10 Ways to Help Avoidant Partners Develop Empathy

Believe it or not, most people with avoidant attachment styles want to please their relationship partners. People often mistake low levels of empathy for a lack of care. But avoidant attachment means people are avoidant of negative emotional states, not that they are avoidant of people. You know they want to be in relationships—why else would so many relationship partners complain about them?

At the start, it is also important to distinguish care from empathy. Care is a mental attitude. I know many people who are highly avoidant and who also are the most caring people in the world. They are the first to volunteer at the homeless shelter, will work tirelessly for you, and will give you the shirts off of their backs. Because of this, many caring avoidants might look like they have secure attachment styles when you first meet them. Most don’t fit the stereotype of the hard-charging ruthless executive.

You like their charm, their interest in you, and their stable presentation. It isn’t until they experience strong emotions that you find them backing away or seeming to be stoic or checked out. They have a hard time “holding” negative emotions or those that entail being highly vulnerable (like love). They have a hard time holding emotions because their parents didn’t “hold” their emotions when they were little.

People learn about emotions—how to experience, label, and understand them—through their early childhood relationships with parents. When the child of a securely attached parent falls and skins his knee, the first thing he does, before he even starts crying, is look at his parent’s face. The secure parent is empathetic and feels the child’s pain. So, the child finds an expression of pain mirrored on the parent’s face along with a verbalization, "Ow!” He then immediately starts crying. He knows that the parent has captured (literally felt) his pain, understood it, and reflected it back to him. The secure parent then holds him as he cries. And this is the basis of empathy; somebody sees into me to the extent that they can feel my experience, reflect it back to me, and hold (tolerate) my painful emotion as long as it takes while they comfort me.

But children who end up being avoidant adults may not get this. When they fall down and skin their knee, the avoidant parent, not wanting a crying child on their hands, may keep a neutral or positive facial expression (not wanting to signal to the child distress). They will not hold the child’s pained emotion, and will instinctually invalidate it with a statement like, “You’re fine,” “Get up,” “It’s not that bad,” “Boys don’t cry,” “Suck it up, buttercup!” This is not empathy. The parent refuses to see into the child, the child cannot get a mirroring facial expression, the parent does not “hold” the child’s distress and does not offer comfort.

So, what can a child do in this situation? They can deny their own emotions ("I guess I’m not hurt"), not feel their pain ("I’m fine"), and deny a need for comfort. In other words, they can learn to not have empathy; first for themselves and later for others. Not being able to acknowledge or “hold” their own pain or ask for comfort, they struggle to see/feel the pain of others, cannot hold others’ negative emotions, and will often withhold comfort or support when needed.

But if it is learned, it can be unlearned. And here are 10 steps you can take to help your avoidant partner:

1. Realize that not having a lot of empathy is not their fault. It is something that happened to them. They had to suck it up and be stoic because there would be no comfort when they were hurt and in need. Because they had to turn the “need circuit” off in themselves, they had to turn it off for others. In order to have more compassion for others, they would first need to feel, accept, and validate their own pain. Share this statement with them.
2. Remember that even if they are low on empathy, they can be high on caring. They will try to give you what you want if you are patient enough to hold your anger and teach them. The adult in front of you has a misunderstood child inside of them. You can set boundaries but don’t attack the traumatized child.
3. If you are already too wounded prior to reading this to have empathy for your non-empathic partner, or if you believe you should not have to teach another adult empathy, then maybe you should walk away.
4. Practice having your partner read your facial expressions and emotions and give them feedback on their accuracy along with emotion-word vocabulary.
5. Try demonstrating empathic thinking out loud by saying something like: “I imagine that you are feeling (or thinking)…. about what just happened.” This is also known as “mentalizing.”
6. Give them a trigger warning when you are going to introduce potentially distressing information. Say something like, “I need to talk to you about something that is bothering me, and I want to ask you to listen and hear me out and wait to respond until I am finished.”
7. Suggest that they experience part of their emotion physically so that they can “hold” it in their body while they sit still and listen. Suggest that they take the feeling in their head, neck, or torso that comes to them as you are talking, move the sensation down lower in their body (using slow deep breathing), and hold it in their body as an uncomfortable physical state… all of this so that they can keep their mind still while you speak.
8. Ask them to run a mental simulation of how you or other people will respond to them emotionally before they speak or act.
9. Show them how to validate someone’s feelings (“I understand how you were impacted by what I said”) without defending yourself (you don’t need to add that you didn’t do anything wrong). Don’t defend yourself when trying to teach someone empathy.
10. Show them how to be gentle with themselves and to keep the other person’s emotions in mind (not their own defenses) as they offer verbal and/or physical (if appropriate) comfort.

Having empathy for your avoidant partner’s anxious trepidation about having this conversation, try sharing this post with them before initiating a face-to-face practice session.