AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT:

WHAT'S THE SOLUTION?

If you're thinking - "this sounds like me" - well congratulations, you're normal!

 

A quarter of the population classifies as avoidantly attached. That probably means lots of people you know (particularly as groups of friends may reinforce each other's similar patterns). Attachment styles are also fluid - they are simply dynamic patterns of interacting with each other and not inherent, unchangeable traits. Studies show that over time, 30% of us change our dominant attachment strategy. For example, after a relationship that brought out anxious patterns that left you feeling vulnerable, you may unconsciously respond in your next relationship by protecting yourself and presenting as particularly avoidant. 

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It's also important to remember that attachment styles were not in our control, and are not our doing. If you see yourself in these descriptions and patterns, take heart. This defensive process is a normal reaction to a situational stressor in childhood, and by adulthood typically operating at a deeply unconscious level. As a vulnerable child you likely experienced pain that made you feel rejected at the core, and had to suppress your feelings. Unconsciously something made you associate connection with pain. But everyone is worthy of love and stability. Always be kind to yourself.

 

We are every one of us juggling our own quirks, and there is no hierarchy of needs: wanting space is just as valid as wanting closeness. There is nothing wrong with being this way, and no one has to change their own personality or their partner's. However, you are probably here because it has been making your relationships more difficult and you would like to change that. The biggest step forwards is simply awareness - so the best thing about learning about our attachment style is it can help us understand and unapologetically embrace what it is we need, and potentially how to get it in a successful relationship.

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I bought into the most dangerous rule: if you’re struggling, don’t talk about it. I created an illusion of who I was supposed to be on the outside — the kind, funny, and charismatic guy with a great career and relationship. But on the other side of that facade hid my shadow — the destructive and manipulative version of myself who couldn't hold up relationships, who lied and cheated. The idea of anyone finding out my truth felt like death. 

 

And then it happened. Someone important to me cracked the illusion wide open, and I couldn’t lie my way out of it this time. To avoid crushing shame, I shut everyone out and ran. One night, while living in the back of my car, my reality hit me like a ton of bricks: I had chosen to completely isolate myself and hide, rather than take ownership of my darkness and face the people I had hurt. It was then that I realized I only had two options: to continue to hide and silently suffer, or shine light into my deepest corners and start talking about it. 

 

It was in that darkest moment that I learned the greatest lesson:The shadow lives within all of us - the part of our psyche that causes self-sabotage. When you try to run from your shadow, it consumes you and becomes the puppeteer… and you a passive player in your own life. It can take over in the form of addiction, infidelity, anger, anxiety, analysis paralysis, avoiding healthy habits, depression, sexual dysfunction or deep unfulfillment… And while truth can sting, the first step in healing your dysfunction is to face these parts of yourself that make you the most human. Facing it is the beginning of awakening your greatest potential…"

- Connor Beaton Self Mastery

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“From the dark places, we often get a new sense of priorities. Ultimately, it’s the quality of our relationships that will determine the quality of our lives.” – Esther Perel

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SELECT ARROWS:​

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"To resist the lessons hidden in hardships is to resist change and growth that life is offering up to us,

and to hold on to the pain and suffering"

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• 'I don't want to'

 

An avoidant type admits:

 

“As a person with an avoidant attachment style I can tell you most of us won’t be that motivated to change our attachment style (unlike other attachment styles). This is because people with this style don’t experience much subjective distress (it’s more subconscious) and we use coping strategies like repression, denial and disassociation. So there is no incentive to change. Even though I am fully aware about attachment theory and have a lot of knowledge about it I still am reluctant to change it.”

 

No one needs to work on their attachment style if they're genuinely happy as they are, and are aware and open about their different wants and needs and not hurting others. Avoidant attachment can protect us from hurt in the short term and allow us to keep focus, so has its advantages. And it was a survival adaptation that we learned kept us safe, so our subconscious can fight very hard against letting go of it. 

 

The very large majority of avoidants are not interested in change. They think there is nothing wrong with their behaviour, even if it makes them unhappy and gives them health problems, and they prefer a partner to follow their rules,  even if those rules may not be conducive to a loving, stable relationship, can cause hurt in the long term and put the emotional labour for maintaining the relationship on partners.

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The conundrum for us avoidants is that solving this requires getting close to the very emotions that our whole system is designed to suppress. Why would we go through that pain when we can just carry on suppressing?! These psychological defences are incredibly powerful. There is a lot of shame associated with revealing ourselves to another person. The gaze of another can re-evoke crippling feelings and memories. We instinctively expect the other person would be cold, unempathetic or critical just as earlier attachment figures were. Closeness with others risks feeling exposed as an inadequate fraud. "The avoidant feels contempt for himself, and believes he deserves to suffer. The wish is not to be seen, and for this sadomasochistic relationship with the self to remain a private affair." Until we have worked to become accepting our true inner selves, it can feel safer to have contempt for intimate connecting than risk being exposed, and both seeking and depriving ourselves of connection may make us feel elements of anxiety and depression.

 

There is an additional reason that avoidants are particularly resistant to change: they internalised early on it was safer not to try. There may have been few opportunities with caregivers to experience things other than rejection, criticism, overlooking or commands to contain distress in response to showing their real needs, with the overriding message not to expect help from anybody. With this worldview it would seem absurd to make yourself vulnerable to further rejection or attacks. As a result, avoidants are the least likely to enter therapy, or to really let the therapist in if they do.

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But remember, suppressing your needs is not the same as being able to self-validate. We are still hurting at the core. Do not confuse confidence in your own self-reliance with true courage. Suppressing is in fact a short-term strategy that only leads to more pain in the long-term. And though avoidant techniques were once helpful quick fixes to protect ourselves from being hurt by people, they’re also strategies that keep us from having loving, close relationships with a secure attachment. Humans need emotional connections, and denying yourself that in an attempt to appear independent can do much damage. Safe doesn’t always mean happy! What is the cost of this long term? What will life look like if relationships are repeatedly sabotaged or left prematurely? The longer we resist developing, the longer we may be keeping ourselves ultimately unhappy. By working on our patterns we safeguard our future.

 

• You're still hurting - have these patterns worked so far?

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Sometimes we can be very good at taking care of ourselves when we're by ourselves, but when we find a partner everything seems to go to pieces. This is because relationships awaken our primal attachment triggers.  Being in a relationship brings up everything within us that needs to be healed, so a relationship is the real test of whether or not we’ve moved beyond our core wounding issues. We often relate easily to friends, around whom we don't feel emotional dysregulation, because unconsciously we are not expecting them to be parents. But we fix wounds from our childhood through our partners. With avoidants, this often involves distancing from an overwhelming situation that we never had the control to run from when younger. The activation of these childhood wounds is terrifying and we do need someone understanding to take care of these impulses, but we also need to own and soothe them ourselves, and learn to put the relationship first.

 

Regardless of what happened, relationships are great teachers of what our needs are and what we need to work on to be happy - if we can work out those lessons. And relationships do not just work perfectly - if we weren't taught them we need to master the skills to make them a success, which are very learnable. If we want to have relationships that will last, it is imperative we are willing to grow, change, and adapt - and choose partners willing to do the same. If we go in expecting everything to be perfect or our partners to solve our problems, the relationship is brittle and will easily fail.

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And if we don’t take full responsibility for our own healing, we’ll simply go on to repeat similar patterns in our next relationship. Lots of people aren't aware of how or why they behave as they do, and so just victims to their repeating patterns. If you are it puts you at a huge advantage in relationships.

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"It becomes apparent that being avoidant isn’t really about living a self-sufficient life; it’s about a life of struggle involving the constant suppression of a powerful attachment system using (also powerful) deactivating strategies. Because of their power it’s easy to conclude that these behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs are impossible to uproot and change. But this is not the case. What is true is that people with an avoidant attachment style overwhelmingly assume that the reason they’re unable to find happiness in a relationship has little to do with themselves and a lot to do with external circumstances—meeting the wrong people, not finding “the one,” or only hooking up with prospects who want to tie them down. They rarely search inside themselves for the reason for their dissatisfaction, and even more rarely seek help or even agree to get help when their partner suggests they do so. Unfortunately, until they look inward or seek counselling, change is not likely to occur."

- Attached by Levine & Heller

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• Might want a family someday, or to get more out of your existing one?

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Attachment patterns can also be important to address if you're interested in potentially having a family - fear of being relied upon and low self-esteem may make avoidants fear they are not up to the task, though once self-aware of their patterns they are able to be devoted, sensitive, reliable, resilient, practical and thoughtful caregivers, and gain a great deal from their relationships with their children (with the exception of stronger avoidants who - you guessed it - run away). Studies found parents with more avoidant attachment styles did experience greater stress after the birth of their child and perceived parenting as less satisfying and personally meaningful, and that unchanged avoidants can neglect their children's emotional needs - but this only applies when people are unaware of their patterns so is within our power to change.  If any intimacy is very difficult for you at present, you might want to consider delaying children a little until you have started some self-development. Birth to age 2 are the critical years for developing healthy attachment. And strong parenting comes out of strong, supportive relationships. These are all things you can nurture and develop.

 

Half the population has insecure attachment - it's absolutely not reason not to have children: understanding ourselves simply helps us be cognisant of how we show up for them. Once we are aware of and feel more control over responding to our patterns, then we've set the groundwork for great familial relationships. Remember that while insecure styles are often passed down families in cycles, the best predictor of a child’s security of attachment is not what happened to their parents as children, but rather how their parents made sense of those childhood experiences - if the parents were aware of and responded to their own attachment patterns. Understanding yourself gives you a great advantage! It's very valuable to practise getting comfortable with showing love and handling emotions now, so we could happily attend to those of our children, and so end the cycle if we choose. This comes from proactive work, not sudden change.

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• We're designed to heal​

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No one was born with their attachment style - they are learned behaviours. If we learned those, we can learn new patterns. We carry trauma forward by taking forward the behavioural coping mechanisms we learned from the past to situations where they are no longer relevant. But the past is gone, and the defence mechanisms of the past aren't necessarily useful in our present. We get to choose whether to bring them with us, or to heal from that trauma. 

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Because avoidance can come out of undervaluing real loss, often a big loss in our lives kickstarts this process naturally. People who have lost loved ones, for example, can find themselves more able to appreciate and dedicate themselves to relationships afterwards (although initially the reverse can also be true as our internal world becomes too painful to share, and we seek to protect from further pain). But we shouldn't have to wait for such a big life event - a time when it can help to have a supportive attachment figure already in our lives - for change.

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Most people (particularly with avoidant attachment) never become aware of their attachment style, let alone work on it. So they can go through their lives confused about their behaviours and their inability to get what they believe they’re after. Now you’re in the know, you can choose to be the exception! If you find that your attachment patterns are making you and your relationships unhappy, or stopping you from getting what you truly want, then the great thing is that you can choose to change things. 

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“We are fundamentally designed to heal. Even if our childhood is less than ideal, our secure attachment system is biologically programmed in us, and our job is to simply find out what’s interfering with it—and learn what we can do to make those secure tendencies more dominant.”

- Diane Poole Heller