Okay, so you’ve clicked on this video, and you are fed up with the emotional crickets in your relationship, right? Your partner doesn’t celebrate you, doesn’t ask questions about your life, and ignores you when you do talk or tell them how your day was over text.
Come on, we could admit it. Do you find yourself fantasizing over other couples and how they treat each other, and you are literally wishing, damn, I want a piece of that loving pie?
Now, my past relationships have all been just like this. I simply existed and felt incredibly lonely, even sitting next to my partner.
But then I learned the three mindsets of overcoming loneliness in my own relationships. I’m gonna share with you that you can adopt straight away. And also, I’m gonna let you in on a sadly unsexy secret that is the reason why you are letting yourself sit through the continuous loneliness in your relationship.
But first, I wanna tell you the story of monkeys and blankets and yeah, it’s relatable, I promise.
So in 1958, Harry Harlow wanted to understand how important relationships with the mother were for children. So he separated monkeys at birth from their mothers and put them in two different caged environments just to see how they responded to different relationships. Now, one cage was uncomfortable, but it had a feeding bottle, and the other was lined with a comfortable terry cloth with no feeding bottle. Throughout the experiment, Harlow noticed that the monkeys were always trying to keep in contact with the human carers. And when they weren’t around, the monkeys would find their way to the cage with the comfortable cloth. And you guessed it, the cage that only served the purpose of feeding wasn’t seen as important to the monkeys.
Now, the cloth in that cage was designed to be able for monkeys to cling onto kind of like a hug from mother. And when it was removed for cleaning, the monkeys would protest until it returned.
Yes. So this experiment tells us that all infants need a safe base that they can cling onto when they are young. Simply a cloth piece of material allows them to de-stress when they hug it.
And if a child is deprived of mother affection in that critical period of growth, what happens? Well, emotional damage occurs better known today as attachment injuries or childhood emotional neglect.
1) Avoiding Growth
So mindset one dives deep into avoiding growth. As a child, did you have that cloth of comfort? Or were you only given a cage with a feeding bottle? If your parents gave you that cloth and then they took it away, at times you end up trying to find ways to make sure that cloth sticks around for longer. What do you do? Well, people-pleasing stuff. You appease your parents, striving to win their affection. It could even have been staying up late talking about boring adult-related topics way past your bedtime just to keep them engaged to clinging at crumbs of comfort.
Let’s apply the cloth or the mentality to your current relationship or your past ones. You could begin to notice a pattern. Are you dating the same type of person? Do you always feel ignored in your relationships? And so you end up finding it easier to shut down your feelings of being noticed and emotionally connected with so that you don’t cause a fuss for your partner in case they remove that comfortable cloth.
Now, let’s think about it. Have you always been avoiding growth? Have you always struggled to call them out on their behavior? Maybe you find it easy to just let it go and think, I’m asking for too much. I’m being intrusive, I’m being too needy.
But let’s be factual here. If you don’t tell your partner that you aren’t happy and that you want to create change, how are they going to know how to love you for you?
Yes. “I can see Dani is annoyed that I keep leaving my shoes at the top of the stairs. I can feel that it’s a safety hazard. I best change my ways.”
Yeah, let’s be honest, mind reading doesn’t work. So are you purposely self-sabotaging your relationship because it feels super uncomfortable to actually step up for yourself and say, “Hey buddy, I don’t like it when you emotionally ignore me”?
Why is this? Because, you are used to being punished for getting your needs met, or you try to get your needs met as a kid and it never happens and it hurt too much. Or deep down, you don’t believe that you are good enough to date someone who is emotionally supportive. For you all three, you know that accepting growth in your relationship means that you have to step up too.
So let’s think more about that. Are you worried that your partner is unable to grow as a person to love you for you? Maybe you feel you have a reason to believe that they are unable to change things for the relationship to be better, or simply, you already know that things right now are not right for you. But the thought of change hurts so much that you cannot even begin to think about the process of breaking up.
But think about it. Are you more comfortable staying in a relationship for the next 20 years that you are not happy? Or are you gonna be uncomfortable for six months finding a new apartment to live in?
Look, let’s be honest, growth is uncomfortable for everyone, right? It makes us stay small and we never actually speak up, but incredible happen when we play outside of our comfort zones. You may tell your partner how you feel and they turn around and say, “Wow, I understand. Let me work on this. I don’t wanna lose you.” Or let’s be real. They may refuse to put in that effort and you break up with them, but then you will find someone else and you will already have that strength to speak up and accept that change can be for the better.
Now whilst we are on the lines of breaking up, it’s better to cut things off that aren’t working as soon as possible so that you can spend more time with the things that make you happy.
So open a space to tell your partner that you feel ignored and how you would like them to step up for you and show you more attention. If you then allow the time for them to actually achieve this new growth, it’s not gonna happen overnight, so have patience, or maybe you realize that this mindset means you are holding onto a relationship that cannot grow anymore. You’ve exhausted all options, yet you are too scared to end things for the fear of your own growth because being alone all of a sudden means a new home, financial pressure, loss of extended friends and family. And remember, it’s unfair to hold onto another person just to soothe your own anxieties.
And without further ado, let’s look at mindset number two.
2) You are drawn to the emotionally unavailable
If your partner ignores you emotionally, maybe this is on purpose. It’s a form of emotional manipulation to keep you at a distance so that you don’t connect, or maybe this is the start of the breakup and they feel so uncomfortable with connection and they want to protect themselves, or maybe on a subconscious level they feel very uncomfortable with closeness. And this would be with anyone that they would be dating, not just because it’s you. They feel they are getting too close and then they shut down and create that distance. And they don’t really know how to handle this cycle. All they seem to do is just ignore you.
Here’s an example. You may say that you are really sad that you’ve gotta work next Wednesday when originally you were supposed to have it off, but now the workplace is short staffed, and your partner will respond with nothing, just silence. And then you have to say the same statement again to get a response. Or there’s that uncomfortable pause of silence before they do say, “Oh yeah, that does suck for you.”
Sometimes you will have moments where they don’t ignore you. They offer that comfort blanket that we spoke about, but then it gets taken away again and it can happen over text message too. A new person that you are talking with can make you feel amazing. You’re getting really close and then you just randomly share your day with them and they don’t respond to all of your messages, or they thumb emoji react and say, “Yeah, that sucks.” And you are left there thinking, what? What happened to this amazing person?
When we are not aware of mindset two, you may think that the relationship is fine because you aren’t being physically assaulted, but then this lets you continue in that relationship. You may think they’re just having a bad day. I’ll ignore it, but then it happens again and again and again.
Now, I do have a video that will help you to spot the signs of emotionally unavailable people. Click here https://youtu.be/Eo0iFZy-wOY But in short, if you are always feeling that you date people and you don’t have a deep connection with them and they don’t have a deep connection with anyone in their own lives, including their friends, they don’t support you, they rarely display an emotional connection with you, and you always feel that distance, then it could be a sign that you are acting from a place of your own anxious attachment. Now, let me tell you, and I’ve experienced this too, until you’ve worked on your own attachment trauma, you will continue to be attracted to emotionally unavailable people.
And let’s be real. If you actually think about this for a second, the person that you are having this problem with right now are they displaying traits like your parents, the people that originally taught you that being ignored was okay.
So this mindset helps you to recognize when you are acting from a place of letting your anxious attachment win, and also from a place of self-sabotage. Because if you feel that have to make yourself super small to win the affection of a partner, this is a huge sign of disrespect to yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, and your successes and failures, because they all matter and they should matter to your partner.
Now I get it. You might say, “Hey Dani, sometimes people are busy, they can’t always respond to long text messages and right on. I agree with that, but, and there’s always a, but it is everyone’s mature responsibility to work on their own relationships and to speak up when things are tough. Meaning instead of ignoring your partner or friend when they are emotionally reaching out, you should say, or you should be told, “I’m so happy, or I’m so sad for you right now, but right now I’m super stressed. Let me just deal with this thing that I’m going through and I will come back to you later on to celebrate or to take you out, whatever. The point is, if a partner tries to maintain that emotional unavailability and they are trying to pretend that they don’t hear you when you’re talking changing subjects, when you ask them for emotional support, then that is a sign that something major is going on here. Do they all of a sudden have something to do when you are requesting for emotional support?
“Darlin there’s, just something I wanna talk about. I feel really sad at the moment, and I think it has to do with the fact that I feel emotionally ignored when I talk about things.”
“Sorry, love. I’ve just remembered I have an elephant in the car that I need to get rid of.”
So yes, if things to be done have just appeared from thin air in that moment that you are trying to have this heart to heart conversation, it’s a big sign of their emotional unavailability.
The moment that you accept that you have this mindset, you begin, oh my gosh, what am I saying? So when you adopt this mindset, you begin to accept that you are continuing the cycle of attracting emotionally unavailable people by you being the anxious one or the people-pleaser partner.
So of course, if you are brought up without an adult acknowledging your emotions and you never felt important, you are unseen and unheard. You’ll choose a partner who does the same because dating someone that isn’t like this would be scary and uncomfortable.
3) Hypersensitivity to perceived abandonment
Now, this might be an unexpected mindset because sometimes we make out our relationships to be a lot worse than what they are based on our hypervigilance to their behavior. For example, we might see someone is on their phone tapping away and you are saying to them, “Hey, what are you doing? Why aren’t you spending time with me? What’s wrong with me?” And they’re simply continuing to tap away. Little did you know that they could have been ordering a surprise gift for your birthday and they just needed that time to actually order the surprise party materials or whatever it is. So having this mindset helps us to assess how often we reach a final conclusion of Aha, my partner is factually ignoring me, when in reality they actually weren’t.
So this mindset aids in mindset one, where we can accept growth and change that we need to do, and also our partner’s growth, but also mindset two of understanding that because of your partner’s emotional unavailability, things may never change and you have to accept that or agree on a compromise.