Have you ever found yourself pulling away from someone without entirely understanding why? Maybe a friendship starts to grow closer, and you suddenly become less available. A promising relationship reaches the point where commitment becomes possible, and you find reasons why the other person isn't right for you. Or maybe someone tries to help when you're struggling, but instead of letting them in, you retreat.
Sometimes pushing someone away is a considered, appropriate decision because some relationships are unhealthy or simply no longer right for us. But sometimes it becomes a default pattern that appears across different relationships, including ones that could be good for you. You repeatedly create distance from people you actually like or love; you might recognise what you're doing while you're doing it and still do it anyway, then feel regret or loneliness, all while wondering why relationships never seem to work out.
If you've found yourself asking, 'Why do I push people away?', there isn't one universal explanation, so stop looking for one (if you are). Understanding your particular reason is far more useful than attaching a label to yourself.
Because pushing people away is a pattern you learned early in life
Perhaps those who raised you experienced rejection or difficult relationships, and you repeated some of those patterns. When you're young, you don't have much basis for judging whether the relationships around you are healthy. What you experience can become what you learn to expect and later repeat.
This doesn't mean childhood determines your adult relationships, but it does mean some of the rules you learned about closeness and dependence may never have been properly reconsidered as you entered adulthood.
Because your mind-body system is trying to protect you from a perceived threat
Something happening in the present may resemble something painful or threatening from your past, even when the circumstances aren't actually the same. If you were badly hurt in a relationship before, for example, signs of increasing closeness can trigger a protective response. You may withdraw emotionally and start looking for reasons why the relationship won't work.
Pushing someone away reduces the immediate sense of danger, but it can cost you the relationship you want.
Because you expect the relationship to end anyway
Low self-esteem can contribute to a belief that someone will eventually lose interest and reject you as not being good enough. Rather than wait for what feels inevitable, you bring the ending forward yourself. There is a perverse logic to it: rejection can feel easier to bear when you control when and how it happens. If you leave first or make the relationship impossible, you don't have to wait for the other person to decide.
The protection comes at a price, though. You may repeatedly create the outcome you feared and then use what happened as further evidence that relationships don't work for you. This is a vicious cycle therapists see often.
Because you have competing priorities that you haven't properly examined
You may believe, for example, that your career has to come first and assume that serious relationships and career progression cannot successfully coexist. That assumption may have been with you for years without ever being properly challenged.
Consequently, when a relationship begins requiring more compromise or commitment, you create distance. From your perspective, you are protecting something important, without necessarily establishing whether the threat to your career actually exists.
Similar assumptions can operate around independence, friendships, family responsibilities and lifestyle. Sometimes we aren't choosing between two incompatible priorities at all, but acting as though they are incompatible.
Because you already have too much going on
Work, family responsibilities, financial pressure or other demands can make another person's needs feel like one demand too many. Pushing people away can then become a form of demand management. You may even get an immediate benefit, such as one less conversation to have or one less person expecting something from you.
The danger comes when reducing relationships becomes your standard response to feeling overloaded. Instead of addressing whatever has made life unmanageable, you remove people from it, including people who might actually be able to lighten your load.
Because the real person is competing with an imaginary one
You may be waiting for the 'right person' and have a surprisingly detailed idea of who that person will be. The difficulty is that this person doesn't exist outside your imagination. Real partners have faults. They make demands. They occasionally disappoint us. They also have their own needs and priorities.
An imaginary partner has none of these inconveniences. If you remain convinced that somebody better is waiting, pushing away the person in front of you can seem reasonable because it keeps you available for the perfect relationship you expect eventually to find.
Over time, however, it can become worth examining whether your standards are helping you choose relationships well or protecting you from having to commit to an imperfect human being.
Because closeness changes what you have to risk
Some people don't start pushing others away when a relationship is going badly, but do when it's going well. Bear with me on this seemingly self-sabotaging act.
Early dating may feel relatively easy, or a new friendship can be enjoyable. You can spend time with somebody, enjoy their company and remain interested in seeing them again. Then something changes: the relationship becomes important.
You realise you care what this person thinks, and would miss them if they disappeared. Perhaps you're beginning to depend upon them emotionally, or they are seeing parts of you that you don't normally reveal. There is now something to lose.
Creating distance can restore the feeling of independence you had before the relationship became important. But that can produce an uncomfortable contradiction: the more valuable somebody becomes to you, the stronger the urge to protect yourself from losing them.
When do you start pushing people away?
One aspect people want to understand in therapy, once they better understand the ‘why’, is when they start to push people away, because it can be just as revealing.
So, rather than looking only at relationships that have ended, go back to the point at which your behaviour began to change.
- Was it when someone wanted more commitment?
- When they told you how they felt?
- When you realised how much you liked them?
- When they disagreed with you?
- When they needed something from you?
- When you needed something from them?
Perhaps the change happens after sex, during periods of stress, when somebody gets emotionally close or whenever you begin thinking about a shared future. Look at friendships and family relationships as well as romantic ones, as you may discover that the same trigger appears in very different relationships.
The sequence is important. Something happens. You interpret what it means. Your emotional response changes. Then you do something that creates distance. That might mean cancelling plans, taking longer to reply, becoming unusually critical, starting an argument, focusing on the person's faults or convincing yourself that you were never particularly interested in them anyway.
The more precisely you can identify that sequence, the less mysterious your behaviour becomes.
What does pushing people away do for you?
This may sound like an odd question if pushing people away has repeatedly caused problems, but recurring behaviour usually does something for us, at least in the short term.
Perhaps distance reduces anxiety or gives you back a sense of control. Maybe you no longer have to worry about being rejected or accommodating another person's needs. That immediate consequence helps explain why the behaviour survives even when its longer-term consequences are painful.
Consider, therefore, two separate questions: what do I gain immediately by pushing this person away, and what does pushing them away eventually cost me?
Those answers are likely to be very different, such as when a behaviour provides short-term relief while producing long-term loneliness. Recognising both sides makes it easier to understand why simply telling yourself to 'stop pushing people away' probably hasn't worked.
From automatically pushing people away to choosing
The aim isn't to force yourself to become closer to everyone, as that could be just as unhelpful. Some people deserve greater access to your life, while others deserve less. Relationships sometimes need to end, and boundaries are necessary. Deciding to leave a relationship can reflect good judgement rather than avoidance.
The aim is to get yourself into a position where you can choose. When you notice the familiar urge to withdraw, create some space between the feeling and the decision. Ask yourself, ‘What has just happened?’ Try to identify the trigger rather than immediately acting on your response to it. Then ask, ‘What am I expecting will happen if I stay engaged?’ Perhaps you expect rejection or loss of independence, conflict or demands you won't be able to meet. Put the prediction into words.
Now consider: what evidence do I have that this is happening in this relationship? Past experience is relevant, but it isn't automatically evidence about the person standing in front of you.
Then consider the alternative: what happens if I push this person away? Don't restrict your answer to the next hour or the next few days. Think about what repeatedly using this strategy has done to your relationships over several years.
Finally: if I weren't automatically moving away from this person, what would I choose to do next? The answer doesn't have to be stay. It might be to talk honestly about something that is bothering you, such as asking for more time or setting a boundary. You may, of course, decide that the relationship genuinely isn't right for you. The difference is that you have made a decision rather than enacted a familiar response.
Try doing something different before doing something dramatic
When pushing people away becomes an established pattern, the alternative can feel like complete vulnerability: either retreat or throw yourself wholeheartedly into the relationship. The good news is that plenty of options exist between those extremes.
- If your normal response is to disappear for a week, wait before disappearing.
- If you usually decide a relationship is over following an uncomfortable conversation, allow yourself another conversation before deciding.
- If you begin compiling a mental list of everything wrong with somebody once they get close, notice that you're doing it before treating the list as objective evidence.
You can also tell the other person what is happening without disclosing your entire relationship history. Something as straightforward as, 'I've noticed that when I feel under pressure, I tend to withdraw. I don't want to make a decision about us while I'm feeling like this,' creates an alternative to simply disappearing.
Small interruptions are important because they give you information. You discover what happens when you don't follow the established pattern.
You may still decide to walk away
As I say above, learning why you push people away doesn't mean learning to keep everybody close. Understanding yourself better may actually lead you to end some relationships. The difference lies in how you reach the decision.
If you have considered the person in front of you, the relationship you actually have, what you want from it and what continuing it would require, walking away may be entirely appropriate.
But if you repeatedly find yourself withdrawing at similar moments, for similar reasons, with people you later wish you hadn't lost, something else is probably happening. Here, rather than asking only, 'Why do I push people away?', start paying attention to when you do it, what happens immediately beforehand and what pushing them away achieves for you.
Once you can see the pattern as it happens, another possibility becomes available: you can decide whether this is someone you genuinely want to move away from, or whether an old response is making the decision before you've had the chance to make it yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions About Pushing People Away
Why do I push people away when I like them?
You may push someone away precisely because you like them. As a relationship becomes more important, you have more emotionally invested and therefore more to lose. Creating distance can reduce that sense of vulnerability and give you back some control. The important question is whether you genuinely want distance from this person or whether closeness itself has triggered a familiar response.
Why do I push people away when they get close?
Closeness can trigger expectations based on previous relationships or experiences. If being close to someone has previously resulted in rejection, hurt or disappointment, you may respond to a new relationship as though the same thing is going to happen again. Other explanations are possible too, including feeling overloaded, protecting your independence or believing that relationships will interfere with other priorities in your life.
How do I stop pushing people away?
Start by noticing when the urge to create distance appears and what happened immediately beforehand. Then consider what you expect will happen if you remain engaged and whether there is evidence that this is actually happening in your current relationship. The aim isn't automatically to stay. Giving yourself time to understand your response means you can decide whether you genuinely want to step away rather than allowing an established pattern to make the decision for you.