Pursuing and Distancing in Relationships

Making Sense of On-again Off-again Craziness

Most of us are familiar with relationships in which one person desperately pursues a partner who creates distance or is unavailable. In a variation on those straightforward roles, some couples do a dance in which one person pursues a distant partner and then the dynamic flips so that the pursuer becomes unavailable or uninterested and the distant partner becomes the desperate pursuer. If we’re watching such relationships, it can seem impossible to make sense of what’s going on. And worse, if we’re in one of these relationships it can be totally crazy-making and create an overwhelming sense of despair.

So what is going on with pursuers and distancers? Part of the answer to that question lies in what we learned in our early relationships. As children we all have emotional needs to be loved and accepted for who we are, and to be encouraged to develop into individuals. However, to a greater or lesser extent, our parents (or primary caregivers) fail to act according to our best interests and instead act from their emotional needs and insecurities. These failures in turn help to establish our ways of being in relationships.
In general, our ways of being were adaptive in that they ensured we got as much love, care, or attention from our parents as possible. Another facet of how we behave in relationships is about asserting our unmet emotional needs. This facet was also learned based on whether and how it was acceptable or safe to express our needs as children. In our current relationships unmet needs can be legitimate adult needs combined with carried unmet needs from our past.

Pursuers
We all have a lifelong need for connection and intimacy. However, if as adults we feel desperate for love, connection, or validation, our parents may have been incapable of being close to us or acknowledging that we were special and unique beings. If our parents were abandoning or rejecting, as adults we may feel desperate to establish and maintain connections even if they’re unhealthy. Needing to desperately pursue love may reflect some of the following:

• We have a fear of abandonment or rejection tied to a traumatic absence or loss of love in our childhood. This fear can be intense and visceral and feel like our very survival is being threatened.
• We need to be chosen by our partner (or any partner) or we feel worthless or that we have no identity. This lack of self-esteem or sense of self is tied to not being validated as a child or to it not being safe to develop and express a unique self as a child.
• We are recreating the relationship dynamics from our childhood. This compulsion to recreate serves several purposes. When we choose someone unavailable or rejecting we hope for a different outcome. If they choose us, we will prove that our parents were wrong and that we are worthly of love. Recreating childhood relationship dynamics provides a situation in which we can continue to broadcast our unmet needs. It also keeps us from coming face to face with the unspoken messages of not having had our needs met and it keeps us from feeling the grief of not having been cared for or loved well.

Distancers
If we desperately need distance in our adult relationships, our parents may have been too emotionally close or demanding when we were children. Such emotional closeness or demands were not about our needs as children but were about our parents’ needs. Our parents may have needed us to behave in strictly defined ways or to achieve or accomplish things. They may have looked to us to care for them emotionally. They may have controlled us through emotional manipulation or abuse to manage their own anxieties, insecurities, or emotional frailty. Needing to create distance in relationships can reflect some of the following:

• We feel like we’re being smothered or engulfed in relationships, tied to never being allowed to develop or express ourselves. Early relationships were about the other person and being close equated to losing or stifling ourselves.
• We feel like the relationship and its demands will drown us. This sense is tied to our needs not being acknowledged and to inappropriately being asked to manage an adult’s needs as a child.
• Being in a relationship triggers feeling angry and resentful because we expect to have our needs for love, caring, and nurturing denied based on our early experiences.
• We have a compulsion to establish and hold on to a separate self, and the only way we know how to or feel safe doing that is through activities and behaviors that put up walls.

Some of the ways we may create distance in relationships include substance use, affairs, being grandiose or contemptuous, or pursuing outside interests obsessively.

On-again Off-again
What about those of us who flip-flop between desperately needing a partner and then retreating and creating distance once we have a degree of closeness? If as children we were required to deny our needs, to become needless and wantless, because our parents couldn’t handle our demands or shamed us about having needs, we may have the same desperate need for love talked about above. However, when we approach closeness, we may experience intense anxiety related to:

• Close relationships are unfamiliar and uncomfortable
• We’ve been taught that it’s not okay to have needs and wants or to have them honored
• We have internalized shame from being told indirectly that we’re not worthy of having our needs and wants met
• As we move toward intimacy, we feel that our shameful secrets are going to be exposed, which increases the perceived risk of rejection and abandonment

Creating distance in response to these anxieties in turn triggers our desperate need to pursue love and connection, perpetuating the cycle.

As difficult as these dynamics are, it is possible to move beyond them. Healing requires understanding the legacy of our childhood relationships, grieving what we didn’t receive, learning to honor our needs and wants in our adult relationships, and practicing taking risks with closeness, intimacy, and vulnerability. Author and therapist Pia Mellody talks about the distancing/pursuing dynamic in terms of Love Dependency (or Love Addiction) and Love Avoidance. She does an excellent job in several of her books explaining how these tendencies get established in our childhood relationships and the process of recovery (see my Recommended Reading List.

If you would like help exploring and improving your relationship, I would love to help.  You can contact me at  720-363-5538.