Are You a Pursuer or a Distancer?

In her book Conquering Shame and Codependency, Darlene Lancer says that some codependents are Pursuers and some are Distancers.

Pursuers will do anything to be loved because they find it too painful to be alone. As soon as they are attracted to someone, Pursuers find themselves already thinking of merging with this person and becoming a couple. Prior to recovery, Pursuers rarely think in terms of meeting their own needs for love by better loving themselves. Instead, their focus is on finding love and validation through a partner. Receiving love makes them feel worthwhile and promises to ease the pain of past rejection and self-alienation.

The problem most Pursuers run up against is their own personal neediness, which leads them to smother their partners. Smothering begins with giving total attention to the partner (often a Distancer). Initially, the partner may love all of the attention and love that is lavished upon them, but eventually they realize it comes with many strings attached. The Pursuer is lavishing on the love and attention because they have a great demand: They desperately want it reciprocated. The Pursuer is in constant pursuit of outside attention and affirmation from the partner. Most Pursuers have extremely poor self-love and self-worth and so they need constant validation and they PURSUE it endlessly.

Other characteristics of Pursuers mentioned by Lancer include the fact that Pursuers 1) Dissect personal communications looking for signs that they are loved and compatible with their person of desire. They will idealize positive signs while ignoring negative ones; 2) Pursuers also wait for phone calls or text messages and place their lives on hold in order to be available to the person of desire. In doing so, they place family and friends on the back-burner because their entire world rotates around their partner; 3) Pursuers become possessive of their partner and feel threatened if the partner wants to hang out with friends or family instead of with them; 4) Over time, Pursuers become resentful that they are always accommodating the partner. They begin to see the partner as selfish and as more concerned with other people than with the Pursuer.

Distancers may have equally as poor self-love and self-esteem as Pursuers, but they also are more independent and have a fear of closeness. After all, too much closeness may lead to too much self-disclosure and Distancers fear they will be found lacking and face rejection. So Distancers tend to be less emotionally available. Sex may be more important to a Distancer than romance, although Distancers enjoy the excitement caused by the chase of the Pursuer. Initially, Distancers like the attention and affection poured on them by the Pursuer. Once it begins to feel intrusive or smothering, however, the Distancer will throw up boundaries or push the Pursuer away out of fear of being exposed as not quite being so wonderful and loveable as the Pursuer perceives them to be.

So what do we do when we discover that we are either a Pursuer or a Distancer? Well, first we have new clues to our own patterns of behavior and we can work at better understanding ourselves. But more importantly we can better get to the root cause of these patterns of behavior and we can work at healing ourselves. It seems to me that whether we are Pursuers or Distancers, we are all suffering from the same underlying problem that drives our behavior: Lack of self-love. Both Pursuers and Distancers are running from the fact that they feel unlovable. The Pursuer wants someone to make them feel lovable and the Distancer is too afraid to be vulnerable enough to allow themselves to be loved.

Both Pursuers and Distancers fear being “found out.” They fear that if the other discovers the TRUE person underneath, they will be rejected because they have already rejected themselves. This means that both Pursuers and Distancers need to work on loving themselves. If a Pursuer does their internal recovery work of learning to love and value themselves, they will feel less of a need to have someone else to validate them because they will be learning to validate themselves. Thus there will be less of a need to pursue someone else to make them OK, worthy or lovable.

And if the Distancer does their inner-homework, they will gradually learn to love and validate themselves in ways that make them less fearful of being vulnerable. The more they love themselves and believe that they are valuable, the more they will be open to real intimacy.

Once again, self-acceptance and self-love is the answer.