Attachment theory is one of the most established theories in psychology. It states that our early childhood interactions with primary caregivers shape how we relate to others in adulthood, especially in romantic relationships. These modes of relating to others are referred to as attachment styles.
Attachment styles are of two main types:
1. Secure
2. Insecure (Anxious and Avoidant)
All about survival
Human babies are born helpless and remain so for a long time. Therefore, they are wired to attach and stay close to their primary caregivers.1Sullivan, R. M. (2012). The neurobiology of attachment to nurturing and abusive caregivers. The Hastings law journal, 63(6), 1553. The primary caregivers, usually parents, are, in turn, wired to love and care for their young. Infants and children have certain core emotional needs, such as:
- Attaching securely to caregivers
- Freedom to express valid needs and emotions2Andriopoulou, P. (2021). Healing attachment trauma in adult psychotherapy: The role of limited reparenting. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 23(4), 468-482.
When parents are responsive and emotionally attuned to their child’s needs and distress, the child forms a secure attachment to them. Being emotionally attuned means you act as a mirror to the child’s emotions. If the child expresses distressing emotions, you validate their experience and comfort them, resulting in co-regulation.
When the child expresses a need, you validate it, even if you can’t immediately meet it. Children who are raised by such parents feel emotionally safe. They learn that it’s safe and rewarding to express needs and distress.
How does avoidant attachment form?
Insecure attachment style in children forms when parents are inconsistent and/or unpredictable in their responsiveness. They’re not as attuned as is required for the formation of secure attachment. They may meet the child’s physical needs, but emotionally, they’re lacking. At best, they’re emotionally unavailable and unresponsive. At worst, they’re hyper-critical and abusive.
When a child repeatedly learns that it’s neither safe nor rewarding to express needs and distress—because the parent, at best, ignores them, or at worst, dismisses, denies, or minimizes them—the child eventually stops expressing needs and distress.
“When I express my emotions, they get upset, overwhelmed, angry, or anxious. I shouldn’t express them so I can continue to be on good terms with my parent and my survival is ensured.”
The parent-child dynamic is lopsided in terms of power. The parents hold all the power. The child can’t enforce its will on the parents. The child’s psychology has to adjust to sustain the relationship.
When this ‘quitting expression of emotion’ occurs, the child can no longer co-regulate with the parent. Therefore, it must be able to self-regulate or self-soothe. It needs to learn to manage its own emotions. The avoidant child typically does this by creating a psychological space around them. When they’re in that space, they either distract themselves from their feelings or process them. They need this space to make sense of their emotions. It’s a mirror for their feelings that their parents didn’t provide. It’s a ‘secure base’ they go to to parent themselves.
How avoidants behave
The program that runs on loop in an avoidant’s mind is “avoid-avoid-avoid”. When they’re in novel or even familiar social situations, their mind goes “avoid-avoid-avoid”. They want to avoid connecting with others because they have learned it’s not safe. They’re afraid their painful childhood experiences and dynamics will get recreated.
You could say they have lower-than-normal connection needs, but really, deep down, they want connection like every human, but they fear it too much to seek it actively. If it happens on its own, great. They are hyper-independent and tend to be successful in their careers and hobbies. Their relationships tend to be superficial or non-existent. They believe relationships are unimportant. They may even cringe at affectionate behavior.
Avoidants structure their lives in a way that enables them to avoid vulnerability and emotional intimacy.3Allen, J. G. (2012). Restoring mentalizing in attachment relationships: Treating trauma with plain old therapy. American Psychiatric Pub. They’ll rarely attend social events, and they won’t post on social media. They’ll avoid expressing themselves, except when they feel safe. Their attitude is:
“I won’t bother you, and I don’t want to bother you.”
Everywhere they go, they take their psychological space, their invisible parent, with them. They are aloof and won’t initiate contact. If you initiate contact with them, they’ll get suspicious and think you have ulterior motives.
Of course, all these tendencies get worse when avoidants enter relationships. During the initial phases of a romantic relationship, they’ll be great because there’s hardly any vulnerability or emotional intimacy. They’ll finally feel safe to express their emotions and be loving and affectionate. They’ll find themselves doing the same behaviors they used to cringe at.
As soon as the relationship gets close, they’ll feel overwhelmed, trapped, and uncomfortable. They’ll feel afraid of losing their space and identity. They’ll feel fearful of getting engulfed by their partner.
When this happens, they’ll get triggered and engage in deactivating strategies. These are behaviors designed to increase distance, such as shutting down, pulling away, and not calling and texting.
Healing
Healing avoidant attachment requires changing the core beliefs about emotional expression and relationships that were formed in an avoidant person’s early childhood. How they’re behaving now is a reflection of those core beliefs.
For instance:
- “I am defective.”
“If my parents weren’t responsive to me, something must’ve been wrong with me.”
- “I am unsafe.”
- “I am not good enough.”
- “I am invaded.”
- “I’ll get abandoned.”
- “Emotions are bad, weak, and unsafe.”
- “People will drain my energy and resources.”
- “Conflict is bad.”
Avoidants have a shame wound that gets triggered when they’re criticized or feel criticized. That will make them retreat emotionally. They’ll structure their lives in such a way as to avoid activating their shame wound. That is why they don’t connect with others. They’re afraid others will bring out their inner sense of shame. They’re afraid others will take their high self-esteem mask right off their faces and take a peek at their flawed, emotionally vulnerable self.
Healing avoidant attachment involves addressing and changing negative core beliefs that contribute to healing the shame wound.
Steps to heal the core wounds
1. Self-awareness
You can’t work on yourself if you don’t have self-awareness. If you’re an avoidant who wants to heal, start monitoring your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in different situations. Pay attention to your triggers.
- What type of situations trigger you?
- When something triggers you, what thoughts start running through your mind?
- How do you feel?
- Can you link those thoughts and feelings to core beliefs?
- Can you delve into your past and explore how those beliefs formed?
Awareness is the first step for change. Until now, you might have thought that your thoughts, feelings, and reactions are normal, but they’re not. They’re normal to you. Because they seem so normal to you, it seems that’s who you are. But you’re not just that. That’s who you’ve become, and you can become anything you want.
2. Challenging core beliefs
Okay, so you have these negative and unhelpful core beliefs that were formed in early childhood. They may have helped you survive and cope in childhood, but are they helpful now? Can you see how they’re preventing you from having deep and meaningful relationships? Are you ready to change them?
When you’re ready to change them, all you have to do the next time you think thoughts related to those beliefs is ask yourself:
“Is it true?”
You keep telling yourself that relationships are unimportant. Then how come you feel good when you connect? You keep telling yourself that emotions are weak, but you probably know that they’re essential signals worth paying attention to. How many times have you perceived criticism where there was none, to reinforce your belief that people are unsafe?
If you believe you’re flawed, gather pieces of evidence that show that you’re not. If you think people are only out to get you, look at people who have healthy, reciprocal relationships.
When you do this consistently, your negative core beliefs will weaken. You’ll gain cognitive flexibility that’ll enable you to behave differently. When you act differently in certain situations, you form different beliefs around those situations.
3. Reinforcing beliefs with action
Nothing reinforces beliefs as much as action does. You can do all the editing and reframing in your mind, but if it doesn’t play out in your behavior, you haven’t changed. You haven’t healed. When something triggers you, feel the emotional pain, choose to do the opposite of what the trigger urges you to do, and observe the result. Next time you feel like withdrawing from a situation because you think you’re being criticized, how about asking the other person what they meant by what they said?
You’ll soon realize that more often than not, your triggers are lying to you. They’re repeating painful stories from the past to keep you safe. When you catch your emotional trigger lying to you, it’s game over for the trigger and the associated core wound. Their show is over. You run the show now. You decide what’s real and what isn’t. What you should or shouldn’t think, and how you should or shouldn’t behave.
What healing looks like
Healing requires a significant amount of time, self-reflection, and effort. Once you heal, it’ll reflect in your attitudes, feelings, and behaviors. You’ll start to form secure attachments to people. Instead of the “avoid, avoid, avoid” program that dominated your psyche previously, a new program will run when you meet people:
“Connect, connect, connect.”
While you were previously glad to avoid social connections, perhaps self-deceivingly, now you’re happy when you get a chance to connect. There was a time when canceled plans brought a sense of relief. Now, they leave you feeling upset.
You’re shocked how easy it is to talk to people and connect with them when you remove the trauma-induced blocks or walls from early childhood. You realize how much mental energy you were spending on keeping up those walls.4Muller, R. T. (2010). Trauma and the avoidant client: Attachment-based strategies for healing. WW Norton & Company.
Your current relationships deepen and get better. You no longer have time or energy for superficial connections. If somebody doesn’t want to connect with you, you don’t see it as rejection. The rejection you were previously trying to avoid by avoiding connection. Now you no longer care if you’re accepted or rejected. If you’re accepted, great! Let’s see if we can form a deep and meaningful connection here. When you’re rejected, that’s okay, too. To each their own.
Avoidants pretend they don’t care about other people to hide that they do care. They put up a facade of being secure, but if they truly were, they wouldn’t get so triggered when someone rejects or shames them.5Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2012). An attachment perspective on psychopathology. World psychiatry, 11(1), 11-15 In contrast, secures truly don’t care. They’re chill with you not wanting them. It doesn’t touch any wounds inside.
Is it necessary to heal?
People often think that healing is a wonderful thing that will solve all their relationship problems, far from it. Everything has pros and cons, including healing avoidant attachment. When you heal, you bring your mind to a place of balance. Balance is excellent, and it’s what you should strive for to maintain psychological stability and enhance well-being.
That said, I’d say it’s not necessary to heal trauma. The defenses you developed in childhood to cope with a threatening environment may still be helpful for you in the environment you currently find yourself in. I don’t know why, when discussing healing, psychologists don’t talk about the risks of relationships. It appears that society has collectively chosen to overlook the risks associated with romantic relationships.
The truth is that romantic relationships are stressful and can become very toxic or even life-threatening. What if your avoidant tendencies are simply protective strategies meant to shield you from these risks by keeping you at a distance from relationships? What if the things we call negative core beliefs are true? After all, ‘negative’ does not mean ‘not true’.
As long as the world and people remain unsafe, it makes sense to have defenses that protect you from them. These are adaptations. When the world becomes truly safe, you can then drop these defenses.
Despite this, I still recommend healing avoidant attachment because of the fulfillment you’ll gain, increased self-awareness, improved communication, and the ability to see reality more accurately. At the same time, don’t altogether ditch your avoidant tendencies. Let them run in the background and do their checks.
You only want to form safe relationships with people who are worth forming secure relationships with.6Guina, J. (2016). The talking cure of avoidant personality disorder: Remission through earned-secure attachment. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 70(3), 233-250. And those people are rare. While you previously dismissed everyone as unsafe, when you heal, you give more people a chance to prove themselves. You give more people the benefit of the doubt.
