Beyond ‘Anxious’ and ‘Avoidant’: Understanding Attachment in Real Life
It’s no secret that attachment theory is inviting. The idea that one’s childhood could explain the way we find love in partnership appeals to the masses because of its linear approach to connection. Words like anxious or avoidant can be thrown out easily, especially in social media to explain how a partner acts or perhaps, why they don’t act the way we’d like them to.
“The idea that one’s childhood could explain the way we find love in partnership appeals to the masses because of its linear approach to connection.”
Attachment styles stem from childhood and the relationships we form with our caregivers. The classic school of thought is that anxiously-attached children had caregivers who were inconsistent. They were unable to provide cohesive emotional stability and as a result, their child becomes hypervigilant of them and their environment. The child also learns that if the try hard enough through heightened emotions (i.e. crying, tantrums, explosive fits) that eventually their caregiver will provide comfort or at the very least, attention. This hypervigilance paired with high emotionality causes them to become highly sensitive to those around them and when it comes to love, an anxiously-attached person is going to watch their partner closely in order to be on the lookout for any change in demeanor. If their partner changes even subtly, they will feel inclined to react emotionally in order to feel cared for.
Avoidantly-attached children grew up in a household where their caregivers were unable to care for them due to lack of emotional intimacy, rigidity or strictness. Avoidant children may have been raised to be self-sufficient which can become challenging in adulthood when their hyper-independence and their lack of reliance on others for support can lead to emotional distance in partnership.
It’s Not All Gloom and Doom
Anxious and avoidantly-attached individuals also have many positive attributes. Anxiously-attached individuals hypervigilance can make them incredibly caring friends. They can be the type of people who remember birthdays, pick out special gifts or recall important details in their friends’ lives. Their ability to hone in on special ideas, people, and places makes them detail-oriented and highly attuned to those they feel emotionally safe around. The self-sufficient nature of an avoidant makes them fairly easy-going. They can come across as good-natured, calm and go-with-the-flow. They may integrate easily into large groups of friends and exude a nonchalance about what others do allows which in a friend group, can be a welcomed dynamic.
When Opposites Attract
The place where anxious and avoidant styles come into conflict is in relationships where they attract one another. In the beginning, the anxious is attracted to the perceived “calm, cool and collected” demeanor of the avoidant. Because the avoidant doesn’t demonstrate outward emotionality, the anxious individual can misread this as the avoidant being safe or predictable. For an anxiously-attached person, this can feel relieving. The supposed predictability of their partner means they don’t have to be hypervigilant all the time. In the beginning stages of dating, an anxious will learn a certain amount of information about an avoidant and put them in a box. They will negate information that challenges their perception of their partner in order to maintain order, consistency and most importantly, predictability.
Avoidants are attracted to anxious because anxious individuals wear their emotions outwardly. The lack of suppression and rigidity in an anxious individual is a welcomed change for an avoidant who is used to keeping things bottled up. The anxious can come across as exciting and invigorating to the avoidant’s “under lock and key” emotional processing. The potential that an anxious partner can help an avoidant release the emotions can lead to an increased attraction and fear.
When fear in the avoidant bubbles up, the anxious partner can feel it coming from a mile away. Although they can’t always make sense of it, subtle changes in their partner’s demeanor, tone of voice or even how they text alerts the anxious partner that something is going on and thus sets off their pursuit to solve the mystery. It is here that cracks in the relationship begin to form.
I speak to clients often about their anxious or avoidant partner and the parts that are consistent in every conversation are the way that the anxious individual wants to get to the bottom of why their partner changed and the way the avoidant wants to cut and run. It’s not because they don’t like one another. Very often anxious/avoidant partnerships have great affection for their partner but there is a disconnect in how they express love, care or affection.
It’s not because they don’t like one another…
“Very often anxious/avoidant partnerships have great affection for their partner but there is a disconnect in how they express love, care or affection.”
When the attachment style has been triggered and one or both partners enter a state of fear, they begin to revert back to their childhood reactions which prohibits them from acting in a loving manner. It doesn’t matter who pulls away first. What matters is that distance is being created and thus finding connection becomes challenging. The anxious partner can become fearful that the avoidant will leave them and start to become more intense about connection or the avoidant can begin to feel that the closeness of their bond is becoming too much for them to process and instinctively begin to withdraw from the relationship without cuing their partner in to what they’re doing.
The anxious individual begins to be more insistent on being close to their partner, spending time together or remaining in constant contact. They experience a sensation of fear that if they don’t cling tightly to their partner, they could lose them. This harkens back to the childhood experiences that if they didn’t cry enough, yell enough or beg enough they wouldn’t receive comfort, care or affection from their caregivers. Anxious individuals learn that if they just try hard enough in any way, they will eventually get what it is they’re seeking.
The problem is that anxious individuals didn’t have avoidant parents. Remember the difference in how both styles were raised. Anxious individuals had caregivers who acquiesced to their emotional needs eventually. Avoidant individuals had parents that were emotionally distant and promoted self-sufficiency. So when an anxious partner begins to feel their avoidant withdraw, they do what they would normally do – try harder until they get the response they need to feel calm and safe.
As the anxious partner ramps up their need for emotional intimacy, the avoidant begins to pull away to a greater degree. They may have been subconsciously withdrawing from the relationship since the beginning but now that the anxious partner has become more forthcoming with their desire for connection, the avoidant wants to retreat and fast. Avoidants retreat back into what I would call their “shell” when emotionality becomes too much. They know on some level that they care for their partner but they place their own emotional survival above the needs of others and as a result, will begin to pull away no matter the repercussions. This can look like:
Failing to answer partner’s messages
One word texts
An inability to agree to plans.
Avoidants will then allow the anxious partner to do the work of ending the relationship or they will “slow fade” until the anxious partner feels hurt and confused enough to stop trying. The breakup of an anxious and avoidant regardless of relationship status causes one result: The anxious partner wonders what they could have done differently and the avoidant partner comes back around when they no longer see their partner as an emotional threat.
Changing the Dynamic: Emotional Safety
In order to change the dynamic, partners have to create emotional safety within themselves before they begin to cultivate it together in partnership. Emotional safety includes:
Learning how to self-regulate
Discovering how to navigate complex emotional processing
Identifying how, when, and why you may not feel emotionally safe in a scenario
This heightened awareness of emotional safety allows us to begin to view potential partners not as the person responsible for making us feel safe, but as the person who can enhance our already calm and safe environment.
Recall the box that anxious individuals put their avoidant partners in. When we enter the state of emotional safety, we begin to realize that our partners are not responsible for meeting our emotional needs. We can then prevent ourselves from putting partners in a box, removing the risk that we may be negating important aspects of their personality.
For avoidants, creating emotional safety starts with disturbing their supposedly calm environment. Their cool, calm and collected demeanor has to be dismantled in a thoughtful manner in order to let in some level of emotional processing. Avoidants who spend time understanding their feelings on a physical level may begin to notice that they are less attracted to individuals who promote high emotionality and may instead favor partners who promote stability with emotional understanding.
Although attachment styles play heavily into romantic relationships, the styles can become triggered in all areas of life where there are relational dynamics. Creating emotional safety within oneself and recognizing the signs when we don’t feel emotionally safe can be the first step in healing attachment styles. It can help us dismantle the triggers that cause us to become fearful about how we relate to others and, in turn, can promote healthier, long-lasting, and stable relationships. If you're ready to embark on this journey, consider seeking the guidance of a therapist. Therapy can provide the tools and support needed to foster emotional safety, whether you're navigating avoidant, anxious, or other relationship challenges. By taking this step, you can begin to cultivate a stable, loving partnership and enhance your overall emotional well-being.
