Deep Dive: The Avoidant Attachment Style

 Love me, but from over there - The Avoidant attachment style  

I want to send out a hopeful message to everyone listening – you have secure attachment in your system biologically. It’s in your system and your system wants to be connected, that’s what it’s wired for. It’s that throughout development stuff get’s dumped on your system, which interrupts this. Wounds, attachment injuries, trauma disconnects us and our system wants us to return to security. 

People use different language for attachment style which can be confusing so, were going to refer to the avoidant attachment style today – can also be referred to as the dismissive avoidant, insecure, fearful avoidant etc.

How it develops 

The avoidant attachment develops through absenteeism – it’s a message of “nobodies there”. Think of a vacant, dissociated parent – a child might be trying to find their parents eyes staring at them and there’s nobody home! Which is scary for infants who are 100% dependant on their parents! 
I also want to add that sometimes it’s not just the parenting of the child – sometimes it’s a medical procedure or an illness, maybe there was birth trauma or the parent is unwell – different factors can come in here. Any parents listening please take the burden to be perfect off your shoulders, we only need 30% attunement for secure attachment and it is a very forgiving system. 

Another way it can show up is when only left-brain activities are responded to – so whenever there is a learning of a skill, or an achievement in some way they were there, but whenever it was emotional or there was a need for comforting, they weren’t available enough. 

So, what this means is there sense of self is largely felt as isolated and they tend to regulate through dissociative mechanisms like zoning out to Netflix because they have a knee – jerk reaction to withdraw and a stress on connection. 

If you’re an avoidant you need time to surface to connection – it’s like you’ve been deep deep diving in the ocean and if you come up too quick you get the bends, so when I’m working with couples sometimes I’ll ask how much time they need to re-surface or what helps them come up slowly, because it’s hard to go from deep deep isolation to connection. 

Avoidance is a deep withdrawal that has helped them survive – it doesn’t mean they want to be alone. And often when an avoidant starts to connect to the longing of connection, it’s incredibly painful, that’s also our secure attachment surfacing! 

How to move towards security?
Experiment with low-risk situations of connect

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Please note: this episode is for informational purposes only and does not replace personalised psychological advice.