Let me tell you something first, and I want you to really hear it.
The person you love who looks like they don’t want to be close to you, who goes quiet, who pulls away right when you need them most? They are not cold. They are not broken. They are terrified.
That is the single most important thing I can offer you right here.
Here is what is actually happening underneath the surface. Your partner learned, probably a long time ago, that getting close means getting hurt. That wanting someone too much means being a disappointment to them. So their nervous system built a very effective protection strategy: pull back before the pain arrives. Go quiet. Disappear inside themselves. Because the wound they are carrying is “I am not enough. I am a disappointment. If I get too close, you will confirm that.”
So when they retreat, they are not leaving you. They are trying to survive.
Now here is where it gets really important for you. Because you are probably doing something that makes complete sense from your side but is actually feeding the very cycle you hate. When they pull back, you reach harder. You raise the intensity. You push for more connection, more reassurance, more response. And every single time you do that, their nervous system reads it as confirmation. “See? I knew it. I am already on my way to being a disappointment. Better stay away.”
And the more they stay away, the more you reach. The more you reach, the more they retreat.
This is not a you problem or a them problem. This is a system. And once you can actually see the system, something starts to soften. Because you stop making each other the villain.
So what do you actually do?
The single most powerful thing you can offer someone with this kind of wound is safety without demand. That means when you are hurting because they have gone distant, instead of pushing or criticizing or asking them to show up differently, you find the vulnerable truth underneath your protest and you share that. Just that. No request attached.
Not “why do you always shut down on me” but something closer to “I get scared when things go quiet between us. I start to feel like I don’t matter. That’s what’s happening for me right now.”
You are not asking them to fix it. You are just letting them see you. And that changes the signal your nervous system is sending to theirs. Instead of “you are failing me,” it becomes “I am a human being who is hurting and I trust you enough to say so.”
That is a completely different emotional invitation.
Now I want to be honest with you about something else. You cannot do this work alone. You can shift the cycle by changing your part in it, and that is genuinely powerful. But if they are not also willing to eventually drop into their own vulnerability, to say what one of my clients said once: “When I go quiet, I am not leaving. I am terrified.” If they cannot find their way to that, even slowly, even imperfectly, then the system cannot fully heal.
The goal is what I call Sovereign Us. That is the place where both of you stop protecting yourselves from each other and start protecting the relationship together. Where you can both say “here is the part of me you have never seen” and trust that the other person will stay.
That is possible. I have watched it happen. But it requires both people to eventually get brave.
The question worth sitting with is not “how do I fix them.” It is “what does my part in this system look like, and am I willing to change it?”
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond
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