There are abundant reasons why healthy relationships are crucial for your well-being. Not only do they boost emotional health, but they also provide a sense of support and belonging.
Yet, your ability to build these relationships strongly in part depends on your attachment style. If you have, or suspect you have, an avoidant attachment style, it might be difficult to develop close bonds with the people around you.
If this sounds like you, remember that you’re not alone, nor are you at fault for the attachment style you developed. You can reverse unhealthy relationship habits through personalized strategies, self-compassion, and professional guidance. Over time, you can heal an avoidant attachment.
What is an avoidant attachment style?
An avoidant attachment style is a psychological and emotional pattern that develops when a child’s primary caregiver doesn’t provide adequate care or attention. Over time, this can cause a child to avoid emotional closeness and maintain independence, often as a way to protect themselves. They may avoid emotional intimacy, pushing others away. They might also experience hyper-independence, believing they can’t rely on anyone, nor can anyone depend on them.
It’s also possible to hear avoidant attachment referred to as ambivalent, insecure resistance, or anxious preoccupied. Avoidant attachment is one of the three insecure attachment styles along with anxious and disorganized attachment. However, different labels exist within avoidant attachment style:
- Dismissive-avoidant attachment style: This describes someone who views themselves as entirely independent, refuses to rely on others, and insists upon taking care of themselves. They are often emotionally detached and have strict emotional boundaries.
- Fearful and anxious-avoidant attachment style: If someone fears abandonment, they might give mixed signals, like pushing a loved one away and then pulling them back. They likely have few close relationships and fear ending up alone.
An avoidant attachment style can have harmful effects on your well-being and life. Studies have shown that young children who displayed avoidant attachment characteristics had increased difficulty coping with emotional problems and performing well in school.
Avoidant vs. secure, anxious, and disorganized attachment
Attachment theory describes four attachment styles, and everyone falls into one of four categories based on their childhood and life experiences. In addition to avoidant attachment, these three other attachment styles describe different approaches to emotional closeness:
- Secure attachment: People with secure attachment styles tend to form healthy bonds with others. They are comfortable expressing emotions, trusting others, and establishing healthy boundaries.
- Anxious attachment: People with anxious attachment styles often fear being rejected or abandoned. They might become clingy, jealous, possessive, or overly invested in their relationships with others.
- Disorganized attachment: People with disorganized attachment styles tend to switch between anxious and avoidant attachment characteristics. One moment, they might be attached, while the next, they might be distant.
Each attachment style reveals itself through unique traits. If you’re curious about your attachment style, consider exploring its traits more closely.
Avoidant attachment style traits
From an outsider’s perspective, someone with an avoidant attachment style may appear self-sufficient and hyper-independent. They may even be high performers in the workplace and have robust social lives. However, they reveal insecurities and distance themselves when forming close bonds with others. You can identify avoidants by noting these potential personality traits:
- Focusing on sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy
- Pulling away when someone begins to get close
- Preferring to maintain strict emotional boundaries in the relationship
- Acting disdainfully toward their partner for showing emotions or affection
- Coming off as cold, distant, or lacking emotional maturity
- Maintaining a surface-level relationship
- Sabotaging relationships, both romantic and platonic
- Wishing to break up with their partner at the slightest uneasiness
If you have an insecure attachment, you might try to avoid emotional closeness. These tendencies impact how you handle dating and manage each stage of a relationship.
How do avoidants act when dating?
In the early days of dating someone new, the relationship feels exciting and flirty. You may go on dates often and regularly talk throughout the day. However, someone with an avoidant attachment style will pull back when the relationship begins showing signs of emotional vulnerability.
Someone with an avoidant attachment might cancel dates at the last minute, respond less often to text messages, and avoid sharing intimate details when asked deep questions. You may feel like this person is putting up an emotional barrier.
When confronted, the avoidant attachment person might deny their actions or make excuses about being too busy. If these tendencies aren’t proactively addressed, the relationship is more likely to fizzle out.
To better understand an avoidant attachment style while dating, consider working through an official questionnaire like the one from Trauma Solutions. It contains statements related to all attachment types. Here are some examples:
- I find myself minimizing the importance of close relationships in my life.
- It is difficult for me to reach out and ask for help.
- I insist on being self-reliant; I do many tasks, projects, or hobbies alone.
Read through these statements and mark each one with a 0 (disagree), 1 (sometimes agree), 2 (mostly agree), and 3 (strongly agree). Add up your total score. The closer you are to 30, the more likely it is that you have an avoidant attachment style.
What causes an avoidant attachment style to develop?
You develop an attachment style through early childhood experiences. As a young child, you depend entirely on your caregiver for everything from shelter to food. Their ability to meet your basic needs and emotionally attune to you determines your attachment style. Yet genetics is a factor, too. A child can have great parents who are emotionally attuned to their needs, but the child still develops an avoidant attachment.
You likely learned an avoidant attachment style if your primary caregiver’s parenting style was inconsistent or unpredictable. The same is true if a caregiver couldn’t tune in to your emotional needs. Often, a caregiver with an avoidant attachment style will display those characteristics with their child. As a result, they model those behaviors for their child, discourage emotional expression, and remain emotionally unavailable. Childhood trauma or mistreatment can also lead to the attachment style.
It’s important to remember that developing an insecure attachment style isn’t your fault, nor is it necessarily the fault of your caregiver. They might have been doing their best in the given situation.
How avoidant attachment style impacts relationships
People with an avoidant attachment style tend to be emotionally distant from their partners, which often hinders relationship quality. They are independent and self-reliant, offering little room for closeness or collaboration. An avoidant attachment style can also make it difficult for the person to acknowledge a mistake and apologize. While they may have many friends, their relationships are most likely surface level.
Additionally, an avoidantly attached partner might resent their partner for showing emotions, shut down during conflict, and may minimize or disregard their partner’s feelings. They may also gravitate toward casual or long-distance relationships where they can easily keep their partner at arm’s length.
A relationship with a partner who has an avoidant attachment looks different depending on the other partner’s attachment style. Here is how each pairing could look:
- Avoidant-anxious pairing: The anxious partner tends to push while the avoidant partner pulls away. An anxious partner’s perceived “neediness” may overwhelm the avoidant partner. However, the anxious partner is even more fearful and anxious because the avoidant partner seems distant. Most likely, neither partner has their needs met.
- Avoidant-disorganized pairing: A union between an avoidant partner and a disorganized partner often results in inconsistent and unpredictable behavior. The disorganized partner can sometimes demonstrate avoidant attachment style traits while showing anxious traits at other times. It usually results in neither partner feeling fulfilled by the relationship.
- Avoidant-avoidant pairing: Because both avoidantly attached partners keep the other at arm’s length, their relationship remains surface level. It might be a casual partnership. The relationship is more likely to end because both partners are willing to walk away or avoid fixing a relationship when it gets tough.
- Avoidant-secure pairing: The partnering of a securely attached person with an avoidantly attached person can work well. Often, the person with an avoidant attachment must be willing to heal. The securely attached person must learn when to give their partner space and when to create a safe space for sharing emotions.
No matter which attachment styles are present in your relationships, it’s important to remember that they can change, and you can strengthen and deepen your relationships.
How to heal avoidant attachment style
An avoidant attachment style is something you can work on improving. The following are several practical ways you can heal.
Practice identifying and expressing your emotions
If you have an avoidant attachment style, you likely actively avoid being emotionally vulnerable with anyone, including yourself. Researchers drew a connection between attachment theory and the diathesis-stress model. If you have an insecure attachment, you experience elevated stress levels and are more likely to experience negative outcomes after stressful situations.
Learning to sit with your emotions is the first step in healing your avoidant attachment. Take these steps to get started:
- Acknowledge the emotion when it appears: Pause whatever you are doing and get curious. You don’t need to name the emotion or its source immediately, but take note that something has caused it.
- Notice where you feel it in your body: Pay attention to whether you feel a tightness in your chest or a twisting in your gut. Your heart rate may speed up. Remember, these are normal reactions to intense emotions.
- Practice breathwork or other mindfulness techniques: Instead of avoiding the emotion, try implementing a breathwork strategy to calm your nervous system. Box breathing or focusing on how it feels to sit in your chair can help you stay present.
- Try journaling how the emotion appears in your body: The emotion will still be present after calming yourself. It’s a good sign. Now, journal about the sensations you felt in your body and your observations about the experience. Consistent practice can help reduce cognitive biases related to an insecure attachment style.
If you have an avoidant attachment style, pushing down emotions when they arise is the well-worn path. While healing, it’s important that you resist that urge. Challenge yourself to sit with the uncomfortable.
Pro tip: If you feel drained or exhausted after sharing emotions, you may be experiencing a vulnerability hangover. It’s a normal experience, and the feelings will pass.
Understand the cause of your avoidant attachment
Knowing the cause behind your avoidant attachment style can often help you extend yourself grace and compassion. Early childhood experiences set the stage for attachment styles. However, as a child, you had little to no control over your environment or how your caregiver met your needs.
As you get acquainted with the cause of your attachment wound, you will likely spend a lot of time recalling memories and connecting with your inner child. While you may not remember these memories concretely because you were a young child, your body has an emotional memory. Expect to feel uncomfortable. It’s normal. You can move forward at a pace that is comfortable to you.
Pro tip: A daily journaling practice can help you process everyday emotions. Consider following shadow work prompts to get to know yourself better.
Find emotional regulation strategies that work for you
Because an avoidant attachment style causes you to dodge emotions, emotional regulation may be something you struggle with. Emotional regulation is your ability to identify and manage emotions in a healthy way. For example, with an avoidant attachment, you may shut down or go numb when experiencing negative emotions.
Where emotional regulation refers to managing emotions, emotional intelligence is your ability to identify and understand them. The most important part of improving your emotional intelligence is accepting the emotions. You may not be able to control which emotions arise in a situation, but you can control how you respond to them. Acknowledge and accept your good and unpleasant emotions, free of judgment. Try these strategies for better emotional regulation:
- Identify an anchor: Focus on all the items colored blue in your space or listen to your favorite song.
- Try a grounding technique: Breathwork is an excellent mental grounding technique, but if it feels too overwhelming at the moment, try stepping outside for fresh air or taking a warm shower.
- Reframe your perspective: An unpleasant emotion may create initial panic. Instead of shutting down, try pausing and changing your perspective.
Boosting your emotional intelligence improves your ability to navigate and communicate challenging emotions, which strengthens your interpersonal relationships.
Work on setting healthy boundaries
One of the core characteristics of an avoidant attachment is maintaining strict emotional boundaries. You might avoid relying on your partner or having deep conversations about the future. If a partner or friend tries to understand why you’ve pulled away, it may cause you to retreat even more.
You can remedy these habits by focusing on creating healthy boundaries. Consider these examples of healthy emotional boundaries you can establish in your relationships:
- Request that your partner ask if you have space to discuss emotions. If you can’t discuss it right then, choose a time when you both can prepare for a healthy conversation. Your partner’s willingness to work with you is a relationship green flag.
- If you feel yourself pulling away, seek reassurance from your partner. Tell your partner that you feel yourself becoming distant and ask them to reassure you that your relationship is secure. However, it’s best to avoid doing this too often as it can push an insecure partner away or make a secure partner feel insecure. It can also enhance your sense of emotional permanence — trusting someone cares for you even if they aren’t present.
- Vocalize when you’re feeling hurt, but do so with kindness. If you’re in a healthy relationship, your partner most likely didn’t intend to hurt your feelings. Express your hurt and give them the benefit of the doubt. Doing so allows you to work through misunderstandings together and grow stronger.
- Determine your relationship values and communicate them. Your values in a relationship can help frame how you approach challenging emotions and seek support from a partner.
When setting healthy boundaries, aim to create space for you and your partner to express feelings without judgment. Maintain an open dialogue while respecting each other’s needs.
Be compassionate toward yourself
As you learn to work with your attachment style, you’re likely to recall instances of childhood trauma or experiences. Your habits of avoidant attachment might make you want to shut down and avoid engaging with any difficult emotions. It can feel frustrating, as if you’re fighting against yourself.
It’s important to grant self-compassion and practice self-acceptance. Remember, you are taking huge strides toward healing by implementing new practices to better manage your emotions. You won’t always do it perfectly, and that’s OK. Practice positive self-talk and words of affirmation to remain compassionate toward yourself.
Maintain patience throughout your healing
While on your healing journey, aim to rewire old habits to form new, healthy emotional responses. But have patience. These changes don’t happen overnight.
Not every attempt to rework avoidant attachment habits will prove effective. Additionally, you most likely won’t always recognize automatic responses to emotions in the moment. Both are OK. With practice, you can slowly work toward implementing healthy emotional coping mechanisms.
Work with a mental health professional
Even as you implement strategies to heal your attachment wound, it can often be helpful to work with a mental health professional. Whether it be a coach, cognitive behavioral therapist, or another mental health provider, they can offer proper guidance to navigate unpleasant emotions.
A qualified professional will work with your unique situation and needs. Together, you can devise a plan to approach working on an avoidant attachment style so it feels as comfortable as possible. You can also create healthy coping strategies that work for you. With practice, you’ll increase emotional maturity and overcome insecurities.
Heal an avoidant attachment to create healthy relationships
Healthy relationships are crucial to our life satisfaction and happiness. Attachment styles govern how you build those relationships. With an avoidant attachment style, it can feel difficult, as your instinct is to shut down and push people away. But the good news is that you can heal your avoidant attachment.
The path to healing is full of ups and downs. However, you can slowly reverse unhealthy habits by maintaining self-compassion and consistency. The end result is a greater ability to establish lasting relationships. Work with a BetterUp Coach to learn how to build healthier relationships.