If you have been ghosted, if you have felt abandoned by someone who once made you feel deeply seen, if you have experienced the painful runner-chaser dynamic…and if you have been the one on the other side – the one who ghosted and abandoned…

This article is for you.

The Kind of Connection That Changes You

Some connections don’t just touch your life – they rearrange you. They make you feel understood in ways you hadn’t before.
There was chemistry, but also emotional intimacy. It felt spiritual, sacred, fated.

And then something shifted. The one who once leaned in began to pull away.
Messages became slower. Conversations shallower. Presence became absence – a painfully black nothingness in their shape that threated to engulf you.

And you – the one who stayed emotionally available, redoubling your efforts to pull them back in every time they took one more step to distance themselves – became the ‘chaser’; not because you were desperate, but because you cared. You thought they would hear your words with understanding and attention. They didn’t. 

Their disconnection felt complete and cruel, making you feel small and reduced. It was as if you never existed in their reality.  

The Runner and the Chaser: A Trauma Dance

Psychologists often describe this pattern as an anxious-avoidant attachment dynamic.

In simple terms, one partner fears abandonment and seeks closeness (the ‘chaser’), while the other fears engulfment or emotional vulnerability and withdraws (the ‘runner’). Neither is wrong. Both are wounded.

Often, the runner isn’t running from you, the chaser. They are running from what intimacy activates inside them:

• Unprocessed grief
• Childhood wounds
• Fear of not being enough
• Fear of losing themselves
• Fear of losing their independence
• Fear of losing control
• Fear of being vulnerable
• Fear of emotional responsibility

Often, when the intensity feels overwhelming, their nervous system doesn’t fight or argue – it shuts down.

When Silence Is a Nervous System Response

Emotional shutdown is not always cruelty. Sometimes it is survival.

You might have heard of the Flight or Fight response. There are also the Freeze and the Fawn responses you might not have heard of, but which explain a lot of behaviours we experience and see in relationships. 

Emotional numbness can arise when the nervous system enters what is called a dorsal-vagal response – a freeze or shutdown state.

Instead of fighting or fleeing, the body conserves energy and disconnects. This is a response to a perceived threat – your nervous system is trying to protect you and keep you safe from the stress and overwhelm that it is incapable of processing in a relationship that is terrifying in its depth.

This can look like:

• Going silent or ghosting
• Emotional detachment
• Avoidance
• Physically distancing oneself
• Detaching and acting as though nothing happened
• Building walls to keep the other person out
• Burying oneself in busywork

It feels devastating to the one left behind – they have been discarded or ghosted; neither explanation, nor closure was provided. They are left to grapple with a multitude of questions and a deep sense of shame, rejection, and abandonment.

While the runner appears to be cold and uncaring, in truth, they may simply be overwhelmed. When the nervous system perceives intimacy as unsafe or too intense, it can numb out as protection. Numbness, as the research suggests, is not the absence of feeling, but a protective strategy.

All is not doom and gloom though! The good news is: ‘If you learned it, you can unlearn it.’ However, that unlearning requires awareness. And willingness. This, itself requires facing one’s ‘demons’ – which psychology calls one’s ‘Shadow’.

The Moment the Chaser Stops Chasing

As the chaser, there comes a moment when you are emotionally, physically, psychologically, and mentally exhausted from trying, from carrying alone the weight that needed two people; from forgiving and empathizing; from understanding and excusing. You have reached a point where you realise that no matter what you do, you will not be chosen by the runner. It is clear that this is more to do with them than with you. You reach a crossroad: either you choose growth by working on yourself or you choose stagnation by remaining in a cage of despair and darkness. Even at this juncture, you feel compelled to…

– Draft the text of one more message – you know communication is needed.
-Stare at the screen – hoping that something, anything, will show up from them.
-Replay the memories – they pop up as fleeting, poignant moments that stab at your heart.
-Connect just once more – wanting to make that call, knowing that you will receive nothing but silence for your effort.

The prospect of reliving the abandonment and hurt all over again for the umpteenth time is now beyond your capacity. Your emotional core whispers: Enough pain. Enough effort. Just – ENOUGH. You go silent as well, not to ghost, but because of exhaustion.

Your logical mind tells you loudly and clearly: Connection requires reciprocation. Love is not proved through endurance of neglect. Unconditional love does not mean accepting less than you deserve, nor does it mean excusing poor behaviour again and again. Effort cannot live on one side.

That moment – when you stop reaching out – is not giving up on love. It is choosing dignity and self-preservation. It is recognising that emotional maturity means:

• Both people acknowledge the impact they have on each other.
• Both are willing to grow.
• Both are willing to look at their shadows.
• Both are willing to change.

Not change who they are – but evolve into who the relationship requires them to become.

That is growth. And growth cannot be forced on another person.

The Grief No One Talks About

What makes this kind of ending so painful is that love may still be there. You may both still care, and yet, be incapable of togetherness. What happened need not have necessarily been betrayal or cruelty – just misaligned nervous systems and unhealed wounds.

You were willing to do the work. They were not ready.

That doesn’t make you better. It makes you at a different stage of healing. Awareness of this fact is, in itself, a huge step to moving forward. It is freeing to know that you are not the problem; that it is okay to be you even if you aren’t enough in someone’s book. It wasn’t you that they rejected, they rejected themselves – their rejected self lives in their shadow. It is their responsibility to explore it and integrate it just as it is yours to work on your shadow.

Shadow Work: The Part Most People Avoid

Intimacy is not limited to physical closeness, it can also be intellectual, psychological, emotional, or spiritual among other types. Being intimate involves building deep trust; being vulnerable; and sharing one’s inner world, fears, thoughts, beliefs, and dreams with another. It can exist between friends, family members, lovers – any two people that share a deep bond based on closeness, open communication, trust, and love. Intimacy is the glue that holds relationships together.

True intimacy triggers the parts of us that we have suppressed or denied and pushed into our subconscious mind so we don’t have to look at them in our conscious state. These could include fears of:

• Being abandoned
• Being controlled
• Being unseen
• Being ‘not enough’

When these parts are triggered, people either lean in consciously – or unconsciously self-sabotage. Self-sabotage can look like:

• Pulling away when overwhelm happens
• Picking fights
• Becoming distant
• Disappearing

From the outside, it looks careless. From the inside, it often feels terrifying. This is where emotional maturity becomes essential.

Intimacy is not just chemistry. It is love that has the capacity to:

-Sit with discomfort and examine it.
-Communicate fear instead of running from it.
-Admit and say, “I’m sorry. I am triggered. I want to work through this.”

Without such capacity, even the deepest connection cannot survive.

When The Anxious Partner Finds Closure On Their Own

You may still wake up thinking about them. You may still believe that if both of you healed, something extraordinary could exist. Maybe you’re right. However, alignment requires timing. You cannot drag someone into growth.

The most powerful thing the chaser eventually learns is this:

Love does not require pursuit. It does not require to continuously fight for space in someone’s life. If someone wants to be in your life, they will shore up their courage, reel in their ego, drop the pretense, and step toward you. Not once. Not reactively – consistently. If the desire is strong enough, they will find their way to you. The effort and action have to be on their part now, you are done trying. 

Intellectual understanding is a great step, but it isn’t enough to bring release and relief. Extricating yourself from the web you are entangled in is a daunting task. Finding yourself and making yourself whole and secure through shadow work is a journey only for the brave; those who understand the enormous cost of not undertaking the journey. To successfully get through this arduous journey, a shadow coach is needed to guide and assist you, and to keep you accountable to yourself as you negotiate the difficult terrain.

Walking Forward Without Closing Your Heart

Being the chaser or the anxious partner, having done everything in your power to try and grow with the runner to keep the connection and finding that they are not ready, you are ultimately left with only one choice: to step back and move on.

Moving on does not mean you abandon the connection or numb yourself from feeling. It means that you stop denying what was real – the real parts hidden beneath the surface – your shadow. You recognise it, explore it, and integrate it through shadow work:

You take the lessons.
You tend to your own wounds.
You work with your own nervous system.
You soften your anxious parts instead of shaming them.

You stop chasing and become secure within yourself. You release control over whether the runner chooses to evolve.

Sometimes, two people must separate to grow. If both do the work, life has a way of bringing frequencies back into alignment, not because of destiny, but because two regulated, self-aware adults can finally meet each other without fear running the show.

If You Are the One Who Was Left

Please hear this gently: You were not ‘too much’ or ‘exhausting’ or ‘too needy’. You were not unlovable.

You were asking for reciprocity. You were asking for effort that matched yours. You were asking to be met half way – where both partners are equally invested. That is not weakness. It is emotional health.

If the person you loved could not meet you there, that says more about their capacity than your worth.

There is a quiet kind of hope in the anxious partner that remains after this kind of love.

Not obsessive. Not desperate. Just a soft knowing: If the avoidant partner choose to face their shadow aspects, if they learn to regulate their nervous system instead of fleeing, if they grow into emotional accountability…and if you continue to grow too…

Then perhaps one day, you will meet again – not as runner and chaser, but as two secure people capable of staying. Until then, you live your life: You expand. You heal. You love – wisely. You learn to trust that real connection is not about chasing. It is about mutual choosing.

If You Were the One Who Ran

This may be harder to admit:

You were the one who pulled away; not because you didn’t care or are a ‘bad person’, nor because the connection wasn’t real or worth it, but because it felt too much: Too intense. Too deep. Too exposing. Too activating. Too triggering. It required a level of vulnerability you were incapable of.

Understand this: When someone sees you deeply, it can awaken the parts of you you’ve kept buried in you subconscious mind:

• The fear of being abandoned first
• The fear of disappointing someone
• The fear of not being enough
• The fear of losing control

Running is not always indifference: sometimes it is a nervous system trying to survive. When intimacy feels threatening, the body can move into shutdown – numbness, silence, distance. For you, it is the protective freeze response at work; a strategy learned long ago to avoid overwhelming pain and feel safe. For the person you left behind, it looks a lot like cruel rejection, abandonment, betrayal. It leaves them feeling exactly what you were trying to protect yourself from: they might feel deep shame in not having been enough and of having disappointed you.

In addition, their own shadow adds to their pain: they might feel their requirement to feel seen, heard, cherished, honoured – being chosen – was ‘too much’, ‘too exhausting’, and that they were ‘too needy’ after all. They may blame themselves for you pushing them away and for their failure in ‘saving’ the connection; not realising that saving the connection was a shared responsibility. They too go into freeze response, numbing themselves in a haze of pain.

It is worth your time to think about this. It is also crucial to recognise that while running might have protected you, protection is not the same as growth. For growth to happen, you have to face your fears – confront and explore them with curiosity, openness, compassion, and a great deal of courage.

Shadow work helps you do just that. It asks difficult questions:

What did this connection mirror back to you that you weren’t ready to face? Did you withdraw instead of communicating? Did you silence yourself instead of expressing fear? Did you convince yourself it ‘wasn’t right’ because staying required vulnerability? Was it the chaser that was really responsible for you distancing yourself and abandoning the connection? Were you too lazy or too afraid to take on the challenge of turning inward? Which of your shadow aspects did you project onto the anxious partner? Did you self-sabotage the connection to avoid looking at parts of yourself that your conscious mind thinks of as weakness or as being undesirable?

Avoidance in relationships of any kind protects a younger version of you – the inner child. At the same time, it prevents the adult version of you from evolving. Evolution requires you to grow.

Growth, for the runner, looks like:

• Learning to stay when discomfort rises
• Recognising and Naming fear instead of disappearing
• Regulating the nervous system instead of numbing out
• Taking responsibility for the impact of silence

If you were the one who ran, this is not condemnation. It is invitation to look inward, to meet the parts of you that panic when closeness feels threatening. Do the work so that next time, you don’t have to escape what you deeply desire. Escaping will leave you unfulfilled, living a life of regret and what could have been.

Remember that love is not only about feeling, but also about capacity. Capacity is built – slowly, consciously – through self-awareness.

Shadow work will give you the means to live life with authenticity, accepting yourself, evolving in awareness, and learning to negotiate connections with assurance, empathy, and maturity. Whether you choose to circle back to the chaser or not, you will have made yourself whole, calm, and able to respond with intent rather than react in fear.

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Hi! I am Rachana Misra.

Begin your Shadow work journey with me. I use multiple modalities and coach you 1:1 to meet, heal, and integrate parts of you that you have been unconsciously hiding away from your conscious mind.

Make the unconscious conscious!

Be whole. Be authentic. Thrive!