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You read their three-word reply again, looking for the tone in it, and what makes this one confusing is that the weekend was good. Saturday night, you talked for two hours about things you hadn't talked about in months. Sunday, they were warm. By Monday evening, they're in the shed or on the laptop or answering you in three words, and nothing happened in between. You've checked. You've been back over the whole weekend twice, looking for the moment it turned, and there isn't one. So your mind offers the explanation it always offers, which is that they've had time to think and they've gone off you. You're not doing anything wrong. There's a mechanism underneath what they're doing that may have nothing at all to do with going off you. And once you see it, a Monday evening like that one can read very differently. If any of that sounds familiar, you're not broken. You're not too much. Your nervous system may be doing exactly what it learned to do long before this relationship began. I'm Dr Narelle Duncan, a Clinical Psychologist drawing on 30 years of helping people understand themselves. This is Steady and Connected. Each episode, I'll bring you the science, the tools, and the clarity to understand what may be happening when anxiety shows up in love, and what you might do with that understanding. Let's get steady and connected. Last time, we looked at how you might say something about your own pattern out loud. Today, we go the other way and look at how to read theirs, what withdrawal after closeness actually can be, why its timing makes it so easy to misread, what it may be doing for the person doing it, and one thing you might hold onto on a Monday evening that asks nothing of them at all. Let's start with the word because it's doing a lot of work, and not all of that work is helpful. Avoidant describes a pattern. It doesn't describe a person, and it isn't a diagnosis. You can't diagnose someone from across a kitchen table, and neither can I from here, and I'd want to say that before we go any further. What we can talk about is a way of regulating closeness that's common enough to have a name. Here's the shape of it. Some nervous systems learned early that closeness came with a cost. Not usually a dramatic cost, more often a small and repeated one. A parent who was warm when things were easy and less available when things were hard. A household where needing something was met with impatience. A system that learns that tends to arrive at a workable solution, which is to keep some distance in reserve and to take closeness in measured amounts. An anxious system learned something different. It learned that closeness may be available if you reach hard enough for it, so it reaches. Neither of those is a defect, and neither of them was necessarily chosen. They're both adaptations made early by nervous systems doing the best available thing with the information they had. What matters for a Monday evening is the consequence. Two people can share the same good Saturday, and their systems can do opposite things with it afterwards. One system can file it as a reason to come closer. The other can file it as a reason to steady by oneself. The same evening, two different instructions. So here's what it can look like from where you're sitting The good day, then the flat day. The closeness comes first, and the distance follows it, often within a day or two. The order is the tell The sudden busy. A project appears. The garage needs sorting. Work gets described as unusually full at the moment. None of that is necessarily untrue, and the timing of it is what's worth noticing. The three-word replies. Not cold exactly, more like efficient. Information with nothing around it. The physical distance. They're still in the room, and they're at the other end of the couch or facing the television or already half standing. The deflected question. You ask whether everything's all right and you get, "Yeah, fine, just tired." Which may be entirely accurate and may still not be the whole answer. The return you weren't expecting. Three days later, they're warm again with no reference to any of it, as though none of it had been going on. This is often the one that's hardest to hold because it leaves nothing to resolve and nothing for you to point at. If any of those landed, it's worth taking notice of, and here's what recognizing them doesn't tell you. It doesn't tell you that this is what's happening in your relationship. People go quiet for a great many reasons, and some of those reasons are about work or health or something they haven't found the words for yet. Notice what lands and notice what doesn't. Now the mechanism, and it's the part that can change how a Monday evening reads. Closeness raises arousal in the nervous system, not only in yours, in theirs as well. A long conversation, a good night, a moment where something honest got said, all of that registers in the body as a significant event, and a body has to come down from a significant event. Here's where the two of you may differ. Your system may tend to come down from closeness by staying near it. Proximity is what can settle you. So after a good weekend, you want more contact, not less. Their system may come down by getting some room. Distance is what might settle them. So the withdrawal may not be a retreat from you at all. It can be a recovery from the intensity, and from the outside, it can look like a retreat from you. It can be hard to tell the difference just by watching. There's a second piece. For a system that learned closeness carries a cost, a good weekend can register as exposure. Something might have been said on Saturday that can't be unsaid. More is known about them now than was known on Friday. That doesn't land as a gift for every nervous system, and stepping back can be the system checking that it still has some room of its own, which produces the timing that confuses almost everyone. The closer the weekend, the more likely the Monday distance for an avoidant pattern. It isn't in spite of the good time. It can be because of it. If you'd like to know more on how your own system tends to come down from closeness, the free quiz at steadyandconnected.com.au is a good place to start. It's for self-reflection, not a clinical assessment, and your results come to your inbox with a short email series that goes deeper on what they mean for you. It's worth a moment on why this particular pattern is so easy to read as a verdict, because that reading is where most of the difficulty tends to live. Withdrawal is silent. It gives you nothing to work with. If someone tells you they're upset, you have information, and information is workable. What you have instead is an absence, and an absence gets filled by whatever explanation is nearest, and the nearest one is usually the one you've had the longest. There's something else in it. Distance that follows closeness can be harder to sit with than ordinary distance because it arrives just after you went further out than usual. On Saturday, you said the thing. By Monday, the ground you said it on seems to have moved. It's understandable that a system reads that as a lesson about what happens when you reach. And then the layer underneath, which is the one that can be uncomfortable, somewhere in the sequence a thought forms, and the thought is about you, that you were too much on Saturday, that you said one thing too many. Most people don't say that part out loud, and it may be doing some more work than the withdrawal itself. That thought may be misguided, and not because you're above criticism, because the sequence doesn't support it. This pattern tends to follow closeness regardless of how the closeness went. A perfect Saturday can produce the same distant Monday. So let's go back to that three-word reply and walk it through. Saturday night, two hours of talking. For your system, that's a deposit. For theirs, it's a significant event that the body now has to come down from. Sunday warmth, both systems still up, both of you still in it. Monday, the distance, their system reaching for the thing that settles it, which happens to be the thing that unsettles yours. And the reply that came back in three words, which may not be a message about you at all. It may be a message from a system running low on room. The part you couldn't find, the moment it turned, isn't there because there wasn't one. You were looking for an event, and what happened was a recovery. So what is your system actually asking for on a Monday evening? It looks like it's asking for them to come back. Underneath that, it may actually be asking for something smaller, which is a reading it can trust. The difficulty here isn't only the distance. A good deal of it is not knowing what the distance means and having to decide alone on incomplete information in the evening while it's still happening. That's a great deal to ask of someone Which is why a second reading is worth having ready in advance. Not because a second reading is guaranteed to be the right one, because when only one explanation is available, your system will use it, and the one that's always available is the oldest one. Having a second reading doesn't remove the discomfort. It can slow the sequence down enough that you're choosing what to do rather than being carried, and that gap is where most of the work of these episodes happen. So here's the one thing for this episode, and it happens entirely inside your own head. When you notice the distance, say two sentences to yourself. The first one names what your system is doing."My system reads distance as loss." The second one names theirs, and it's held loosely."Their system may be coming down from closeness." That's the whole practice. You're not saying it to them. You're not testing whether it's true. You're putting a second explanation next to the first familiar old one, so the first one isn't the only one in the room. This is a gentle experiment with no right result. Some evenings, the second sentence will land, and the discomfort may drop by half. Other evenings it won't, and that's information rather than failure. And a note on scope, because it matters here. This is a way of reading a pattern. It isn't a way of managing your partner, and if the distance between you is constant rather than occasional, or if anything about it doesn't feel safe, that's worth taking to someone who can sit with both of you. If you'd like help building your own two sentences, I've made you a

one-page guide called Two Speeds: 14:46

What Your System Does With Closeness and What Theirs Might Be Doing, and the two lines you'd say to yourself. It's at go.steadyandconnected.com.au/two-speeds. Free and yours to keep. There's a version of all this where the distance gets announced instead of just appearing. Four words said out loud, "I need some space." Most people find that harder to sit with than the silence, not easier, and there's a reason for that too. That's where we're going next time. And one more thing before I go, understanding the pattern is where this starts. What tends to shift it is doing something with the understanding, and not once, repeatedly, in the ordinary moments where it actually runs. That's what I built the workbooks for, three of them and a start here guide, so what you learn here gets put into practice. They're at steadyandconnected.com.au. That's everything for this episode. If today resonated, follow Steady and Connected wherever you listen so the next episode lands automatically. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, share it with them. If you'd like to know which attachment pattern is most active for you, take the free five-minute quiz at steadyandconnected.com.au. Your results come straight to your inbox, along with a short email series that goes deeper on what they mean for you. If today's conversation has brought up anything you need support with, please reach out. Lifeline is available 24/7 on 13 11 14. And if you're ready to explore this work more personally, I offer individual telehealth sessions at getlifedirection.com. I'm Dr Narelle Duncan, Clinical Psychologist. Take good care of yourself, and I'll see you in the next episode.