I’ve been with assholes in relationships. I’ve been the asshole.
It was all basically a result of not understanding attachment styles.
Instead of unconsciously swinging from one extreme to the other, now I’m on the path of learning secure attachment.
This post will cover:
– How my history with relationships was a result of my childhood
– Self-love vs Being loved by others
– History of Attachment Theory
– What Anxious Attachment, Avoidant, and Disorganized Attachmnet looks like and strategies for dealing with them
– How there can be overlap between the different styles
– On and off relationships
– What Secure attachment looks like
– Extending attachment beyond human relationships and beyond present time
✨ ❤️ ✨
“It’s very presumptive of you to tell me I don’t love myself. Maybe it is self-love, that even if I care for someone, to let go of that relationship if it feels bad to be in. It just doesn’t work for me to be friends with someone who can’t respond for six months. It doesn’t work for me to be friends with someone who holds communication hostage.
I know you wouldn’t be facing the challenges you’re facing unless you were meant for great things. I believe in you. Who knows… maybe one day, when all the hurt has been transmuted, we could be friends again.”
It was my final message in a series of videos I had sent to my, now, ex-best friend.
The videos were the culmination of years-long turmoil between me and her.
After years of being a doormat in an emotionally unavailable friendship, the videos were me finally saying No. It was a crowning moment.
But in the aftermath of the breakup, I had a lot of things to ponder.
For example: this friendship with her was actually the third in a row of emotionally unavailable relationships, both romantic and platonic.
I had to confront the question of WHY I kept on being involved in these types of relationships.
I knew from my prior healing work that I could extrapolate backwards from this pattern.
So, finally: I reasoned that I kept on being involved with emotionally unavailable people… because of an emotionally unavailable upbringing.
However, it was a rather abstract connection I made, and I couldn’t tie it to a concrete example.
Until much later, when I was visiting family in Toronto one year.
It was simple, on the surface: I said something to my aunt, whom I was visiting, and she heard me when I said something the first time. I felt surprised that she heard me the first time.
And something clicked, when I realized I shouldn’t be surprised at being heard the first time.
But that surprise was a result of having to so often repeat what I’m saying to my dad, who is often distracted.
In effect, the lack of presence / distractedness from my parents primed me for emotionally unavailable relationships. It primed me for relationships where I was getting “some” attention on a surface level, but not the deep and fulfilling kind that would leave me feeling satiated.
Emotionally unavailable people were familiar to me on a primal level, and my subconscious sought them out in its own equation: if an emotionally unavailable person accepts me and becomes available, then I’ll finally achieve safety in relationships and feel like I’m fulfilled.
This way that humans have of repeating experiences they had early on is called “repetition compulsion”.
Although, its an admirable effort by the subconscious, the obvious problem is that the nature of the inputs (emotionally unavailable people) means that the the desired result (safety in consistent relationships) is very, very unlikely to happen without dedicated effort on the part of both parties.
The good news is, it is completely possible to break these patterns within ourselves, once we have awareness.
✨ How attachment theory came to be ✨
The backdrop of what was going on before attachment theory is important to understand: at the time, psychiatrists were advocating a “cry it out” solution, which entailed basically ignoring the baby until they stopped crying.
It was thought that this would prevent children growing into ‘whiny’ and ‘overly dependent’ adults.
Now, although some people still believe in the approach, thanks to attachment theory we know that the net result of “cry it out” is chronic stress for the child and it leads to them emotionally shutting down.
In the fifties, John Bowlby was researching foster care systems. His research demonstrated how maternal deprivation can affect the development of children drastically, even noting how many of these deprived infants died an early death.
He thought that for ideal development to occur, children needed to have secure attachment to at least one caregiver, but he also thought that attachment systems remained in place throughout one’s life.
Hence: attachment theory was born.
Harry Harlow tested Bowlby’s attachment theory with his research on rhesus monkeys—he separated the baby monkeys from their mothers and gave them the choice to either attach to a A) cold wire monkey that provided milk or B) soft cloth monkey that had no milk.
Given the choice, the baby monkeys unanimously stayed with the cloth monkey and only went briefly to the wire monkey for milk.
The experiments demonstrated at the time that comfort and emotional safety was a primary need, and that attachment to parental figures wasn’t just a function of nutritional requirements.
(CW: sexual violence) Some of Harlow’s experiments were exceptionally cruel, like subjecting the female monkeys to rape. It’s important to honour the animals’ sacrifices in contributing to the understandings we have today. But it is darkly ironic to have to learn human truths through inhumane behaviour. (A point I’ll touch on a bit more later.)
In the sixties’ and seventies’, Mary Ainsworth then fleshed out attachment theory’ with her invention of the “strange situation”.
She wanted to test the basic contradiction in humans, in that infants needed to stay close to their caregivers for safety, but they needed to explore away from their caregivers in order to learn about the world.
In her strange situation, Ainsworth observed how toddlers behaved:
1) With their mothers one on one
2) When a stranger entered the room with their mother present, and
3) With a stranger when their mother was not present.
After many observations, Ainsworth was able to categorize the types of interactions into 3 categories: anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and secure. (The first two are popularly shortened nowadays to anxious and avoidant, respectively.) Later research by Mary Main introduced a fourth category, disorganized attachment.
The degree of security was reflected in the degree the toddler felt comfortable exploring, the extent they could calm themselves down in the face of unfamiliar stimuli, and whether they returned to their mother or not when she came back, and was soothed by her return.
Ainsworth theorized that the degree of security a toddler had was a result of how attuned the mother was to the child’s needs and emotions. If the caregiver was attuned, they acted as a “secure base” for which the child felt free to explore from.
Understanding how fundamental attachment is to humans, and how sensitive it is, sets the stage for the rest of the discussion.
As infants, if during an eye-gazing session the mother breaks eye contact for even a couple of seconds, the baby shows immediate signs of distress. There’s also the flipside of the baby being too overstimulated with too much connection as well.
Since love equals survival for the infant, everything an infant does is tied to maintaining that primal connection. If a behaviour elicits more attention, the infant will do more of that, and if a behaviour elicits less attention the infant will f eel ‘shame’ and perform those behaviours less.
We maintain what we learned as infants throughout the rest of our lives—unless we gain awareness about them, or learn from new experiences with intimate relationships.
In the late eighties’, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver extended the attachment styles beyond infants and into adult romantic relationships.
Their research showed that the fundamental instinct for connection—and the association between connection and basic safety—never goes away.
✨ Self-love vs Other-love ✨
“The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.” (Attached by Levine and Heller).
This is what is called the “dependency paradox”.
We’ve all heard that RuPaul quote, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”. It’s the idea of first having a foundation of self-love instead of seeking to fill that foundation with external sources of love, and avoiding a codependency trap in the process.
Lately, I have seen some push back against this idea because it can be used to promote toxic self-reliance culture which ignores the fact that humans have evolved to depend each other.
So, what is it? Self-love or being loved by others?
Like anything, it’s a mistake to look at it as a rigid binary. I’ve experienced some powerful shifts in my life when I realized all my fulfillment was already within me, but it was also true that being an island indefinitely was exhausting and impossible and that connecting on a genuine level with others is what made life meaningful.
Basically, it’s a matter of degree. How much of your needs and self-worth is sourced from yourself, and how much is sourced from others? Leaning too heavily in either direction can be detrimental.
In the strange situation, what allows the infant to freely explore and become independent is feeling their caregiver is safe, reliable, and attuned (a secure base).
When the caregiver leaves, and the infant is left with a stranger, the infant’s ability to soothe themselves is related to how much of a secure base their caregiver was. The baby soothing themselves is self-regulation.
When the caregiver returns, if the baby was able to be soothed successfully, that is indicative of secure attachment. This is co-regulation.
If we’re not secure attachers, there’ll likely be a learning curve in balancing between self-regulation and co-regulation.
And there may be seasons in our lives where we’re more so learning and growing from solitude and introspection (self-regulation), and others where we’re learning more from the crucible of being in relationship (co-regulation). Both are valuable, and especially so done with intention.
✨ ❤️ ✨
The following is a breakdown of the different styles: anxious, avoidant, disorganized and secure. Everything that isn’t secure attachment would fall under the insecure category.
If you follow attachment literature at all, you might notice the labels to describe the different styles vary, as well as some describing other sub-styles. The important thing to keep in mind is understanding the essence of each type.
❤️ Anxious Attachment❤️
Anxious attachment develops because attention is given, but it is given inconsistently or in an un-attuned way. The child then becomes obsessed with strategies to gain their caregiver’s love and attention, often using ‘protest behaviour’.
In the strange situation, anxious attachment is characterized by: intense stress when the caregiver leaves, showing fear or avoidance of the stranger while the caregiver is present, demonstrating little exploratory behaviour, and upon return of the caregiver, not appearing to be particularly soothed and even displaying anger towards them. (This anger upon reunion is why Ainsworth originally classified this as anxious-ambivalent.)
Ofra Mayseless in her 1991 paper describes something of interest: often, the inconsistency is a result of hyper vigilance on part of the caregiver. The caregivers are intense with their attention, then they burn out and need space and are unavailable for their children. “The result may be unstable, ill-timed, and unpredictable responsiveness. Their caregiving may sometimes be intrusive and sometimes underinvolved.”
When they grow up, infants with anxious attachment will often be drawn towards emotionally inconsistent/unavailable people like their caregivers (like I mentioned near the beginning.) Emotionally unavailable people are characterized by them *sometimes* showing care and affection, but other times acting aloof, distant, and unresponsive—or showing care and attention that isn’t 100%.
In these situations, otherwise independent and logical people can turn into puddles of goo when their anxious attachment gets triggered.
It makes sense: if love equals safety, then our physiology will be focused on gaining love at all costs and before anything else.
The emotional roller coaster of an anxious attacher being involved with someone who is emotionally unavailable is literally addicting.
A mistake many anxious attachers make is conflating these highs and lows for passion.
Receiving inconsistent rewards(aka love and attention) is the same thing that makes gambling addictive. The technical term for it is an “variable ratio of reinforcement”, which means the time in-between hits of reward is varied, rather than fixed.
Reinforcement schedules was originally studied with rats and food. Research found the more unpredictable when the next hit of food (reward) would come through, the more likely the rats were to be obsessed with pressing the food button, and the more likely the rats were to maintain this obsession even when the food stopped coming altogether. Humans display the same type of responses to variable ratio of reinforcements.
“Breadcrumbing” is the same phenomenon in another context. It’s when someone gives you enough (attention, validation, etc.) to feel hopeful, but never enough to be truly satiated.
When anxious people feel like the person they’re attached to is unavailable, this kicks in their attachment system and they become activated towards trying to win back the attention of the unavailable person.
Being activated gets the brain into an obsessive, goal oriented state, flooded with dopamine. People often think dopamine comes with reward, but it’s actually more associated with the thrill of the chase itself. Not the satiety that comes from actually getting what you want. (Amanda Blair / Maia Svalavitz in Unbroken Brain)
The thing is, we anxious attachers can get pretty ruthless when we get into this goal-oriented obsessive state of trying to “win” love.
Specifically, we can be pretty ruthless with ourselves. A pretty common thing is self-abandoning in order to get affection/love/attention.
“Having needs = being abandoned” – Amanda Blair
Oh, we’re chill, we’re cool, no, we don’t need anything! But we’re happy to give you anything YOU need.
Right.
It was so bad for me, that when someone first reflected to me that I had needs too, it didn’t even compute. The concept seemed too abstract to even register for me.
Having been deeply in this self-abandoning place, I can say it is quite a painful position to be in. We edit ourselves down and try to become the most convenient, pleasing, people we can be… until we’re slivers of ourselves.
Just because we’re acting chill and cool, doesn’t mean we actually are. Sitting tight and patiently, anxious while you wait to get your needs met from others, is a losing strategy. Anxious attachers need to learn to be direct with expressing their needs. If we wait too long to do this, the resentment may build up and our communications may end up hostile and confronting and put the other person on defensive.
An example of this is establishing communication expect ations. Something we might do when we’re activated is message or call our partners/friends constantly and obsessively. In general, how often one responds or not can be a contentious issue in many relationships.
If this is an issue, and the relationship is an important one to both parties, have a conversation about what works for the two of you in terms of communication frequency. That way, the anxiously attached heart can be at ease in terms of when to expect the next moment of connection.
When you are direct with expressing your needs in a way that isn’t threatening to the other person, how the other person responds can be a litmus test for the relationship. Do they gaslight you, belittle you, not take your concern seriously in another way, or agree but not actually follow through? Take these signs as red flags. (Levine and Heller, 2012).
This can apply to early dating stages too. In “Attached”, the authors describe a woman in the dating scene, who was in her 40s and wanted to get married and have kids. Instead of hiding this fact in order “not to scare people off”, as common advice would dictate, she was upfront about it in the beginning. She did indeed scare people off, but in the end, she found exactly who she wanted.
That’s what’s key for anxious attachers—not to have a scarcity mentality around suitors and friends and trust that there are more people out there who are right for you.
It can be hard, though, especially because we can often feel incomplete without someone to be close to.
If they’re perfect for you on paper except for the fact that they’re super not into you, then they’re not perfect for you and it’s best to keep looking (Arden Leigh).
We can often put the objects of our attachment on a pedestal and have rose-colored glasses about them to protect ourselves from any fact that might threaten their potential to be our secure base.
To help prop our partners/friends up, we might end making ourselves feel like less-than. I noticed this phenomenon with an intense relationship with an ex-friend who was emotionally unavailable. I felt inferior compared to her where I never felt like that with anyone else.
Anxious attachers are the first to blame ourselves, automatically thinking if something has gone wrong that it has to do with us and not the other person / external situation. If we’re paired up with someone who never takes responsibility for themselves and always blames others, then it can be a toxic combination. We can end up apologizing for things that aren’t our fault, or overapologizing in general. (If anyone’s familiar with “fawn” response, lots of similarities here.)
Another thing we might do when we’re activated is try to get approval and validation by dressing sexy or acting seductive and waiting for people to notice this. (Amanda Blair calls this “intruiging”.)
Blair also says that casual sex might be particularly hard on those with anxious attachment because it feels like a big hit of validation, only to be abruptly done and for us to feel abandoned in the aftermath.
This validation and approval seeking also makes anxious attachers more susceptible to social media addiction. If you notice yourself endlessly checking for likes or compulsively scrolling, the trick is to stop, take a breath, and * ask yourself what you need *. Maybe you just need to give yourself some love and attention in that moment, or go for a walk.
Anxious attachers often feel like they’re a burden, feel guilty for taking up space, or feel like they’re “too much”. The truth is, we just received too little of what we needed. This feeling of being “too much” is often reinforced by emotionally unavailable people around us, and from our wider culture that fetishes self-reliance.
There is a caveat to the feelings of being “too much”—people with anxious attachment tend to have a big void where the consistent love and attention growing up should be, and they might attempt to fill that gaping void with another person. If anxious attachers aren’t aware of their unmet needs and can’t communicate to their partners/friends how to effectively meet them, they can end up overwhelming the people close to them.
We can think fulfillment comes from relationships and not from within ourselves. (Aka being on the extreme of co-regulation rather than self-regulation.)
We often want to become very close to people, very quickly, to fill that void fast. There can be pacing that is too quick in relationships, and inappropriate vulnerability (i.e being vulnerable with people who haven’t established that they can respect it, or people who we haven’t established safety yet with), or using vulnerability to rush the natural pacing.
There can be a hyper vigilance about the state of the relationship, constantly keeping tabs on its temperature. When the relationship is going well, we’re over the moon, when it’s not, we’re in despair: an unhealthy enmeshment between the state of the relationship and our mental state.
We can be more likely to suspect infidelity.
We often get into one-sided relationships where we give more than we receive. There can be a shadow side to generosity here, where we feel we need to give in order to get. There’s a belief that if we just give enough, then eventually we can get our cup filled too.
This is especially a trap when we get involved with people who are often in crisis, because we feel it is a moral obligation to help them. (Obviously, people should be helped—the discernment here is helping before our own cup is full or not, or if we’re subconsciously helping in hopes they’ll help us get our cup full.)
Keeping score has a bad rap, but I think in overgiving situations, keeping score of the give and take is a great way to develop clarity about an imbalanced relationship.
Anxious attachers often have very poor boundaries. If we go back to the Strange Situation, we know that infants only feel comfortable exploring when the safety with their caregiver has been established. Exploring away is a form of infants’ self-differentiation from the parent, and self-differentiation is what allows growing kids to develop healthy boundaries.
If anxious attachers didn’t feel safe enough to explore and self-differentiate, their boundaries will be under-developed and they’ll need to undergo a boundary learning curve in adulthood.
Anxious attachers might be more likely to have a soft and quiet voice. Often, if we weren’t truly seen as children, this can develop.
We can start to get resentful if we don’t get what we need—like the angry infant upon the return of the mother, if we get distressed enough we can display “protest behaviour”, behaviour designed to get back the attachment figure at all costs.
This includes things like threatening to leave the relationship, cold-shouldering, angry messages (result of forgetting we have needs and acting chill all the time, until it builds up to a point where we decidedly can’t act chill), trying to make our partner/friend jealous, and thinking thoughts like “they better come crawling back to me for forgiveness!” (Levine and Heller, 2012).
We can try to mold relationships into being more consistent and reliable, and not read that the other person is not interested in that.
It’s important to note, that for anxious attachers, anyone who we’ve previously experienced as emotionally unavailable in the past may trigger activation in us anywhere from subtle to distinct. Even an emotionally unavailable person liking our facebook posts can function as a breadcrumb for us, which is why I’d recommend social media boundaries with anyone who has displayed this pattern towards us.
For example: Something interesting happened with a friend I used to be romantically involved with years ago, someone I’d experienced as emotionally unavailable within the relationship. It was a formative relationship because it was my first romantic one.
Recently, me and my friend had a meeting to discuss our past from the vantage point of the present. It was a good discussion and at the end of the meeting, they mentioned that they would be open to either stay platonic…or relate romantically again in the future.
This admission felt like a bomb drop, surprising me and throwing me for a loop.
Because in my personal experience, I find that I often find myself liking people romantically only after my brain interprets some action of theirs as them liking me. My guess is that it has to do with how attention/love is like catnip for those with anxious attachments and it gets them hooked.
This is how my brain interpreted my friend’s light suggestion of possibly relating romantically in the future.
While I was processing that meeting with my friend who I used to date, I messaged another friend of mine:
“Typically with me and intense interpersonal things, my feelings will fluctuate a lot and only with time / the right processing will I gain any kind of clarity.
So my head is very much like, no, it’s a bad idea [to get involved again after the negative experience that was had the first time], but after the meeting I found another side of me being tempted.
I think my resolving of this will be basically reconciling these two sides, and I’m certain the answer to that question is inner child work.”
I felt really torn, initially. But I let my my emotional fluctuations play themselves out, and then messaged my friend again:
“Yeah… it’s just been a couple days and I already feel clearer about it. You know, some part of me felt angry that they dropped the bomb like that.
And when I inquired why I felt actually distressed — it’s like, with emotionally unavailable people, if they show signs of liking/loving you, that’s the ultimate prize for the anxious attacher.
And I think receiving this big hit of validation pulled me back into those push-pull days, and being reminded of the push-pull context made me feel unsafe on a primal level.
So… it became clear to me the part of me that was tempted, was actually my inner child desperately wanting the validation from an emotionally unavailable person.”
Another interesting thing happened during this period of time that I was mulling over re-kindling the relationship.
Before, I’d never normally got metaphorical images popping up in my head.
But after the meeting with the friend I used to date, I started having this vision of my younger self just sitting in a dark room and being cold.
So what I did with these metaphorical images was imagine my adult self bringing blankets and fire to my younger self, and also bringing her out into the sunshine. (This is what inner child work is–healing the younger aspects of our psyches.)
It felt profound and healing to do this.
That’s the crux with all this attachment work: the other people we get involved with in unhealthy ways are simply manifestations of an outer layer. The core is actually a sad kid on the inside, a sad kid who needs our love.
That’s the trick to healing anxious attachment —healing the inner child within. We need to own and stand up for our needs. We need to stop self-abandoning ourselves, stop looking for security and fulfillment from people who’ve proven themselves to be emotionally unavailable, and transmute our fear of abandonment (EFT, or any other belief modality would work for this.) We need show * ourselves * the consistent and available love we didn’t get originally, and also stand for relationships that model this back to us.
❤️ Avoidant attachment ❤️
There are two lines of thought as to how avoidant attachment develops:
One is that it develops from consistent unresponsiveness from parents.
The other is that it develops from a smothering attitude and a lack of independence given to the children. (Imo, I think a smothering attitude could also lead to an anxious attachment because it is “attention” but the kind that doesn’t feel 100% secure, like its more about soothing the parent than it is the child.)
The avoidant attachment style might manifest in a different “flavor” depending on if the avoidant attachment came from emotionally unresponsive parents, or smothering parents.
In the strange situation, avoidant attachment in infants is characterized by: little distress from the infant when the mother leaves the room, little distress when alone with the stranger, little interest in reuniting with the mother when she comes back, and minimal interest in exploring surroundings.
“Ainsworth and Sylvia Bell theorised that the apparently unruffled behaviour of the avoidant infants is in fact as a mask for distress, a hypothesis later evidenced through studies of the heart rate of avoidant infants…Avoidant behaviour allows the infant to maintain a conditional proximity with the caregiver: close enough to maintain protection, but distant enough to avoid rebuff.” (Wikipedia)
The underlying feature of avoidant attachment is that the child sublimates emotional needs and becomes very independent. They grow up uncomfortable with intimacy, because it either reminds them of: being rejected (distant parents), or losing autonomy (smothering parents.)
They can also be uncomfortable with emotionality in general. There’s a tendency to brush aside hard emotional things like it’s NBD.
They are likely to say their childhood was fine and dandy, even if it was emotionally bereft.
They might believe the only person they can rely on is themselves.
People with avoidant attachment will often break things off before they become too intimate, or be involved in more casual relationships.
They might have difficulty emotionally supporting those they are in relationship with, and might not share their innermost details to them.
They might be unresponsive to texts and messages.
They’re likely keep relationships on an uncertain level or undefined for a longer period of time. They’re less into intimate forms of sex, and might have less sex in general. (Levine and Heller, 2012).
Avoidants might cheat as a way to create distance in relationships.
Avoidants are also likely to be involved with people who are more into them than the avoidant is into their partner—often with people who have anxious attachments (anxious-avoidant trap). That means that avoidants will have the “upper-hand” in the relationship and can control the pace of it. & Control is just way for someone to feel safe, deep down.
Often times— when avoidant’s partner/friend expresses some independence and backs off for a bit, the previously avoiding avoidant will start coming around because they feel safe to do so, and perhaps even because they miss them. But once contact is established again, the avoidant might push their partner/friend away again. This dynamic is at the heart of a lot of push-pull cycles.
In a lot of ways, avoidants are the mirror of anxious attachers. Where anxious attachers of “activating strategies”, avoidants have “deactivating strategies”.
This can look like putting down a partner/friend, only remembering their negative qualities, or fantasizing about an impossible standard of relationship. (Levine and Heller, 2012).
They might feel irritated at their partner/friend for no obvious reason (except the reason probably is, the avoidant feels like they don’t have enough space).
When partners/friends bring up emotional concerns, those with avoidant attachment are more likely to avoid the conversation and hold communication hostage, or gaslight them and say things like “you’re too sensitive/you’re making too big a deal of things.”
Where the anxious attacher is likely to blame themselves first, the avoidant is more likely to blame others.
Although the avoidant can coast through life in their self-reliant way for quite a while, eventually the lone wolf, I’m-an-island feeling might take its toll and the avo idant can end up feeling quite lonely.
The way for avoidants to move into secure attachment is to titrate into comfort with intimacy. Notice when the need to push comes into play, and get into the edge of the comfort zone—that is, lean in instead of running away.
Not gonna lie, it’s probably going to be unpleasant when you first do this:
I actually started dating someone, as I was writing this article. And because he was more anxious than I was and I felt too enmeshed in the beginning, it kicked up my avoidant attachment style(something I will talk about later, how we’re not always “just” one attachment style).
Something telling happened right after a period of time of hanging out with him so much that I felt like I was losing myself.
I was at home, in the kitchen, and my mom was there as well. I was feeling heavy with overwhelm from the relationship. My mom moved towards me to tell me something, and I noticed this hyper irritation within myself that she was standing so. damn. close. to me.
It clicked for me: I was triggered by feeling enmeshed by my boo because it reminded me of feeling enmeshed by my mother. ‘Cause my mom, bless her, is definitely an anxiety-prone smothering type. Not feeling like my boundaries and autonomy are going to be respected is a big wound of mine.
Since I was triggered from the start of our relationship, feeling my autonomy was threatened to be engulfed, at the beginning I was very much one foot in and one foot out.
A vision of this scene from “Adventure Time” started popping up in my head at the time.
It was a scene between Finn, the protagonist, and the Flame Princess, a girl literally made of fire. They were both trapped in a hole with the oxygen quickly depleting. The flame princess is on the verge of death when Finn kisses her, giving her one of his few breaths of oxygen left. His face is burned, but they end up surviving.
The message from the vision was clear. Love burns. Love feels like you’re losing oxygen.
The pain that avoidants feel with intimacy is real.
It was only when my boo and I had a conversation with each other’s inner childs that I felt safe enough to have both feet in the relationship.
He reassured my inner child that he would respect her boundaries and that he appreciated her autonomy and individuality.
I validated his inner child’s pain at receiving inconsistent love and attention and reassured him that he was safe and that he was worthy of love. Because I was half-in and half-out, I had also triggered his inner child with the idea that love was fickle and inconsistent.
So, avoidants: don’t overdo past your limit with intimacy, but practice moving through the edge.
Something that can be helpful is to start with doing an activity together that requires focus — cooking, playing a sport, etc.. The focus is not on intimacy with the other person, so its unthreatening and allows the avoidant to let their guard down and feel fondness for their partner/friend. (Levine and Heller, 2012).
It’s important for the avoidant to communicate when they’re feeling their need for space come up instead of leaving their partner/friend in the cold.
That requires that avoidants be with people who can respect their need for space so avoidants don’t feel overloaded. (So if the avoidant is with an anxiously attached person, ideally their partner/friend is doing their own healing work, and the two are coming up with agreements that work with their respective needs.)
Lastly — work with the fear of rejection/abandonment/not being good enough, or fear of enmeshment and loss of autonomy, which often comes with the avoidant attachment style. I would recommend EFT and inner child work for this. (If you have questions about how to go about this specifically, feel free to message me).
❤️ Disorganized attachment ❤️
Disorganized attachment develops when the primary caregiver was someone the child was afraid of, or who just didn’t feel safe for some reason.
It results in a fundamental confusion, in which the natural instinct is for the child to run toward the parent for safety, but the parent feels like or is an unsafe person, or just feels undependable.
You can look at this fundamental confusion by comparing the two metaphorical visions I had.
In the first one, I mentioned I had a vision of my inner child in a dark room and being cold. Healing my inner child involved bringing fire into the dark room.
However, in the second metaphorical vision, I saw the scene between Finn and the flame princess and felt the feeling that love equaled being burned.
You need love to feel warm and to survive, but it can also hurt and burn you.
In their own way, all of the insecure attachment styles (anxious, avoidant, and disorganized) are about ways in which to maintain this dangerous balancing act towards love.
Having disorganized attachment doesn’t necessarily mean physical or obvious abuse is involved, although those are red herrings for it. It can also include things like parental depression, having inappropriate emotional responses to the child’s cues (i.e parent laughing when child is upset), or the parent is frightened or anxious all the time themselves.
In the strange situation, upon the return of the caregiver, the child will display contradictory behaviour like running to greet them, and then backing away immediately, show expressions like half-fearful and half-smiling, or display hitting behaviours. When the stranger comes, they may not go towards the caregiver for comfort at all, like one infant who ran into a corner. The infant may suddenly freeze with no context, as well. (Main and Solomon, 1990).
Disorganized attachment is the least understood of the attachment styles. Sometimes, it is understood to be a combination of anxious and avoidant. That’s why looking at the characteristics of anxious and avoidant can be helpful for those with disorganized attachment. However, some of the research I looked at disorganized attachment as something other than a combination of avoidant and anxious—it sees it as an incoherence of strategy for maintaining attachment.
As the child gets older, they can become “parentified”. Ofra Mayseless (1998) describes two phenomena: the child either becomes overly agreeable, nice, and compliant, or they become aggressive, domineering, controlling and ‘overtake’ the parent.
As you can imagine, growing up with this fundamental contradiction is a painful predicament to be in.
As an adult, disorganized attachment can manifest in these ways:
– Difficulty trusting people
– Difficulty self-soothing or emotionally regulating
– Disassociation
– Lacking empathy
– Feeling literal fright in romantic or intimate relationships
– Lashing out in violent ways when provoked
– Trouble making sense of the past and making sense of things in general: foggy or incoherent narratives
– Tendency to be involved in abusive relationships. Again, this is repetition compulsion at play. It’s simultaneously seeking what is subconsciously familiar, while attempting to heal the original wound vicariously.
– Difficulty maintaining friendships and romantic relationships.
– Fear of abandonment.
– Feeling unsafe in world in general.
– Feeling unworthy of love.
Not a lot of literature discusses this, but I think if children with disorganized attachment can become “parentified” to be either overly compliant or aggressive, I think as adults many disorganized attachment style folks may be extreme people-pleasers, or those with anger management problems on the other side of the spectrum.
The way to heal from disorganized attachment is to heal the underlying childhood trauma: making sense and meaning from it and releasing the painful emotions. Therapy would be really useful in this case. After that process has begun, practicing safe relationship would be the next step. Attachment-based therapy can be beneficial for that specifically.
I would also personally do some belief work in fundamental beliefs such as worthiness, safety, and fear of abandonment (using whatever kind of modality – tapping, CBT, hypnosis, etc.)
✨ The spectrum of attachment ✨
Something that was pretty huge for me to realize was that we don’t always act like one attachment “type”. Instead of looking at attachment styles as categorical (i.e we fit into one category or another), I’ve personally experienced it as a spectrum.
I first heard about looking at it as a spectrum though Arden Leigh’s Re-Patterning Project. She used the yin yang symbolism as an analogy — within each side, there is also a bit of the other. Two sides of the same coin:
The avoidant is still desiring intimacy on some level, because they’re involved with people at all. The anxious person, even while consciously reaching for intimacy, is still choosing unavailable people where they won’t actually get to be truly intimate.
Both the anxious and the avoidant are afraid of truly being seen.
This is also backed up by the attachment research itself: when I dived into it, I found the categories weren’t so clear cut as I thought they’d represent it as.
For example, in the strange situation, there are multiple subtypes of secure attachment—ranging from an avoidant secure style to an anxious secure style. Yet, they all were still categorized as secure. In avoidant attachment, there are also degrees of avoidance, with some infants less avoidant than others. In anxious attachment, baked into its definition is ambivalence itself. Similarly, in disorganized attachment, the defining feature is a lack of coherence in attachment strategy.
It makes sense, then, that depending on who we’re relating with, different attachment styles will get triggered.
I also haven’t read a lot about it, but I also think it makes sense that if our caregivers have different attachment styles (for example, one parent is avoidant and the other is anxious), then we might develop a bit of both of their styles.
I think we can all have all four types within us. I identify as anxious, but as I mentioned before, if someone is more anxious than I am, then I’ll start showing up as an avoidant.
I think rather than overly identifying with one style, it can be helpful to look at how we’re showing up in any particular context.
For example, if I hadn’t identified so strongly as anxious before, then I might have seen earlier how I was showing up as an avoidant asshole in one of my previous relationships.
✨ On and Off relationships ✨
When I say I’ve been an asshole in relationships, this is primarily what I mean: being the wishy washy avoidant when the other person was all in, and giving them whiplash with all the pushing and pulling I was doing.
I thought because the other person agreed when I clearly said where I was at emotionally, it was okay to continue the on and offness and ambiguity.
I didn’t understand that just because my anxious partner was agreeing, that meant the agreement was coming from the most aligned place—it was coming from unmet childhood needs and a scarcity mindset around relationships.
It’s true that there could be purely healthy ways to do on and off relationships. It’s also true that sometimes relationships don’t fit into the rigid boundaries prescribed by culture. In fact, I learned a lot from all of my on and off phases, and the only thing I think was negative about it was making my partner at the time feel unsafe with the inconsistency.
Still— often, on and off relationships are the manifestation of an unhealthy anxious and avoidant dynamic.
By the way, many relationships that have gone from being secure and monogamous to friends-with-benefits, or monogamous to open/polyamarous, would fall under this umbrella of on and off relationships.
(Lawd, misusing open/polyam relating styles to bandaid fundamentally unhealthy relationships—topic for another time 😂)
If you find yourself in an anxious/avoidant on and off trap — the trick is to analyze what constitutes and precedes the “on” phases and the “off” phases. On/off relationships can be a result of not being able to holistically see and evaluate the good and bad together as one: instead, reacting to good and bad in isolation.
Once you take apart the good and bad, you have awareness. But awareness by itself won’t change the dynamic. Both you and your partner can either commit to undergoing the learning curve of secure relating (which I don’t have personal experience doing with on and off relationships), or, I would recommend taking a six month no contact break, allowing space to see things more clearly from the other side
❤️ Secure Attachment ❤️
In the strange situation, infants with secure attachment are comfortable exploring while the caregiver is around, are able to self-regulate/self-soothe a certain amount their own distress when the stranger comes in, and they eagerly seek reconnection with the caregiver upon their return and are also easily soothed by the their presence.
Ainsworth noted that the secure infants’ caregivers were highly attuned to their children—being able to sense what they needed in any given moment.
Secure attachers tend to describe their relationship with their parents as warm and loving, and the relationship between their parents as positive as well. (Hazan and Shaver 1987)
In a nutshell, secure attachment is the combination of a sense of autonomy and an ability to self-regulate, with a comfort with intimacy/vulnerability and an ability to co-regulate.
Secure attachers don’t play games. They are effective communicators, responsive to others’ needs, easily affectionate, and naturally expressive with feelings. Intimacy begets more intimacy.
They can keep disagreements and arguments civil and work out a solution. They don’t take things as personally and don’t resort to personal attack.
If they’re not feeling a relationship, they are able to communicate that to the other person with integrity and let them go.
They are comfortable setting boundaries, and working with others’ boundaries as well—not taking others’ boundaries personally.
They have high self esteem and are comfortable asking for help. They trust their partners/friends and don’t easily feel jealous. They don’t ruminate a lot about their relationships, and their feelings towards their relationships are relatively stable. They are aware of their partner’s/friend’s shortcomings and accept them anyway.
Secure attachers are capable of helping those with insecure attachments they’re in intimate relationship with move towards secure.
On the flip side, though, sometimes being with an insecure partner/friend can make secures less secure, if they’re not aware of their secure qualities. And because secure attachers are so good at working things out, sometimes they will stay in a relationship for too long trying to work something out when it is simply not workable. (Levine and Heller, 2012).
If you have secure attachment: congratulations! It is a wonderful gift.
For those of us trying to move towards secure attachment —the term is called “earned secure”. It’s when someone with an insecure attachment style, through enough self-growth and experience with healthy relationships, develops a secure attachment style. It is very possible with a willingness to undergo the (potentially steep) learning curve. A lot of us are undergoing, or have gone through the secure attachment learning curve without being aware of it. It can be hard, but it’s worth it.
🌎 Cultural Attachment / Attachment to the Earth 🌏
I’m going zoom out the discussion here and look at attachment from macroscopic, historical lens. I wasn’t planning on writing this section originally, but I was inspired by what I’m learning in a course I’m taking with Tada Hozumi a nd Dare Sohei, which introduced me to the concept of cultural attachment and earth attachment.
So, our attachment style is actually an intergenerational pattern. We will often inherit the same attachment style of our parents.
There was a study done comparing adults’ attachment style and their children’s attachment style, using a test called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI):
“…What an adult unconsciously reveals about his own childhood during the course of the attachment interview will predict his own attachment patterns with his children… AAIs conducted with the parent before the birth of an infant was able to forecast accurately how the infant would behave in the Strange Situation at one year of life.
Furthermore, when those children are followed two decades later, their performance in the Strange Situation is found to have accurately predicted their own patterns of narrative in the Adult Attachment Interview.
Thus, the adult’s AAI narrative of his own childhood will often predict how he will nurture his future child, and therefore how his child, at one year, will respond in the Strange Situation. And, the child’s behaviour in the Strange Situation will foretell the type of narrative, she, in turn, will give about her childhood twenty years later! ” (Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No).
If we inherit our attachment styles from generations and generations, then that means there is a style of relationship we have to our families of origin and therefore, our cultures of origin.
Estelle Simard, a social worker (who is Indigenous), first coined the term “cultural attachment” in the early aughts. Essentially, she argued that Indigenous children must have a secure attachment/connection to their ancestral culture to truly thrive and be well-adapted.
Cultural attachment serves as a strong container and framework for one’s life experience.
Of course, for Indigenous folks living in a settler society that regularly and actively enacts colonial violence towards them, it is particularly salient to have secure cultural attachment.
However, what’s less obvious is that cultural attachment applies to everyone—other POC and white folks, too.
Stephen Jenkinson calls Western culture an orphan culture. A culture united in the initial European settlers’ decision sever their roots and “start fresh”. Except they weren’t really starting fresh—they fled Europe to escape oppression, and ended up recreating that oppression on Turtle Island and wherever else they colonized. We know that unhealed trauma tends to replicate itself.
My high school social studies teacher (a white person) talked of how his grandparents made the decision, with pride, to not to teach their children their ancestral German in order to fit into Canadian society better. Many initial European immigrants traded their heritage for status in the monolithic white hegemony (gaining advantage over BIPOC in the process).
Western culture is a collection of compensatory strategies designed to mask European cultural trauma. These strategies include things like white supremacy, rugged individualism, hyperrationalism, oh, and endless consumption to the point of planetary collapse.
And it’s important to note that compensatory strategies can take “good” or “bad” forms, like an overachiever equating high grades to love vs someone who uses drugs to numb trauma. They are still compensatory strategies all the same.
So for everyone—BIPOC, white,—living within this colonial Western culture, a question emerges of how to navigate attachment to something that is inherently insecure. (This insecure cultural attachment also has implications for cultural appropriation.)
The networks of cultural attachment can get quite complex. For example, I’m a desi person living in so-called Canada. I have to navigate attachment to Western culture, to my ancestral culture (which itself has been marked by centuries of colonialism—which BIPOC’s ancestry hasn’t been?), and additionally, to the Indigenous lands I’m residing on and the lineage of people for whom this is their ancestral homeland. Additionally, as a practitioner of Qi-gong, part of not being appropriative with traditions that are not my part of my heritage is having a relationship with the ancestors of that tradition (credit to Dare and Tada for that last point!)
Another question emerges from all this. If individual attachment trauma is a result of ancestral/cultural attachment trauma going back generations and generations and generations, what was the original wound?
The original wound is ancient. It was losing secure attachment to the Earth Herself.
In the process of becoming agrarian, many societies became more hierarchical as power became based on how much resources (i.e land) one had accumulated. Empire, and the war, destruction, and trauma that comes with empire, was born as a way to control land. Patriarchy was born as a way to control female bodies’ reproductive capabilities to maintain “the line” for land transfer. Birth of patriarchy also facilitated queerphobia because of a need to maintain rigid gender lines. And these developments only became more entrenched with the creation of religious hegemonies. This is what “civilization” is made of.
We became less embodied and more abstract. Many of the abstractions of civilization are useful, like written language and math and science. I think now we’re using these abstractions—or object technologies that replaced the prior spiritual technologies—as tools to get humanity back to our true north. Hence, torturing monkeys for science in order to find out fundamental human truths.
As humans domesticated themselves, the relationship to the Earth became more about controlling Her and less about embodied sacred relating. Instead of a relatively easy hunter gatherer lifestyle of working a couple hours a day with several days off (easy because of an in-tune relationship to the earth), we had to toil for hours a day on farmland just to “earn our keep”. Poverty was born.
“As individuals, we are very fragile. Connected to larger entities like mountains and lakes and oceans, our nervous system becomes much more robust.” — Dare Sohei (paraphrased)
Industrialized cultures lost a lot when we severed our connection with the earth. Instead of mediating life through the context of Earth’s massive support, suddenly all of that fell on our tiny individual shoulders.
The good news is that in terms of re-learning secure attachment, the Earth is probably the most accessible entity for one to practice secure attachment with.
If you want a place to start: Sit or lie down on the ground, and feel the feeling of being held by the planet. Send love down. Wait for a moment, and feel the planet sending love back to your body.
As I’ve practiced deeper connection with the Earth, and with ancestors, I’ve felt many anxieties melt away and a deeper rootedness within my role in life. Nested within the framework of the planet and with lineage, I wasn’t a random floating human with no context anymore.
✨ ❤️ ✨
Over the course of writing this, I went down many rabbit holes. I thought I had a decent understanding of attachment theory, but the more I learned the more I realized I didn’t know. Some of what I learned confronted me.
But that’s what I love about doing healing work. It pushes me and it dares me to embody more of myself.
If you’ve read this all the way through, then you’re also one of the ones doing the work and I see you and honour you.
✨ ❤️ ✨
Resources/References:
Amanda Blair:
1
2
3
4
Arden Leigh
“Attached.” by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
“Procedures for Identifying Infants as Disorganized/Disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation” by Mary Main and Judith Solomon (more academic)
“Maternal Caregiving Strategy—a Distinction Between the Ambivalent and
the Disorganized Profile” by Ofra Mayseless (more academic)
Tada Hozumi
Dare Sohei
“When the Body Says No” by Gabor Maté
“Unbroken Brain” by Maia Svalavitz