Avoidants: Are you a caretaker?

@shiningstar
Oh I know about the dreadful silence. After the explosive arguments , came the days and days of silence. Of ignoring each other and the silent anger. The days of 3 word sentences. “I don’t know”, “ask your mother”, “ask your father”, “get it yourself”. You Feel absolutely invisible.

FA perspective here. I could have written many posts from this thread but especially this one by @shiningstar. I quoted all the parts that are 100 % true of me too. Right from first identifying as AP and then seeing it's only situational with a more avoidant partner - real APs are a completely different story and I become a different person with them, very aloof, guarded and avoidant. Becoming AP-like with my ex partner was really painful as it felt completely out of character for me and the exact opposite of what I had always identified myself to be. I now think it might have been my attempt to escape my life-long pattern of running away from intimacy - by choosing someone who was running away even more.

I've been in the caretaker role in most of my relationships. Not asking for anything and giving a lot in terms of empathy, support, validation, listening. I've been the personal therapist of my friends. A mother figure even. At the same time I've considered them to be exhausting and high maintenance, and I've tried to keep my distance to take care of my own needs. I feel like I just can't help but give and give and I always end up wondering why I'm not getting reciprocity - even a reasonable amount of it, as the split between support has been something like 80-20 or 90-10. Keeping distance has been the only way for me to balance it. There are a few exceptions but mostly this has been a pattern. It has often left me feeling like I'm only important to people in this needless caretaker role and the minute I try to break free of it, they will not be there for me.

In my case, this is also the false self that was created in my childhood. A needless creature hiding her true emotions, faking a strong facade and taking care of others. I completely relate to what Jeb writes about FAs in his page: "Those who think of themselves as their friends will often be surprised and hurt when high stress brings out the true personality of the masked one. By hiding their true selves, such people live with a social support network that has been attracted by their fake persona, so that when a crisis occurs, those who might have cared for them aren’t around, and those who are around don’t care for the real person revealed by the crisis." All my relationships have had this pattern: problems emerge whenever I try to bring my true self in with actual needs and emotions. I'm going through a crisis right now and I feel like I can only count on myself and my psychologist.

I've been seeing this psychologist for months, starting actual psychotherapy with her soon, and I've already allowed her (and myself!) to see glimpses of my true self and while it has been painful and even terrifying to find and show that vulnerability, it has also been a very healing experience: for the first time in my life, I've been able to express what I truly feel and be received with calm compassion instead of panic or dismissiveness, without me needing to take care of that other person's emotional state. With her I've also been able to recognize some patterns from my childhood, for example, parental role reversals with my mother, with whom I've had a very enmeshed relationship. Just the way @shiningstar wrote (I also had a very distant abusive father). There haven't been any boundaries between me and my mother and I've felt like I've needed to emotionally carry her, be a friend, spouse or parent to her rather than her daughter. I've been thinking that this may have also caused my abandonment trauma. When I was fearful or dissociated in my childhood, my mother was often either panicky or dismissive of my fears, and I had to try to forget my own emotional state to calm her down or not make her abandon me. But I was not able to self-regulate either so I dissociated. She was also the martyr mother and helicopter mother and I often felt like it was my job to keep up the image of her as the perfect mother; if she couldn't handle my emotions, it just meant I was overly sensitive or too difficult to deserve empathy. This also lead to me idealizing her and internalizing the shame when she could not respond to my emotions (which were not even extreme - she always said I was such an easy child).

This is the root of my FA style and also what triggered me so badly with my ex partner. Whenever I needed him most or had "too difficult" emotions, he either walked away, dismissed me or shifted the focus to how bad I made him feel with my emotions. I felt like I needed to take care of his emotional state first, but I never got any solution to my own emotions. There clearly was the pattern that whenever I felt bad, his response would only make me feel worse, so I ended up freezing and dissociating, just like in my childhood. We became aware of these issues during the relationship and tried to work on it, but it was still too triggering for us both to keep going.

So I think this caretaker role is mostly related to enmeshment trauma and parentification of the child, not sure about how specific it is to particular attachment styles. Some sources state avoidance actually comes from enmeshment trauma - some say it comes from constant neglect. I used to think it was contradictory, but it looks like they can both be present: there is no respect for boundaries but at the same time no consideration for the child's true emotional needs.

I haven't read the rest of the comments yet, but my first response is that I'm curious if some of these sources might be conflating DA and FA? I know a lot of sources do lump a lot of FAs into the DA box and think FAs are a very rare breed, if they acknowledge our existence at all. And there is no scientific line separating where FA ends and DA begins anyway. It's a spectrum. 

This idea that this is a DA trait is surprising to me. I am FA, definitely not DA in most situations, and I am definitely a caregiver. I don't feel like that is coming from my avoidant side. Sometimes I feel what I believe to be more DA-ish, and when in that mode I do not feel like I need to take care of everyone. It is when I am in an FA or AP mode that I do. I know a few DAs who are definitely "very" DA, meaning in this context anywhere from low-medium to high in avoidance but very low in anxiety, and none of them are caretakers. In fact they pride themselves on not being such and can't wrap their heads around why and how I could do that.

My sisters, both FA as well, are both caretakers too, and one of them is more towards the DA side of the box, perhaps some tests might even label her as DA or a therapist who she wasn't 100% honest with might?

What have I learned about it, myself and repairing it? This is going to be pretty vague, but I'm trying to be brief. I can provide more detail or examples of specific situations and what I believe I did to grow if you like. I guess over time I realized I am not in fact responsible for everyone else and I kept reminding myself of that, and I realized that in some cases taking care of people is not even helping them. Maybe building my self-esteem and becoming more secure just made it easier to be less of a caretaker? And as far as romantic relationships, I also realized that most men don't actually find it attractive, so that has helped me to do it less. Giving is a masculine trait, and I'm a masculine woman and have been working on being more feminine. Talking about energy here, not looks. I guess being avoidant can encourage masculine traits, because avoidants are highly independent, may have trouble receiving or relying on people, etc. 

What I meant is not that I don't believe some DAs are caretakers, but more that I find it surprising if caretaking is a typical DA trait and caused by their avoidance, their DA-ness, as opposed to, perhaps, many DAs having a chunk of FA in there. Since it's a spectrum. I just read all the comments and I still don't see "the answer," I just see some opinions that DAs don't actually all have high self-regard and that caregiving is a feminine trait. Despite women being mothers, I have read a lot of authors associate caretaking with masculinity.

Did I miss something?

Hmm, I don't know if my perspective is helpful for you, because even though you said you wanted to hear from both DAs and FAs and fearful-avoidant has avoidant in the name, the more avoidant and less anxious I'm feeling the less caretaking I am. So I feel like my reasons for and experience of being overgiving and taking care of everyone must be different from yours. I guess that what helped me as far as having better boundaries and not parenting everyone coming along naturally with being more secure and raising my self-esteem and just being mindful of it etc could be the same for everyone though. Do you find that being overgiving comes along with not having good boundaries?

The question is, where is the line between compromise and enmeshment? The biggest lie in this life is that we can have it all, I think. I was earning $90k when I met my ex-wife, and in the year we separated I earned $18k, and still didn't feel like I was around enough, or when I needed to be, or when I was expected to be. I now know that's my stuff, not hers.


Is this line different for different people?