Why Smart, Capable Women Freeze When Things Get Close
It Always Starts Subtle: The Moment You Pull Back Without Noticing
A client once told me, “I want that feeling of closeness, of intimacy, but when someone actually shows up for me, my stomach drops and I freeze.”
She wasn’t dramatic. She wasn’t unhealthy. She wasn’t unhealed.
She was a high-performing, emotionally intelligent woman—someone who could run a business, raise a family, handle crisis with calm, and hold everyone else together.
But intimacy? No way—her body treated it like a threat.
The more I listened, the more familiar her story felt—not because I’d heard it before, but because I had lived parts of it myself.
For years after my divorce, I could speak on stage about emotional mastery, and then the minute someone tried to get close to me romantically, every old protection strategy lit up like a dashboard.
I would pull away, shut down, over-explain, overwork, apologize, disappear.
We don’t do this because we’re broken. We do it because our nervous system learned “connection = danger” long before we learned language.
This is the part most high-performing women never realize. This is the part shadow work makes impossible to ignore.
Shadow Work Isn’t About “Fixing” You — It’s About Seeing Who’s Actually Running the Show
When a woman tells me she struggles to stay open or to get too close, here’s what I know instantly—she’s not being led by the adult version of herself.
She’s being led by:
the Shadow Child who learned to please or disappear.
the Protector who controls, shuts down, or stays hyper-independent.
and the Future Self she hasn’t fully grown into yet.
These parts aren’t enemies. They’re survival strategies frozen in time.
And, until you bring them into the light, they operate unconsciously—especially inside intimate relationships.
“Why is he texting me again?” → Protector
“What if he leaves?” → Shadow Child
“I don’t need anyone.” → Protector
“Why can’t I feel anything?” → Freeze response
Most women think this is just their personality. It’s not. It’s patterning.
When High Performance Becomes Emotional Armor
The hard truth is that many high-achieving women become exceptionally good at career, crisis management, leadership, and independence because those domains are emotionally predictable.
They’re structured.
They’re controllable.
They don’t require vulnerability.
Emotional intimacy, on the other hand, asks for something different:
slowness
presence
receiving
truth-telling
emotional honesty
letting someone see where you haven’t healed
These are the exact capacities we never learned how to do safely.
In other words you can be successful, brilliant, accomplished—and still deeply uncomfortable being held.
Not because you don’t want connection, but because your nervous system doesn’t recognize it yet as being safe.
This is where the anxious–avoidant loop begins.
The Anxious–Avoidant Loop Has Nothing to Do With “Neediness”
The biggest misconception I see is that people think anxious women cling, avoidant women shut down, and that’s that.
No.
Most high-performing women carry both—just on different days, under different stress loads, with different partners.
Shadow work reveals what’s underneath:
Anxiety = “Don’t leave me.”
Avoidance = “Don’t see me.”
Both are fear responses.
Both are attempts at self-protection.
Both get activated when intimacy hits the parts of you you’ve never slowed down long enough to feel.
And, both dissolve when the nervous system has enough safety to stop bracing for impact.
A Story from My Own Journey: When “Strength” Becomes a Disguise
After my marriage ended years ago, I told myself I was confident, strong, and emotionally-attuned.
And I was.
But underneath the strength lived an unspoken truth: I didn’t trust myself to choose a partner who was actually safe.
So, my body kept me distant.
I stayed busy.
I stayed focused.
I stayed “fine.”
But every time someone genuinely good showed up, I felt that familiar tightening in my chest—the subtle freeze, the slight urge to retreat, the internal voice whispering, Not yet. Not safe.
That’s when I finally understood that my freedom wasn’t going to come from pulling away and hiding.
It was going to come from re-patterning my nervous system and integrating the parts of me I had abandoned.
That was the turning point. Not a grand epiphany—just a quiet moment of truth:
I couldn’t keep outsourcing my healing to time.
I had to participate in my own becoming.
Emotional Intimacy Isn’t Mastered — It’s Relearned
Healing the anxious–avoidant loop is less about forcing yourself to stay open and more about creating internal conditions where openness doesn’t feel like a threat.
Three things that shift women the fastest:
1. Nervous System Re-Patterning
Without regulation, every relationship feels like walking into a room with the lights off. Your body will always react faster than your mind.
2. Shadow Work
You can’t change patterns you aren’t aware of and you can’t ignore your wounds once you become aware of them. Integration gives you back your full range of emotional truth.
3. Identity Recalibration
The little version of you who created these patterns isn’t the version of you who will need to come online in order to sustain a healthy relationship.
If This Story Felt Familiar, Here’s Your Next Step
Get access to my free 4-Week Nervous System Training Blueprint and start re-patterning your nervous system for safety so your body stops bracing against the very connection you say you want.
You’ll immediately receive a downloadable pdf with the Anxiety Release Process to help you restore regulation, build resilience, and expand your energetic capacity before you dive into deeper inner work.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Author Bio:
Tris Thorp is a master coach with 20+ years of experience, an international best-selling author, speaker, and emotional healing expert who helps high-performing women heal the anxious–avoidant loop through shadow work and subconscious reprogramming.