Why Do I Push People Away in Relationships?

You don't mean to do it. Someone gets close—really close—and something in you starts to pull back. You pick a fight. You go cold. You find a reason to leave, or you act in a way that makes them leave first. Afterward, you wonder: why do I keep doing this?

It's not a mystery to you anymore. You can see the pattern. You might even be able to trace it back to where it started—an unavailable parent, an early loss, a relationship where closeness meant pain. But knowing doesn't stop it from happening again.

That's because this isn't a thought problem. It's an enactment.

What is an enactment?

An enactment is a pattern that gets acted out rather than remembered. It's what happens when something from your early relational life shows up in your present behavior—automatically, outside of awareness, before you have a chance to think about it.

Toni Greatrex describes enactments as rooted in implicit memory—the kind of memory that stores pre-symbolic, preverbal emotional experiences. These aren't memories you can recall. They're procedures. Ways of being in relationships that got encoded before you had language, before you had a reflective mind that could make sense of what was happening.

When you push someone away, you're not choosing to do it. You're enacting something. An old relational template is running in the background, shaping your behavior without your conscious participation.

Implicit memory: you don't remember it, you live it

There are two kinds of memory. Explicit memory is what we usually think of—conscious recall of facts and events. Implicit memory is different. It operates outside awareness. It governs skills, habits, emotional responses, and relational patterns.

The way you learned to relate to people in your earliest years—before words, before conscious thought—is stored implicitly. It doesn't feel like a memory because you can't bring it to mind. It feels like reality. It feels like who you are.

When someone gets close and you feel a sudden urge to withdraw, that's implicit memory in action. Your nervous system is responding to a pattern it learned long ago: closeness is dangerous. Protect yourself.

You don't think this. You do it. And then, afterward, you try to understand why.

Why insight isn't enough

Most people who push others away already know they do it. They've read about attachment. They've been to therapy. They can explain the pattern in detail.

And yet, it keeps happening.

This is because insight is an explicit process—it happens in the conscious, verbal part of the mind. But enactments come from the implicit system. They're faster, deeper, and they don't respond to logic or explanation.

Greatrex points out that these patterns are "resistant to change" precisely because they're stored in pre-symbolic, unconscious emotional systems. You can't think your way out of something that was never thought in the first place.

How change actually happens

If the pattern was learned in relationship, it has to be changed in relationship.

This is where therapy—specifically, a therapy that understands enactments—becomes essential. In the therapeutic relationship, the pattern will show up. You'll start to push the therapist away, or test them, or withdraw. That's not a failure. That's the material.

A skilled therapist doesn't just interpret what's happening. They stay present through it. They don't leave when you push. They don't retaliate when you withdraw. Over time, this creates a different experience—one that challenges the old implicit template.

Allan Schore's research shows that these early patterns are encoded in the right brain, which is also where they can be changed—through emotional, relational experiences that happen in real time, not just through talking about the past.

You don't overwrite implicit memory with insight. You overwrite it with a new relational experience, repeated enough times that the nervous system starts to update its expectations.

This is what depth therapy is for

Short-term therapy can help you understand the pattern. But understanding isn't transformation. If you want the pattern to actually change—at the level where it operates—you need a relationship that can hold the enactments as they arise and offer something different in response.

This takes time. It takes a therapist who understands implicit process and isn't afraid of what gets enacted in the room. And it takes your willingness to stay in a relationship long enough for something new to happen.

You're not broken for pushing people away. You're enacting something old, something that made sense once. But you don't have to keep living it out forever.

Ready to explore this? I offer consultations for clients in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida.