Healing After Loving a Dismissive Avoidant

What is there left to say after you’ve healed from a relationship with a dismissive-avoidant partner—after you finally realise that they were more unhealed than you?

Honestly, not much.

The pain they cause is indescribable. I carried it with me for decades after mine.

For so long, I thought he was independent, strong, untouchable. But the truth was, he wasn’t running from me—he was running from his wounds. He loved me, but he didn’t have the capacity to hold that love. He didn’t have the healing, the courage, or the tools. He had to find someone “safe,” someone who wouldn’t stir his soul too deeply - because for a DA loving truly, madly, deeply - that's just far too scary.

It’s the same story I see repeated in so many unhappy relationships around me: people carrying their unhealed wounds into adulthood, wondering why they can’t seem to be happy.

This morning, I heard Perrie Edwards’ new song on the radio, and the lyric “if he wanted to, he would” made me smile.

Simple. True. Piercing.

Avoidant partners often cloak themselves in a story of independence or strength, but the reality is much sadder: they avoid love because it exposes the parts of themselves they’ve spent a lifetime hiding from.

Some of us, the ones with deep hearts, high emotional intelligence, and an openness to real love, collide with them almost like chemistry experiments gone wrong—explosions that exist to wake them up.

The tragedy is, avoidants can spend years, even decades, running from the mirror we hold up to them. And so, we are left with no choice but to let go.

Because yes—you know the love was real. You know the soul connection was there. But unless they are willing to step into therapy and face themselves, there is nothing you can do but heal yourself and move on.

The Knock-On Effect of Healing

What’s strange, though, is how healing from that kind of love shapes the rest of your life. It doesn’t just change you romantically—it changes everything.

I now deal with emotionally repressed family members differently. I navigate work, writing, and even conflict with more clarity. Why? Because I let go of what I can’t control.

I’ve learned this: some people are simply incapable of seeing themselves clearly. They will go on accumulating mistakes, making choices from their wounds, and spinning lies to themselves. That’s their path. That’s their responsibility. It’s no longer mine to fix.

So I let them go—without malice, without regret.

What Healing Really Means

For me, healing has looked like:

• Learning to let go of what I can’t control.

• Allowing people to come to me, instead of chasing.

• Doing things on my own—moving house, traveling, making big decisions—without reference to anyone else.

• Loving my own company.

• Sitting with uncomfortable pain until it shapes me instead of destroys me.

  
  

At the end of the day, no one is coming to save us. Only we can do that. But first, we have to be willing to see ourselves clearly.

The anxious partner learns this earlier, because the pain is immediate and raw. But for the avoidant? Their reckoning is delayed. The sting comes much, much later—sometimes decades later—when they finally realise what they’ve done.

They pushed away real love and built a life based on “safety,” but really, it was a lie.

A big, enormous, gargantuan, devastating lie.

And while it might protect them in the short term, it eventually burns them to the core.

The Final Truth

Healing from a dismissive-avoidant relationship is brutal. But it gives you clarity:

• You cannot heal for them.

• You cannot force them to see themselves.

• You cannot wait for their capacity to grow.

  
  

What you can do is heal yourself. Let go. Build a life rooted in your own truth.

And when you do—you’ll find freedom, self-respect, and maybe even peace.

Because in the end, their journey is theirs. And yours? Yours is about becoming whole again.

TR