Skip to content

You are PROBABLY reading AVOIDANTS WRONG...and sabotaging LOVE!

Channel: Guided Awareness
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUqz_N7Iy3g

The speaker, a therapist who works mostly with avoidants, lists five misreadings (mostly made by anxious-preoccupied partners) that sabotage relationships by projecting anxious logic onto avoidants who do not operate that way.

Key points

  • Giving chances: anxious-preoccupied hold on and give chances even when mistreated, resentful, or angry, because keeping the relationship feels more valuable than how they feel. A dismissive avoidant who stays, shows effort, or moves past a fight is simply fine and content; if they have checked out emotionally they stop trying. Take an avoidant's presence at face value.
  • Critical self-view: anxious-preoccupied are harshly critical of themselves (clingy, needy, too much, undeserving) and assume a partner's space or anger is about their own flaws, so they tiptoe and over-correct. Avoidants do not see themselves or their mistakes as critical and do not fear abandonment for failing to fix things; tiptoeing wastes connection time and breeds resentment.
  • Calm vs passionate connection (called the most important point): dismissive avoidants feel love through calm, relaxed, low-key time together, not intense or romantic intensity. Anxious-preoccupied read fights-then-makeup, milestones, and passion as deep romance and reassurance, while the avoidant feels miserable during it and most loving when things are calm. A steady calm relationship is what keeps an avoidant from leaving. Fearful avoidants may find intensity magnetic but tend to shut down or pick it apart, and also do better with calm.
  • "Nothing is wrong": for avoidants (especially dismissive) this almost always means literally nothing is wrong, or, less often, they want to solve it independently and do not see it as worth raising (fearful sometimes also fear your reaction). Unlike anxious-preoccupied, who often say it is fine while clearly wanting you to probe, take an avoidant's "nothing" at face value and just offer a safe space.
  • "I don't know": roughly 90% of the time an avoidant who says this genuinely does not know and is hiding nothing; occasionally they know but fear your reaction.
  • Framing throughout: avoidants are described as more emotionally "simple," anxious-preoccupied as hyper-vigilant and emotionally aware; neither is right or wrong, and anxious patterns are framed as trauma from childhood neglect.