Can an Avoidant Wife Fall Back in Love?

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Transcript

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So, in this video, I'm going to answer the question: Can an avoidant wife fall back in love with you? I'm going to I'm going to talk about what this is, what a avoidant personality is, why this is happening in the marriage, why she's doing this, and what is the solution. So if this is your first time here visiting with me, my name's Cody Butler, and I work with men in late-stage marriage and divorce crisis. And I'm gonna this video really is for men who want to save their marriage and want to understand the situation better to move forward. So after working with really thousands of men now, one of the one of the common questions that I get after men discover attachment theory and the ideas of attachment personality disorders and avoidance, all that kind of stuff, is the emotional detachment that you're experiencing right now, experienced in the avoidance permanent in the relationship, is she just simply wired this way? Is this the way she is as a human being? Or is this a trauma response? Is this coming out of childhood, etc.? And is there any hope that this can change or is there a path forward? And spoiler alert here, the answer to the question is yes, absolutely, this can be changed, this can be turned around 100% for sure. And by the end of this video, you're gonna understand what you need to do and how to turn that around. But the but the way this turns around is probably not for the reasons that you think it's gonna turn around, and it's definitely not the advice that people are giving you on the internet right now. So the key understanding, which is essential, if you if you want to change a situation, you have to understand a situation, right? So the key understanding here is that yes, an avoidant wife can fall back in love, but not because you learned how to manage an avoidant personality. So again, a lot of the men that I talk with, they go, Well, how do I deal with an avoidant personality? How do I communicate with her? How do I reach her? That's not what happens. She reconnects with you. The avoidant personality disappears when the reasons for her protection begin to disappear. So this is a key understanding, right? The reason she's avoidant is fundamentally she's avoiding pain. That's what the avoidance is, right? And when we can start to remove that, then the need for avoidance goes away. So the biggest misunderstanding that men have about avoidant behavior is that men often believe that their wife is happiness-driven. She's moving towards happiness. She wants some more happiness, or she wants something in her life that she doesn't have right now, something's missing. But the reality of the situation is that's not the case at all. She's actually attempting to move away from pain. Uh, her primary motivation right now that's driving the avoidant personality is it's not the pursuit of pleasure, it's the avoidance of pain. So her primary motivation here is protection. She's protecting herself from something. All behavior serves a purpose. All behavior produces, or at least in the person's mind, they believe that that behavior is going to produce a certain outcome. And if you can understand the outcome that the behavior is trying to produce, then you can turn that around because nine times out of ten, if not ten times out of ten, there is a there is a healthier way to produce the outcome that the behavior is intended to bring. But you have to understand actually what the outcome is. And in this case, it's almost always going to be protection. So the name in this situation here tells you everything that you need to know. We're talking about avoidant avoidance, avoidant personality disorder, right? It's not moving towards something disorder, it's avoidant. She's avoiding something, she's not primarily moving towards something here. She is trying to get away from something, or in other words, she's becoming avoidant because she's trying to avoid something. And that is it when you put it in those terms, it's very simple, right? But it's simplicity on the far side of complexity. Many of us never connect those dots and realize that actually what she's doing here, she's trying to avoid something. And if I can just figure out what it is that she's trying to avoid and then remove that from the equation, bada boom, bada bang, she's back on the field playing ball. So understanding, my friend, what she's moving away from or she's trying to avoid is really the key to understanding her attachment style here. So if she has an avoidance detachment style, then you gotta figure that out, right? So all you need to understand at this point, or the key understanding, is that the attachment style is just a tool. That's all it is, it's just a mechanism to help her get what it is that she needs. So the diagnosis, let's just call it uh avoidant personality or avoidant detachment or whatever you want to call it, it doesn't matter really. That's a descriptor that describes accurately the behavior that she's engaging in right now. She's being avoidant. That's true. That diagnosis is true. You're not wrong to think that. But it does not describe what she's moving away from or why she's moving away from it. So, step one is the diagnosis, which you have avoidant personality or avoidant attachment, whatever you want to call it. But then we have to go to the next layer underneath that, which is that the avoidance is just a mechanism. It's the tool that she's actually using to create an outcome or to attempt to create an outcome. It's just a tool, it's all it is. And then once we understand that, we peel the onion one layer further and we go, okay, well, what mechanism, what what actual outcome is she trying to avoid? What is this tool or mechanism trying to avoid? So diagnosis produces the behavior, the actual behavior itself is the mechanism, but very rarely do any of us ever get to the actual, what is it that she's trying to avoid? And that's where the magic happens. If you want to turn this around and you want to win your wife back, you want to reconcile, this is what you have to understand. This is of critical importance. So the way this works, and again, it's many men make the mistake of thinking that your wife is looking for something, she wants something from you. But really, this is this is a task of uh of subtraction, not addition, right? This is not about adding something to the relationship, it's about understanding the thing that she is trying to avoid or why why the avoidant behavior is there, the avoidant behavior is there because she's trying to avoid something, right? And actually removing that. And and often it's it's a behavior or it's a pain or it's a condition, etc. etc. So most men make the mistake at this point of going, well, let me add something to the conversation, Cody. Let me add something to the marriage. And it's like this might be flowers, might be date nights, holidays, vacations, love letters, romantic gestures, future plans, better communication, etc. etc. But remember, she is this is avoidant behavior. She's trying to avoid something. She's not trying to get you to introduce something new. So this is this is a plan that isn't gonna work. All these things may be great, right? But until you identify what needs subtracting, they're not gonna help your situation, and you're just gonna be confused and you're gonna be disappointed, and you're gonna go, this is you're gonna jump to a conclusion that isn't correct. Like maybe this is just the way she is, or this is a result of childhood trauma, or she's just wired this way. None of this stuff helps you, and none of this stuff is actually true, right? So all of these attempts here are uh they're attempts to add pleasure to the situation to make her experience of life more pleasurable. But as we've already said, avoidance is driven by the avoid the avoidance of pain, not the pursuit of pleasure, right? So the pain must be reduced or removed from her experience of the marriage, her experience of you before any future pleasure or any pleasure can be introduced or experienced within the relationship. So once you understand that, you understand that avoidance isn't solved through addition, it's solved through subtraction. Key point here. If you're making notes, this is a great note to make, right? Avoidance isn't solved through addition, it's solved through subtraction. So the the strategy here is to stop trying to make her happier or bring her what it is that you think you want before you've stopped making the closeness that she's avoiding right now emotionally painful or difficult or something that she wants to avoid. So, as we've said here, an avoidant personality or an avoidant attachment style is actually a protective mechanism. It's designed to protect, right? Avoidance is a protective mechanism. So the question becomes: what is she trying to protect herself from? So once we understand that avoidance is actually a protective mechanism, then the next stage to understand is that protection always has a purpose. We don't decide to protect ourselves from something that has no ability or no perceived ability to harm us. So now that we understand that avoidance is protection and protection always has a purpose, then the smart man asks this question: What has she learned that happens when she gets emotionally close to me that she needs protection from? Now, although that might be difficult, and there's gonna be men I know for a fact going right now, so it's my fault, it's my fault she's she's she's detached, it's my fault she's avoidant. This is not about blame, this is not about psychology, this is not about moral judgment, this is not about spirituality, religion, right or wrong. This is about getting the result that you're looking for. I I'm assuming that you're still watching this video because you want to save your marriage. And one of the questions that I always ask the men that I work with, one of the first questions, in fact, is do you want to be right or do you want to be married? Because you can be either, but you can very rarely be both. So the question here is what is she's avoiding the relationship. That's what you care about, right? You don't care what else she's avoiding, it's not that important to you. So the question is, what is what does she feel like this avoidant behavior is required for? What is she protecting herself from within the relationship? So some of the things that typically show up are criticism. Is she getting criticized when she gets close? Defensiveness, control, conflict, pressure, emotional labor, walking on eggshells, feeling misunderstood, disappointmentness, hopelessness, emotional exhaustion, etc. etc. etc. etc. This is by no means an exhaustive list of things. It's just designed to get you thinking in the right direction. And quite frankly, even the best relationship, the best husband, the man who's really worked on himself, worked on his marriage, and has really good understanding of himself and his wife, still brings these things to the relationship at times. We never really fully get away from this, but we start to reduce it to the point it's it's tolerable within the relationship. So the protection, or again, we can just these words now we understand this are interchangeable. Protection or avoidance, right? They mean the same thing. Now we understand this. We could say she has a protective personality, not an avoidant personality, or protective attachment style, not an avoidant attachment style. Protection is a response to repeated experiences within the relationship. If you are constantly criticized within a relationship, are you going to avoid that relationship? If you are constantly misunderstood, or if you are constantly pressured to do something you don't want to do, or if you are constantly controlled within a relationship, are you going to become avoidant of that? Are you going to seek protection? This is all this is. This is not a disorder, a wiring, a past trauma. It is simply a learned response to pain and a desire to avoid that pain, as I have, as you have, as we all have. When we understand this, we stop judging, we start accepting, and we can start to really make some progress in saving the marriage, really, saving your family, saving the future of your children. So here's the key understanding, and again, let's make this so obvious it's indisputable, right? People don't protect themselves from experiences they enjoy. We've just said that in protection and avoidance can be interchanged, they're interchangeable, they're synonymous with each other at this point. She's not protecting herself from an enjoyable experience. She's not protecting herself from a marriage that is a vase of roses. People protect themselves from experiences that they've learned through experience are painful. And when we put it in these terms, it becomes very obvious why the avoidant attachment style has shown up. So the goal here is not to remove the avoidant behavior in her. That's just that's just avoidant attachment disorder is just a descriptive term to explain exactly the behavior that she's engaged in right now. That's all it is. The goal is not to remove that, the goal is to remove the reason that the avoidance became necessary in the first place, right? When we understand that avoidance is not a miswiring or a mental disorder, that the avoidant behavior is simply a desire to not experience pain, then if we can remove what it is that is causing the pain, then the avoidant behavior, the avoidant attachment becomes no longer necessary. It serves no purpose anymore. So let's look at what a lot of men do to try to solve this problem that just doesn't work, very rarely is going to work. So promises often fail, usually fail. So what men do is they they promise what that they think that the solution is I'll change, I'll do better, give me another chance. Remember how good we used to be, remember how good it was. You think that she she's seeking pleasure, she's not. Try to get her to think about the future. Let's talk about how it could be, what it could be like moving forward, what we could do together. Again, this is a misunderstanding. You're operating out of a paradigm, out of a belief system that says her avoidant behavior is a desire to get more pleasure in the present or the future. Incorrect. All of these mechanisms communicate pleasure, not that the pain is going to be removed. So understand, she's not avoid she's not evaluating the promises that you make, she's evaluating the predictions from you. So her nervous system is a is a continuous predictive mechanism. Every piece of information that's ever been fed into, as is true with you, creates a prediction about you in the future. This is what confirmation bias is. She has a belief based on past experience of what you are going to do in the future. When she says something to you, she's already predicted what's going to happen. In the same way that you have predictions of how she's going to respond. That's the nervous system predictive mechanism working. So what's going on here is she's not evaluating what you're saying or what you're doing. Her nervous system is asking the question: based on everything I've experienced of this man in the past, what is my future experience likely to be with him? What's it likely to be? And if her past experiences have been predominantly pain, then her predictive mechanism, her nervous system, is going to spit out the answer. The most likely future experience with this man in this relationship is going to be more pain. And then the response to that, the subconscious automatic response is going to be, well, I don't want to experience pain, so get me out of here. And then the avoidant behavior becomes the mechanism to avoid the pain. This is the chain of custody, this is how it works. This is very simple stuff once you understand it. There's nothing complicated here. This doesn't take years and years of therapy, and it doesn't take a PhD psychiatrist to understand what's going on. Understanding what's going on in your wife's mind is very simple. She's simply trying to avoid pain. And the mechanism that she's chosen to do that may or may not be supportive, right? That's where we're at. So what's going on here is that your wife, she's not emotionally attaching or detaching from your intentions, she's emotionally attaching to her repeated experiences of you. Or she's detaching based on her repeated experiences of you. That's all got that's all that's going on. And the bottom line here, man, is that promises don't change her automatic predictions of you. Her nervous system doesn't rewire itself based on promises that you make, it rewires itself based on repeated experiences in the present. That that then changes the prediction. When the predictive mechanism spits out an answer of the most likely experience that you are going to have of this man in this relationship is one of pleasure, one of understanding, one of acceptance, etc. etc. etc. Then the avoidance goes away. There's simply nothing left to avoid. So you want your woman back, right? You want your man, you want, you want your relationship, your marriage back. So let's talk about how to do it. What makes a woman naturally, naturally, naturally return? Can't talk. It's not control, manipulation, script, any of that stuff. It's very simple, right? People naturally move towards experiences that improve their quality of life. If she's moving away from you right now and she's becoming avoidant, it's because her quality of life in an avoidant state, distance from you, distant from you, produces a better experience and a better quality of life of a non-avoidant attachment type. And being close to you. It's as simple as that. That's all it is. If you want her back, then you simply have to create an experience for her that creates a better quality of life than her being over here and moving away. So all you have to do is ask the question and honestly answer this. And at this point in time, if you've got this far into the video, the answer is very obvious. We don't need to even think about this. We're going to let reality and the situation answer the question. Is her life genuinely better because I'm in it? And if she's moving away and she's avoidant, then reality tells us that the answer is no. And that truly is the diagnos the diagnosis here. This truly is the real diagnosis of the situation that's going to make a difference. The diagnosis is not that she has an avoidant attachment style. The diagnosis is that her life is better, genuinely better, with you not in it right now. And I don't say that to piss you off or offend you or put you down or trigger you. Unless you can see that and acknowledge that, and all that is doing is simply acknowledging reality. Hopefully, you can see that after we've gone through what's going on in her mind and why she's doing the things, then it just becomes a case of making her life genuinely better with you in it than you not in it. It's as simple as that. So association here really becomes everything. Her her attachment style is based on past experiences. Really, we're just talking about the marriage at this point. We're not talking about her style of attachment as a as a generality. We're just talking about her style of attachment with you in the marriage, in this relationship. And it's all about associations. What had what has the relationship and what have you taught her? What has her nervous system learned that being in a relationship with you is like? What has your her nervous system taught her and is now predicting that a conversation with you is going to be like? The the the avoidant attachment style is simply the result of an association between what she's going to experience within the relationship and the pain that she's trying to avoid. That's all it is. So the question to ask yourself is when she hears your name, when you knock, when you come home and you turn the key at the end of the day, or when she gets when she gets around with around you, what does she feel? What does she actually feel? Is it relief? Is it does she feel stability? Does she feel peace and relaxation? Or does she feel dread? Does she feel pressure? Does she feel anxious? Does she feel exhaustion? And again, as Jesus very truly said, know the truth for us, the truth that shall set you free. It's not about how you want her to feel or what you would like for her to feel. If she feels dread, pressure, and exhaustion when she's around you, she's going to continue to have an avoidant personality, an avoidant detachment style. And we all have it, right? We have people that when we get around them, we just dread it, we're just like, man, this is going to be hard work, man, this is going to be difficult, man, this is going to be painful, etc., etc. So the key understanding here is every every person in your life you have an emotional association with, whether it's me in these videos, whether it's your wife, or whether it's someone at work, it doesn't matter. When somebody's name comes up, you associate a feeling with that person. So your presence either raises or lowers somebody's quality of life. There are people in your life that the idea of spending time with them and being around them, or even just having a conversation, just the idea raises your quality. And then there are also people that are the exact opposite, that just the thought of being around them drains you and lowers your quality of life. So just human, basic human nature here is people naturally gravitate towards people who consistently improve their experience of life. People don't detach and avoid people that increase their experience of life. They just don't. They avoid people that create pain or associate it with pain, and they are naturally gra they naturally attracted to or gravitate towards people that improve their experience of life. This is it's as simple as this. This is not complicated stuff at all. So your goal here is to become relief to her instead of just another problem in her life that she needs to avoid, i.e. avoidant attachment. Become emotion, you know, and these are just some examples. There's many, but these are a few examples, right? Emotionally regulated, become emotionally sovereign, stable, consistent, calm under pressure, humble, self-aware, generous, selfless, predictable. Develop a sense of true masculine leadership. And if you want some help with this, I work with men with this. There's some links in the description, some resources. Check them out. Some of them are free. If you want to work with me one-to-one, that's available too. I've got free workshops, etc. Check it out. There's the links in the description if you want to go into more detail on how you can actually start to do this. But these are the things you want to start to add to your life, your personality, your identity. And then these are the things that you want to remove. And again, this is not exhaustive, it's just a list to get you started: neediness, emotional dependency, reactivity, defensiveness, arrogance, selfishness, pride, control, emotional volatility. All right. The objective here is that we want to become a net positive experience to our wives. And who wants to be around this? Who wants to be around defensive people, arrogant people, selfish people, controlling people, emotionally volatile people? We all avoid those people, right? And in light of that, we all have avoidant attachment personalities in that situation. The avoidant personality, the avoidant attachment is not something she's wired with. I say that again and again. I'm repeating myself to get the message across. It's simply a mechanism that she's using to best manage the situation that she's currently in. So understand you don't your wife doesn't fall back in love with you because you convince her. It's not a case of how do I communicate with an avoidant person. She falls back in love with you because life comes better becomes better with you in it. It's as simple as that. Life becomes better because you're a net positive. It's as simple as that. So focus on becoming the man whose present consistently creates relief and stability, removes the pain that she's trying to avoid, and the need for avoidance simply disappears. So let's bring this thing home, man. So in conclusion, can an avoidant wife fall back in love with you? Absolutely, 100% yes is the answer to that question. I've seen it so many times, I can't even count. And hopefully you can see, hopefully, I've presented this to you in such a way that it just makes sense. It's just logical that you don't even have to stretch your imagination to believe it. Hopefully, you can see now after this video that there is a logical pathway and a process to her falling back in love with you. It's not you don't have to rewire her or deal with her childhood trauma, none of that stuff. So when be she will come back to you, or you stand the best chance of her coming back to you when being close to you once again becomes one of the best parts of the day instead of one of the hardest parts of the day. Hard to hear, but the truth, and when you understand this, the solution becomes very easy. So understand that for your wife to reattach to you, you must become a man that women can attach to emotionally. If she's not attaching to you emotionally, if she's avoidant, the smarter question to ask is is it something that I'm doing that's preventing her from emotionally attaching to me, or is she just screwed up in the head, right? Most of us lit literally go to the second there. Once we get the diagnosis that she's emotionally avoidant or she has an avoidant attachment style, we think that the diagnosis then is the solution. Hopefully, you can see from this video now that the diagnosis, although accurate, is really pretty irrelevant to what's going here, going on here. So the greatest compliment that your wife can give you is not he bought me flowers or he took me out, it's I love the way that he makes me feel. When she looks at you and says, I love the way you make me feel, or when she thinks about you in her mind and goes, I absolutely love the way this man makes me feel, then you've won. Then the need for the avoidant attachment has gone, and there's no there's no barriers, there's no obstacles between you and her anymore. So hopefully that helps. If you want to learn more about this, then watch this video here. If you get a lot out of this content, if you like this, give me a thumbs up, a like, leave a comment, let me know. It really helps with the distribution and helps me to stay motivated to make more content. So bless you all. Hopefully, this helps somebody, and I'll see you in the next video.