I know the performance is extremely convincing but they still love you! #avoidant #afterbreakup #discard #attachmentstyle #latenightthoughts

You wanna know what avoidance actually do after heartbreak because I can guarantee you it's not what you're thinking. Now, whether this ended in no contact, a messy breakup, ghosting you, or whatever the case may be, most avoidance tend to go through the same phases post-breakup. Start at the beginning of the breakup because you're probably stuck in the process of like trying to initiate conversation, throw out some signals that there's still love there, try to repair things, right? You're just like going through the motions of, what am I gonna do? How can I fix this? Is it even possible for it to be fixed? Now, the avoidance is gonna respond to these outreaches and these attempts to repair with complete indifference and this will make you feel insignificant and make them seem like the coldest people in the world like they just somehow flip the switch and shut off their love for you and you were just no longer coding space in their hearts, right? Like, you're not taking up any real estate in their minds. They're just over it, right? This is what you tell yourself. But has life not taught you to stop taking things for face value because your critical thinking is extremely important when you're observing the behaviors of an avoidant post breakup? And you've probably seen a lot of videos on TikTok telling you that the first phase is relief and that holds truth because it is. They're detaching, they're suppressing emotions, there is a little bit of this relief, right? They are releasing all of this pressure and saying, you know what, I feel so free. My identity's back like I'm just over it, right? I need to go and just distract myself, it's important to myself because that was a lot. But the misinformation in those videos is the fact that they're telling you that they avoidant during this relief phase is not thinking of you. And that is actually the opposite of what's going on because even during detachment, you are holding up so much space on their minds. I mean, you are consuming their lives still at this point. This is the whole reason they initiate no contact. Again, critical thinking here. No one avoids something that's insignificant. You avoid what holds way too much pressure and way too much weight for you to face and for you to keep enduring or holding onto. During this phase of relief, the avoidant is usually pouring more energy into their day-to-day activities and into themselves. But they're also caught up on you. They're wondering what you're doing, whether they're looking at your stories, whether they're going through old messages, whatever the case may be, they are still contemplating. They're still up here thinking, did I make the right decision? Did, you know, what happened? Why did this have to go this way? Like, why didn't they understand me, right? They're actually not over you at all. The nervous system is only going to give a couple of options for the avoidant to actually be able to regulate. Now, whether this is going to be them distracting themselves, looking at options or rebounds, or leaning on a support group, like the group chat, the girls or guys chat, whatever, right? But the one thing that they will not be able to do comfortably is isolate themselves. Because in order to suppress anything, even if it's just for a second, you have to visit the data. The information, right? The experience has to come to your internal front to cortex, which is like an alarm. It's a response system. It has to come there. And then your body is going to translate that and send signals everywhere to your nervous system and say, what are we doing about this? So again, guess who's on the front of their mind? Quite literally, you and that relationship. Now, there is no guarantee of what the timeframe will look like in this relief phase, because it differs for everyone, right? Whether you're fearful or dismissive, any type of avoidant, it can take a week's, it can take a month's, however long, right? Until they have just simply run out of distractions and they're forced to face themselves. Now, by the time that they get to a point where they're actually going to sit and revisit the emotions surrounding the relationship and how everything ended, you have probably started your healing journey. You've probably stopped outreach. You've probably moved on. There's so many different factors that play into it, but you live goes on, so you have probably kept pushing forward. Which is valid, because you shouldn't lose yourself waiting on someone to choose you, but understand that you thought they were done with you, which is why you moved on in the first place. Thank goodness, because if you stuck around and knew how they actually felt because they weren't truly over you, then you probably would have waited for someone that knew you were waiting and this cycle would have continued.