Avoidant Attachment Style: The Withdrawer Pattern Explained

Fearful avoidance, he says, involves a desire to distance oneself from closeness because it makes them feel vulnerable (or at risk in this position). Dismissive attachment downplays the value of close emotional bonds, Fraley explains. Anxious attachment is rooted in fear of being left, rejected, or unlovable. As a result, you might appear emotionally numb, cold, or distant from your partner and very thewingtalks.com reluctant to receive care or help they offer. For your partner, that may dredge up feelings of loneliness, confusion, or emotional exhaustion as they try to keep the relationship afloat.

How Do Children Form Secure Attachment In Early Childhood?

Cultivating corrective relationship strategies is key to fixing avoidant attachment patterns. This can happen with an understanding friend, partner, or sensitive counselor or therapist. Avoidance may be fixed by learning to relate and build trust in a psychologically safe space defined by healthy boundaries.

However, with self-awareness, communication, and a willingness to work on their attachment style, dismissive-avoidants can learn to navigate their feelings and build healthier, more secure relationships. Therefore, to create change, you must first become aware of your dismissive-avoidant attachment style and how it manifests in your relationships. However, for children who develop dismissive-avoidant attachment, their caregivers may have been unresponsive, rejecting, or inconsistent in meeting their emotional needs. People with disorganized attachment styles tend to have unpredictable and confusing behavior in relationships. Jordan said they may alternate between being aloof and independent and clingy and emotional.

What Happens When We Argue? How Each Style Responds To Relationship Stress

Someone might also develop an avoidant attachment later in life if they experience trauma or a series of bad relationships and interpersonal interactions. Clinical psychologist Kendra Mathys, PsyD, explains just what it means to have an avoidant attachment style and what you can do to stop it from getting in the way of your current and future relationships. Again, self-work can make dating with an avoidant attachment style an easier process, and this is best done with a therapist.

How To Heal Avoidant Attachment Style

• Avoidantly attached individuals often experience low self-esteem and mental health challenges due to suppressed emotions.
• An avoidant individual regularly chooses casual, noncommittal relationships, avoids emotional intimacy, and selects careers or social circles that require little vulnerability.
• People with this type of attachment style tend to be overly focused on themselves and their own creature comforts, and largely disregard the feelings and interests of other people.
• That internal monologue, or some version of it, is playing in the mind of the withdrawer while their partner is reading their silence as indifference.

You have a right to connection, to emotional presence, to feeling wanted. But the timing of when you express those needs, and the distinction between expressing a need and pressuring for a response, is everything. This is critical because the treatment approach for a burnt-out pursuer is fundamentally different from the approach for a true avoidant. If you treat a collapsed pursuer like a withdrawer, you’ll miss the raging hunger underneath the silence. And if you treat a lifelong withdrawer like a frustrated pursuer, you’ll overwhelm a nervous system that’s already at capacity. I use an architectural metaphor with couples to help them map their relationship.

Of course, it is possible to date with an avoidant attachment style. However, how to date with an avoidant attachment style may look quite different to those with a secure, anxious, or disorganized style. Furthermore, having an avoidant attachment style as a parent is likely to affect your child’s attachment style. But you cannot change what you cannot see, and you cannot see what you refuse to name. With avoidant attachment, it may feel strange to discuss your feelings, and you may be reluctant to consider therapy.

However, by creating a coherent narrative of our story and allowing ourselves to feel the sadness of how we were hurt, we can break destructive relationship patterns and form more secure attachments. We can understand why we’re struggling in our relationships and actively challenge patterns that were prescribed to us by our past. An avoidant child will adapt to their circumstances by becoming pseudo-independent, finding ways to suppress their needs or meet them themselves. In addition, it is much easier for a child to believe that there is something wrong with them than to accept the grave reality that there may be something wrong with their parents. If the child were to perceive their parent as lacking, they would lose a sense of safety, which is paramount to their survival. For this reason, it can be life-changing to sort out attachment experiences in adulthood.