Avoidant Attachment: Close, but Not Too Close

We all practice avoidance. Whether it’s keeping away from a person you don’t enjoy being around, avoiding certain foods for health reasons, or steering clear of a congested road during your commute, it’s not hard to argue the fact that avoidance is a smart option. Truly, avoidance can be an act of self-preservation. 

But we also know that certain patterns of avoidance can be problematic. Often we steer clear of what makes us anxious and uncomfortable, even when facing these experiences head-on would be much better for us in the long run. These avoidance patterns can result from intentional (and understandable) decisions to sidestep something unpleasant, or they can be driven by unconscious dynamics that automatically steer us, without conscious intentionality on our part.  

Making sense of avoidant attachment patterns

For someone with an avoidant attachment style, emotional intimacy is the proverbial hot stove they’ve learned not to touch. In these instances, our very attachment needs — the desire to depend on and become emotionally close to another — have become the problem, since they lead us into rocky relational terrain. 

The negative relational expectations of someone with an avoidant style are born out of early experiences where basic needs for emotional security and nurturance are regularly left unmet — at some point in development it becomes undeniable that we can’t reliably count on being understood, appreciated and comforted. Within this context, the question to ask is not: Why would someone become avoidantly attached?; but rather: Why wouldn’t they? 

Attachment wounds: When pain is layered upon pain 

Imagine the following scenario: 

As a child you are upset because a classmate starts to ignore you and coldly announces to anyone within earshot that the two of you are no longer friends. Peer rejection of this sort can be crushing. It can cause confusion, sadness and shame; when we’re socially ostracized we are often flooded with feelings of humiliation. 

You try your best to put the pain of what happened out of your mind, but you can’t help mentally reliving the event over and over again. You continue to ruminate about the rejection, and in a heightened need for comfort, you seek out your mother’s attention later that day. She asks what’s wrong, and when you begin to tell her, you can no longer hold back your tears. Rather than meet you with tenderness, she physically tenses up and appears uncomfortable. She sighs in frustration and snaps, “Stop it already, that’s part of life. You’re being too sensitive!”  

In this example, you were already distraught after your friend rejected you. It was this pain that led you to seek out your mother for comfort. Your mother’s response (which became another significant rejection) sent you a powerful message: What you are feeling and the way you are handling your emotions is wrong, and she will not soothe you, nor will she offer you an empathetic connection.

In short, her response layered additional pain on top of the pain you were already struggling with. For a child in need, this kind of parental insensitivity and criticalness is unbearable. Confused and hurting, you are now left to figure out what to do with all these overwhelming feelings — and you’ve also discovered that sharing your emotional experiences with the person you need and depend on the most can actually strain the relationship. As a result, you might begin hiding parts of yourself and present to her a “false self” — a facade designed to placate your mother. 

For the child in need (and as children, we are always in need), turning toward an unavailable or abusive caregiver when we are already distressed about something causes additional pain on top of the pain of unmet longing for love and connection. Turning away from others when in need becomes the most viable option, a means of mitigating one’s pain based on the options available. 

If I don’t feel and need, I can’t get hurt

When our foundational relational experiences establish deep within us beliefs and expectations that others are not trustworthy, that people are generally opportunistic or self-serving or, at best, uninterested in who we are, then keeping others at arm’s length makes sense.

For someone with an avoidant attachment style, most forms of emotional contact can feel “too close.”

Learning to squelch one’s emotions sets the stage for becoming “free” from the problems associated with having to rely on others. When our caregivers are unresponsive or critical of our reactions, we cannot use these relationships to help us make sense of and regulate our emotional world. Parents who offer their children emotional safety send the message that you can bring all of your feelings and self-experiences to me, and in doing so, your feelings will become more manageable, less overwhelming, less frightening. 

For the securely attached, relationships have the potential to bring comfort and undo the pain of loneliness. 

The parents of insecurely attached children have a difficult time (for a variety of reasons) tolerating their child’s negative feelings. Anxiously and avoidantly attached children must learn alternative methods of dealing with their emotional life, ways that do not involve using connection with others as a pathway to self-regulation (Holmes & Slade, 2018; Mikulincer, Shaver, & Fereg, 2003). 

If you have an avoidant attachment style, early on in your life you might have discovered that bringing your struggles to others only makes things worse. To adapt to this painful reality, some level of self-estrangement from your inner world (and the wide-ranging emotions that make up your internal life) must be achieved so that these avoidant attachment strategies can take hold.  

Over time, you may become increasingly less interested in your own emotional life, seeing it as an unwanted part of yourself that you must learn to manage — finding ways to ignore, minimize and/or distance yourself from these experiences might become the norm.

As a result, avoidantly attached adults are often overly self-reliant, independent or emotionally stoic, these ways of being developed over time in order to counterbalance the anticipated negative consequences of trying to connect with and rely upon others.     

In short, due to repeated relational wounding, avoidantly attached children and adults have learned to mute their needs and feelings (Cassidy & Kobak [1988] stated that those with an avoidant attachment style have found ways to deactivate their attachment needs, a reliance on what the authors call “deactivating strategies” in order to prevent further relational pain). 

The wide net of avoidance

Once these avoidant, deactivating strategies take hold early in life, they become highly automated and cannot be easily adjusted based on the dynamics of a particular relationship. In other words, you cannot simply choose which people you’ll be avoidant with and which you’ll be more emotionally open with. 

This, of course, can become problematic when you are in an intimate relationship with someone who is trustworthy and values emotional openness; you may find that a spouse, partner or friend who desires connection and wants access to what you are thinking and feeling may frequently voice frustration with you for not being able to share your self-experiences. You may hear complaints such as, “I never know what’s going on with you!”; “Why don’t you talk more?”; or “We never talk about anything of substance, it’s all superficial.” 

These types of complaints can be quite confusing to someone with an avoidant style, since they may not be deliberately withholding. Quite the contrary, they are acting and being in the only way they know how, in ways that were established long ago and have become cemented over time. 

An important step in one’s journey in learning how to adjust avoidant patterns is to start the process of becoming acquainted with your internal world — to begin attending to the physical sensations and emotional reactions that you long ago had to compartmentalize and lock away in order to remain safe. These reactions may be very subtle at first and can easily go unrecognized. Because of this, they require considerable attentiveness; your inner life needs you to hold a space where what was once a part of you that got lost can gradually be found again.   

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Rich Nicastro, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist based in Austin, Texas. With over twenty-years of experience, he offers telecounseling services to clients seeking individual and couples therapy throughout the United States. Visit his fees page to find out the states where he offers telecounseling.

Article references

Cassidy, J., & Kobak, R.R. (1988) Avoidance and its relationship with other defensive processes. In J. Belsky & T. Nezworski (Eds.), Clinical implications of attachment (pp. 300-323).

Holmes, J. & Slade, A. (2018) Attachment in Therapeutic Practice. Sage Press.

Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P.R., & Pereg, D. (2003). Attachment theory and affect regulation: The dynamics, development, and cognitive consequences of attachment-related strategies. Motivation and Emotion, 27, No.2., pp. 77-102.