How to handle a da / avoidant partner

Walking patterns:
When you go for a walk, lets say when you are on vacation, and your partner almost all the time walks in front of you and your partner dosent notice that you could be out of sync: (maybe you have told you partner before, if he/she can wait for you to catch up, and your partner have said yes, but still forgets about it):
A solution could be : snap them out of it by suggesting that you go for coffee at a cafe nearby or that you want to bye something in a store. Then they maybe will wait for you or come back to you, and you can enjoy some time together. Avidants are often single focused and paralell focused instead of thinking of it as a joint adventure.
Often they do not notice, that they are out of sync with their partner, so if you take it personal, try not to.
The avoidant can also practise joint attention activities in their daily life - ex. go for a walk side by side with a friend, your partner ect.
(Recommended by Diane Poole Heller)

Being droped at the door step/how to keep a secure connection when you go out:
When you are at a big party and your partner leaves you without introducing you to people they know and they somehow "forgets" about you the hole evening:
Because DA´s are single focused, and in the left part of their brain, and they often do not think about it, a solution COULD BE:

Agree before you out to introduce each other to people you know at the party from your own "tribe" OR
make eye contact ONE OR MORE times throw the evening (an eyegaze) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grd9XLkn2hw OR
sit/stand together at a time through the evening OR
drop by and touch your partners shoulder and maybe ask if he/she are having fun.
(Stan Tatkin, Couple Bubble, Diane Poole Heller)

Do avoidants really want connection?
Often Avoidants don’t recognize they need their partners until the partner actually leaves, through divorce, death, separation, illness, or something else. Then, when they realize nobody is in the house, that’s when the crisis hits. It’s then that a very deep depression can happen, because they actually want connection like anybody else. It’s their adaptation, which seems like they don’t want connection. A lot of attachment writers sometimes they describe Avoidants as not wanting connection and that’s not true. If you unpack it, there is a very deep longing for connection; they want it like everybody else, and there are certain things that are in the way.

In the house but not in the same room:
It’s not that avoidants don’t want anybody around. For some avoidants the ideal situation is: somebody is in the house but not in the same room, so they have the experience of “somebody is around,” which is what their history usually was: they had a parent that was around, in the house somewhere, but not in contact with them, so they are comfortable with that.

Operating within a one‐person psychological system - an example: (Stan Tatkin)
Mandy and Mike are upstairs getting ready for bed. Knowing that Mandy is interested in business ideas, Mike reads her something he read in a magazine. A light bulb goes off in her head. Without saying a word, Mandy goes downstairs while Mike is still reading to her. She grabs a pen and paper to write the idea down. She comes back upstairs to find Mike who is now angry. She is surprised by his reaction and unaware of having done anything wrong. Mike complains: she was rude for walking out of him while he was telling her something. He’s angry because she seems to do this a lot in other instances.

Mandy, operating within a one‐person psychological system, "forgot" that she was with another person. Never occurring to her to share her thoughts about the idea with her partner, she instead ran downstairs to protect the idea herself. Had she been oriented to a two‐person psychological system, she would have used Mike as her pen and paper by sharing her thoughts with him thereby recording them within his brain. Mandy is alone all the time whether or not physically present with someone. This default position is ego‐syntonic without awareness of its downside. She is not oriented toward to utilizing her partner as a brain into which her own brain can expand.

When Mandy realized what she had done, she was shocked by her own behavior. She didn't understand why she would do such a thing even though it was quite natural to her. Though physically with Mike while getting ready for bed, she was in a dissociative state, autoregulating and unaware that she was with another person at that moment. Mike on the other hand was completely aware that he was with Mandy and so, for him, her walking away caused a momentary breach in the attachment system. The severity of the breach was moderated by her surprise at her own behavior.

There’s not enough limbic-to-limbic connection:
In Avoidant there’s a lot of isolation and a feeling of existing in an emotional desert, in a way. There’s not enough limbic-to-limbic connection in the caregiving dyad.
They’ve even made studies now, suggesting that memory of a personally felt sense of being somewhere in your past depends on having had enough limbic connection to make an emotionally-rich – versus just fact-based – memory. So if you’re born into a family where that’s not really available, it’s harder to develop an emotional sense of the world, an emotional sense of yourself, and also having a self-sense in your own narrative of your history of actually being there. You might remember going to school in the red brick building on Sheridan Street, but you don’t remember what it felt like to sit in that wooden chair. You don’t realize emotionally what happened with you and your first grade teacher or friends on the playground. So we’re looking to help people come out of that isolation.

Co-regulation vs. auto-regulation (and selfregulation) and positive dependency:
Another challenge in Avoidant Attachment is that from the get-go, if that was the original pattern, the child doesn’t learn how to interactively regulate – their body and nervous system actually don’t really know how to do it. And that’s something that needs to be brought back later, and because the isolation is so strong, often people don’t even recognize this lack of connection is particularly a problem.

There tends to be a lot of dissociative reaction, or dissociative style of Auto-Regulation that occurs without the presence of another person. For people that have an Avoidant style, one of the things we’re trying to teach them in therapy – or within the context of their partner relationship, if we’re lucky enough to have them in couples therapy – is how to co-regulate each other, and also how to experience Secure Attachment nourishment that was missing in childhood inside the present day relationship.

An exercise with Avoidantly-attached folks is helping them recognize the relational field, just to notice what’s even happening between the therapist and them, or someone that they have in their mind, or if their partner is there that’s really helpful, because they tend to feel stress when they are aware of the relational field.

They’re more comfortable, it’s more familiar to not be aware of the relational field, to be in their own sort of virtual reality. They might be resourcing about going through something where the therapist working mostly with the nervous system regulation, but they’ll keep referencing their own legs, or their own capacity, or their own something. And then I might say, “Well, I know your legs are there for you all the time, but I wonder if you’ve ever had that experience with a person.” And that’s a much bigger challenge.

What happens when the avoidant opens up to relationsship:
Avoidants are not aware, how much energy it takes to try to stop their attatchment system. When they do open up to relationsship, and you are able to connect with them, there is a deep risktaking ect. They feel it more deeply than the ambivalent feeling their abandomend fear, because when the avoidant have to give up this numming out, that was helping them to deal with so much emotional pain, they do not have the tools to seek help from others (co-regulation).
When you do not really get interactive regulation from a nerveus system perspective, you do not build the physiologial capacity, to co-regulate and seek support. Selfregulation comes later in life than co-regulation.
Affect regulation is also difficult as their brain do not have the capacity for emotional regulation.

How to talk to your avoidant partner: (especially if you are ap)

The dismissive avoidant is rational, and if you can speak to the rational part and in pictures, since they are visual, then there is a chance, that they will listen much more to what You have to say.

You Can Explain to the da, the purpose of talking about emotions. When they get explained, why it is a good thing talking about emotions, they can better understand it, and they will often listen.

If they understand, that it makes their partner happy, to talk about emotions, and that it is important to their partner, then they can better accept IT, without fully understanding it.

They can accept, that this is how their partner feels, even if they feel in a different way themselves.

If it becomes too overwhelming with the emotional talk, the avoidant can imagine, that he/she is holding a paper basket in front of her/him, that can pick up the other person's words.

An attatchment/couples therapist