Okay, let’s talk about it. We can’t avoid it. The entire reason I decided to start this blog. You’ve seen the videos, read the books. You’ve been told that avoidants are manipulators, liars, users, abusers, assholes.  You’ve been warned to stay away or get away as fast as you can. There’s even a book about them called Fuck Them. For real.

There are videos explaining how he doesn’t love you. He loves the idea of you, how you make him feel as long as you don’t voice your needs or express your feelings. There are relationship coaches explaining what those real late night bids for presence are. Or how they give you breadcrumbs and offer nothing more. They are so certain. It’s soothing, in a way.

It also sounds a lot like protective anger. They are saying, “Look, this guy has caused you endless pain. It’s time to detach.” And what’s the best way to detach? Hate on the offending problem. When I was a kid, my dad said you could train yourself to hate junk food if you told yourself enough you hate it, list all the bad things about it, hate on it. The real therapy speak here is “reframing the thought,” and it’s actually a key tool for managing depression and anxiety, though not necessarily to be used in this way.

Well, that’s certainly…a way to detach from avoidants who repeatedly hurt you. I suppose we should accept “whatever works.”

So I tried it out. My slippery fox ghosted me after I asked for clarity, and was I livid! I told my sister that come Monday morning, I was going to march into his office and demand he tell me to my face he was no longer interested in me since he was too cowardly to do it via text. To think this guy thought he could ghost me, someone he literally worked with!

Alas, it’s not prudent to create a hostile work environment, I decided to give him the cold shoulder. Oh and that baleful look of shock when I passed by him without smiling warmly and wishing him a cheery good morning, it gave me a false sense of power.

I repeated every slight, inserted how selfish he was, how he used me—I think the phrase I used was “hit it and quit it.” I told myself he lied to me, purposely misled me, he didn’t care about me, and when I no longer served his purposes, he dropped me like a hot coal. It fueled my anger. I admitted to my sister that I think I was truly letting him go. Finally.

And then a few days later, I snubbed him by not introducing my mom to him when she visited my work (and what right does he have to be introduced to my mom after he hit it and quit it? Why would he even care?).

In response? He topped my cold shoulder with the coldest freeze, and I was left scratching my head. Why would he care? Did I hurt his pride? Or did he really care about being a part of my world? Which means, maybe, I misinterpreted his silence after I asked if things had fizzled out between us. Annnnnnnd he sucked me back in.

That right there is the lie they sell. I believed the narrative that avoidant attachment is a bone-deep flaw in an individual’s character. That they are malicious and callous. And yet right there, I saw a very human reaction to hurt. In myself and in him. Both valid, just evidence of dysregulated, sensitive, and chaotic nervous systems reacting to the same trigger—perceived rejection.

All human here, no unfeeling antagonists trying to burn the world down.

That narrative of a malicious avoidant transformed my hurt into anger, which gave me the power of certainty. It was almost just as intoxicating as his warm affection when he chose to give it.

So why didn’t it actually solve anything? I was right back in Avoidant Hell.

Because certainty is not clarity. Anger is not the answer to detachment. And the lie isn’t that avoidants don’t hurt us—it is that their hurtful behavior proves they don’t care.

They absolutely do care.

If we keep mistaking dysregulation for apathy, then we will continue to seek out stratagems that promise power, not healing. And worse, we are ignoring our own dysregulation while blaming someone else for it.

Mistakes like this cost us our wellbeing. It perpetuates the very cycle we want to break. It keeps us trapped.

What other lies have we been told? What other falsehoods have dictated how we approach loving an avoidant? What misalignment have we been taught? And most importantly why does it matter?