to preserve my own space and not be as emotionally at risk in everything that's going on here." So, during this episode, we're going to use the words anxious and avoidant here for the sake of convenience, but both of the individuals are anxious and avoidant in their own ways. The pursuer is avoiding standing on their own, the distancer is anxious about emotional intimacy.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:07:39] And these are normal ways of being, they're affected by life circumstances. Maybe you're just a securely attached two year old rolling along, and then your main attachment figure dies, you are abandoned, you know, their partner's whole world is upside down, you get a lot less attention, suddenly there's this catastrophic injury that would then make you more clingy, and pursuing, and monitoring, and, you know, [rumble] regulating going on into adulthood later. So, there are a lot of reasons that call for compassion in these different ways of being. We can kind of pathologize, too, I think, pursuers more than distancers, although, flip the other way, I think I've seen a lot, when you have this dynamic, which is really common, pursuers seek distancers, distancers seek pursuers, in the beginning it was so wonderful, they seemed so nice, but then time goes on and they're in my office, and I think one of the things that's really useful to appreciate is how they're caught up in vicious cycles, on the one hand, and on the other hand, that very often they want the same thing, they want the same thing, but their styles in going about it just rubbed the other person in the exact wrong way, which precludes them getting what it is that they really want.
Forrest Hanson: [00:09:00] Yeah, I think it's interesting that, just what you said there, Dad, that these people end up together, seemingly, so frequently.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:09:09] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:09:09] It's kind of like selecting for somebody who activates the specific material that we feel the most vulnerable about for some reason, and I don't have a really great explanation for why that is, we'll explore a couple of those maybe a little bit later in the episode because I think it's fun to talk about. We've already talked about one of the patterns that can come up here, this kind of classic pursuer-distancer, where there's that seeking for more connection and it leading to more distancing, there is another pattern that you've certainly seen come up in your office, and I was wondering if you could talk about a little bit.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:09:39] What I see often is that people generalize from their own personality, which is self-evident to them as the right way to be in life, generally speaking, and they think it should be a rule for everyone. So, from a pursuer's standpoint, they say things like - "What's the problem? I just want to be close with you, I want us to be on the same page, I like the idea of our minds kind of merging together, it's a beautiful thing. People want relationships, all trauma is healed in relationships" - which is, by the way, not necessarily true, but I'll keep going, and so they generate an ideology around their way of being. And then you see the other person who says things like - "Solitude is great, I just like having time for myself. It's not out of lack of caring for you or good wishes toward you, I just kind of need my own world, I like my own world, I'm comfortable in my own world. Why can't you respect my privacy? Why do I have to tell you everything? Why do we have to process everything? Can't we just watch some TV?" - etc [laughs]. Right? And then they go round, and round, and round, and I think it's really helpful to start out by just thinking, okay, this is like cross-cultural communication, it's not good, it's not bad, these are just different styles.
Okay, how do we bring our different styles together so that we can get more and more of what we want? So, in the context of that, notwithstanding the very common situation in which there's a pursuer that is pursuing a distancer, who distances even more, which evokes even more pursuing, fine, what do you do when the distancer steps in rather than steps out? And there too, I've often seen a dynamic in which the more distancing person really tries to respond, but what can happen is that the pursuer person does not really internalize the emotional availability, the faithful commitment to them from the other person, the attention that the other person is giving them, the effort that the other person is sincerely giving them, even though it's really not their style or inclination, that just doesn't land, and that seemingly bottomless pit of hunger for evermore reassurance, evermore relationship supplies doesn't seem to be addressed.
And one of the reasons for that is a concern, going back to childhood, understood compassionately, that if the pursuer person really let in the reassurance and presence of their more distanced partner, if they really let it in, and it landed, then they would have no longer a basis for a claim on their partner. They would no longer have the basis for insisting, often with a sense of grievance, that their partner stay there and keep giving them more. Unfortunately, that kind of claiming and demanding tends to drive people away, and actually, if you register and let the good efforts of your more distanced partner land, that gives your partner reassurance that you're not an emotional vampire, which you're not, and reassurance that their efforts are appreciated, and also reassurance that what they've done is enough, it's enough, there's not an inexhaustible demand here, and that therefore is good motivation for them to keep giving you what you really want.
Forrest Hanson: [00:13:33] I think it's an interesting piece of the whole thing when we start trying to explore kind of who's at fault here, because in these two dynamics that we've just named, both pursuer-distancer and this kind of escalating cries for reassurance from the pursuer, it's really easy to look at the pursuing partner as the problem, or the pursuing person, because this exists in all kinds of relationships, not just romantic ones, but it's really easy to frame that person as like the person who's at fault, and if they were just more chill, these problems would go away. For starters, that's just not true, if they were more chill, probably there would be other issues inside of the relationship, for example, never getting to the actual depth of intimacy that sometimes a relationship requires. Avoidance oriented people are often more than happy also to not explore different kinds of problems that come up inside of a relationship, they sweep things under the rug, a lot of problems that can come out of that.
But I thought it was really interesting when I was prepping for this episode that I had a hard time coming up with some of these kinds of classic dynamics where it's really apparent that the more avoidant person is the person who's kind of generating the problem. And so, I thought about that a little bit, because that struck me as really interesting, and I think that there's something about that anxiety or pursuit orientation, to use a loaded term, a little bit of like borderlinishness, by its nature, that tends to produce more obvious problems for people than avoidance, or distancing, or another word that we're gonna talk about a little bit, schizoidalness, or schizoidishness maybe, because definitionally, pursuers tend to suck people into them while distancers tend to push them away, and this means that in most examples, it's going to look like the pursuing person is kind of like creating the issue, because the distancing person would be more than happy to just fly off into space with each other and have nothing kind of emerge out of it. What do you think about this?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:15:24] I think you're getting a something, Forrest, that I've really never heard anyone talk about, and I think, which is really good. A wrinkle is that commonly, the pursuer is female-
Forrest Hanson: [00:15:39] Oh, yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:15:39] And the distancer is male.
Forrest Hanson: [00:15:41] Yeah, we're going there. Totally.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:15:42] Yeah, and acknowledging issues around gender categories and all the rest of that. I think one of the reasons for the more frequent pathologizing of the pursuer is that those are more frequently females who in our culture have historically been much more pathologized than males. A version of this that you probably have not yet heard of, Forrest, you know, baked deeply into psychoanalytic history, is the combination of the hysteric and the OCD, obsessive compulsive personality type. It's a different way of talking about it.
Forrest Hanson: [00:16:20] Yeah, I'm very familiar with all of the history of hysteria and all of that. I haven't heard of this pairing, though, before, so that's kind of an interesting [unintelligible]. Yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:16:28] Oh, it's interesting, and you can kind of see it in a way.
Forrest Hanson: [00:16:30] Yeah, totally.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:16:30] You can see the person who's really flamboyant, kind of in all directions it wants, you know, a beautiful hot mess, sorta, sorta, but really intriguing and beguiling, and then you see over here the more buttoned-down, OCD-ish person who really has their act together, probably is more financially stable, and orderly, and so the two come together. From the standpoint of the more OCD-ish person, the hysteric person is full of life, and drama, and vivid, and has friends, and woo, adventure, sexuality, woo, and then the OCD-ish person seems stable, grounded, trustworthy, reliable, you know, so forth. So then, they come together, but then increasingly, the hysteric person is driving the OCD-ish person crazy, and the OCD-ish person feels controlling and boring to the hysteric person, and then the vicious cycles often ensue. So, and of course, I guess the word for hysteria comes from women's reproductive organs, and of course, it's the women who are the hysterics. So, it's easier to pathologize that one.
What's interesting to appreciate is that in game theory, the person who can say no has the power. The person who can withhold, the person who can nod, can smile, but then doesn't budge, they have the power. And so, in the therapist's office, very often it's the person who is least committed to the process who has the power in the room and the therapist needs to pay the most attention to to keep them in the process, and that very often is the more distancing person who in general doesn't have as much of a feeling even, or emotional processing that their more pursuing partner would have. I've seen definitely situations where people control by withholding, and punish by withholding. It's not just a typical situation, let's say, where the distancing person is just by nature more introverted, private, shy, and also quite sensitive to interactions, and can feel often overwhelmed by them, it's precisely because they're so relational that they need to gate the relationality of their relationship, because it's too overwhelming, they're just that way, and then the issue is more around - How do we work around just our fundamental tendencies?
Then you have situations where the more avoidant person is angry at the pursuer, or is wanting to keep the pursuer in the game by doling out variable reinforcement [laughs], every so often the slot machine pays off to the pursuer to keep them in the game, there's kind of a control there, and I have to say, I've seen many situations where I don't think that anxious, clinging attachment style is bumping into a hardcore avoidant attachment style, I think actually, the pursuer person just wants probably about twenty minutes a day, actually, of real contact, real connecting, real conversation with their partner. That's all they want. If you would just give them twenty minutes a day, maybe half an hour a day, maybe with a little affectionate touch that is not a bid for sex, just that would make them so happy. Just pay attention to them when they're telling you something, give them your undivided attention, be emotionally available to them. It's not a high bar, but I watch the more avoidantly attached person interpreting all that as a dominance power move coming at them and they just won't budge, and they then become, their lack of budging around reasonable, not a big deal requests from their partner, that does become now a key problem in the relationship.
Forrest Hanson: [00:20:43] So, if these dynamics have so many problems associated with them here, Dad, why do you think these two people seem to be drawn to each other?
Dr. Rick Hanson [00:20:50]: I do think opposites attract, in general, we do look for people who kind of complement us. If you can imagine a relationship with two, in the extreme, hysterics running around the room, each of them being very flamboyant, agh, it's not very stable, right?
Forrest Hanson: [00:21:08] There's an instability there, yeah, totally. There's no correction for weakness, yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson [00:21:12]: Yeah. Go the other way, two people who are very schizoidal, very distancing, you know, an evening of conversation basically might have four words in it, and, you know, they tend to not last very long with each other as well.
Forrest Hanson: [00:21:26] Yeah, there's nothing that's anchoring them in the relationship part of this. Yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:21:29] Yeah, and we keep forgetting that the natural field for a long-term relationship is a hunter-gatherer band of 40 people. And so, in that band, there are all these other supports that give you on the one hand room to distance and kind of go into your own space if you're the distancer, and also give you other forms of social contact if you're more the pursuer, and here, today, we dropped these two people, they walked back down the wedding aisle, let's say, or the equivalent, and then they're just, [blurp], they're on their own.
Forrest Hanson: [00:22:04] Yeah, they're stuck with each other forever. Yeah, totally.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:22:06] Yeah, with all these fantasies, of course, of romantic wonderful mess for the next 40 years, and aging together, how beautiful. [Sigh], that's a lot of work.
Forrest Hanson: [00:22:18] Yeah, I think that's a great point, Dad, that I don't think about enough in terms of the nature of the problems here.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:22:24] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:22:24] I wonder how much of these issues can really be boiled down to we don't have to have social support, we don't have social structures present that help the pursuer find other things out there to pursue, and help the distancer find some safe harbors where they can just go and read a book for, you know, 30 minutes or whatever without being bothered, and if we had a sort of more dynamic, general social life, a lot of those relationship problems might just vanish.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:22:50] Yeah, I think that's really true, and-
Forrest Hanson: [00:22:52] Yeah, I wonder about that.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:22:53] I know. And if I could do a thing here to show on the video maybe, so if you imagine the natural range of, let's say, closeness, and emotional traffic, and depth, and contact, okay, let's say there's one person who wants a lot of it but there are in a range, you know, at the low end of that range, they'd be okay, their preference would be the high end of the range but they'd be okay, then you had this other person whose natural range is much lower in terms of ongoing contact, the question is, can the ranges be adjusted or negotiated so that they overlap and then they can make their relationship in that space of overlapping? And that's where I think there's a great opportunity, it's not to pathologize the other person, not to presume that your way of being is obviously self-evident, like how everyone should be, no, have compassion for them, and see what you can negotiate, and see if you can find, as you usually can, that actually, a shockingly small and doable list of daily behaviors on your part would be just fine on both sides.
Forrest Hanson: [00:24:08] Yeah, I think you're totally right on here. To give a little shout-out and say a little bit more about the "Do opposites attract?" part of the question, I saw this clip of Esther Perel saying something like we go for people who express the part of us that we don't want to deal with, which I think is kind of similar to what you're saying here, Dad, in other words, somebody who kind of fills those gaps for us, because we all need a combination of both intimacy and autonomy, we all need both. So, if we tend to kind of struggle with them, one of them more than the other, be more vulnerable to one of them than the other, it's sort of sensible for us to look for a partner that can help us compensate for that to some degree. There is another possibility here that is very consistent with what we talk about on the podcast a lot, and that's a sort of more developmental or doomed quest aspect to this that I've heard you talk about a lot, this idea that we often look for partners who essentially allow us to kind of transport back in time, and try to do things a little bit differently these days than we were able to do back then, and I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:25:10] Oh sure. This is a notion that is very developed in what's called Control Mastery Theory, the basic idea that, to put it in our terms here, that a pursuer person may well have had a parent figure who was distancing, emotionally unavailable, kind of remote, one of the common gendered versions of that is a girl with a father who is absent, or playing traditional father roles with a lot of emotional absence, so then, later in life, da-da-da-da-da, those unmet needs still have a longing to fulfill them around them, and so then a person might look for that kind of person cast from the same script, in the same script from their childhood, to work all that out with. Sometimes that goes okay, often, though, unfortunately, if you pick the same kind of person today that was the person you had these unmet needs with when you were little, there's a pretty good chance that that person today is not going to be that likely or motivated to fulfill those needs of yours. That would be an example. Or maybe the distancer had an invasive, flambuoyant, narcissistically hungry parent, and, you know, had unmet needs for just being allowed to find an equilibrium of okayness while being around another person, so then we'd be drawn to that more pursuer-ish kind of person to try to fulfill that with.
So, this is a classic structure, and the way through it, of course, is through, how boring, mindfulness, self-awareness, understanding, empathy, being able to talk about this in a not so embarrassed way, just straightforwardly, like - "Oh, this is my wiring, you know, I've been on a quest, and I need to start paying attention to whether I can actually fulfill that quest, whether it's appropriate here in an adult relationship, what could we actually do that would meet my needs?" A really important move in relationships is in this general category, in which essentially I say to you, let's pretend here, Forrest, I say to you - "I know" - and you can edit this as you like - "I know I'm kind of neurotic about this, and, you know, you met my parents, you know my childhood, they were well-intended, and things had impacts, here I am today, I know I'm sensitive on this point, I know I react to it out of proportion to what's happening, I get that, and as your mate, your partner, etc, it would really help me if you would take that into account, and in ways that are okay for you, not being a big phony, not giving up your own needs. If you, it would really help me, given my big red-hot buttons here, if from now on, when we, let's say, talk about money or something, if you could, let's say, approach the topic more gently with more of kind of a warm up to it rather than just dropping it suddenly in the room. I understand that in your family and in your own background, people were just blunt with each other, and they just dropped things on the table, and it was no big deal, people just dealt with it, for me, it sends alarm bells up my spine, and then I, it's hard for me to actually have a real conversation with you about it. So that's it, I'm not saying that you're doing anything wrong, but just for me, it would help things go better."
Forrest Hanson: [00:28:59] Yeah. This is a great way into talking about what to do about all of this. And we focused on these tendencies in relationship with each other so far during the episode, but there are two ideas I've been thinking a lot about recently. The first is that trying to change other people is mostly a fool's errand. It's very, very difficult to get people to be the way that we want them to be for a whole bunch of different understandable reasons.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:29:22] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:29:22] So, this means that the best way in to affecting somebody else, whether it's a relationship context, or a friendship, or whatever else, is actually by being different ourselves, because sometimes changing ourselves creates the space that allows the other person to change in meaningful ways, or to change in the ways that we would like them to. And this means that whether we're working on a relationship, or we are outside of a relationship context, we're just standing on our own, and we're going - "Hey, I know that I have this tendencies, and I want to do some work on them" - turns out the answer is actually the same for both, and there are some ways where it can be easier to work on this stuff when you're not actively in a relationship, and there are some ways where some of these specific tendencies can really only be practiced on when you're in a relationship. So, there are kind of pluses and minuses to both sides of it, I think that people can get a lot out of this either way.
I think I want to start here actually, Dad, by focusing on the more distancing person for all of the reasons that we've talked about. For starters, anxious people get a lot of focus placed on them already, also, the distancer can sometimes hold a little bit more of the power inside of the relationship. And you said something a little bit ago that I want to come back to. Speaking for myself, for a long time I was perceived, and I really perceived myself, as being this very like top-down, logical person who had a little bit of divorcement from my feelings. This wasn't because I didn't have big feelings, it was because I actually had really big feelings, and I struggled to kind of manage them in different kinds of ways. And I think this can be a helpful insight to explore if you are somebody who tends to be a little bit more avoidant or a little bit more distancing, how that behavior is coming out sometimes out of that fear of intimacy, or out of that like fear of accessing those feelings that you have inside of you, because you're just not sure what's going to pop out if you do that. This can then take us to a lot of stuff around like how do we access those emotions in safer ways, or kind of like let that out a little bit. But just for starters, Dad, thinking about that, is there anything that you've seen help people work on those more avoidant tendencies?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:31:29] Oh, huge, I mean, because I was like that. Well, for starters, becoming more comfortable with your own interior will help you become more comfortable with the interior of other people, and paradoxically, really shoring up your sense of independence and autonomy will help you become more intimate. I find a lot that people who are more in that avoidant style have not developed enough confidence in their own ability to create boundaries, and to create sort of, I'm searching for the right word, to kind of regulate the permeability, moment, to moment, to moment of their boundaries. So, they can raise their shields or lower their shields moment, to moment, to moment depending on what's actually happening around them, and when you have more and more confidence in that, then you can become more comfortable with lowering your shields, knowing that you can put them back up again in an instant. And I sometimes find myself, with people who are more distancing, exploring, first, their very skillful and effective ways of distancing, so they become more aware of how good at distancing they are, and then I'm able to say and point out - "Well, because you're so good at distancing, you can actually start taking more risks with connecting."
I would say another thing is that people who tend to distance tend to be more flooded by experience, and so learning to develop a greater sense of an inner core of calm, calm strength, equanimity, so that you're actually more stable on the inside and you have more sense of refuge there. In effect, someone who is more avoidant, in the language of Lord of the Rings, tends to be more of a dwarf type [laughter], where they have deep riches inside, and they want to protect those riches with thick, thick walls, layers of thick walls, out of fears that if they don't have those thick, thick walls, the world will invade them and plunder them, take from them and exhaust them, you know, like an exhaust fan that's emptying the air out of the room.
Forrest Hanson: [00:33:44] If you're a fan of the Enneagram here, Enneagram type five, this is very much a thing. So, okay, Dad, go ahead, yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:33:51] Yeah, that's exactly right. So, it's really helpful to, you know, to realize that there's a lot of stuff bubbling around inside you, and you can get better at establishing your inner most keep, to continue the castle metaphor, that's unassailable, that's calm, it's clear, you see what you see, and the more you can trust that you can be in touch with that, the more comfortable you'll be with letting the barbarians, you know, wander the streets inside the castle walls [laughs].
Forrest Hanson: [00:34:24] Yeah, totally, I think this is great advice, Dad. I also think that some of this, for people who tend to be a little bit more avoidant, can sometimes get to a certain kind of mission confusion that's going on inside of their life, where, particularly inside of more of a relationship context, sometimes where anxiety and avoidance come up around commitment issues of different kinds, like the so-called fear of commitment, and we perceive the person who is a little bit less willing to commit to a relationship fully, whether that's committing emotionally, or moving from being in a situationship, I don't know if you've even heard of that term, Dad, to being in a full-on relationship. Don't worry, I won't bore you with it.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:35:03] A situationship?
Forrest Hanson: [00:35:05] Oh my God, Dad, we would have to go so deep down the rabbit hole here for us to have this conversation, just let that pitch slide by, buddy, maybe we'll talk about it someday [laughter], but going into like a full-blown relationship with another person, and we perceive that as being like more avoidant behavior. Sometimes that comes along because a person doesn't really have a great sense of what they want in life.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:35:25] Uh-huh.
Forrest Hanson: [00:35:25] That could be a possibility. Another possibility is that they're pushing away one thing because they're essentially trying to preserve different types of options in life. What this actually means most of the time, in my experience, both in terms of myself and working with other people around it, is that there is a sense of loss around roads not taken. There's this feeling of like - "Oh, there are all these things that I kind of wanted to do, or this vision of my life that I had, and am I kind of giving up on one kind of vision by stepping more fully into this relationship which commits me to a particular vision of life?" - and the sense of loss that a person has on, quote-unquote, "giving up" on those other possible realities can really be quite a bit to overcome for somebody. I know for me, that was a very real thing for a long time, it even infected what I did job-wise, the directions I went in terms of career path, this feeling of like - "Oh, by doing this thing, I'm not doing this thing over here" - the kind of exclusionary nature of it all. And you could do a lot of work around that, like that's a very deep thing for a person to explore. Sometimes it can get to a real feeling of like sadness or loss, and you have to do some real emotional processing around it to be able to kind of step into the reality that you've chosen more fully.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:36:46] That's very poignant, Forrest.
Forrest Hanson: [00:36:48] Yeah, no, it's been a real thing in my own life, for sure, so.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:36:51] To super simplify, is it a kind of coming to terms with the fact that you will never have gotten certain things in a key relationship, and that going forward you most likely never will get certain things in that relationship?
Forrest Hanson: [00:37:10] Some of that can be there if you, again, in a romantic context, if you feel like you're landing with a certain kind of partner, that means that you're not landing with a different kind of partner, and maybe you had sort of a model growing up of the way that your partner was, and so you're making kind of a choice around that. That could be one version of it. You can see this with people who avoid different kinds of career decisions, like they don't really fully commit to a career path, or to going back to school, or whatever it is for a million different reasons, of course, but one of them might be because that's a very committal act, it puts them on a real trajectory that's kind of hard to get off of once you get on the conveyor belt, and so there's a certain anxiety and avoidance that's going on there as well.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:37:51] Even broader than pursuer-distancer, what do you do, so now, let's say that you're five, ten years into a relationship, and maybe you've decided to get married, or some equivalent version, or maybe you haven't, you're not quite there yet, but basically you're in deep with this person, the clock's ticking, you're staring at the birthdays going by, and you just realize, you know, my partner is just never going to naturally want to do X, or my partner is just never really going to be comfortable with Y, or my partner is just never going to connect with me about this really significant part of my life, this interest I have of one kind or another, oof, what do you do then? And let's suppose that you make a decision that you want to stay in the relationship, you're invested, you're in, all kinds of reasons for that, let's suppose that's the decision, let's suppose that you're closing the door on looking for greener grass elsewhere, let's suppose, how do you come to terms with this, and how do you, what do you say? Do you actually reveal to your partner that truthfully, you're deeply disappointed [laughs] in several areas, and don't expect it to ever get better, and is that really skillful to reveal, let's say, to that person? How would you feel if you're on the receiving end of your partner revealing that? It's complicated, and I don't know what your reflections might be, but I just want to name this territory perhaps without solving it. You know, maybe that's another episode.
Forrest Hanson: [00:39:36] Yeah, I wonder if this is a different episode, but I do think it's a great question, I think it's a common issue for people. But it does get to something that I did really want to talk about a little bit here today, Dad, which gets to change capacity and different kinds of motivations for the behaviors that we have. So, here's what I mean by that. So, remember when we were talking about avoidance?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:39:56] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:39:56] We were framing it in terms of this is an anxious behavior. I would describe myself as more of an anxious personality type, so any avoidance that I have comes from that more anxious motivation, there are things that I don't like or I'm afraid of, and therefore I create some space from them. That's a certain kind of motivation, and that motivation has certain kinds of tools that we can apply to it. I can learn how to resource myself more, feel more stable internally, develop more emotional regulation, all of the stuff that we've already talked about to some extent. But there are other reasons that a person might be avoidant, and this gets to this word that we've said a couple of times during the episode, which is schizoid, and in the therapy talk world, people have heard a lot about anxiety based disorders, and personality structures, and things like that, whether it's borderline personality disorder, or more like anxious attachment, or whatever it is, and I think there's some commentary in the fact that, probably I'll guess most of the people listening to this have never even heard the word schizoid before in their life. People who are more schizoid, it's called schizoid personality disorder, they experience a pervasive sense of detachment from and disinterest in social relationships, they're just not drawn toward other people the way that most people are, and this goes way beyond what we typically think of as being introverted. It might be helpful here for me to just share the diagnostic criteria from the DSM.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:41:20] I think it would be great, I always love it when you do this, they have a lot of levels.
Forrest Hanson: [00:41:22] Yeah, because it really, it's clarifying.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:41:25] Yeah, yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:41:25] And I'm not trying to like excessively medicalized this, you know, don't apply this to your friends, but just like, it's a way of thinking about it, right? So, for a diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder, patients must have a persistent pattern of, first, like I said, detachment from a general disinterest in social relationships, and then second, limited expression of emotions in interpersonal interactions, so lower affect is sometimes what that's called. This pattern is shown by the presence of four or more of the following, so all diagnosis is a kind of rule out system, it's a box score, you have to check a certain number of boxes in order to receive the diagnosis. First, no desire for or enjoyment of close relationships, including those with family members. Second, strong preference for solitary activities. Third, little, if any, interest in sexual activity with another person. Fourth, enjoyment of few, if any, activities generally. Fifth lack of close friends or confidantes, except possibly first degree relatives. Then, apparent indifference to the praise or criticism of others. And then finally, emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affect.
The key point here is that people who are more avoidant have a desire for greater intimacy, fundamentally, like deep down inside they want to connect with other people, but there's something that's getting in the way, and then there are a variety of tools that we can apply to that to help them work through that. Then, on the other hand, there are some people who just don't want that intimacy, they are not interested, and I feel like we kind of don't talk about those people enough to some extent, which can lead to a lot of miscasting inside of relationships where you can have this system that I'm sure has walked into your office, Dad, kind of like you were describing, maybe they're long term partners, or long term friends, long term whatever, they've been on this ride for a while, and you've got the more pursuing partner who is always looking for that thing, and there might even be a model inside of them where - "Oh, this person is avoidant, and I heard on TikTok that that means that there are these fundamental anxieties inside of them, and if we just work through those, they will give me what I want, which is more intimacy." And the other person is like kind of trying to perform that, they're trying to do that dance-
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:43:37] Right.
Forrest Hanson: [00:43:37] Because they've sort of heard a lot of like - "Oh, this is what you're supposed to do"-
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:43:40] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:43:41] But the truth is, deep down inside, they just, they're just not that way. What do you think about that? Have I described that fairly here, Dad.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:43:47] Great description. In terms of a rule out, this is also not autism spectrum disorder of some kind.
Forrest Hanson: [00:43:55] Yeah. These are the commonly confused ones, is avoidant personality disorder and autism spectrum disorders with schizoid, and I can talk a little bit about the differences more, but go ahead, Dad.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:44:04] Oh, why don't you do that first.
Forrest Hanson: [00:44:05] Oh, sure. So, like really, really quickly here, avoidant personality disorder, motivated by that fear of rejection that we were talking about, embarrassment, punishment, again, there's this inhibition that's stopping them from being sociable. For ASD it's actually really, really interesting, because you could see how some of the things that I said for schizoid, particularly like flat affect, and more of a disinterest or withdrawnness around social relationship, could really connect to ASD. People who are on the spectrum tend to have much more difficulty with, and I hope I'm saying this kind of in the appropriately compassionate way, with what's sort of refer to most of the time as just general social functioning. People who are schizoid can do that dance just fine, they just don't care about it. Also, people, ASD comes with a way wider range of other differences and behaviors that aren't present in schizoid, for example those kinds of repetitive patterns of behavior, different forms of stimming, having particular interests that really draw your attention. For example, somebody who is more ASD might be more than happy to engage with other people if it's in their particular area of interest, whereas somebody who's schizoid really doesn't kind of care what they're talking about with somebody else, they would just rather not be talking with that person. And again, that's in the more kind of extreme-
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:45:20] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:45:21] Part of it, and we can think of all of these as being somewhat spectrumy, you can be a bit schizoid in nature, you can have three of those characteristics, maybe you didn't hit the formal diagnostic criteria of four of them, but does that mean that you don't have any of that going on? Clearly it means that something's there. This is all complicated, but that's sort of a way of thinking about it.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:45:39] Yeah, and then it gets at, so I think it's great description, and, well, what do you do?
Forrest Hanson: [00:45:46] Yeah, totally. Particularly as the anxious person, frankly, you're in that relationship, they're just not giving you what you want, your needs are understandable, like that's a tough spot to be in.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:45:56] It is a tough spot to be in.
Forrest Hanson: [00:45:57] Yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:45:58] There's a version of this that I think is actually quite common, it's not in the structure that we're doing, I just want to name it to make this more concrete maybe. Often in relationships, long term relationships, there's a substantial difference in natural interest in sex, and you have people-
Forrest Hanson: [00:46:19] Oh, sure, this is a huge place where it comes up, yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:46:21] Yeah, who, truthfully, they just have little or no natural interest in sex, and then what do you do with the other person who, let's say for them, you know, has a moderate to high natural interest, let's say? How do you work that out? So, how do we work out these differences? And this gets at something that I have seen in relationships as a fundamental central matter, just like I said earlier, being able to ask for what you want in a vulnerable way that does not make what you want some dogmatic universal rule, but basically ask your partner, because they care about you in general, would they be willing to give you this thing that you want? Let's say. That's a very, that's a broad principle in terms of long term good relationships.
Here's another one, very often the truth is we don't have a natural inclination to do something. On the ten different ways to spend the next hour or a half hour, let's say, with someone, for one person, conversation of some emotional depth would always be on that list. For the other person, let's say the schizoidal person, it's never on the list. What do you do? And I find, very often, if we take responsibility inside our own minds, we can often warm up a natural interest that's authentic to us, an authentic interest in whatever it is, let's say emotional conversation. We have to make an effort to kind of get our mind in the game, and you could imagine the analogy here around sexual interest, let's say, but around emotional conversation, you know, we can get our mind in the game but we have to kind of make an effort to it. Now, some people could make all the efforts in the world, they're never going to be interested in that emotional conversation, but for some people, it's in range, it's in range. And then the question becomes - Huh, am I motivated enough out of caring for this relationship to make that effort which I can recognize would be good for the relationship with benefits circling back to me?
Or from the other person's side, let's say - Do you, over there, who I understand are a normal version of you're a kind of person who does not have a natural interest in something that I'm enthusiastic about, but do you care enough about me, do you care enough about our kids, do you care enough about our life together, etc, to make that effort in your own mind for five, or ten, or twenty minutes that would kind of warm up the circuitry so that, you know, maybe on the 0 to 10 range of intensity of interest, you're barely a two, but that's good enough for me, normally functioning at about an eight, you know, in interest in, let's say, emotional, deep conversation? And then you go forward. Or what sometimes shows up is that the other person, honestly, it does not value the relationship enough to make that effort. That's the cold, clear fact, and it becomes evident over time. And then, oof, what do you do then? Can you talk about that fact? Can you deal with it? And sometimes you realize I'm never ever going to get that from this person, and then you're in fateful choices about what to do about that.
Forrest Hanson: [00:49:51] I think that what can be helpful here is that motivational aspect of it.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:49:55] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:49:56] Is it that the person is withdrawing from intimacy because there is some fear that's being activated? Or is it that they're withdrawing from intimacy because they're just not that interested in intimacy? And sorting those things out can help people, particularly the person who's doing more of the withdrawing, feel better understood, and feeling misunderstood, I think it's an experience that we just don't talk about enough. It is a very painful experience to feel like there is something inside of you that is not being seen accurately by the people around you. Like you feel like you are a different person on the inside than they are perceiving externally, even though you feel like you are acting from that internal person. So, it's not that you're inauthentic, it's that people just aren't reading you right, like that feels really bad, and it also helps us locate better solutions inside of the relationship. Is it that they're holding out on you, or is it that they find that kind of physical intimacy totally repulsive, but they would be completely happy to do A, B and C things that are a little more accessible for them? And that can just kind of really help us be a little bit more problem-solving oriented about the whole thing.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:51:07] The good news and bad news is that the mind is very plastic, it's very malleable, very malleable, and that's the good news. The bad news is that because it is very malleable, it is very plastic, and we do have great influence over our own minds, we therefore have a lot of responsibility for what we do there. And so, this means that often in relationships, the real issue is not that we have two people who are naturally somewhat different from each other, that's normal, that's where we start, the real issue is whether either or both of them are willing to make the efforts inside their own minds to budge their habits and tendencies enough so that their range and their partner's range can overlap each other. And my blunt experience as a longtime mental health person is that many, many people fundamentally are just, they don't wanna [laughs], they don't want to make the efforts in their mind.
Forrest Hanson: [00:52:22] Sure.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:52:23] And that fact gets kind of disguised in a variety of ways, and other people may dance around it because they don't want to call that question - Do you care enough about me to even try? And yet, ooh, it's the heart of the matter, and also the great opportunity, that when we do try inside our minds, we can very often find a way to give our partner enough of what they want that will help them be happy, and we can also very often find a way to manage the fact that there are some limitations in what we're getting from our own partner going the other way. This is not a way of saying that you ought to trick yourself and manipulate yourself into staying in an abusive situation, and sometimes there's a place for realizing that we had a great run but we've run out of gas.
Forrest Hanson: [00:53:12] Sure, yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:53:12] And, you know, we're midlife, and it's time to look elsewhere, it's okay. But often, I think that the real issue in many relationships is lack of effort internally from one or both people, so therefore, the solution is effective effort from both of them.
Forrest Hanson: [00:53:30] Yeah, and then we're getting into what helps somebody make those efforts, which I think is a huge question we could do and have done many episodes on it. But I want to talk about this a little bit more from the perspective of the anxious person, because something that Elizabeth has certainly talked about, and Elizabeth does couples work with people, in essentially all of the couples that she's worked with who have this kind of a dynamic in place, where there's a more anxious pursuing partner and a more avoidant distancing partner, one of the things that can be tricky is that the avoidant has these big emotions inside that they're shielding in different kinds of ways, but there's not really a lot of space for those emotions to come out safely inside of the relationship, because the more anxious pursuing partners emotions are eating up all of the oxygen in the room, there's just not a lot of like, you know, the more distancing partner feels like they're doing so much work managing the emotions of the pursuer that they don't, there's no room for their own content to come out. Have you seen that, Dad, and is that something that you've kind of experienced?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:54:33] Oh, man, that's fantastic. Yay, Elizabeth, perceptive, of course.
Forrest Hanson: [00:54:37] Yeah, good observation, totally.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:54:39] Yeah [laughter]. It's really-
Forrest Hanson: [00:54:42] [Unintelligible] just affirmative.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:54:42] I'm just like, wow, yeah, I have light bulbs about 30 people I've seen just flashing before my eyes.
Forrest Hanson: [00:54:49] Yeah, that's awesome.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:54:49] Yeah, and how do you do that? And then it can seem, you know, it can land on the more pursuer person as - "Wait, what? I'm already starving for oxygen in this relationship-"
Forrest Hanson: [00:54:58] And you're telling me to calm down. Yeah, totally.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:55:00] "And you're telling me to stop breathing so that he can have the floor?" [laughs]. But that said, yeah, I think that's really right, that's really, really right.
Forrest Hanson: [00:55:12] What do you think helps the more pursuing partner create enough space so that there can be more of that feeling of like letting a little bit of fizz out of the bottle for the more distancing partner?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:55:25] Probably boring, but to help yourself feel and know that you're feeling that you're basically okay right now, so that you can lower your anxieties and your gravitational pull for social supplies from the other person, you can just, [huff], be okay enough over here to not be pulling for more from over there, like that would always help. Curiosity about the other person, I find that very often, at least in my own experience, pursuer-distancer walk in the door, the distancer feels sort of abashed and guilty, and a little shamefaced, like - "Oh, I guess I should be better" - and the pursuer, you know, they're on the critique, they're in the prosecutor's chair, and the distancer is the defendant, and, you know, the pursuer often has kind of a pathologizing head of steam going, like and they'll sometimes just go - "Well, Steve over there, because of his childhood, I listened to Esther Perel's podcast, and, you know, I think Steve is now doing to me what Esther really said, ugh, that's kind of tough." So, sometimes the pursuer needs to [huff].
Forrest Hanson: [00:56:43] For the record, love Esther, that wasn't a commentary about her content, it was a commentary about people-
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:56:47] Oh, yeah, it was a plus.
Forrest Hanson: [00:56:48] Yeah, about the way that people can take what they like listen to in a TikTok clip, and just start applying it to their relationship, for better or worse.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:56:56] Yeah, yeah, exactly right, exactly right, good stuff. So, yeah, so I think there's an asymmetry of pathologizing.
Forrest Hanson: [00:57:02] Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:57:03] Often that kind of rolls in the door. So, it would be really helpful if the pursuer were just to kind of slow the roll a bit, stop the guns blazing, slow it down, and be more kind of curious about the complexity of their partner, because when we pathologize, we tend to essentialize others, we drop them into some kind of category, and they're stuck in that box, and we lose sight there of the complexity that there are many boxes, actually, inside them. I think sometimes the pursuer person has to manage their impatience, because often they're more skilled interpersonally, and more trained in emotional intelligence space, and there's a kind of, come on, catch up, speed up, you know, keep up, you know, vibe that comes at the more distancer person which is then read as both an attack and a power move, a domination move, so [pfft] now they're really inclined to step back. So, you know, managing impatience, giving them time, maybe helping yourself see that distancer person in a really positive light that works for you, like whatever works for you. Like for me, immediately, suddenly I'm seeing the distancer person in my mind as a little bit of a socially awkward ten-year-old boy, and not a bad kid, you know, not a problem, not pathological, just sort of shy, or awkward, or never really learned, or sort of overwhelmed, and, you know, and suddenly now I'm much more sympathetic to that person and tuned in even. So, things like that can often help for the pursuer person too.
Forrest Hanson: [00:58:47] I think that's great advice, Dad. A lot of this gets back to some of the emotional regulation skills that we talk about all the time on the podcast. Something that I've been orbiting as a topic recently, but I've been a little leery of talking about it, self-consciousness, which is often a real feature of anxiety, this kind of preoccupation with the thoughts and feelings of other people and how they intersect with us, is often thought of as this very empathic, other oriented thing - "I'm just so attuned to the feelings that are going on over there, and so that makes me a real empath, and that makes me very focused on their experience, I'm really noticing their experience." The truth is that self-consciousness is egocentrism in disguise. You're fixating on the aspect of this other person's experience that implicates you, and you're making a lot of assumptions about it most of the time. So, truly, the way out of this is actually by trying to focus on the whole of the other person's experience.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [00:59:57] Ah.
Forrest Hanson: [00:59:57] Like real empathy, as opposed to hyperfixating on the part of it that has to do with you, and that you're kind of wrapped up in. That can come across as a little judgmental, which is part of the reason I've avoided kind of doing that spiel of the past, Dad, but I'm wondering what you think about it. That was something that actually, for me, when I like kind of got that internally really helped me out.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:00:19] It's so often true that when we're interacting with somebody in the moment, and also in the field of a relationship generally, we get sucked into tunnel vision around something we don't like, some particular issue about them, and then locked to it, sort of bound to that particular red light on the dashboard of the mosaic overall, and it's so useful to, [woop], widen the field, go out to the whole - What's the whole of this person sitting across from me? What's the whole of what they're burdened by? What's the whole of what they're dealing with? What's the whole of the complicated dynamics inside them? - with curiosity. And then, yeah, it's going to be better for you if you do that, and it's going to be better for them if you do that.
Forrest Hanson: [01:01:05] Is there anything that you think that we should talk about that we haven't gotten to yet? Do you think we've mostly explored it?
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:01:11] Maybe we should even do an episode on this one, but I'll apply it to the dynamic here that we're talking about.
Forrest Hanson: [01:01:17] Yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:01:18] There are certain questions that if people in a relationship, could be siblings, family relationships, could be romantic, could be partners in a business together, any important relationship, that if we were brave enough to ask these questions and were able to engage answers to them, it would really, really, really help the relationship. So, for example, in a relationship in which there's some kind of dynamic, and they still probably want to be together, but they're accumulating a certain amount of friction, a certain amount of allostatic load, as it were, in the relationship, if they were, for example, to just say to each other - "Okay, look, what are the three things that if I were to deliver them consistently to you would make you so happy with me?" - that's a brave question, and then, to talk it through. My experience is that it's important to translate those questions and answers to the questions in pretty operational terms that are then deliverable, but once you get to what it actually means operationally, an incredibly large fraction of couples and relationships in trouble could deliver, could deliver those things. I recommend those questions. Like just think of them from the pursuer, a pursuer says to the distancer - "Look, what are three things I could give you, I could deliver, by doing or not doing, that would make you really happy with me, and would make this issue go away?" - and then you're going to take turns, and often you're going to make a deal, because often, the things that you are not giving to each other are caught up in a negative vicious cycle, but if you were each to give those things to each other, it would produce a positive virtuous cycle.
Forrest Hanson: [01:03:20] Totally, totally. And I think that relationships are, to some extent, defined by the questions that we don't ask.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:03:27] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [01:03:28] The things we don't do for each other in different kinds of ways, the conversations we don't have, which again puts in some ways an aspect of the burden on the more distancing person who has a little bit more of a tendency maybe to avoid those kinds of conversations. But I also think that, man, a lot of the time the pursuing partner is asking a certain type of question over and over again, so they avoid asking this question that's lingering over here, which a lot of the time is some version of like - Do you really love me? And that can be very difficult for people to encounter and face, yeah.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:04:02] A variation on the questions are - What could I give you so that you'd be more able and motivated to give me X?
Forrest Hanson: [01:04:14] Yeah, fill-in -the-blank, totally, totally.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:04:15] Yeah.
Forrest Hanson: [01:04:15] Well, I think this was really great, Dad. This episode, as sometimes happens, took like a slightly different shape than I was expecting, but I thought it was a super cool conversation, I was really into it, and I hope that people listening got some value out of it.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:04:27] I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think about our relationship, earlier today I was doing a Q&A for the Foundations of Well-Being program, which now is in its 11th month of the current cycle, and the 11th strength which is aspiration, and I ended up speaking to a question that came in unrelated to aspiration situations, where there is not quite estrangement, but there's more distance generationally between the person who asked the question, who now has grandchildren, and would love to spend more time with them, and spend more time with the son's family, but the wife, uhh, you know, isn't that interested in that, so then you have the pursuer being the older generation, and the distancer, in effect, being the younger generation, understandably. And I've lived through that, I was the distancer toward my own parents, you know, when you and Laurel came along. And so, that's something to kind of also name as one version of this, and in that context, I just want to really appreciate you as being so emotionally available, and generous, and kind.
Forrest Hanson: [01:05:38] Ah, well, thanks, Dad.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:05:39] And so, there's no need for any kind of, you know, pursuit of you.
Forrest Hanson: [01:05:43] Yeah, well, I also think that, you know, you guys had a lot to do with that too. I had great parents, and I feel very well parented by them, and it helped us land in a situation where we all feel pretty darn good about the relationship, which is great.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:05:55] Yeah, that's right.
Forrest Hanson: [01:05:56] Yeah. Well, thanks for taking the time today, Dad.
Dr. Rick Hanson: [01:05:57] Yeah, thank you, Forrest.
Forrest Hanson: [01:06:05] Today, I talked with Rick about two different very common personality styles, first, a person who prefers more closeness and intimacy, and then a person who prefers more distance or autonomy. When these two different types of people enter into any kind of relationship, romantic or otherwise, common patterns can emerge that can be really challenging to deal with, and for whatever reason, it seems like opposites attract, so it's quite common for people to end up surrounding themselves with people who are very different than the way that they are, and so we spent this episode exploring some of those common patterns and talking a bit about what we can do about them. It can help to understand these personality types in a bit more detail.
First, you've got the more anxious pursuing partner, there's often this feeling from them like they're pulling for more of you, they want more closeness, more intimacy, more understanding, if they could, you know, crawl up inside of your skin, they probably would. And this maps pretty well to anxious attachment or to more borderline-ishness, not necessarily a full-on borderline personality disorder or dependent personality disorder, but it has some things in common with those kinds of traits. This person has a craving for closeness and intimacy, there might be more of a fear of abandonment in the mix, and they can feel a bit clingy and emotionally volatile.
Then, on the other hand, you've got the more avoidant or dismissing partner. This person really feels like they're kind of constantly keeping you at arm's length, there's an optimal distance that they have, where they're really good at orbiting other people at the distance that they like, and so when that other person takes a step in, they take a step back, if the other person takes a step away, they take a step forward, and they're kind of always maintaining that orbiting distance. This maps loosely to more avoidant forms of attachment, or maybe even schizoid or avoidant personalities, and there can be a fear of entanglement and dependance in them; they're uncomfortable with intimacy, they tend to withdraw from others, and they can be a bit more emotionally distant.
It is very helpful to keep in mind, though, that both of these personality types have something that they're avoiding, and both of them have something that they're anxious about. For example, the pursuer has an anxious need for more emotional soothing, and they typically struggle to apply this to themselves, they have a hard time with self-soothing, so they need the people around them to do that for them. The distancer, on the other hand, they have the anxious need to avoid the risks of intimacy; they like being just close enough to get their emotional needs met but not so close that they put themselves at risk.
So, a common pattern that comes out of this, whether it's a friendship or it's a romantic relationship, is something that's called the pursuer-distancer dynamic. Very easy to understand intuitively, the pursuer wants more intimacy, they take a step forward, the distancer looks at that, goes - "Wow, that's a little too close for me, I'm going to take a step back." The pursuer looks at that increased space and goes - "Oh, I need to take an even bigger step forward here to correct this problem" - the distancer goes - "Whoa, that's way too much intimacy" - and then takes another step back. This pattern becomes a kind of negative spiral which sometimes leads to the end of the relationship, but what happens if the avoidant partner actually kind of takes a step in and they really do their best? Well, this can create a different kind of problem, where there are these escalating cries for reassurance from the more anxious person.
What this commonly looks like is the more anxious pursuing partner reaches out for reassurance from the more avoidant member, this bid often includes some criticism, maybe some implicit criticism, like - "Why don't you, fill-in-the-blank, do this thing for me?" - then the more avoidant member does their best, they kind of try to strap in, and for whatever reason, it just doesn't land right for the anxious partner. The reassurance that the avoidant partner offers just doesn't quite do it for the anxious partner. Maybe it's because the avoidant partner is out of their comfort zone, they're not used to that much intimacy, so there's maybe some clumsiness in how they offered whatever they offered. But a lot of the time it's because the more anxious or pursuing partner is carrying around a bucket that just has no bottom, and they might have a hard time understanding that the problem is not how good the avoidant partner was at soothing them, but rather that they struggled to be soothed, period, and so the question is - Can they develop more of a sense of that inside of themselves?
Now, it's telling that in both of those examples, it really looks like the anxious partner is more at fault here, and so we talked about that at some length during the episode, like what's going on there? And there are a couple of different things that are going on here. First, anxiety, clinging, BPD-ishness, whatever it is, by its nature, that tends to produce more obvious problems than avoidance or distancing. Pursuers tend to kind of suck people into them while distancers tend to isolate themselves, so this means that in most examples, it's going to look like the more anxious person is causing the problem, because the distancer would just be more than happy to kind of marinate in their bad feelings, or marinate in not quite intimacy endlessly. Does that make it the pursuers fault, though? Well, no, both of these people are doing something, have some kind of a tendency that could be activating some issues here inside of the relationship. There's also a heavily gendered aspect to this, the pursuing partner tends to be a woman, the retreating partner tends to be a man. If you go back into the history of therapy, you start looking at all of the work that was done around hysteria and hysterics, it was heavily gendered.
And it's also a bit telling that people have heard plenty about BPD, but they haven't heard so much about Schizoid Personality Disorder, which we also talked a bit about during the episode, because there's this really important distinction here. Avoidance is caused, in general, by a kind of underlying anxiety, but schizoidness isn't, the person is just not that interested in that level of emotional intimacy with another person. The problem to solve when somebody is a little bit more schizoid is not dealing with their deep underlying anxiety around fears of rejection or about opening themselves up to vulnerability inside of a relationship, it's managing the reality that they just don't want that much of that, and how do you have a relationship with that kind of person? The truth is that you totally can, particularly somebody who's on the more mild end of that spectrum, but it creates unique problems to it that need to be addressed functionally, and understanding those differences of motivation can then really help us have some insight about how to address these underlying problems.
We spent most of the rest of the episode talking about what to do about all of this, and the reality, both sides of the coin, whether you're by yourself, you're in a relationship, whatever it is that's going on for you, you just want to work on these tendencies generally in your life so you can feel a bit more comfortable, feel a bit more like you can access the whole court and you're not just stuck on this one half of it, it's really all about integrating the aspect that we're struggling with. For more anxious people, they're working on the ability to self-soothe, they're becoming less preoccupied with these passing emotional states, and they're learning that their thoughts aren't reality, they're developing more space around emotions.
For the more avoidant person, they're learning to look inside and figure out what they really want, to articulate that effectively to other people in ways that support them in getting their needs met, and to feel that wanting in a complete inside out kind of way. They're then developing the emotional resilience to bear the risks of intimacy with other people, and alongside that, developing more of a feeling of internal confidence and assuredness, this ability to trust yourself, including trusting that you can commit to a particular path rather than kind of endlessly keeping your options open, and you're letting yourself come in contact with that fuzzy, emotional, vulnerable core, and understand increasingly that, a: you will not melt if you feel those feelings, and, b: it's really okay for some of that to come out in a relationship.
And one of the major things that we talked about are the different kinds of gifts that we can give each other. For example, I mentioned how sometimes in couples therapy work there can be this feeling that the more pursuing partner is eating up all of the emotional oxygen in the room, so there's just not a lot of space for the emotions of the more avoidant partner to come forward because the therapist is spending all of their time regulating the emotions of the more anxious partner, so by developing more emotional resilience, space is created for the more distancing partner to come forward a little bit more. Then we can flip it around the other way, maybe if some of the more pursuing partners needs were met, maybe if they were getting, like Rick said, the twenty to thirty minutes a day of real emotional connection and relationship that they were hungering for, just that, twenty, thirty minutes a day at the top end, wow, that would really do so much for them, that would make them feel so much more confident, and comfortable, and in touch with themselves, and like their needs were being met, so they could relax a little bit and develop a little bit more of that emotional regulation, and it would just put them in a much better position to be able to create more space for the more distancing partner.
Bottom line, there's a fundamental idea in psychology that everything seeks homeostasis, this is a kind of stable equilibrium that resists change, even if the current situation, as it is, is full of conflict and suffering, we still resist change. And Rick has seen this so many times with counseling couples, each person has things they don't like about the relationship, each person has things they wish were different, but they don't talk about it, they never ask the critical question that would really change everything, they never risk that dreaded experience with another person. Each one wishes that the other would act differently, each of them also has a pretty good idea of what the other person wants, but they're stuck. Person A says to person B - "I'll change if you change" - then person B says - "Sure, you first" - or - "Oh, I tried, and then you didn't like it" - or - "Wow, you make me wrong whenever I do" - and then it just devolves, it just falls apart from there.
So, we're doing two things at the same time, on the one hand, we're building ourselves up as individuals, we're getting a little bit more control of the whole court of the game, we're feeling less stuck in our half of it by doing some emotional processing work, by looking inside of ourselves, by learning to regulate those emotions, whatever it is that we're doing, and then at the same time, as we do that, we're getting more and more comfortable with creating the space inside of ourselves that allows the people that we're around to deal with their own content more effectively. And this is a kind of superpower, it's a little way that you can almost like alter the gravity of your relationships, and it's very cool if you're able to start doing it, how as you calm down, the people around you calm down, as you relax, they relax, as you make these bids for connection, if they're done skillfully and thoughtfully, and again, like I mentioned for a second there, with a real interest in the wholeness of somebody else's experience, what's really going on inside of them, they can respond in some incredible ways to that, like people can really impress you if you give them an opportunity to. So then, we start getting more of what we want, and as we get more of what we want, we feel more motivated to give them more of what they want, and there's this just like really beautiful upward spiral to the whole thing.
So, I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Rick, I thought this was a really interesting episode. If you would like more episodes like this, please comment down below if you're watching on YouTube, you can also leave a rating and a positive review. If you're listening on your podcast player of choice, probably Apple or Spotify, because that's by far our biggest, our biggest listener bases are on those two platforms, so if you can take a moment to leave a five star rating, we would really appreciate that, it totally helps us out. And if you would like to support the podcast in other ways, you can find us on Patreon, it's: patreon.com/beingwellpodcast, and for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show, and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return. Also, quick reminder, Rick's Foundations of Well-Being course is on sale right now, I think it's on like a 40% discount or something like that, you can get an additional 20% off if you use the coupon code 'BEINGWELL20' at checkout, it's a great program, really encourage you to check it out. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.
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