How the Avoidant Experiences Revulsion and Engulfment.

If your core wound is engulfment and this is triggered by intimacy, how are you to manage contact with others? The Fearful Avoidant is able to do this by using their Internal Switch - as soon as they feel smothered and it becomes unbearable, they can switch to the anxious position where the engulfment fear is no longer active. This option is not available to the Dismissive Avoidant. They have no reprieve from revulsion. When engulfment is triggered for them, they are completely overwhelmed by it, it feels excruciating, the body feels poisoned by it and persecuted.

This torment feels as if it can be provoked at any time and the avoidant is often unaware of what prompts it. They are at its mercy. They may feel connected and loving towards a partner, and then suddenly they feel intense disgust for their beloved. Revulsion and contempt overpower them and they know they must immediately disengage and remove themselves from intimacy.

The feeling is so intense that it demands instant action. The avoidant becomes familiar with this emotion, as do their partners. Partners of avoidants often feel deep despair as they see that they thing they crave; close and loving contact, is the reason their avoidant partner initiates deactivation strategies and cuts off from them.

Often the avoidant is completely unable to explain what emotions they are experiencing as the feelings are so powerful and negative. What partner wants to hear that when engulfment is triggered, the avoidant feels disgust, repulsion, hate, contempt and loathing towards them? Yet, this is what is felt, this is what is experienced, and if the avoidant is to heal this, they have to be able to process these feelings and work through them.

Where have these feelings come from? This is the parentification wound from childhood that the avoidant experiences. The avoidant has been forced in childhood to become self-reliant. No-one is coming for the avoidant child. No-one is going to soothe them and help them understand their own emotions. In a family system where a child develops dismissive avoidant attachment, there is often a parent who needs regulation. The parent/child dynamic is turned on its head, and the child becomes a faux-parent. The child soothes the parent and reassures them. The child develops hyper-attunement towards the adult, but is cut off from their own emotional needs. This is enmeshment, it is emotional incest, and it leads to a child being horribly burdened by the dysregulation of an adult.

As an adult in relationships, this formerly parentified child initially performs the role of a faux-parent. They offer reassurance, they give co-regulation, they use their ability to hyper-attune to their partner. Waiting though, waiting patiently, is the spectre of having been used and engulfed by a parent's needs in childhood, and this spectre will at some key point in the relationship, be activated.

In a moment, the horror of engulfment is triggered. Perhaps the partner has used a word that reminds the avoidant of what a parent once said, perhaps a request for reassurance feels coercive to the avoidant, something minor happens, and the avoidant is flooded with the full force of disgust and rage and horror of having been a small child at the behest of a selfish and unsupportive parent.

The avoidant feels completely unable to cope with the strength of these feelings, and must withdraw. This is the pattern and it is fated to repeat indefinitely until the avoidant begins to process the engulfment they have experienced as a child.

How to do this work? It demands a very robust working alliance with a professional. If you are an avoidant, find a therapist who can hold you, who can cope with how much you will reject them when you feel your engulfment surfacing. You will need someone who understands that the revulsion is not personal and will be able to offer co-regulation to you when you are experiencing the overwhelm. The disgust needs out, it needs to be expessed in the working alliance so that you can process it, purge it if you will. It is a wall between you and love, and you will need to dismantle it.

The vulnerability you will experience in doing this feels toxic and frightening, it feels terrible to feel your own weakness and fragility and connect with your own need, yet this is the work, this is what will allow you to be present in relationships and feel safe enough to stay connected to another person through the overwhelm of disgust and revulsion.

Remember while you work through this, that this is an old wound, it isn't truly happening in the present. Your therapist will not engulf you and harm you, they are not the enemy, resist if you can the urge to lash out at them as you feel vulnerable. They are on your side. You are safe, safe even when you feel exposed and fragile, you are supported, and support will not diminish you, it will truly help you.