The Role of Criticism in Anxious-Avoidant Dynamics
Today's episode is all about the role of criticism in anxious-avoidant dynamics. Both anxious and avoidant people have been known to deploy criticism as a strategy to manage fears and self-protect in relationships - but this will often look different (and be motivated by different drives) on each side.
One thing's for sure: no matter how it shows up, criticism is really harmful to relationships - so if this is something you struggle with, you've come to the right place.
WHAT WE COVER:
how anxiously attached people use criticism as a protest behaviour
criticism as a way to convey our hurt
how avoidant people use criticism to sow seeds of doubt and create distance
how to identify the needs underlying our criticism so we can communicate in a healthier way
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Apply for my 6-month Homecoming Mastermind
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
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You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here. You hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. Today's episode is all about criticism in anxious avoidant dynamics, so how criticism tends to come up and what different partners might use criticism for in an anxious avoidant dynamic.
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So this has been something that's been swirling around in my head, as is the case with many of the topics that I speak about on the podcast. And it's come up for me because I think that criticism, if you read any of the literature around attachment, you'll find that criticism is something that both anxious and avoidant leaning people will deploy as a strategy at various points in time to try and get a need met. And I think that as a broader point, if you're familiar with my work and my approach, you'll know that even these ostensibly unhealthy or problem behaviours, if we were to call them that, they're all ultimately trying to meet a need, they're trying to protect us against something, they're trying to achieve an end. And so looking at criticism through this lens of what am I trying to achieve when I criticise my partner? Whether that's inwardly, whether it's just our inner voice noticing the deficiencies of our partner and feeling very judgmental, or whether it's outward criticism and it's something that we are using to try and elicit a response or change or engagement in a partner getting really curious
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around.
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Okay, what's driving that? What is this really about for me? So that we can create a little space, create greater awareness and ultimately create the possibility of using a healthier strategy that's more conducive to a secure relationship and is much more likely to get whatever the underlying need is met than just being critical of our partner. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we dive into that, a couple of quick announcements.
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The first being I'm really, really excited to share that applications are now open for my Homecoming Mastermind. So I haven't spoken very much about this programme, but it is the most intimate way to work with me. It's a small group, mastermind. It runs for six months. I've been running the current Cohort since January and it has exceeded my expectations in every way.
0:03:03.50 → 0:03:39.32
It is a beautiful, beautiful group. We meet weekly and we have coaching calls. We talk about most everything you could imagine from relationships, relationship with self fears, insecurities, desires. We really cover the full spectrum. And it has been so very humbling to watch not only the breakthroughs and the transformations, but the way that the women in the group relate to one another and support one another and cheer each other on hold each other, in our tears and in our tender moments.
0:03:39.43 → 0:04:11.85
It has been incredibly healing, not only for the people that I've been guiding through the group, but for me as well. It's something that I look forward to every week. I will be starting another round of Homecoming in July and I am accepting applications for that now. It is by application only, just because it is such a small group and I want to make sure that we're a good fit on both sides. But if you are someone who is not brand new to this work, it's not really suited for someone who is just dipping a toe in.
0:04:11.97 → 0:05:15.70
If you're someone who's been doing this kind of work for a while and you probably have a lot of the self awareness and the intellectual stuff down pat, that maybe you're looking for a way to get to that. Next level of inner freedom and peace and worth and joy and liberation that can really only come with embodying and integrating all of the knowledge and all of the learnings. I would love to have you apply for Homecoming. All of the details of that are in the show notes or you can go directly to my website and if you have any questions on that one, once you've read through the registration page, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram or you can reach out to my team at support@stephanierigue.com. Okay, the second quick announcement is just to share the featured review, as always, and this one is stephanie's podcast and Higher Love course have helped me immensely.
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I started listening a couple of months before leaving my toxic, anxious avoidant relationship and used the tools from her work to get me through that hard time setting goals for the future and navigating putting myself out there again, I cannot recommend her highly enough. Thank you so much for that beautiful review. I really appreciate it and I'm so glad that you've found that empowerment through the podcast and Higher Love. If that was your review, please send an email to podcast@stephanierig.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my Master classes. Okay, all of that out of the way.
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Let's talk about criticism in Anxious Avoidant relationships. So, as I said in the intro, when it comes to something like criticism, it's really easy to fall into a pattern of self defence. And as I've often said, and this is a line I got from my therapist giving credit where it's due, if you attack someone, they'll defend themselves. And similarly, if we feel attacked, we will defend ourselves, right? That is fairly predictable and reliable, straightforward.
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And yet oftentimes we feel very justified in defending ourselves in the face of a perceived attack and we feel very frustrated when people defend themselves in the face of our attacks. Right? It is one of those double standards, but I think that we have to dig a little deeper when we notice criticism coming up in our relationships. And I should say at the outset, criticism is so damaging to relationships, it really very quickly erodes the connection. If the overall tone of your relationship is infused with negativity and criticism and nitpicking and blame and judgement, contempt even, there's no real space for genuine love, connection, care, appreciation, because that negativity tends to take up a lot of space and it tends to give rise to more negativity.
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So it's a really very quick downward spiral from that place and it can be hard to get out of. I think a lot of the time, when we're in a bit of a rut and maybe we're both feeling critical of each other, or one person's feeling very critical and the other is withdrawing or turning away from that, it can feel really risky to stop criticising. And this probably leads me into the discussion of how anxious attachment, people with an anxious attachment style might use criticism as a strategy and what need are they trying to meet? And I say they, when really it is we, because I've definitely been guilty of this myself, as always, I am not calling any of this out from a place of judgement, but rather of self awareness. So on the anxious attachment side, what role is criticism playing?
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I think what often happens is when we feel like we can't reach someone as an anxiously attached person, and particularly in partnership with an avoidant leaning person, you will often feel like you cannot reach them. Even if you can reach them in moments, you can't reach them all the time. And so the withdrawal of their availability to you feels threatening in some way. And this can be true in a casual setting or in a very long term relationship, but as soon as we feel like we can't reach them, and that leads us to feel some sense of uncertainty or lack of control, then we usually have this escalating, almost ladder of protest behaviours. So we might start with, this will be different for everyone, right?
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It'll just depend on your specific brand of protest behaviours and what you have learned basically in the past has worked for you and what hasn't. We all tend to do this pretty subconsciously, but we have our very well sharpened tools in terms of getting our needs met. So it might be sulking, it might be stomping around, it might be huffing, it might be trying to elicit some sort of what's wrong so that we can then let someone know that they've upset us in some way. When that doesn't work, we might escalate and the escalation again might look different for different people. But as we sort of climb this ladder, I think criticism comes up as one of the strategies that maybe before criticism we try pleading or blaming or some sort of asking for something in a way that doesn't work, or we tiptoe around it.
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We try to indirectly ask for what we need, but it doesn't quite land. And so then we escalate from there. And by the time we get to criticism, what we're typically doing is I'm in pain, and I want you to be in pain with me so that you know how I feel. Or I'm in pain, and I really need for you to understand how bad you are and agree with me that you are bad so that I feel validated in my pain. And so I might hurl these complaints or criticisms at you, telling you that there's something wrong with you.
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Any normal person would know this, or you always do that, or you never do this, and RA in this quite attacking way. But the undercurrent for the anxious person is not, I am attacking you because I think you are terrible. It's I'm attacking you because I'm terrified that I'm losing you and for some reason, attack emerges as a way to get engagement from you. So if I can connect with you via this escalation in my communication, via criticising you and making you see how you've hurt me, then you'll change and then I'll feel safe again. And this can be really real and really big.
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We can have this feeling of I'm terrified that if you don't see how much you're hurting me, that you won't change. And I don't think we can survive if you don't change. So I need to get you to change. And when I ask nicely, in my mind, this is all very much story, right? If I ask nicely, you don't do what I want and so I have to ask not so nicely or tell not so nicely, try and control in order that we can work our way back to harmony as I see it, and I can feel safe again, right?
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So there's a lot in that. And as I said, it will look different for different people. There'll be different flavours of this, but the undercurrent for the anxious person is I'm trying to criticise you to either get engagement when I feel like you're slipping away, so I might be in an argument and again, I've been guilty of this. Not in my current relationship so much, but definitely in a previous one. If my partner in conflict would leave the room, as he often did, he'd sort of just tap out and storm off and I would just go after him like an animal, right?
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I was so incensed and enraged with the fact that he could leave me in that vulnerable moment where I was trying to express something. It felt so abandoning and uncaring that I would follow him. I would follow him around the house and just hurl the awful criticisms at him so that I could get him to see how bad he was and how much he was hurting me. And spoiler alert, that wasn't very effective and usually led him to withdraw further or if he reached some sort of breaking point to start hurling criticisms back at me. But that was really I can look at it now with clear vision and say I was just in this state of total panic that if he was unable to engage with what I was telling him he was doing wrong, and if he continued to invalidate that, then it would go on forever, and my pain would go on forever.
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And that terrified me. So I used criticism as a way to try and get that message across, to try and really convey the magnitude and the gravity of the pain that I was in. But again, not a very effective strategy because as soon as we throw those hand grenades, people duck for cover, right? It's just that defensiveness really inhibits any ability to receive the underlying substance of the message or the yearning or the desire or the fear underneath it. The vulnerability just gets cased in attack and venom and all of this stuff that really inhibits the connection that we so desire.
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So that's what it tends to look like and be driven by. On the anxious side, on the avoidant side, criticism is a little different, but it's definitely there. And I think that in my observation, of course, avoidant detachment is not my personal experience. So I am speaking from an observer point of view of people I've been in relationship with and worked with. I think that the criticism tends to be either a reaction against feeling controlled.
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So if you're feeling like someone's trying to control you, you might notice a real criticism of them and feeling very judgmental of them, really disliking them, almost feeling kind of repulsed by them and feeling critical of everything they do and say and represent. It's like you just feel this really visceral kind of disgust response towards them and can feel very critical about oftentimes quite banal things or quite arbitrary things. So that can be kind of a direct reaction to feeling controlled by them or feeling smothered, feeling suffocated, or it can be a little less direct and can just be sort of part of a broader subconscious distancing strategy. And basically that is a strategy that's going to go about collecting all the evidence as to why the relationship isn't right, why it's not a good relationship, why it's not a good idea. And so you might notice yourself becoming very NIT picky or critical or blaming of just all of these little things, right?
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As I said, it's less likely to be a big outburst of criticism that's in a heated moment and it might show up more as an internal voice of doubt. So feeling, as I said, quite critical towards your partner, just all of the things that they do, the things that they like, personality traits, you might start to find those things really unattractive and feel quite judgmental of all of the things that your partner does. You might find yourself very frustrated if they're not doing things right or in the right way or the way that you think would be best. It's sort of like this sense of the ways in which we're different. My brain takes as proof that we are not a good fit because I feel very protective of my way.
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And so to the extent that you are different to me, I take that as evidence that you are less than and use that to support my protector story that this relationship is not right and kind of push you away using that criticism. So as we can see, they come up in different ways. Right. The anxious criticism and it's kind of emblematic of the broader dynamic there. The anxious criticism tends to be frantic and panicked and ultimately designed to get connection in this really survival driven way of I am this last resort thing of I need to get you to hear me.
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So I'm escalating and I'm going to be critical of you. Whereas the avoidant flavour of criticism tends to be a little bit more under the surface and it tends to be around doubt and uncertainty and creating that distance or disconnection trying to find reasons and evidence that would support our safety strategy. If I need to go back to my aloneness now and I'm justified in doing that and that will be the best thing for me because this person is deficient or not right for me or bad or imperfect in all of these ways and here's all of my evidence to support that. Right, okay, so what do we do with all of that? I think, as always, it comes back to this thing of there's no quick solution.
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It's not a switch we can flip off. These protective strategies are with us for a reason and they've served a purpose and we can see the ways in which they are blocking us from getting what we truly desire and maybe blocking us from experiencing safe, loving, healthy, thriving relationships. I think a really good first step. And if you were to kind of take away an action item from today's conversation, if this is something that you notice in yourself is the next time you feel the urge to be critical of your partner, go, okay, what am I trying to achieve with this? Am I trying to control my partner?
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Am I feeling out of control and am I trying to get back to control? Am I feeling like I can't reach my partner, like they're slipping away from me? Am I feeling really hurt? And I want my partner to either feel that hurt as well or for them to know how hurt I am. And the only way I feel like I can do that, that I'll be taken seriously, is by getting really escalated.
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Am I trying to spot doubts or imperfections in my partner so as to justify my withdrawal as a way to protect my fear? Of vulnerability and intimacy, all of these things. There's a lot in this. And having this lens of curiosity slowing down, rather than taking the surface thing, the surface urge or thought or feeling as true and meaning something about our relationship or our partner, can we instead get curious and create a bit of space and go, okay, what am I afraid would happen if I didn't do this thing? What am I afraid would happen if I wasn't critical or if I didn't say that or do that?
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I think that question often leads us to really powerful insights about the purpose that that behaviour is serving in our relationship. And then once we have a little more clarity around, okay, this is what that's actually about for me, then we can start to create choice and we can start to consider what an alternative might look like. Right? So, to give an example on the anxious side, if I'm using criticism as a way to convey how upset I am and how scared I am, can I instead tell you that I'm scared? Can I say to you, I don't want to criticise you, but at the same time I need you to know how important this is to me.
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And it's really frightening for me when I feel like I can't reach you or that you're not hearing me because this thing feels so big inside me and I don't know what to do with that. And I really need to know that you hear me. Can you tell me that you hear me? Or something? Right?
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But can we say the vulnerable thing rather than the aggressive thing? Because again, attack, defend. That can be your other key takeaway from today's episode. If I attack, they'll defend. And the same goes both ways, right?
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So, knowing that, what could I do instead? What would a non attacking version of this feeling look and sound like? And just try it and allow yourself to be in the messiness of it. Right. I personally love the example I just gave.
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I love that kind of strategy because all it's doing is basically narrating what's going on inside you rather than acting on the thing. So rather than saying, you never do this, we can say, I notice myself wanting to attack you and I really don't want to do that. But here's what I'm feeling and not saying I'm feeling like you never do this and I'm feeling like you're a terrible partner. No, I'm feeling scared, I'm feeling lonely, I'm feeling really worried that you don't hear me or understand me. Right.
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And taking responsibility for the stories, sharing vulnerably, what the feelings are, and then waiting through that mess together and finding a way to meet in the middle and find a solution. Again, the more we dig our heels in and commit to needing to find a good guy and a bad guy and right and wrong, we stay in that really oppositional, antagonistic energy, and nothing good comes from that. We don't get the connection that we all so deeply want when we're in that place. I really hope that this conversation has been interesting to you and that it's been helpful. If you've enjoyed this episode, it'd be so grateful if you could leave a five star rating if you're on Spotify or a written review if you're listening on Apple podcasts.
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But otherwise, I look forward to seeing you later this week for our Q and A episode. Thanks so much, guys. Take care.
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Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg.com or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.