Learning the Truth About How I Love

your growth is directly proportional to the amount of truth you are willing to accept about yourself.

It’s never simple to confront an insecurity you’ve never recognized before, to finally name something that has quietly shaped you for years. I’m not afraid to acknowledge it but I’m also not very comfortable exposing my vulnerabilities . Still, I believe that notes are a record of my thinking process, and for the sake of honesty, integrity, I can’t ignore the mistakes I’ve made or the impact they’ve had on others. Today I came across a quote that perfectly describes the person I’m, in relationships.

Avoidant attachment is a pattern where you feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness and tend to pull away or shut down when relationships start to feel too vulnerable. Deep down, you may still want connection, but it feels safer to stay distant, guarded, or independent.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this term “Avoidant attachment,” and it is crazy how accurately it sums up and explains the recurrence of my patterns, Adding new friends systems , Elaborate Adding new friends system

On avoidant attachment

after watching videos about this topic, I felt it’s relevant to what I’m experiencing, and I just couldn’t believe how mature psychology is, to the point of describing such a phenomenon. Below I will paste a comprehensive summary that can help understand the avoidant personality in a nutshell, and build on top of its light.

Your avoidant isn’t fine, they’re just numb, to you it registers as indifference, what if they’re gone, what if they’re done, what if they’re over this, but internally on their part, it is an emotional shutdown. Avoidant don’t walk away calm, they walk away frozen, they don’t process in the moment, they don’t sit with the tension, and they don’t face what they did and what actually happened. They retreat into the one thing that makes them feel safe, which is disconnection. They are avoiding the emotional bill that just hasn’t hit them yet, because for an avoidant, the guilt, the loss, the shame all of it, it doesn’t hit them right in the same moment that it hits you. It doesn’t hit them early, it doesn’t hit them after a day or after a week, it hits them later on. When the dust has settled, when the thread of closeness is gone, and when they think that you have stopped expecting anything from them, that is the moment that it hits them. That’s when they start remembering the moment that they hurt you. And that’s when they finally feel what you felt in real time.

This piece is the first to encounter when searching for what this term means. I find it very accurate to the point I feel discomfort that there is someone out there is able to describe me in words, to have the words and explanation that I didn’t have, that I was searching for almost my entire life. I can see my own patterns here, by distilling this piece:

• they don’t sit with the tension, and they don’t face what they did and what actually happened This explains the selective ignorance that I adapt

• they retreat into the one thing that makes them feel safe, which is disconnection, this explains many of my disappearances

• because for an avoidant, the guilt, the loss, the shame, all of it, it doesn’t hit them right in the same moment that it hits you,this explains my writing state of numbness

• When the dust has settled, when the thread of closeness is gone; this explains why I avoided establishing direct relationship (closeness), and decided to use society buckets

On the harm I caused others

For a long time I believed I’m just not build for relationships, the moment someone brings emotions to our conversation I pull away, there is this poor Jonior whom I met recently and the moment he told me: “you’re cool, I like you, we could be friends”,As soon as he said that, I completely withdrew. and vanished from his life. Earlier this year I was talking to my friend Omer Monir. on how I’ve abundant the idea of romantic relationships in my life. Due to reasons I failed to interpret at the time, but the idea of I myself avoiding it, is a huge factor. What scares me the most about all sorts of relationships is the closeness and the commitment it brings, I can’t show up everyday, I’m terrified and not familiar with the intimacy that comes with establishing relationships, I run, I pull away and I shut down emotionally the moment these start to happen,

this explains why I freaked out when recently one of the uni colleagues told me I’m their best friend, I froze, I don’t even remember what did I respond with, he was so polite when he added the words “but I understand that you’re always busy and you don’t text too much, but I know that you’re a good man”, I was left speechless, I couldn’t say a word, I felt the guilt of how I’m not able to love them back the way they loved me. but at the end a person will only love you to the capacity in which they’re able to love themselves. I’ve failed many people before; they were victims of my avoidance, This dialogue helps me to imagine the kind of stress I put those people under.

I’m being too much, the replies are getting colder, shorter, it’s like they don’t even care at all anymore, now I’m starting to freak out, because the only person I wanna talk to, and I feel like I’m interrupting them or I’m disturbing them, I feel like I’m a burden, like I’m unwelcomed. Did I do something wrong, am I pushing them away, because they are not giving me the same energy that they did, I just want them to notice, I just want them to remind me that I matter to them.

I once wrote how I’m really not good at putting myself in the other people shoes , and how I fooled myself into thinking people won’t be affected by my own patterns but in reality, I have hurt people, a lot of them, and I keep hurting more, by avoiding them, by showing up randomly and disappear frequently. It’s a strange grief to realize the amount of wounded people not out of cruelty I exposed, but out of an instinct, a second nature I caught before I ever had the words for it. The grief is even harder to bear when thinking that some people didn’t walk away from me; they walked away from the waiting. From my patterns. I only learned the cost after the silence became permanent.

I’m grateful that the things I wrote in the past are finally becoming clear to me. A lot of friends helped to see this part of myself, how avoidant I am, including my best friend AbdAlwahab, and a bunch of victims. I don’t expect this to result in a behaviour change soon, but at least for now, I can recognize my own patterns. At least for now, everything made sense.