How to respond when someone pulls away

What to do when you get that horrible dread of knowing someone's pulling away. Step-by-step guide on how to regulate yourself and response - save for when you're freaking out don't know what to do.

It’s the worst feeling. You’re into someone and it’s going well, you start to allow yourself to get excited about this person, imagine a future with them, dream about what it might be like to love them. Then, just as you begin to let your guard down, something changes. It’s imperceptible to others. Your friends tell you you’re crazy, that you’re reading into things, but deep down in the pits of your gut, you know, They’re losing interest. The texts aren’t as frequent, they stop asking to see you, and they’re a little more stand-offish than usual. To a stranger, it might not seem like anything is different, but you know this pattern, you’ve been here before.

This is the time most of us turn to Insta-therapy, frantically searching how to know if someone is emotionally unavailable?’ and ‘how to make someone like you’. We spend hours trying to craft the perfect text or make it seem like we’re chill and aren’t affected (read my post on cool girl syndrome if this is a pattern for you) when on the inside we’re dying a small death. There’s a knot in our stomach, we can’t focus at work, we develop a nervous compulsion to check our phone every three seconds, and there’s a general sense of inevitable dread that this person is going to reject us, just like all the others. 

Sometimes we’re right, this person is about to reject us and it feels horrible. Sometimes we’re wrong, and it’s just our anxiety and fear of abandonment that’s been triggered (usually by someone’s avoidance). What do we do? How do we calm ourselves?