#47 - Boundaries With "Avoiders"

Welcome to Beyond Bitchy, mastering the art of boundaries with Vicky Tidwell Palmer. Do you think of personal and relationship boundaries as harsh, rigid, or bitchy, or do you feel clueless about how boundaries work? Whether you think boundaries are bitchy or baffling, we will give you a fresh vision of personal limits as a source of freedom and liberation. Every week Vicky shares expert information about how you can master the art of boundaries so you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. Hello and welcome to episode number 47 of The Beyond Bitchy Podcast. I'm Vicky Tidwell Palmer, host of The Beyond Bitchy Podcast and you know it's been almost a year since I launched the podcast and you know for those of you who may have just joined recently, the backstory about how Beyond Bitchy came to be is that I wrote a book about three years ago. The title is Moving Beyond Betrayal, The Five Step Boundary Solution for Partners of Sex Attics and in that book, I introduced the Five Step Boundary Solution process and if this is all Greek to you, you can head over to BeyondBitchy.com and you can get the Five Step Boundary Solution Clarifier which is a fillable PDF that will walk you through this Five Step process of identifying, creating, establishing, and maintaining healthy, effective boundaries but anyway, so I wrote the book and so many betrayed partners wanted to share it with people in their life like friends, family members, co-workers, clergy and they were constrained to do so because, I mean let's think about it. If you hand somebody a book called Moving Beyond Betrayal, The Five Step Boundary Solution for Partners of Sex Attics, well that says a lot and so that's something that you might not want to share with another person speaking of boundaries and so many partners ask me, you know, I think you should write another book just for the general public about boundaries and I may do that eventually but what I really was more excited about was starting a podcast but all that is to say that even though a lot of betrayed partners or partners of sex addicts think of BeyondBitchy as being specifically geared toward betrayed partners, the truth is that BeyondBitchy podcast is for anyone who wants to identify, create and establish healthy, effective boundaries. All that being said today, I have a special announcement specifically for the segment of my audience that are betrayed partners, that are partners of sex addicts. So this episode will be released on February 27th, I'm recording it about a week ahead of that and two days after this podcast is released, I'm going to start a five part class called the Survive and Thrive Blueprint mini course and the Survive and Thrive Blueprint is a five, it's essentially five components of capabilities information knowledge base, the five essentials for healing that every betrayed partner needs and this is based on my now over 11 years of working with betrayed partners and people who are impacted by another person's addiction, but anyway I will be doing a five part class starting March the 1st and you have until Thursday 28th February at 11.59pm to sign up because after that registration will close. If you are listening to this much much later, just know that this five part course will be turned into a course that you can listen to later. Obviously, the people who join me starting March 1st, they get the benefit of being their live and also asking me questions, however it will be available for purchase long after the course is done. All right, so if you're interested in that, you can head over to VickyTidwellpalmer.com and click on courses and it's right there at the top of the courses page, Survive and Thrive Blueprint mini course. I hope to see you there. So let's get to episode number 47. This episode is inspired by a listener's question. She wanted to know what is the role of boundaries in situations or relationships with people who are in her words avoiders. Another way of saying that is people who are more avoidant. I've talked about avoidant attachment style before I'm going to go into that very briefly to review and to describe what it means to be an avoider or to be avoidant and so what she wanted to know and I'll read a portion of her questions. She said, "I guess my question would be, are there boundaries that we can put in place with people who are avoiders or no? Or do we just have to encourage them that we are a safe place?" You know, what I make up about the last part of her question, do we just need to encourage them that we are a safe place? I imagine that she was thinking, you know, if we just sort of present ourselves or demonstrate that we are open to the other person, if we are a safe person, that it's safe to share certain information with us that maybe they would drop their wall and, you know, I just want to say about that, that it assumes too much power on our part and so, you know, there's no doubt our behavior or our failure to act in certain situations, no doubt has an impact on other people and we get into trouble when we start thinking, well, if I just do this or if I just do that or if I try to make myself seem like a more safe, comfortable person and this person will come out from behind their wall, it's probably not the case. So I want to just address that part right now, but I'm going to spend the rest of the episode talking about avoiders and how I see the role of boundaries when you find yourself in a relationship with a person who's more avoidant or you have extended family members who are avoidant, what do you do and what does that have to do with boundaries? So first of all, let's talk about what is an avoider? So to me, synonymous term with avoider is someone who's avoidant and, you know, avoidant is one end of a continuum that has to do with our attachment style. Attachment styles is it's a fancy way of talking about how we relate to other people in important and intimate relationships. And essentially, there are two basic attachment styles, one is to be on the avoidant end of the continuum and the other end of the continuum is that you have an anxious attachment style. So briefly about the anxious attachment style, this is the person who wants almost constant reassurances from you that, you know, we're good. You love me, you're not going to leave me for someone else. They may text and call you multiple, multiple, multiple times a day. They can come across, when it's very extreme, they can come across feeling very needy. And if it's bad enough, it can be experienced as extremely draining. And I'm sure that all of you have known people like this, that they just feel extremely needy and draining and, you know, when you think about your instincts, when you're around a person like that, you kind of want them to get away. And let's also keep this in mind, when we're talking about a continuum, there are the two extremes of which almost nobody is at the very ends of the extremes. And then there's all the way from the extremes to the very middle. And when it comes to attachment styles, secure is the healthy middle, a secure attachment style. Most of us have a default. We tend to lean toward the avoidant side or we tend to lean toward the anxious attachment style. Okay, so that's anxious. Let's talk about avoidant. So a person who's more on the avoidant end of that continuum, they are, especially in an intimate, you know, very personal, like, you know, an intimate partner relationship. They can be experienced as being checked out. They're distant. They're uninvolved or they're seemingly uninterested on a variety of levels. This is a person who, you know, could spend all day, Sunday behind a newspaper or in front of the television on a regular basis. You know, there are some Sundays where you really would want to read all day and that would be fun and enjoyable, but this is like a lifestyle. So they're just checked out, distant, uninvolved, and it worst, they may stay perpetually busy. So they're constantly in motion. They've got, they're out in the garage building something doing this, doing that, watching a lot of TV that I mentioned before, engaging obsessively with gaming or hobbies or, uh, and, and they are usually neglecting their responsibilities, um, often in kind of a covert way, meaning a hidden way that they can look like they're really busy doing lots of stuff. And oh, I'm building this and doing that for the family, but the truth is they're never really connecting with anyone on any kind of deeper emotional level. And they may have no idea really what's going on in the family. It reminds me of a funny story that I heard one time about, uh, like a surgeon or some, you know, somebody that's like spends a lot of time working, which most people in the medical profession do and came home and, and looked down and saw the dog and like had no idea that the family had a dog. Didn't know they had a dog and didn't know what the dog's name was. So that one's a little more complex because, you know, anyway, I don't want to go into that, but you get my point. They're, they're just not involved. And, you know, people who are avoidant, they often come from families where there was high avoidance, where people didn't connect with each other, you know, the other way that people can become avoidant is by having a, a parent, you know, I mentioned before about the anxious, anxious attachment style. If you have a parent that is very, um, needy and some parents are like this, they have this constant need to either control their children or to get their children to do or be a certain way that can actually create avoidance in a child. Because as I mentioned before, when you have a person who's just constantly has their eyeballs on you or they're breathing down your neck or they're trying to control you or they want to know every single thing you're doing and every single thing that you're thinking and they want to control everything you wear and where you go and what, you know, you get the picture. What's your instinct? You just want them to back off. And that can create avoidance in a child because the child has to back off the parent just to have a sense of having their own life. So when you're in a relationship, an adult relationship with a person who's an avoider or isn't avoidant, you will probably have a sense that what they're doing or most of what they do for you or with you is kind of out of the sense of obligation or duty and they may not really want to do it. It's like you can sense that their heart's not in it because people who are avoidant often engage in activities that they have no interest in because they don't, well, let me put it this way. Avoidant people will do almost anything to not have to deal with conflict or disagreement. And so if you ask an avoidant person, hey, you know, would you like to go to the opera if inside they're thinking, oh my gosh, like I'd rather like, you know, poke my eye out or something like that. They'll say yes, even though they don't want to go because it's a way, again, it's a way to avoid. And that's why it can often feel like they're not there. They'd rather be somewhere else because the truth is they would, but they will not say that. They do it out of obligation. Also, quick tip for all of you out there that are listening to this that know you're an avoider or you tend to default toward the avoidant end of the continuum. When you're a partner, especially your partner asked you to do almost anything unless it's, you know, past the salt at the dinner table, I highly encourage you to buy time. I encourage you to say, oh, okay, let me think about that. Or, you know, I'd like to think about that and get back to you. And I would give yourself at least 24 hours. Say, you know, I'll get back to you tomorrow. I want to think about that before I give you an answer. And, you know, if your partner is in his or her right mind, they will thank you for it because it is much better to get a know from someone who really doesn't want to do something, than to get a yes, and then to spend the whole time engaged in going to the opera, for example, and the other person is just emitting this humongous wave of resentment and unhappiness. That's just miserable. So, you know, again, like I mentioned, the person who's avoidant, they will avoid difficult or meaningful conversations. And what you'll find is that you are probably angry or distressed in the relationship more about the things that they are not doing or saying, then maybe what they are doing and saying is again, they're avoidant. And so it's this real absence of anything happening. And I think that that really is at the root of the listener's question, because if you have, if you're in a relationship with someone who's sort of perpetually checked out, or they're just not giving much in their relationship, it's like, well, where is the role for boundaries in that situation? And it's a great question. So, you know, I talked about how avoiders become avoiders, but I want to say a little bit more about that and why people avoid. So, you know, of course, they may have learned this and come by very honestly in their family of origin. But, you know, people also withhold for different reasons, like sometimes they just don't want you to know who they are for different reasons. Maybe they don't really know, maybe they don't really want to know who they are. And so they're definitely not ready to share that with you. Well, actually, they don't know. So they can't even share it. You know, some people choose not to share things with us, not out of deception, but out of their own right to have privacy. I think this is more true in relationships that are not intimate partner relationships, but people do have a right to their private information. And some people are just more private than other people. They are maybe they're an introvert. And so they they seem to be more avoidant, but they're just very private people. They don't like to share a whole lot with other people. Whereas a very expressive extroverted person, you know, some people will share everything with you. Like, I know people. In fact, I have people like this in my own family where if you get together with them, they're going to tell you everything that's happened to them since they got up that morning and everything that they had for breakfast and how they cooked it. And if they have a picture of it, they may share it with you. So, you know, that's kind of an extreme, but there are people who are sort of at the opposite of that too where they really don't even want to tell you a simple thing like maybe what they had for breakfast, for example. So that's another way that people with hold information is from deception or just to, you know, they don't want to share their private information. And here's the thing, you know, even when a person is truly avoidant or they're an avoider, here's the hard truth. They have a right to be who they are. You know, they are who they are. Most avoiders are not trying to be avoiders necessarily unless they're being deceptive and then they may be trying to hide something from you. But if they're just essentially on this avoidant end of the attachment style continuum, as we talked about, that's who they are. And people have a right to decide to be a certain way and make certain decisions, of course, as long as it's not abusing her, you know, offensive to other people. And when I say offensive to other people, I don't mean that you don't get to decide that it's rude for someone to be avoidant and that makes it wrong for them. That's actually a very deep thing, what I just said. But a perception that a person is offensive is not the same as them offending a person, meaning that they're actively victimizing another person. But anyway, so, you know, people have a right to be who they are. And you also have a right to decide how you want to interact with them. And that really is where the boundary work comes in. Because I believe that when you're dealing with a high level of avoidance or sort of chronic avoiders, where you have the most power and where the benefit of boundary lies is in what you decide to do about it and the boundaries you set for yourself. And I want to be very clear here that it, you know, most of you, when you hear the word boundaries, you're going to automatically think of limits and restriction and constraints. And in this case, specifically, I want you to focus more on the other missing piece of boundaries that I talk about all the time, which is space and freedom. Because when you're dealing with an avoider or a person who's an avoidant or an avoidant family system, it's very easy to feel trapped and frustrated and really a lot of pain. Because when you're in the presence of a high level of avoidance, it can feel extremely painful because it feels lonely. So, the simple question is, yes, you know, there is a place for boundaries. And the boundaries are more likely to be the limits that you decide for yourself rather than for others. So, for example, the listener who asked this question was talking about extended family. And so, one of the frustrations for her is that, for example, she'll take Um, her children to visit extended family members, but they're just kind of checked out and disinterested. And so one of her thoughts is, well, I should just stop taking my children over there because they don't really make an effort. And it's very frustrating to her. And that's a great example of where the boundary work can come in. So, uh, I believe, and you may believe otherwise. And that's okay, but I believe that, uh, let's use grandparents as an example or even other family members. I believe that family members at grandparents, aunts, uncles, whoever they are, cousins, it is their responsibility, if they're adults, to create a relationship with children, like, for example, a grandchild. I don't believe that it's my responsibility as a parent to facilitate the relationship between my child, if I have a minor child and a grandparents. I believe that it's the grandparents job to do that work. And again, this is, um, this is not something that is commonly agreed upon. And you were welcome to disagree with me. But you know, when I think about my own self because someday I may be a grandmother, my, my son is grown. And so it's a little different now. I certainly wouldn't see myself as responsible for making sure that my adult son has a relationship with his grandmother, his grandmother, uh, or grandmothers can, uh, do that themselves. They can text him on his cell phone. But anyway, even if I had, um, a minor child at home, or I was talking about being a grandmother, I got sidetracked, um, when and if I'm a grandmother, I will not see my son as being responsible for making sure that I have connection with my grandchild, it will be my job to reach out to when the child is old enough to call or maybe face time or come and visit or ask if I can take the child and, you know, have the child stay with me and my husband for a night or a weekend or whatever. I will see that as my responsibility. So anyway, in this case, if, if this person who asked the question is frustrated about that, she can make the decision that that this no longer works for her, that it doesn't feel mutual because the, uh, for example, grandparents are not essentially holding up their end of the relationship. And she feels as though and she may be doing all the work. And so the boundary in that case is that, you know, when, when this happens, when I take my children over there to try to, you know, help them have a connection with their grandparents, but the grandparents don't really seem interested or they don't reciprocate. What I think about that is that we don't have a mutual relationship. And I'm not willing to participate in relationships that don't feel mutual. So therefore I choose to not participate in that way. So not to take my children over there any longer. And that kind of a boundary or a limit in essentially to it, it's such a relief when you think about it because it relieves you of the responsibility for facilitating these relationships, which in my opinion are not your responsibility. So that's an example that's very relevant to this listeners question about how boundaries might work. Now you might ask the question, especially if you've been a listener for a while, you know that it's also possible to set boundaries, create boundaries with another person by way of making a request that turns into an agreement. And that certainly is a possibility. So like in the scenario I just brought up, you could even ask the family members to, to make the effort. You could say, you know what I would really like for you to do is when you, when you want to see the grandchildren that you reach out to us and let us know. And that might even be a good thing to do in addition to making the decision that I just talked about where you don't want to participate in this kind of situation where it's not mutual. You could request and that would be more of kind of a, it's not a request that you're asking for their agreement. You're simply offering them the opportunity. But even in a situation where you might need an agreement. So let's say you're in a situation with your spouse and you're, you experience your spouse as being an fighter at a restaurant. So you go to, when you go out to a restaurant, your spouse barely says anything to you or he or she doesn't look at you and you experience this is being very avoidant. And so a request might be, you know, when we go out to a restaurant, together, I would like for us to at least half of the time that we're having our meal to be in conversation or I would like for you to have eye contact with me at least several times during the meal. It needs to be something very specific, something that you can see here, something you could record with a video camera. You could request that and you could ask the person, is that something you're willing to do? And then they can answer, but remember what I said earlier about this, that people who are avoidant, they will tend to agree. Even when they really don't agree or their knee jerk response is just to say, yes, to most of what's asked for them because that in and of itself is a avoidant kind of behavior. And in the end, even though for sure, you could ask that, I really believe that in, in most cases, when you're dealing with a high level of avoidance, you're going to get the most relief when you take charge of the things that you have power over, like the example of not taking your children over to a relative's house, for example, or here's another one. And this happens a lot in, in really all relationships and not just with people who are avoidant. So if you've been in a relationship for more than even just a couple of weeks, you have likely experienced disconnection or you have experienced the feeling of being maybe cut off from the other person, even I'm not talking about them ending the relationship. I mean, they're just not available. Maybe they're going through something really painful or difficult and they're really just not has nothing to do with you. They're just not available or maybe they got angry about something that you said or did and they really don't want to be with you or they are with you. But they're, as I sometimes say, they're putting out a stink. They're sort of emanating, you know, like somebody who's been smoking cigarettes and you can just smell it, you know, wafting off of their clothing. It's like that. So when you experience these kinds of things, these disconnections that we're going to experience no matter what, what do you do to take care of yourself? And the best way to know how to do that is to notice how it impacts you. First of all, on a sensation level, you know, so if I'm in the presence of somebody that's really angry with me, I'm going to feel the unpleasantness of that most likely, you know, it depends on the situation. If I'm doing really well or meaning I'm in a good place, I'm really in balance, or maybe if I perceive that whatever they're angry with me about is not really important, or I have a disagreement about whether or not they should be angry with me. I might not feel it so much, but let's say that I do. And so I'm uncomfortable with their anger. And maybe I start to feel my own anxiety go up. I might feel my heart rate go up, or if I, maybe I'm getting angry back at them so I can kind of feel the heat coming up in my body. Or sometimes you might feel fear. You're afraid of the disconnection and you feel that or you know, a lot of times when someone is very checked out or they're perpetually or chronically avoidant, it can feel painful and very lonely to be in their presence. And so you feel what that feels like in your body. And then you have to ask, you know, how do I want to take care of myself? And boundaries truly are about self care. And so I know in my own life from time to time, I've found that if I'm in the presence of someone who is either not available for whatever reason, or they're just very checked out, I will usually choose to not be in their presence because it just doesn't feel comfortable. And it may make me feel, I don't want to say make me because that's the wrong way to put it. But I may feel this kind of deadness or pain or discomfort that I just would rather not feel. So I may just decide to go do something else, find something else that I want to do and let them be who they are. And this can be depending on how kind of highly activated you are or what the situation is, it can be very challenging. But this is where your power to essentially create limits and the limits are, I'm limiting the amount of time I want to spend with this person. I'm limiting how much exposure I want to have to their pain or to their anger or to whatever is going on. So that's the first place is to notice what your sensations are. what your thoughts are, what your emotions are, and then take action accordingly for your own well-being and your own self-care. And you know, in a much broader way, it might look like that you pull back or reserve your own energy or your time or your resources if that's relevant so that you can create more physical or sexual space or emotional distance in order to again, for your own self-care. Or here's the other thing too, for those of you who are in long-term relationships with people who struggle with avoidance, you are absolutely going to need to find other sources of emotional connection and support so that you can get some of your emotional needs met. There are other ways to do that for yourself, like for example, I am an avid journaler, I journal every single day, and it's one of the ways that I really take care of myself on an emotional and spiritual level. So there are some things like that we can do for ourselves and it can be extremely helpful and advisable to have other people who can be there for us around the kind of emotional connection that we need and want. I do think that, you know, above the boundaries that I talked about, because I've talked about some very challenging boundaries, you know, even the one about taking your children to see family members, that can be an extremely hard decision to make and a boundary to set. But I think that the most challenging part of this whole, you know, being in relationship with a person who's an avoider or an avoidant is staying in reality about who the other person is. And you know, again, they're right to be who they are because when we don't like the way another person showing up, we often think that if we just complain about it or asking of questions or making a request that they'll be different, and that's often not the case. And you will feel better when you are very much in reality about who they are, what their limitations are, how much they're willing to show up for you, and then figuring out how you need to take care of yourself, then to continually sort of go back to try to get them to be different because the more that we hope for people to be different or we want to change them in some way, the more miserable we are most of the time. And this is very difficult when we're talking about a spouse, you know, a partner or a very close family members. These are all opportunities for us to learn how to accept life on life's terms and to realize our powerlessness over other people. So there's one last thing I want to mention before I wrap up this episode in the listener who asked the question, when she talked about the extended family members and their avoidance and her perception that they're real avoiders and that they're not really connected, she has some concern about her husband, you know, because these are his parents. And what I'd say about that is that I think it's very compassionate, you know, to not want your spouse to suffer because your spouse has parents who are avoidant. And I want to say a few things about that, you know, every one of us, we have our own path and our own history. And I can tell you from my own experience of having some family of origin experiences that are somewhat similar to this, that the way it looks to you being the partner, the way it looks to you from the outside is likely very, very different than what it feels like to your husband. And the reason for that is because he's been living with this for his entire life. And so most of us, especially if we've done any kind of healing work or therapy, we've processed a lot of it. You know, the reality too is that people can go into denial about it, but often we come to some kind of peace about it. So even in adulthood, when they do similar things, it just doesn't impact us in the same way. But when you're looking at it from the outside, it can just seem really awful. So my encouragement around this, and this is for all of you who, you know, you have a loved one that it really pains you to see how they're treated by family members or friends to understand it again that they, they have their own path, they have their own experience, but they also have their own higher power and they get to decide what they think and feel about that and to do whatever they need to do to feel more comfortable. I will say you could ask your spouse, you could say, you know, when I, you could say the way it impacts you, you know, the way that when your parents do these things or don't do these things, this is what comes up for me. And I feel very pained about it and you could offer to be there as, you know, a supportive person or as a listener and say, you know, if there's anything that I can do to support you or help you or to just, you know, let you vent, I'm happy to do that. But keeping that, that's really that really good internal boundary that says, you know, this is, this is on their side of the street. And I can release this and know that they have all of the resources and everything that they need in order to manage this. And I can just simply be here as a compassionate, supportive partner with, you know, with empathy. All right. So today we've talked about dealing with avoiders or people who are intimacy challenged or who are on that avoidant end of the continuum on the attachment styles. And when you're dealing with them, you know, what are the boundaries that you can create, which I believe, as I said, are mostly about boundaries you create for yourself. And it's also so important to remember that, you know, we're the only people that we have any power or control over. And that other people have a right to be who they are to make the choices that they want to make. First, you can make requests, you can ask for more of what you want and need, staying in reality about the limitations and the capacity of the other person to respond to your request. And in the end, where you're going to get the greatest results and probably the relief that you're looking for when you deal with avoidant people on a regular basis is how you can take care of yourself given that they are exactly who they are. And it is a difficult pill to swallow, but, you know, that is just the truth of the matter as I see it. So till next week, I invite every one of you to embrace the power you have to create the boundaries you want to create so that you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. See you next time. Thanks for listening to BeyondBitchy Podcast. Head over to BeyondBitchy.com for show notes, the BeyondBitchy blog, and other resources to help you master the art of boundaries. Till next time, remember, boundaries aren't bitchy.