Anxious-Avoidant

Dismissive-Avoidants as Parents

Darth Vader – Dismissive Dad

Avoidants tend to be unresponsive to partner needs and unconcerned with the negative effect their lack of supportive communication has on their partners. How much does this lack of caring extend to their care for children? If you are married with children, you may have observed moments of caring interaction with them, but not as often as perhaps might be appropriate; and studies have shown that the typical avoidant is a somewhat negligent, emotionally distant parent:

Edelstein et al. (2004) videotaped children’s and parents’ behavior when each of the children received an inoculation at an immunization clinic, and found that more avoidant parents (assessed with a self-report scale) were less responsive to their children, particularly if the children became highly distressed; that is, when the children were most upset and most in need of parental support, avoidant parents failed to provide effective care.[1]

The dynamics that make the Dismissive/Anxious-Preoccupied partnership so unsatisfying are repeated with children who try to get more attention from an avoidant parent. A child either learns not to expect emotional support (thus growing more avoidant themselves) or falls into the trap of requesting more and being brutally rebuffed by a parent who sees their needs as weaknesses to be despised:

As expected, avoidant individuals exhibited a neglectful, nonresponsive style of caregiving: They scored relatively low on proximity maintenance and sensitivity, reflecting their tendency to maintain distance from a needy partner (restricting accessibility, physical contact, and sensitivity), and tended to adopt a controlling, uncooperative stance resembling their domineering behavior in other kinds of social interactions….[2]

Over time, children with an avoidant parent will look to their other parent for support. If the other parent is a sensitive caregiver, the child will model future attachment styles on that parent; but if the other parent is, for example, anxious-preoccupied, the child will more likely end up with some variety of insecure attachment type. Between the Scylla of the coldhearted dismissive and the Charybdis of the clingy, preoccupied parent, the child will not have a healthy model to work with.

If your partner is avoidant and you have had or intend to have children, it is especially important that you provide a good model of caregiving: there when needed, and only when needed; calm, cheerful, responsive, but not hovering. Consider carefully (if it’s not too late) how you might encourage your avoidant to handle your children’s needs with more attention and care; and if you are considering bringing up children in the critical years from birth to age 2, whether it might be wise to wait until either your partner has learned to be more supportive or you have found a better partner. Because a steady parent’s love and attention is so important to the emotional health of children, if you find you can’t be the steady one to give your children a good model because you yourself are off-balance from your avoidant partner’s lack of support, do what you have to do to make the environment better. It’s not just your current suffering that you should worry about—your children may suffer a lifetime of attachment dysfunction as well.

Here’s a report from a mother who has just about had it with both her husband and her dad, who show the same dismissive pattern:

My son was crying last night as he talked about how he could not ever talk to his dad about anything. I very much relate and I have great compassion for him. I want to be stronger for HIM.

This morning I went to the gym and there was some show about weddings. The fathers were walking the daughter down the aisle, so proud. Then the other day I saw an ad about graduation…again, the fathers were so proud standing right next to their daughters.

It hurts very badly. I recall inviting my dad to my college graduation and he said he had to work. He doesn’t care that I was with an abusive man in my marriage. Instead he speaks so highly of him, how he is the father of his grandchildren (who he can’t stand and had nothing nice to say about)…

Once when we were visiting, my son (then 10) had a febrile seizure. I told my dad I was taking him to the doctor. My dad criticized me for overreacting. When my older son had a seizure at 5 years old from a high fever, my stepmom acted like I overreacted when I took him to the ER.[3]

And this adult survivor of dismissive parenting talks about how it felt:

My father is passive abusive. His emotional abuse is very covert. Mostly he just doesn’t care, doesn’t listen when I talk to him, doesn’t know anything about me, my life or my kids because he doesn’t care to know and he doesn’t listen to anyone who tries to tell him. To the general public, (and according to my siblings) my father is regarded as this ‘nice’ guy and he is never violent, never mean and never hurtful with his words, but the truth is that his relationship style is dismissive and disinterested all of which is very hurtful. I spent many years in childhood and in adulthood ‘begging’ (in all kinds of ways) my emotionally abusive father to notice me. The fact that he didn’t was and is very hurtful. There is a very loud message that is delivered to me when I am disregarded. The message is that I don’t matter, that I am not important, that I am not worth listening to and that I don’t have anything to contribute to his life. My father is emotionally unavailable, and that is very hurtful. Love is an action and love doesn’t damage self-esteem. Love doesn’t define a ‘loved one’ as insignificant.

After years of trying to tell my passive abusive father that his constant cutting me off whenever I tried to tell him about me, and that his lack of interest in my life was a problem for me ~ and due to the fact that there wasn’t any change on his part, I gave up; I finally realized that he wasn’t going to change.[4]

[Note: if you arrived here looking for insight into a dismissive spouse or lover, this post is now a chapter in the book I’ve just published on the topic: Avoidant: How to Love (or Leave) a Dismissive Partner. Right now available from Amazon Kindle for $3.99, and a trade paperback is also available.]

More on Attachment and Personality Types:

What Attachment Type Are You?
Type: Secure
Type: Anxious-Preoccupied
Type: Dismissive-Avoidant
Type: Fearful-Avoidant (aka Anxious-Avoidant)
Avoidant: Emotions Repressed Beneath Conscious Level
Serial Monogamy: the Fearful-Avoidant Do It Faster
Anxious-Preoccupied: Stuck on the Dismissive?
Anxious-Preoccupied / Dismissive-Avoidant Couples: the Silent Treatment
Anxious-Preoccupied: Clingy and Insecure Relationship Example
Domestic Violence: Ray and Janay Rice
Malignant Narcissists
Teaching Narcissists to Activate Empathy
Histrionic Personality: Seductive, Dramatic, Theatrical
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
On Addiction and the Urge to Rescue
“Bad Boyfriends” for Kindle, $2.99
Controlling Your Inner Critic
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Porn Addiction and NoFAP
Introverts in Management

[1] Mikulincer, Mario. Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Kindle edition, loc. 8408. The Guilford Press, 2007.
[2] Mikulincer, Mario. Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Kindle edition, loc. 8418. The Guilford Press, 2007.
[3] http://www.mdjunction.com/forums/emotional-abuse-discussions/general-support/10708676-small-ventwhen-dad-is-uncaring-and-dismissive
[4] “Emotionally Unavailable Father; The Message of Passive Abuse :: Emerging From Broken.” Accessed September 21, 2014. http://emergingfrombroken.com/emotionally-unavailable-father-the-message-of-passive-abuse/.

More Helpful Ideas for Quieting that Negative Inner Critic

Negativity: Inner Critic

I’ve discussed this in more detail in “Controlling Your Inner Critic.” But Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D, has posted some more useful ideas at Psychology Today blogs: “How to Put Down that Self-Critic:”

Do you find that there is a critical voice in your head that follows you around all day and all night? It may pop up as you get out of bed (“Late again!”) or when you look in the mirror (“You look exhausted”). Or you notice it when you get to work (“You never get things done on time”). And when you meet people you hear that voice nagging at you saying, “What a bore you are.” If this sounds familiar then you might take some momentary comfort in knowing that you are not alone— and I don’t mean you are not alone because your critic follows you. I mean that almost all of us have that voice at times. The question is—what are you going to do about it?…

This may sound odd to say that the self-critical voice shouldn’t be taken seriously. But just because you are thinking something doesn’t mean that it is important, relevant, or something to spend time with. I like to think of these negative thoughts as the telemarketing call that you don’t take. Or, the caller ID that tells you it’s someone you don’t want to talk to. Or you can think of the self-critical thought as one of the trains at Grand Central Station that’s not going in your direction. Simply having a negative thought does not mean it is at all relevant to your valued goals. If you focus on your goals—and carry out challenging and sometimes difficult behavior to accomplish those goals—you can allow the self-critical voice to yack away in the background while you continue to move forward. Think about self-criticism as eaves-dropping on someone else’s conversation.

An alternative to the self-critical voice is the self-correction voice. Imagine the following: You are learning how to play tennis and you hit the ball into the net. The trainer comes out and tells you to whack yourself in the head ten times. Is that a good idea? In contrast, imagine a different trainer who shows you exactly how to hit the ball over the net. Which is the better approach? You can correct yourself without criticizing yourself. You can say, “OK, that behavior didn’t work this time, so let me try a different approach”. Replace your self-criticism with self-correction. Then you can use your mistakes as an opportunity to improve.

Self-criticism is often very general and very vague. Seldom does the person actually say, “Well, I need to hold the racquet this way rather than that way.” Rather, it is in very general terms, “I’m a lousy player” or, “I’m an idiot”. Check out your self-critical voice and ask yourself if you are making gross generalizations about yourself. Try to replace these statements with specific behaviors that you can change. After all, it’s a lot easier to change the way you hold the racquet than to stop being an idiot. (Here’s the test: How would you know when you had stopped being an idiot? How would you know if you are now holding the racquet correctly?)

Finally, be as kind to yourself as you would be to a friend. I have found that the nicest people I know are often incredibly self-critical–even cruel toward themselves. This is a double standard that only makes you feel worse. Try this: write out your self-critical statements for a day and then imagine saying all these things to your best friend. Why would you think it would be cruel and unfair to do that? In contrast, try saying supportive things to yourself that you would say to a friend. You will get a lot further rewarding and supporting yourself than by treating yourself in a way you wouldn’t treat a friend—or a stranger.

You won’t build a successful life on criticizing yourself. You will build it on getting things done.

All very useful advice. For those of us who suffer an inner critic modelled on a perfectionist parent, this nagging is worse than useless–it is demotivating. You can be a successful perfectionist by concentrating on the task, not yourself–“Next time I will do it differently and it will turn out better,” not “I am so stupid. I can’t do anything right!” If you want to accomplish things, you can’t get bogged down in recriminations — you get right back up and try it again with a correction. And again and again until the result is good enough. The perfectionist has to learn that 80% of what she thinks is perfect is generally a lot better than what others would think good enough, and learn to use her time wisely to move on to the next problem when the returns to further fine-tuning are small. By accomplishing much more than those who get bogged down in that last refinement, she tunes herself to be the very best; by seeing flaws no one else sees, she guarantees she will always be improving. By believing in herself and her methods, she is immune to the dispiriting inner critic.

Subconscious Positivity Predicts Marriage Success…

Happy Couple – shutterstock

..and conversely, negativity predicts turmoil and failure. In attachment type terms, both avoidant types (Dismissive-Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant) have a negative view of attached others in general, while Secure and Anxious-Preoccupied types are positive about others.

The Wall Street Journal reports on an experiment which measures newlywed’s subconscious attitudes about their partners and found those with negative subconscious attitudes experienced a faster decline in marital satisfaction over time:

First off, they found that ratings of marital satisfaction declined over time, something reported previously. They also learned that the [written test] answers from newlyweds predicted nothing about marital satisfaction four years later.

But the scientists also measured something else in those newlyweds, using an “associative priming task.”

This involves briefly flashing a series of words like “wonderful” or “odious” on a screen; subjects have to quickly press one of two buttons, depending on whether the word has positive or negative connotations.

Now comes the subconscious manipulation.

Just before each word, the researchers flashed up a picture of a random face for an instant—300 milliseconds—too fast for people to be consciously certain about what they saw but enough time for our subconscious, emotional brain circuitry to be certain. If the face evokes positive feelings, the brain immediately takes on something akin to a positive mind-set; if the word flashed up an instant later is a positive one, the brain quickly detects it as such. But if the word is negative, there is an instant of subconscious dissonance—”I was feeling great, but now I have to think about that word that means ‘inconsiderate jerk who doesn’t replace the toilet paper.’ ” And it takes a few milliseconds longer to hit the “negative” key. Conversely, display faces with negative connotations, and there is that dissonance-induced minuscule delay in identifying positive terms.

So in the study, the rapid-fire sequence of faces/words included a picture of one’s new spouse, revealing automatic feelings about the person’s beloved. That led to the key finding: The more subconscious negativity in a newlywed, the larger the decline in marital satisfaction four years later.

Did subjects understand what the priming task was about? No, and people’s automatic responses were unrelated to their answers on the questionnaire. Was that discrepancy due to an unwillingness to answer honestly, or were people unaware of their automatic attitudes? It is impossible to tell. Did people with the most positive automatic feelings about their spouses subsequently develop fewer problems in their marriages, or were they less sensitive to the usual number of problems? Subtle data analysis suggested the latter.

What does this study tell us, beyond suggesting that lovebirds should probably take this nifty computerized test before marrying? It reminds us, like much we learn about the brain and behavior, that we are subject to endless, internal biological forces of which we are unaware.

The original Science writeup is here.

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Marriages Happening Late, Are Good for You
Monogamy and Relationship Failure; “Love Illuminated”
“Millionaire Matchmaker”
More reasons to find a good partner: lower heart disease!
“Princeton Mom” Susan Patton: “Marry Smart” not so smart
“Blue Valentine”
“All the Taken Men are Best” – why women poach married men….
“Marriage Rate Lowest in a Century”
Making Divorce Hard to Strengthen Marriages?
Student Loan Debt: Problems in Divorce
“The Upside of ‘Marrying Down’”
The High Cost of Divorce
Separate Beds Save Marriages?
Marital Discord Linked to Depression
Marriage Contracts: Give People More Legal Options
Older Couples Avoiding Marriage For Financial Reasons
Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Vox Charts Millennial Marriage Depression
What’s the Matter with Marriage?
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
Constant Arguing Can Be Deadly…
“If a fraught relationship significantly shortens your life, are you better off alone?
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
“It’s up there with ‘Men Are From Mars’ and ‘The Road Less Travelled’”
Free Love, eHarmony, Matchmaking Pseudoscience
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
“The New ‘I Do’”
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Mark Manson’s “Six Healthy Relationship Habits”
“The Science of Happily Ever After” – Couples Communications
Free Dating Sites: Which Have Attachment Type Screening?
Dating Pool Danger: Harder to Find Good Partners After 30
Mate-Seeking: The Science of Finding Your Best Partner
Perfect Soulmates or Fellow Travelers: Being Happy Depends on Perspective
No Marriage, Please: Cohabiting Taking Over
“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?
Rules for Relationships: Realism and Empathy
Limerence vs. Love
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
When to Break Up or Divorce? The Economic View
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
“Sliding” Into Marriage, Small Weddings Associated with Poor Outcomes
Subconscious Positivity Predicts Marriage Success…
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)

“Sliding” Into Marriage, Small Weddings Associated with Poor Outcomes

Small Wedding

Science Daily has a report on a study of marriage happiness called “Bigger weddings, fewer partners, less ‘sliding’ linked to better marriages.”

Unfortunately this is another study showing correlations but not proving causations, so it is less useful than it might appear:

Rhoades and co-author Scott M. Stanley came to these insights by analyzing new data from the Relationship Development Study, an ongoing national study based at the University of Denver and funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Between 2007 and 2008, more than 1,000 Americans who were unmarried but in a relationship, and between the ages of 18 and 34, were recruited into the study.

Over the course of the next five years and 11 waves of data collection, 418 of those individuals got married. The authors looked closely at those 418 new marriages, examining how the history of the spouses’ relationships and their prior romantic experiences were related to the quality of their marriages.

So far so good. But what they did was select a group of single people, look specifically at the ones who got married, and then question them about the happiness of their marriage, their history and other factors that might be interesting. There are problems with drawing any conclusions: self-reporting of both relationship history and marriage quality, and alternative explanations for some correlations.

Those who have had more romantic experiences — for example, more sexual or cohabiting partners — are less likely to forge a high-quality marriage than those with a less complex romantic history, the researchers found.

Raising children from prior relationships can add stress to a marriage. For women, but not for men, having had a child in a prior relationship was associated, on average, with lower marital quality.

….More relationship experiences prior to marriage also means more experience breaking up, which may make for a more jaundiced view of love and relationships, Rhoades said. It’s also possible that some people have personality characteristics — such as liking to take risks or being harder to get along with — that both increase their odds of having many relationship experiences and decrease their odds of marital success, she added.

From the attachment type perspective, it’s easy to see from the Dating Pool Danger graph that people who have been through several relationships are far more likely to be insecure types: Dismissive-Avoidant, Fearful-Avoidant, or Anxious-Preoccupied. Each of these types would be expected to have a lower-than-typical quality of marriage. So the people who they initially selected were already skewed (since they were single) toward the insecure types, and those with a history of broken relationships were even more likely to be insecure types and thus find marriage rough.

Past studies show that couples often “slide” into living together rather than talking things out and making a decision about it. In this study, participants who lived together before marriage were asked directly if they made a considered decision about premarital cohabitation or slid into it; they indicated their degree of “sliding versus deciding” on a five-point scale. The more strongly respondents categorized the move as a decision rather than a slide, the greater their marital quality later on.

“We believe that one important obstacle to marital happiness is that many people now slide through major relationship transitions — like having sex, moving in together, getting engaged or having a child — that have potentially life-altering consequences,” said Stanley, research professor and co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, as well as a senior fellow for both the National Marriage Project and for the Institute for Family Studies.

That seems fairly intuitive — commitments that occur thoughtlessly, almost by default, happen when people are not strongly motivated by anything but convenience and inertia. After marriage, they may just as easily leave when it becomes inconvenient. Living together for years before marriage tends to show someone was not especially motivated to get married!

Having more guests at one’s wedding — the biggest ritual in many relationships — is associated with higher marital quality, even after controlling for income and education, which may be proxies for how much the wedding might have cost, the study found. Among couples who had weddings, the sample was divided into those who had weddings with 50 or fewer attendees, 51 to 149 attendees, or 150 or more attendees. Among each grouping, 31 percent, 37 percent, and 47 percent, respectively, reported high marital quality.

“In what might be called the ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ factor, this study finds that couples who have larger wedding parties are more likely to report high-quality marriages,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and a professor of sociology at U.Va. “One possibility here is that couples with larger networks of friends and family may have more help, and encouragement, in navigating the challenges of married life. Note, however, this finding is not about spending lots of money on a wedding party. It’s about having a good number of friends and family in your corner.”

This also seems obvious — lots of friends and family at your wedding tends to mean you have lots of social support, and the larger the social network you invited, the more you probably believed in your own wedding as a real commitment!

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Anxious-Avoidant

Dismissive-Avoidants as Parents

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More Helpful Ideas for Quieting that Negative Inner Critic

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Subconscious Positivity Predicts Marriage Success…

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“Sliding” Into Marriage, Small Weddings Associated with Poor Outcomes

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