When the Unfollow Becomes the Protest: What Lee Andrews and Katie Price Reveal About Digital Attachment Wounds
A man sitting in a cell in Al Awir Central Prison in Dubai opens Instagram and removes his wife from his follow list. That is the story. According to a recent Daily Mail piece, Lee Andrews unfollowed Katie Price the same week she returned to the platform following her own ban, while he himself is incarcerated over what is being described as a private civil matter. He went missing for two weeks. Now he is locked in a foreign jail. And the action that made the headlines is a tap on a screen.
The internet has read this as petty. As tabloid theatre. As one more chapter in a public marriage that seems to specialise in chapters. I want to read it differently. Because in my office, I have watched hundreds of couples do the digital version of exactly this. The unfollow. The mute. The block. The screenshot saved for evidence. The followers list checked at 2 a.m. when the body cannot sleep. Different platforms, different income brackets, identical wound.
What you are seeing here is not pettiness. It is a body in a cell, doing the only thing it can still do. And if you have ever found yourself hovering over the unfollow button on someone you actually love, this article is for you.
From Tabloid Spectacle to Therapy Room
You do not need to know anything about Katie Price or Lee Andrews to recognise this dynamic. You only need to have loved someone, felt invisible to them, and reached for the nearest digital weapon. The behaviour scales down beautifully from a celebrity prison cell to a suburban kitchen. The mechanism is the same.
So let's leave the celebrities to their own lives, where they belong, and talk about what actually happens when a person uses a platform to communicate something they cannot bear to say with their voice.
The Fight Is Never About the Follow
In sixteen years of clinical practice I have learned one thing more thoroughly than anything else. The fight is never about the thing. The dishes are not about the dishes. The phone is not about the phone. And the unfollow is not about the unfollow.
Every recurring fight, every dramatic gesture, every digital weapon, is a protest. It is one person's body saying, in the only language it can find, I do not feel safe with you right now. I do not feel seen. I do not feel like I matter.
I had a couple in my office last week who spent forty minutes litigating whether the husband had liked an old colleague's beach photo on Instagram. Forty minutes. He kept defending the like as meaningless. She kept escalating, pulling up other examples, building a case. By the time I slowed them down, both of them were shaking. He thought she was crazy. She thought he was a liar. Neither of them was right. Both of them were terrified.
Because underneath the Instagram like was the question her body was actually asking. Do I matter to you more than other women? Will you choose me when no one is watching? And underneath his rigid defence was the wound that runs his entire system. Nothing I do is ever enough. I am going to be a disappointment no matter how I move.
That is the real conversation. The like was the stage where their pain decided to perform that day. I have written more about how this plays out in the fights couples keep having about social media, because the pattern is so consistent it is almost boring once you can see it.
The Two Questions Underneath Everything
The attachment system in adult love has one job. It scans, constantly, for the answer to two questions.
Are you there for me?
Am I enough for you?
When the answers feel like yes, the body softens. You are generous. You are funny. You can tolerate your partner's bad mood without making it about you. When the answers feel like no, the body treats it as a survival emergency. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. You stop being able to think clearly. You reach for whatever weapon is closest.
In 2015 the weapon was a slammed door. In 2025 the weapon is a tap on a screen that everyone in the world can witness, including the algorithm that will now serve both of you content designed to keep the wound open. The platform is new. The protest is ancient.
A man in a cell, stripped of agency, stripped of his name in the news cycle, stripped of his physical body's ability to do anything about his situation, reaches for the one act of agency that the prison guards cannot stop. He unfollows. The body needs to do something. The body chooses the only lever it has left.
The Compass of Shame Has a Digital North
When the bond is threatened and the body cannot find safety, people spin on what Donald Nathanson called the Compass of Shame. There are four points on this compass. Withdrawal. Avoidance. Attack Self. Attack Other.
Incarceration is a master class in shame. You are publicly named as failed. Your body is held. Your sovereignty is gone. The story being written about you is being written without you in the room. In that condition, the survival response will reach for whatever combination of these four points it can access.
An unfollow is a beautifully compressed cocktail of two of them. It is Withdrawal, because it removes you from the feed, makes you invisible, says I am hiding now. And it is Attack Other, because it is a public act that broadcasts to thousands of strangers this person is not mine and I am not theirs. Both protections deployed in a single tap. The body is doing what bodies do.
The tragedy is that the protections that worked in childhood, that helped you survive the actual conditions you were given, are catastrophic in adult love. Withdrawing from the very person whose presence you need is a strategy that makes total sense to your physiology and total nonsense to the relationship.
The Story of Other Versus the Experience of Self
Here is the move I watch couples make, over and over, that keeps the loop alive.
When the pain becomes unbearable, people retreat into the Story of Other. They become, as I sometimes say in session, the world-renowned expert in the problems of their partner. They can list every flaw, every betrayal, every disappointment. They can build a case so airtight that a jury of strangers on the internet would convict.
What they cannot do is sit in the Experience of Self.
The Experience of Self in a cell looks like this. I am terrified. I am alone. I do not know if she is going to wait for me. I do not know who I am if I am not the man I was a month ago. I have lost my body's freedom and I am about to lose the only person who knows the parts of me the public does not see.
That is not a tweetable feeling. That is not a headline. That is the kind of pain that crushes the chest. So the survival brain performs an emergency surgery. It exits the Experience of Self and dives into the Story of Other. She did this. She always does this. I am unfollowing because of what she did.
The unfollow lets the man avoid the well of aloneness for another ten minutes. That is its function. It is not strategic. It is anaesthetic.
The Waltz of Pain Has Wifi Now
In Emotionally Focused Therapy we map the cycle that couples get stuck in as the Waltz of Pain. It has four steps. One partner experiences an unmet need and a vulnerable feeling. To protect themselves from that feeling, they enact a protest behaviour. The protest behaviour hits the other partner's vulnerability. The second partner reacts with their own protest. The loop closes and begins again.
What looks like petty drama is two scared people dancing their pain. The choreography is just being performed on Instagram instead of in a kitchen.
You can see how the steps map. He feels disappeared from her life. He protests by disappearing her from his. She feels abandoned by his disappearance. She protests by posting more, or posting nothing, or posting something cryptic. He sees the post and feels confirmed in his story that she does not care. The wheel turns.
Neither person is the villain here. Neither person is correct. Both bodies are simply doing what bodies do when the bond feels unsafe and the survival brain has taken the wheel. I have written about this loop in more detail in my piece on the pursue and withdraw cycle, and the underlying mechanism is the same whether you are in a council flat, a Dubai prison, or a Selling Sunset mansion.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Platform as Micro Third Party
There is one more thing I want to name, because it is the thing the cultural conversation almost never names.
Every social media platform is a third party in your relationship. Not a neutral one. An actively interested one. The algorithm has goals. Those goals are not your bond. Those goals are your engagement, your outrage, your scroll time. The platform makes money when you are dysregulated. It loses money when you are settled and present with your partner.
So when you fight about Instagram, you are not just fighting with your partner. You are fighting inside an arena that profits from your inability to settle down. The arena is shaped to keep you reaching, comparing, doubting, performing. It is the perfect environment for an anxious nervous system to lose its mind, and the perfect environment for an avoidant one to find endless distractions.
A celebrity couple lives in this arena at maximum volume. Their fights are not just witnessed, they are monetised. Their reconciliations are content. Their unfollows generate ad revenue. The platform is feeding on the wound while pretending to be neutral infrastructure.
You and I are not famous, but the same architecture is in our pockets. The phone is a micro third party in the bed. The followers list is a piece of evidence in a trial we did not consent to. The block button is a relationship intervention designed by people who have never sat with a couple in pain.
This is part of why building real safety with another human being now requires more than goodwill. It requires what I think of as secure functioning, an explicit agreement between two people about how they will protect the bond from the systems that would happily destroy it for profit.
What the Body Is Actually Asking For
If you strip away the cell, the prison, the headlines, the platform, the cameras, what is left in this story is a man who is terrified and a woman who is terrified, separated by walls neither of them can scale, communicating through a medium designed to make everything worse.
The body is not asking for revenge when it taps unfollow. The body is asking do you still see me. The body is asking will you reach for me even when I make it hard. The body is asking the same two questions it has been asking since infancy. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.
The answer the body needs cannot be delivered through a platform. The platform is not built for it. The answer the body needs is a turning toward, in the flesh, with the rational brain back online and the survival brain temporarily settled. A voice saying I am here. I am not going anywhere. The story you are telling yourself about me is not true.
In a cell, in Dubai, that turning toward is geographically impossible. Which is part of the tragedy. But it is possible for you, reading this in your kitchen, with the phone face down and your partner three feet away.
Bringing This Back to Your Life
You are not in prison. Your partner is not on tabloid covers. But if you are honest, you have probably done the small domestic version of the unfollow this week. The cold goodnight. The pointed silence. The post that was clearly aimed but plausibly deniable. The followers list checked one more time. The screenshot saved.
If you can catch yourself in that moment, before the tap, you can do something different. Not because the impulse is bad. The impulse is your activation asking for help. But the help it is reaching for, the digital weapon, will not actually settle the body. It will only confirm the story that you and your partner are enemies.
The harder move is to put the phone down and name the feeling underneath. I am scared. I am alone. I do not know if I matter to you right now. That sentence is the doorway out of the Waltz. It is the only sentence that breaks the loop. It is also the sentence that the survival brain will fight you the hardest to avoid saying.
What to Do Next
If you are reading this and recognising yourself, not the celebrities, the recognition itself is the beginning of the work. Most people are too defended to even arrive here. You arrived.
The next move is to find a way to interrupt the loop the next time your body reaches for a digital weapon. That interruption is a skill. It is not personality. It is not a fixed trait you do or do not have. It is a capacity you build, one practiced moment at a time, until your body trusts that turning toward is safer than tapping unfollow.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The platform will not save you. The algorithm does not want you to settle. The unfollow will feel like power for ten seconds and then leave you more alone than before. The work is somewhere else. It is in your body, with your partner, in the room you are actually in. Put the phone down. Say the harder sentence. That is the whole game.
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