Two Types of Emotional Avoidance in Relationships and Why It Hurts So Much
TL;DR: Psychodynamic therapist Rick Cox details the two types of emotional avoidance: 1) Passive avoidance rooted in childhood trauma and 2) Active avoidance via toxic positivity or control. Learn how therapy heals these relationship struggles by restoring your emotional capacity.
When closeness feels like danger — emotional avoidance protects us from pain but keeps us from connection
The Silence of the Self
Relationships are meant to be where we find connection and security. Yet, for many, they become sites of chronic pain, emotional distance, and repeating patterns of conflict. We assume the struggle is with the other person, but often, the deepest fracture lies within ourselves.
The heart of this pain is emotional avoidance. We avoid emotion not because we don’t care, but because what we truly feel, be it vulnerable love, vulnerable grief, or buried rage, threatens to overwhelm us. Emotional avoidance creates a chasm, ensuring that the unconscious conflict and the fear that keeps us stuck remains safely hidden.
While the symptoms of avoidance are the same (distance, loneliness, conflict), the psychological strategy used to maintain that distance often falls into two distinct types.
Type One: The Inherited Silence
Avoidance from Old Wounds
The first type of emotional avoidance is rooted in the past, in childhood environments where emotions were shut down or punished. This avoidance is often passive and internalised, born of necessity.
If, early in life, expressing authentic feelings (like sadness, need, or anger) led to abandonment, criticism, or withdrawal, the nervous system learned that genuine emotional presence was unsafe. To survive, you developed a primary defence mechanism, often emotional numbing, intellectualisation, or disconnection, that keeps the feeling locked away.
This type of avoidance manifests in relationships as a chronic fear of closeness.
• The Unconscious Pattern: You may seek intimacy, but the moment you feel truly seen or vulnerable, the old, ingrained defence system gets triggered. This leads to emotional withdrawal, feeling depressed and empty, or cutting off communication.
• The Pain: This type of avoidance feels like an endless state of anxiety and loneliness. You are not actively pushing the person away; your entire system is passively obeying the old trauma script, ensuring the relationship remains distant because, deep down, your history still lives on inside you.
“Emotional avoidance isn’t weakness. It’s a scar from learning too early that your feelings were dangerous.”
Type Two: The Active Performance
Avoidance through Control
The second type of emotional avoidance is active and performative, often hiding behind facades designed to maintain absolute control over the emotional atmosphere of the relationship. This is emotional avoidance disguised by toxic positivity or subtle manipulation.
Here, the person is not simply shutting down; they are constantly working to control reality to prevent any unwanted emotional discomfort, either theirs or their partner’s.
• Toxic Positivity: This is the refusal to acknowledge real pain, struggle, or conflict, insisting that everything must be "fine" or "great." This is a sophisticated defence against authentic feelings like grief or anger. While it might look like strength, it actively invalidates the emotional reality of everyone involved, creating profound psychological loneliness.
• Manipulation: This involves using subtle emotional tactics (guilt, victimhood, criticism, or deflection) to shift the focus away from their own vulnerability or responsibility. This complex manoeuvre is a desperate strategy to regulate their own anxiety by controlling the other person’s emotions, ensuring they never have to confront their internal shame or fear.
In both cases, the relationship is choked because emotional truth is forbidden, making a genuine connection impossible.
The Path to Connection: Healing Emotional Capacity
If you are tired of the exhaustion and heartache caused by these patterns, the work of psychodynamic therapy is focused precisely on reversing these two types of avoidance.
The core of change lies in building your capacity to tolerate your own anxiety and experience your feelings and emotions.
1. Challenging the Defences: Using ISTDP principles, we identify and challenge the defensive patterns, whether they are inherited silence or active control. We interrupt the repetition compulsion in real time, stopping the cycle of self-sabotage.
2. Naming the Truth: We create a safe, professional space where the feelings you have avoided can finally be accessed. This allows you to experience the emotional reality fully, realising that the pain you feel isn’t who you are; it’s what you’ve carried.
This journey requires courage, but by engaging with your emotional reality, you move beyond mere emotional surviving into a life guided by genuine connection and emotional freedom.
Emotional avoidance is rarely conscious, it’s the defence in motion. The Therapy FAD shows how feelings, anxiety, and defence play out together in therapy.
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FAQ: Emotional Avoidance, Trauma, and Therapy
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No. Emotional avoidance is a survival strategy. It kept you safe once, but now it may be keeping you from the life, love and relationships you want. Narcissism is different because it is motivated by control rather than protection.
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Because what you avoid is what controls you. Therapy helps you face your feelings at a pace your nervous system can actually handle.
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Yes, because the patterns you live today were shaped there. Understanding them isn’t about blame. It’s about reclaiming your freedom now that you’re an adult.
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That’s common. Avoidance often makes our emotions feel “numbed out” or confusing. Therapy encourages you to name, tolerate, and experience your feelings instead of running from them.
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Yes. But hyper-independence that keeps everyone at a distance can be a lonely place to be. Therapy helps you keep your strength and have the type of relationships you really want to have in your life.
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Avoidance often comes from early attachment wounds where closeness felt unsafe or overwhelming. The body and nervous system learned to protect you by pulling away when intimacy appears.
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Yes. Therapy helps uncover the roots of avoidance and create new, healthier ways of relating. It’s not quick, but with consistent work, you can face what was once unbearable and build the capacity for closeness.
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Not always. Some avoidance is driven by narcissistic defences that aim to control rather than protect. The key is whether avoidance comes from fear and shame, or from a strategy to dominate and distance.
