You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience

relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome

insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships.

I'm your host, Relationship Coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment.

In today's episode, we are talking about signs that an avoidant partner is deactivating

and what to do about it.

So to be honest, I usually steer clear of episodes like this to the extent that they feel

alarmist or that they are going to feed the part of anxiously attached people that likes to play detective

and that spirals into a bit of an anxious panic when they notice that something's wrong.

I try not to do too much content that is directed at that, but avoidant deactivation is a very real thing. There's plenty to

support the deactivating strategies of avoidant partners as part of that attachment style. And I'm sure

anecdotally that if you are more anxious or you have otherwise been in relationship with an avoidant partner,

you probably know that yes, it is very real, this pattern of deactivation. And much of the time,

I think anxiously attached people respond to that, kind of in the way that I was just describing

and in a way that can probably exacerbate the

deactivation and the disconnection rather than help it. And so I'm hoping that in today's episode,

I can lay out a few signs that an avoidant partner might be deactivating. Give a little context

for what that means and what that might signal in terms of what's going on

under the hood for them. And most importantly, what you can do about it and how you can support yourself

rather than, I think the maybe more clickbaity version of this would be how to get them back

or how to stop them from deactivating. I'm not going to

...