The best way to let go of an avoidant man is by first understanding that you are holding on because your body is trying to help you keep him around as a (inferior) source of love, validation or approval…

And then replacing this (below par) source with something more reliable, consistent and trustworthy than the avoidant man.

Whether it’s replacing your avoidant ex with a secure partner or friend, or something as crazy as a new pet, what you need is a new source of security. (It could be a brand new hobby that you immerse yourself in.)

Now:

If you think that’s too simple, don’t worry. I’m going to go through all the deeper levels of understanding on how to let go of an avoidant man in this article as well. 

Are you ready?

Let’s get started. 

CLICK HERE to LEARN the one specific emotional trigger within every masculine man that inspires him to want to take care of you, worship you and deeply commit to you.

When Should I Let Go Of An Avoidant Man?

That depends on whether you live in a world of ideals or in actual reality.

The ideal best time to let go of an avoidant is when you first test them and they fail the test miserably. 

What do I mean by ‘test’? I mean you try to create intimacy and playfulness with them and they either respond by getting defensive, gaslighting you or shut down completely. 

But let’s be real here: most women never test enough. 

This is why I always say: test men. It’s not immature, it’s inherent in your feminine instincts. You likely just block them out because you fear you’re going to come across as manipulative or low value.

The best way (and time) to test a man is when you first get talking.

And you test him with high value, playful banter that inexorably reveals his ability to engage with you with warmth and playfulness. 

SECRETS REVEALED… Discover how you too can use this little known “Dark Feminine Art” to weed out the toxic men whilst cultivating real emotional attraction with high value high esteemed men. (CLICK HERE to enrol in this free class before it’s gone.)

If you’re past the initial stages when you first meet the avoidant, this is when to let go:

You should let go of an avoidant guy when it’s clear that more than 50% of the time, he rejects your attempts to create intimacy with hostility. 

So if you attempt to create intimacy with him 10 times and he responds by pushing you away with anger or hostility more than 5 times, it’s time to let him go.

Please understand one thing though:

I gave you a simple, quick answer because that’s what people want.

There’s a deeper answer to this if you have the time:

The timing of when to let go of an avoidant also depends on several core factors:

• Whether you’re married (or have been married) to them and have children with them. If you have children with an avoidant and you want to keep those children (along with their mental health), you might not have the luxury of letting go immediately and will have to plan a little bit, because you have dependents to consider. (Think through the consequences on everybody.)
• Are they anxious-avoidant or truly avoidant to the point where they’re past the point of no return? People say that disorganized attachment is the hardest to deal with and fix – that’s just not true. True avoidant attachment patterns that lie on the extreme end of my attachment quiz are hardest to fix, reach and heal. Disorganized is the most complicated and confusing to heal, but not the hardest (the avoidant is). 
• Are they abusive and controlling? If your avoidant is abusive and controlling, you need to be cautious and smart about planning out your exit. It’s not just an ‘up and leave’ affair in this case (your life may be at stake as well as the lives of others). It’s more of a careful planning with a friend, a crisis counsellor or psychologist type of thing.
• Are you dependent on the avoidant for survival? Uh oh. That requires you to try to minimise the damage done by the avoidant whilst actively engaging outside help (until you can rely on yourself to survive). 

CLICK HERE to discover the ONE PHRASE you can say to ANY man that will capture his attention, trigger his curiosity and make him hang onto every word you say! (Works like magic in a high vale non-needy way!)

Walking Away From An Avoidant Is Hard: Here’s Why

Walking away from an avoidant is hard because: 

1. Their behavior can sometimes be alluring. (Their emotional unavailability sometimes feels mysterious.)
2. If you have anxious attachment, it makes walking away feel impossible; and
3. If you’ve seen the avoidant be vulnerable (or they’ve manipulated you with fake vulnerability), you might still hold onto hope that they could be that lover/partner that you dream of.

Recommended: Why Does He Keep Me Around If He Doesn’t Want A Relationship With Me?

Walking away from An Avoidant Is Extra Hard If You’re Anxiously Attached

If you’re reading this article, there’s a decent chance that you have an anxious attachment style.

It is the anxious folk who struggle to let go the most, because we would rather take crumbs than be forced to process the emotions of abandonment and loss. 

And I say “we” because I’ve been there. 

Every new attachment you form to another person means a potential spiral into a kind of metaphorical “death”, should that attachment end. 

Related reading: Why Do I Get Attached So Easily? 6 Reasons. 

I am a former anxiously attached (now mostly earned secure) person, and here’s what I learned from years of debilitating anxiety:

Letting go is not something anxious people can easily do; it feels more like catching smoke with your bare hands. 

It’s too much emotional processing to expect of us. I mean, we would quite literally rather kill ourselves in the process of holding on.

That’s why it’s so hard to let go of an avoidant man.

Just quickly, I wanted to pre-warn you that in the next section of the article, I’m going to go deep, and if you’re anxiously attached, you may begin to feel emotional, or even overwhelmed.

Please know that I am doing this in order to:

1. Give you a deeper understanding of yourself; and 
2. Offer you an ultimate solution.

SPECIAL REPORT: How to Become the World’s Most Attractive & Feminine Goddess (Even if you have no self esteem or no man has ever paid you any attention…) CLICK HERE to download it at no cost.

 

Let Me Speak To The Anxiously Attached Person In You:

Would you prefer the comfort of keeping the avoidant around in your life as a potential source of connection and attachment, or the crippling pain of detaching from him?

Intellectually, you’d prefer the second option, because somehow you might know it’s the “better” choice.

But if you’re anxiously attached then every cell in your body will want to choose the first option: keeping him around. 

Perhaps that’s because letting go feels like sinking into the emotional depths of hell?

We’d all like to think that we could walk away today. It makes us seem like strong people.

We want to uphold that image of ourselves as capable individuals, even if we know we’re not that type of person deep down. 

But at their core, anxiously attached people do not feel 100% capable in relationships. 

It’s a fight every day just to manage our worries. 

And that fight is a huge cost to us not only metabolically, but emotionally and mentally as well. 

We’re already spending a bucket-load of energy trying not to drown in worry (and shame) on your average Thursday morning.

Why would we willingly choose to actually drown in it indefinitely?

Ok, so I know how dramatic all of this sounds.

But I am not trying to be dramatic. Anxious attachment just is dramatic.

It’s designed that way. 

Remember: as a baby, you had to over-compensate for your mother or father’s inconsistent responsiveness by making your nervous system overactive. 

And I want you to take a moment to truly appreciate that about anxious attachment.

MORE: 12 Anxious Attachment Triggers: Recognise & Heal Them.

See:

When you were an infant, you had to fight every waking moment for attention and love, because almost every waking moment felt like an emergency.

You didn’t know if your mother/father would come in two minutes or in two hours, so you escalate your cries now in an attempt to get attention.

Your body has learned very young that securing love and attachment was only possible through signalling constant stress. 

You’re spending insane amounts of energy every day just trying to respond to imaginary (and real) threats to your relationship, your job, your friendships, and your….life.  

And when you break up with an avoidant or end any kind of relationship, the grief is insurmountable, because it forces you to accept the unacceptable:

That you might be…

Alone. 

Wouldn’t you agree that this is a kind of death? 

I don’t mean physical death (although to a child or a baby, it actually does mean that.)

But I really mean the death of the illusion that you have some kind of control. 

How To Detach From An Avoidant Person?

I’m going to answer this question first for anxiously attached women, and then for securely attached women.

Because the path is very different for secure individuals versus anxious individuals. 

First up, the anxious person.

How To Detach From An Avoidant Person When You’re Anxious?

There are two steps I want to give you. We’ll start with step 1. 

Step 1

As I said in the beginning of this article, you let go of an avoidant partner by replacing the mediocre source of love and validation that they are with something stable (and hopefully, better). 

You can’t just “walk away” and detach. It doesn’t work like that for the (ever so blessed) anxiously attached people in the world.

Even if you try by dropping him, it won’t last long. Because it’s not how your nervous system is wired. 

So you have to seek out reliable, secure sources to feed you so that you can regulate your emotions (read: feel safe).

Because please understand:

Men with avoidant attachment are NOT safe.

True avoidants are some of the most emotionally taxing, confusing and even nasty people you’ll ever meet. 

One thing that will help (and that I guide you on in my article on How to Self Soothe Anxious Attachment), is finding reliable anchors for secure attachment.

What are reliable anchors for secure attachment?

They are meditation tracks, memories, photos, music or movie scenes that you keep on hand that connect you to deeper feelings of security.

Something that replaces the sub-par source of connection that your avoidant ex was for you.

It could be re-creating the story of your parents and their relationship. 

Basically imagining them in an alternative reality where they do love you enough to be there for you round the clock.

You might say that this is fake.

It is, in a sense.

But it also isn’t, because remember: your parents did love you in one moment or another, they were just wounded themselves. 

Remember: it’s not that they never came to the rescue. It’s that they didn’t reliably come. 

So this is you bestowing emotional resourcefulness onto your parents, which flows back to you. 

Retelling the story of their relationship as a happy, secure romantic union where they each loved you more than the world itself allows you to draw on the miniscule amount of emotional availability that they had…

…And give back to yourself the emotional resourcefulness that they were missing.

You also feel more connected to them and perhaps forgiving of them, which helps recalibrate your overactive nervous system (which all anxiously attached people have). 

Here are some other anchors of secure attachment:

• Illustrating (yes, literally drawing) an image of the people who did reach out to you as a child and offered you warmth or playfulness.
  You will either frame this picture on your wall so that you can see it every day, or you will pin it to a board or your fridge.
  It reminds you that there is warmth and strength in this world, and someone did see you as worthy.
• Keeping movie clips or music on your phone as these reliable anchors for secure attachment which you can refer to at any time. I explain this further for you in my article on 12 Anxious Attachment Triggers, and How to Self Soothe Anxious Attachment Style in 2 Simple Steps.

There are 7 common signs a woman is perceived as low value to all men, because men simply perceive value differently to women. Do you know what these signs are and how to avoid them like the plague? CLICK HERE to download this special report.

 

Step 2

Understand two important truths about yourself:

1. As a feminine woman, you tend to make everything seem bigger than it is. It’s what my husband and I refer to (in our work) as a “feminine bias.”
2. As an anxiously attached person, you will aggravate this feminine bias further by adding mountains of stress, overthinking and anger to your emotions post breakup with an avoidant. You’re basically collecting for yourself a nice explosive pile of emotional trash.

If you are a woman who is feminine at her core, then you already make everything bigger than it is every single day, at least when it comes to people and relationships.

Add to that anxious attachment and you have every emotion 10 x’ed and on steroids.

If you’re unsure of how feminine you are at your core, I’ve added my specially crafted quiz for you to find out below:

Do our feminine energy quiz: how feminine am i really?

Why Are Your Feminine Biases Relevant?

You might be wondering why your feminine biases are relevant.

It’s because you need to be aware of them in order to calibrate yourself when you are grieving.

When you’re anxious, it’s very easy to break up with an avoidant and 12 hours later, start to grovel to him and beg for them back.

Because your body is actively making every emotion so big and the anxiety so insurmountable, that you will take back any toxic avoidant ex instead of facing the pain. 

(Here are 10 Seemingly Harmless Signs of A Toxic Relationship.)

This is when you get a tendency to block things out with addictions or unhealthy distractions.

I want you to resist those.

And instead, understand that your unbearable grief is not only unbearable grief, it’s also your anxiously attached nervous system making you think that:

1. You’re not going to make it out of the breakup alive, ever; and 
2. You’re not worthy of anyone else’s love 
3. You’re not worthy of anything BETTER than the avoidant. (In part because you cannot handle a securely attached person. And on some level, every anxious person grapples with this.)

When you know that this is your faulty attachment system, you can keep that at the forefront of your mind and remind yourself that it’s not truly that you won’t survive.

It’s that your anxious attachment is creating this bias of feeling and thinking within you.

Reality is VERY different.

Reality is this:

You can and will survive any breakup you wish to.

You are just as worthy as any other human being on earth of having a securely attached, loving, stable and sane partner. 

Your body may think itself as feeble, but your soul is infinite.

And if you remind yourself of this, you’ll start to be able to “watch” your anxious attachment system from above yourself, almost as if you’re a loving parent having a chuckle, and then walking over to yourself as a baby, saying: 

“C’mon sweetheart. Don’t be silly. You’re okay!”

How To Detach From An Avoidant Person When You Have Secure Attachment Style

This brings us to the secure people. How do they let go?

Well it’s a lot easier to guide a securely attached person. (Again, if you’re unsure whether you’re secure, anxious or avoidant, CLICK HERE and take my quiz here to find out). 

Or take the quiz now since I’ve embedded it below:

Do the quiz: What is my attachment style?

Click to read: 8 Ultimate Signs A Man Is Emotionally Attached to You.

Step 1

As a secure person, letting go of an avoidant partner involves trusting your natural calibration process.

What this means is that you honor your need to let your avoidant man go, and let yourself go through the grieving process.

Securely attached people will let go when they need to, because they know that they can bounce back from a breakup.

And you will bounce back with more appreciation and emotional calibration. 

You already know (and don’t have to be convinced) they are not right for you. You just have to follow that knowledge and surrender to it.

Don’t think you need to rehabilitate them, unless you somehow believe that it’s your calling in life.

Avoidants are not a cupcake (like perhaps how my securely attached husband feels sometimes, lol.) 

They’re more like a ghost pepper. When you try to enjoy them, it’s like diving into a pool of lava, where every splash burns.

Step 2

Respect that the avoidant is not blessed like you. Not even close. They live in an alternate reality.

So you need to respect the avoidant attachment patterns and how relentless they are.

Avoidant attachment patterns are not some “choice” that avoidantly attached people make just to “test” you.

These patterns are a deep trauma that is excruciatingly hard to undo without the avoidant being 100% on board (good luck with that.)

As I said in my article on dating an avoidant man, dating an avoidant is like trying to befriend a traumatized, aggressive stray dog. 

By allowing the avoidant into your life, you’re going to get burned by second hand trauma.

No, you will not “lose” your secure attachment patterns, because they are already deeply embedded into your nervous system.

But you may get traumatised in some way, and then have to heal from that. 

It may cut years off your natural life.

Step 3

Go to the people you feel safe with, and spend a lot of time with them.

If you’re secure, chances are that your family might be ok to spend time with. Go to them. Invite them out somewhere fun.

Give to them. Feel the depth of the intimacy you have with these emotionally healthy people. 

Appreciate it. 

Know that you won’t have that with an avoidant.

Step 4

Remember, you can love them but not be with them.

It’s ok to love someone from a distance. 

You don’t have to hold on out of guilt or obligation, as if you have to fix them. 

Know that in life, things are the way they are for a reason, and no good deed goes unpunished.

We all have our life to live, and it’s not your job to carry the weight of a whole person on your back. 

Over To You!

Please share with me what it has been like being in a relationship with an avoidant. 

Vent in the comments all you like, because that’s what it’s there for.

Plus, it’s healing. 

P.S. CLICK HERE to check out my full article archives! Or you may greatly benefit from one of our highly popular paid programs, CLICK HERE to see what we offer right now.

If you want to be supported by a warm community of high value feminine women, then join our Facebook Group. (It’s free and so incredibly valuable!) CLICK HERE TO join thousands of other women in our “High Value Feminine Women” Community.

By the way, while you’re at it, connect with me on social media.