An avoidant attachment style is a pattern where individuals steer clear of emotional closeness and tend to minimize the importance of intimate relationships, often as a way to protect themselves emotionally.
People with this style usually have a skeptical or negative view of others but maintain a relatively positive view of themselves.
They often see others as unreliable or dishonest, while believing they are independent, capable, and don’t really need support from anyone else.
Individuals with an avoidant attachment style often have difficulty forming and maintaining deep emotional connections with others.
They may feel uncomfortable with intimacy, fear dependence on others, and strongly desire independence and self-reliance.
This attachment style usually develops as a result of emotional rejection and neglect from primary caregivers in early childhood.
For these individuals, avoidance and withdrawal become their strategy to protect themselves from experiencing more pain and abandonment.
Avoidant Attachment Signs in Adults
Adults with an avoidant attachment style often share certain key characteristics.
You might recognize yourself or someone you know in thoughts like:
- “I am uncomfortable without close emotional relationships.”
- “It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient.”
- “I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.”
Typically, adults with this attachment style highly value independence over emotional intimacy.
Sharing personal thoughts and deep feelings doesn’t come easily.
They tend to suppress or minimize their emotions, often keeping feelings bottled up or hidden.
Emotional Experience:
- Deactivating Strategies: Avoidant individuals use strategies that suppress or minimize emotional experiences to avoid intimacy and vulnerability.
- Suppressing Emotions: They specifically suppress emotions like fear, sadness, anger, and shame, which might trigger attachment needs.
- Avoiding Closeness: Even positive emotions such as happiness can feel threatening because they promote closeness, something avoidant individuals instinctively avoid.
- Denial and Repression: They may ignore or deny painful memories or emotions and struggle to recognize their own emotional states.
- Emotional Disconnect: Despite appearing calm externally, internally they may have significant physiological stress reactions like increased heart rate or facial expressions of distress.
- Gaze and Attention Control: They often avert their gaze and consciously redirect attention away from emotional or attachment-related triggers.
Relationship Dynamics:
- Struggles with Intimacy: Avoidant adults typically find intimacy uncomfortable, often denying they have attachment needs.
- Defensive Reactions: They might treat current partners defensively, feeling as if their partners are intrusive or rejecting, mirroring past experiences with caregivers.
- Minimal Emotional Depth: Often, they prefer casual relationships, separating sex from emotional intimacy, and may experience jealousy focused on sexual rather than emotional infidelity.
- Trust Issues: Trusting others can be challenging, and they usually rely on themselves rather than seeking emotional support from friends, partners, or family members.
- Challenges with Caregiving: They find it difficult to respond supportively to others’ emotional needs, often distancing themselves from individuals expressing vulnerability.
- Reduced Empathy: They typically exhibit lower levels of empathy, compassion, and cooperative behavior, preferring to withdraw rather than engage when faced with emotional demands.
Other Associated Features:
- Risky Behaviors: Avoidant attachment is linked to increased risks like substance abuse, risky sexual behaviors, and neglect of preventive health measures.
- Social Difficulties: They often have poorer social skills, higher hostility during conflicts, and frequently interpret others’ actions negatively.
- Posttraumatic Symptoms: Avoidant individuals may experience emotional numbing or behavioral inhibition as reactions to trauma.
Personal Account
Here is a personal account of someone with an avoidant attachment style:
“I have known I’m a dismissive avoidant for some time now and the main thing I really want to stress is that this avoidance is almost entirely subconscious on our part unless someone brings our attention to it.
I had no idea I was doing this for years and years and the result was that I truly hurt a lot of people. In college, I started having unexplained physical symptoms (stomach ache, vision changes, heart palpitations, chest pain) which were later determined to be anxiety and depression after the doctors ruled literally everything else out […]
I would be dating a guy who I initially really liked, but as the relationship wore on I would decide they were not good enough due to some fatal flaw and they couldn’t possibly be “the one.” This decision always happens to coincide with these men wanting more commitment.
I loved casually dating, but the second someone wanted to make things official or get emotionally closer, I would suddenly end it, much to their surprise […]
Interestingly, I would become deeply lonely and sad during single periods but would continue the same process or pull away as soon as I started to get close to someone.
Following that I’d become lonely and sad again. I thought my problem was that “the one” was not out there […]”
Triggers of Avoidant Attachment
Avoidant individuals tend to feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable when another person wants to be emotionally vulnerable and intimate.
This is because they have learned that depending on others, wanting to be close, and looking for support will be met with rejection.
For them, it is easier to suppress these needs altogether and avoid deep emotions and intimacy.
triggers and fears for avoidant individuals:
- Too Much Closeness or Neediness: A partner wanting to get too close emotionally or demanding a lot of togetherness is a top trigger. Avoidants fear being engulfed by another person’s needs. If the avoidant feels trapped and will back away. They need space like they need air.
- Pressure to Open Up: Being pushed to share feelings or talk about emotional topics is threatening. Vulnerability is uncomfortable for them, so they get hurt or annoyed when a partner insists on deep emotional disclosure or “talking about our relationship” before they’re ready.
- Feeling Controlled or Losing Independence: Avoidants greatly value autonomy. They are very sensitive to anything that feels like control or entrapment. For example, attempts to monitor their activities, make all plans together, or limit their alone time will scare them. Having to depend on others or losing self-sufficiency is a core fear.
- Unpredictability and Chaos: Big emotional outbursts, sudden changes in the relationship, or partners who are erratic in behavior can deeply rattle an avoidant. They prefer stability (on their terms), so drama or uncertainty in a relationship will prompt them to withdraw for self-protection.
- Criticism and Judgment: Being criticized by a loved one is especially hurtful – it taps into their fear that they’re not good enough. The “persistent fear of rejection or disapproval” means they cannot relax around someone who frequently judges them.
- Being Emotionally Exposed: Anything that makes them feel weak, needy, or embarrassed is extremely frightening. Avoidants fear being judged for being emotional, so if they do open up and it’s not received well (or worse, is mocked), it’s devastating.
Deactivating Strategies
People with an avoidant attachment style tend to cope with challenging relationship situations by pulling away, breaking up, or distancing themselves emotionally and physically from friends and family.
These behaviors are known as deactivating strategies, and they essentially help maintain a comfortable buffer between the avoidant person and others.
At their core, these strategies protect individuals from the hurt and disappointment they’ve experienced in past relationships, often tracing back to childhood.
While these strategies might provide temporary comfort, they can harm relationships over the long term, leaving partners and loved ones feeling confused, upset, or rejected.
Deactivating strategies include:
- Avoiding closeness or intimacy.
- Suppressing feelings of threat, anxiety, or need.
- Preferring to deal with stress alone (what psychologist John Bowlby called “compulsive self-reliance”).
- Maintaining distance physically and emotionally.
- Ignoring or downplaying emotional triggers.
- Avoiding new or challenging situations that might feel threatening.
- Denying personal weaknesses or vulnerabilities to maintain a sense of control.
- Blocking or suppressing memories and thoughts that evoke distress or vulnerability.
- Dampening even positive feelings like joy or affection, making emotional connections harder.
Deactivating strategies are essentially ways to escape or minimize the emotional pain and frustration caused by attachment figures who were unavailable, unsympathetic, or unresponsive – often early caregivers.
Their primary purpose is to “turn off” or dampen the attachment system, preventing feelings of vulnerability, rejection, or disappointment.
According to attachment researchers Shaver and Mikulincer, people deactivate their attachment system when they feel that seeking support or closeness isn’t viable.
Deactivating Strategies keep avoidant individuals from fully enjoying the deep bonds and intimacy that close relationships can offer.
While these self-protective strategies might begin in childhood or adolescence, they can become increasingly rigid with age.
That’s why taking steps to heal an avoidant attachment style can be incredibly rewarding.
Healing Avoidant Attachment Style
Healing an avoidant attachment style involves honest self-reflection, deepening your self-awareness, and actively practicing healthier ways of connecting with others.
While it requires patience and effort, change is absolutely achievable.
1. Understanding avoidant attachment
Start by understanding avoidant attachment through attachment theory.
Avoidant attachment often stems from early experiences where expressing emotions or seeking comfort led to rejection, punishment, or neglect from caregivers.
In response, children learn to suppress their emotions and attachment needs as a protective mechanism.
This pattern, developed during childhood, can persist into adulthood as a defense against potential emotional pain or rejection.
Delving into childhood memories can help you pinpoint the origin of your unconscious thoughts. Gaining awareness and articulation of these beliefs enables their transformation.
2. Recognizing your patterns
Recognizing your avoidant tendencies is an essential first step towards developing deeper, more fulfilling relationships.
Reflect on your past experiences, especially early childhood interactions or significant relationships that may have influenced your avoidant behaviors.
Understanding the roots of your attachment style can help you empathize with yourself and start to gently dismantle these defensive behaviors.
3. Transforming deeply-held beliefs
Healing isn’t about simply changing surface behaviors—such superficial adjustments can lead to compensatory reactions.
True healing means transforming the unconscious beliefs and assumptions underlying your avoidance.
Common avoidant beliefs include expecting rejection if you express your emotional needs or believing that intimacy inevitably leads to pain.
4. Practicing Emotional Awareness
To counteract these deeply-held beliefs, it’s important to practice identifying, expressing, and processing your emotions.
This means allowing yourself to feel and acknowledge vulnerability, fear, sadness, or even joy, rather than dismissing or avoiding these feelings.
Over time, this emotional awareness can gradually build a sense of safety in intimacy and emotional closeness.
5. Challenging negative beliefs
Challenging your fears and negative beliefs about relationships through new, positive experiences is also crucial.
This involves actively practicing vulnerability with trusted individuals, sharing your insecurities, desires, and needs.
Doing so can provide corrective emotional experiences that gently reshape your internal understanding of relationships, moving away from expecting rejection towards trusting and experiencing acceptance.
6. Seeking and accepting support
Additionally, learning to seek and accept support from others breaks the cycle of compulsive self-reliance common in avoidant attachment.
Practicing emotional openness, even in small steps, can significantly improve your ability to connect and rely on others.
7. Compassion and Patience
Remember, your avoidant behaviors developed as protective mechanisms.
Be patient and compassionate with yourself as you gradually work towards building more secure, authentic, and fulfilling relationships.
Benefits of Healing an Avoidant Attachment
- Enhanced Relationships: Cultivating a secure attachment style enhances emotional expression and strengthens bonds, leading to deeper, more meaningful connections.
- Boosted Emotional Well-being: This transition can reduce feelings of isolation and increase fulfillment and connectivity.
- Increased Self-awareness: Understanding personal emotions, needs, and tendencies allows for more intentional relationship choices.
- Improved Parenting: As a less avoidant parents, you can forge closer connections with your children, fostering their emotional regulation and secure attachment.
- Better Emotional Regulation: Healing enables individuals to handle emotional challenges without harming relationships.
- Strengthened Self-worth: Recognizing and valuing personal emotions and needs increases self-respect and self-love and reduces shame and self-doubt.
- Improved Communication Skills: Healing bolsters the ability to express emotions and needs effectively, listen actively, and respond healthily to others’ emotions, enhancing emotional intelligence and averting relationship issues.
Self-Regulation Strategies for Avoidant Attachment Triggers
Avoidantly attached individuals often experience low self-esteem and mental health challenges due to suppressed emotions.
Learning to comfortably ask for support and fostering safe, valued relationships is essential for overcoming these challenges.
Here is some advice to get you started:
1. Healthly Communication
Effective communication is key to overcoming avoidant attachment patterns. Developing active listening and assertiveness skills helps create meaningful connections.
Active listening involves deeply understanding others’ emotions, while assertiveness ensures clear and respectful expression of your own feelings and needs.
Empathy and boundary-setting are crucial for nurturing emotional intimacy.
Empathy helps validate others’ feelings while comfortably sharing your own.
Setting clear boundaries promotes emotional safety and trust, distinguishing between healthy limits and emotional avoidance.
Finally, conflict resolution skills allow handling disagreements constructively, fostering trust and emotional intimacy through open, respectful dialogue.
2. Expressing Your Needs Clearly
Individuals with avoidant attachment often fear expressing strong emotions.
Open, transparent conversations help regulate these emotions healthily:
- Be specific and clear to avoid misunderstandings.
- Use “I” statements to prevent sounding accusatory.
- Welcome feedback to foster mutually satisfying solutions.
3. Allowing yourself to trust others
Gradually practicing vulnerability by sharing your thoughts and emotions can foster trust and emotional bonding.
This openness builds a secure environment for emotional expression and healthy relationships.
Therapy, especially emotion-focused therapy, can further support this process.
4. Identifying and Expressing Emotions
Because of your expectations of other people and relationships formed in your younger years, your patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior are mostly automatic and subconscious.
That means you may not be aware of why you think, feel, and behave the way you do.
In order to create change, you must first become aware of what is happening within you when it comes to relationships.
If you have established that you have an avoidant attachment style, pay close attention to situations that make you feel uncomfortable and provoke a need to shut down or run away.
What thoughts go through your mind? How does your body feel? What is your mind telling you to do?
When you are mindful of these situations and how you are feeling, it’s much easier to intervene.
Ask yourself: Am I pushing someone away because I’m scared of getting close? Am I not asking for support because I fear they will reject me?
Take time and observe what is happening in your mind and body before reacting automatically. It can be helpful to write these thoughts down in a journal to process your emotions, set goals, and track your progress.
5. Regulating Your Nervous System
When your need to avoid is triggered, it means your nervous system and the fight/flight/freeze response has been activated.
When this happens, you go into a trance state where your reactions become subconscious.
Practicing mindfulness and becoming conscious of what’s happening within us is easier when you learn how to regulate your nervous system and automatic reactions.
You can do this by practicing grounding techniques, such as breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, and mindfully connecting with nature.
The more you practice these, the more control you will gain over your mind and body. That means, you should practice grounding regularly, both when you are and when you are not experiencing the need to avoid.
6. Comfort Your Inner Child
A technique that helps to heal the wounds of the past is to mentally revisit your childhood and engage with your child-self with understanding and kindness.
For whatever reason, your caregivers, friends, and/ or partners were unable to meet your needs adequately and may have behaved in damaging ways toward you.
Tell your child-self that it was not their fault; they did whatever they could to survive and what they experienced was painful and undeserved.
Have compassion for yourself and acknowledge that it’s okay to feel sad or angry about the way you may have been treated.
Once you have acknowledged this, it’s easier to let go of the fear of rejection, learn how to be intimate, and ask for help.
The past does not have to control the present and future.
7. Therapy
Although you can do a lot of this work on your own, it is often helpful to have a therapist who can help you through this process. It’s also an opportunity to practice asking someone for help.
A therapist can discuss attachment theory with you and help you to identify and challenge your avoidant beliefs and behaviors.
They can also be a (temporary) secure attachment figure for you and demonstrate what a trusting and reliable relationship looks and feels like.
8. Behavioral Experiments
Once you have established a practice of self-regulation strategies, you can do some behavioral experiments in the form of practicing secure behaviors.
The best way to change beliefs and thought patterns is to have evidence for your ability to behave and feel more secure.
Examples of behavioral experiments include:
- Allowing yourself to receive emotional support from someone
- Asking for help when you are feeling low or stressed (e.g., telling someone what you are feeling and ask them for advice)
- Talking to someone about difficult experiences you have had
- Listening to the concerns of someone else without withdrawing or changing topics
- Making a list of things you like about another person
- Keeping a gratitude diary in which you focus on the positives of the day, making a list of your strengths, and writing down when other people have been kind and supportive
How Avoidant Attachment Develops
Origins and Development:
- Childhood Experiences: Avoidant attachment often originates from experiences with caregivers who were consistently rejecting or emotionally unavailable.
- Parental Rejection: Parents, especially mothers of avoidant infants, were typically more angry, less affectionate, uncomfortable with physical closeness, and less responsive to emotional needs.
- Repeated Rejection: Children with avoidant tendencies learned early that attempts to seek comfort led to rejection, leading them to stop seeking closeness to avoid further emotional pain.
- Parental Sensitivity: Adults with dismissive attachment often had mothers who showed low sensitivity and fathers who were emotionally absent.
To maximize their chances of survival, infants are born with an innate attachment drive.
When they are frightened or distressed, their attachment system is activated, which leads to proximity-seeking behaviors towards caregivers (e.g., crying, clinging).
Once they have achieved proximity and safety, their attachment system is deactivated.
Thus, the primary caregiver’s responsiveness and availability during infancy and early childhood play a crucial role in shaping a child’s attachment style.
Children who experience stable, safe, and sensitive caregiving tend to develop a secure attachment style – they expect to be safe and protected and can confidently explore the world.
Children whose caregivers did not respond sensitively and responsively to their needs and signs of distress often develop an insecure attachment style.
If the child’s bids for closeness, comfort, and safety were rejected and their emotional expression was punished or shamed, they may develop an avoidant attachment style.
Children with an avoidant attachment may have experienced a lack of emotional or physical responsiveness from their caregivers.
When they sought comfort or connection, their needs may have been consistently dismissed or ignored, leading them to believe that reaching out for closeness is futile or even met with rejection.
This leads a child to learn that it is best to suppress or minimize their needs and emotions to avoid disappointment or rejection.
These children tend to develop a highly independent personality, learning to rely on themselves for emotional support and soothing. They tend to become self-reliant and develop a strong desire for autonomy.
It’s important to note that attachment styles are not solely determined by early childhood experiences.
Genetics, innate personality traits, and life experiences can also interact with the caregiving environment to create an attachment style.
Furthermore, attachment styles are not necessarily stable over time, and relationships later in life can also significantly impact shaping attachment styles.
For example, individuals who have healthy and high-quality friendships during their teenage years are more likely to be securely attached in adulthood.
Signs of Avoidant Attachment in Children
There are several common characteristics of children with an avoidant attachment style.
These characteristics include: avoidance of physical closeness, independence and self-reliance, minimal seeking of comfort, emotional suppression, limited eye-contact, and difficulty with trust.
Children with this attachment style are also highly sensitive
According to psychiatrist Dan Siegel, “[children] intuitively pick up the feeling that their parents have no intention of getting to know them, which leaves them with a deep sense of emptiness.”
They resist and avoid close contact with their caregivers to please them and prevent further rejection.
This behavior and the sense of emptiness can make them seem aloof, unemotional, and precociously autonomous.
Everyday Signs of Avoidant Attachment in Young Children:
- Avoiding Physical Closeness: They might rarely seek hugs or physical comfort, even when upset or hurt, preferring to manage independently.
- Minimal Reaction to Separation: They seem unaffected or indifferent when caregivers leave, rarely showing visible distress.
- Ignoring or Avoiding the Caregiver: They often deliberately keep distance from caregivers, focusing on toys or other distractions instead.
- Limited Emotional Expression: They may seem emotionally flat, rarely displaying strong emotions openly, even during situations that might typically cause distress or excitement.
- Distracting Behavior: They frequently redirect attention away from emotional or social interactions to toys or activities, especially when caregivers attempt to engage with them directly.
Here are some signs in more detail:
- Keep emotional distance from caregivers.
- Focus more on toys and activities than on social interactions.
- Appear calm externally but may feel internally anxious or stressed.
- Display a learned sense of independence to cope with rejection or emotional neglect.
While these signs indicate that a child leans more towards an avoidant attachment style, they are not enough to classify a child as avoidant.
These signs have to be viewed in context.
For example, if they see their best friend and are not sad to say goodbye, that does not necessarily mean they are avoidant; they may just be distracted.
Sources
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Sheinbaum, T., Kwapil, T.R., Ballespí, S., Mitjavila, M., Chun, C.A., Silvia, P.J. & Barrantes-Vidal N. (2015). Attachment style predicts affect, cognitive appraisals, and social functioning in daily life. Frontiers in Psychology, 18 (6), 296.
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