Relationships: The Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style
Relationships: The Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style by J. Alan Graham, Ph.D.
Introduction
In my article, “Relationship Therapy and Attachment Style: The Basics,” I briefly reviewed the four Styles of Attachment: Secure, Anxious, Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant. I talked about patterns couples get into and what to do about them. The Anxious, Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant are all insecure styles but manifest that insecurity differently. This article is a brief review of what to understand about the tendencies of the Fearful-Avoidant individual. It is also a brief guide about what to do if your Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style is interfering with dating or relationship success. As you read, keep in mind two things: First, no one is fully one style or the other. Most of us are somewhat to mostly one style or somewhat to mostly another style. Thank goodness. That gives us some wiggle room to work things out! Secondly, if you are not mostly secure, you probably have one basic insecure style (Avoidant, Anxious, or Fearful-Avoidant). The Fearful-Avoidant style presents particular challenges that I want to address here, and I want to do so with hope.
Pitfalls of the Fearful-Avoidant Style
People with a Fearful-Avoidant attachment style can show up in lots of ways. They can be eager to begin relationships and then become clingy or they can be hesitant to engage and remain distant. Mostly, they can vacillate between these two tendencies, which can be confusing for them and especially their partners. This style is most often the result of some type of trauma in the past. We can think of “trauma” as an event, series of events, or life circumstance(s) that profoundly changes the way a person can be in the world; it changes the way a person feels the world is with them. This can happen in adulthood with traumatic experiences such as mass shootings, assaults, or affairs, etc. But when these kinds of things happen in childhood, something gets coded into the very center of what it means to be alive, about what is necessary to survive: the people you need can’t be trusted. In fact, those people can be dangerous . That is an impossible dilemma that trauma survivors carry with them to every relational experience to one degree or another.
An individual client spoke of her childhood emotional abuse being reenacted in a visit with her parents and sister as an adult. When I said, “It makes me sad to hear what happened” she said it was helpful to hear that, bringing us a bit closer. When I asked, “How does it feel to hear it makes me sad?” she said, “It feels good…it lets me also feel angry about how they treated me then, and how they treated me even recently.” I said, “It makes me angry, too, to hear this…how does it feel to hear it makes me angry, too?” She said, “It feels good…but it makes me think you could become someone who’d hurt me as well.” I said, “Yes. I could be someone who’d hurt you. In fact, there are times that I have hurt you. However, I will offer you this: When I hurt you, we can talk about it. I won’t make you wrong for feeling hurt.” That was many years into her therapy and it was a pivotal moment in her healing. She needed me to be the stronger, wiser other that wouldn’t shame her. She needed me to be a person who would remain in relationship with her in these moments so a new relational experience could be coded deep inside. What an important corrective emotional experience that was!
This is the essence of what people with a Fearful-Avoidant attachment style struggle with: the dilemma that relationships that are wanted, even needed, may also be the relationships that hurt, that may be dangerous. This dilemma is held in a place that we call, “implicit knowledge.” It’s the place where we have the knowledge of how to ride bikes or tie shoes. We don’t think about it, we just do it…it’s in our “muscle memory.” It’s not something we can just think ourselves out of. Let me invite you to check out a YouTube video about riding a “backward bike.” If you think it should be easy to learn, it’s not. Backward Bike
Learning to ride a backward bike took lots of practice over a long time. Even after all that time, it was sometimes unnatural. The same is true for us as we attempt to change our attachment strategies. We have to have different experiences in those moments when the fears arise. As uncomfortable as it is, those fears have to come up, they must become alive in the moment with our partner, and we must be able to have a “corrective emotional experience.” I called these moments, “disconfirming experiences” with a trauma couple I worked with. Every time they had one of these “disconfirming experiences” in therapy, we named it and walked around every aspect of what it felt like.
In time, this couple began reporting, “disconfirming experiences” at home—experiences that disconfirmed the husband’s view of himself as unworthy and unlovable. And in time, those “disconfirming experiences” were able to change the way his wife saw herself and the relationship: that it was OK to have needs and OK to bring her needs to her husband, that in fact, he would respond positively to her needs.
Things That Can Help
Perhaps the biggest challenge is managing the big emotions that come up, especially if some part of you may know the intensity doesn’t match the situation (or you are being told it doesn’t). Let's not forget that your brain is activating a survival response of fight/flight at a speed that is many times faster than our thinking brain can catch up. This survival response floods us with stress hormones and worst-case scenarios t our body is preparing us to face. Often this experience is one of being flooded.
Finding ways that help you pause, reflect, self-soothe, and restore your body and mind to calmer, more balanced states is very important. For some, therapy that is specifically focused on this is helpful. Examples include DBT skills training, EMDR, or Rapid Resolution Therapy. These therapies focus on trauma resolution, but there are others as well. Sometimes medications that mitigate intense depression and/or anxiety can be a very important part of recovery, especially early on. Also, you may have health care practitioners that would add alternative therapies such as diet recommendations and supplements. All of these suggestions are means back to an emotional “window of tolerance" so the work of EFT couple therapy can be accomplished. All of these interventions can help life be easier no matter what happens in your relationship, too.
Therapy Takes Time
One of the questions I’m often asked is how long couple therapy will take. For some couples that don’t have trauma or affairs or other attachment injuries, and for those couples who wisely seek therapy before the average 6-7 years of distress, EFT can offer tremendous improvement in a relatively short amount of time. However, when there’s been trauma, and when the negative cycle has caused years of injury, it can take longer. Also, depending on how much one or both of the partners are either cut off emotionally (dissociative) or become profoundly emotionally unbalanced (dysregulated), individual therapy may be necessary so that couple therapy is able to work. In other words, if the trauma survivor’s “stuff” gets too activated and the work of couple therapy shifts to management of the individual trauma responses, the relationship isn’t getting the attention it needs. When trauma survivors can get individual therapy concurrently with couple therapy, the stage is set for everything to work better. One of the therapists who worked with a trauma survivor in a couple I worked with said, “Alan, I couldn’t do the work with "S" without the work you’re doing with the couple.” At the same time, I said to Pat, “I couldn’t do the work with this couple without the work you’re doing with "S." It is also important to say that if there is co-existing mental health difficulties such as addiction, anxiety, or depression (which are common), attention to these difficulties is essential for couple therapy to be effective.
Relapses
Often, couples that have suffered trauma, where one or both partners have Fearful-Avoidant strategies, make significant gains and then feel devastated due to relapses into previous difficulties, sometimes-horrendous conflicts that seem to undo any progress. Actually, this is expected. Let’s think about it. The prevailing dilemma deep in implicit memory is that closeness threatens danger. As couples begin to feel closer in successful EFT couple therapy, that very closeness that they have longed for and have begun to enjoy can suddenly feel threatening at deep levels. For these couples, it’s been helpful when I have predicted relapses and added that with each relapse, if they can lean into the experiences of the relapse, relapses can become less frequent and recovery can become easier and quicker. This is what I’ve seen happen over and over again. One such couple I'm working with came close to divorce after lots of movement forward. As we worked through that rupture and continued to have deep, meaningful “disconfirming experiences,” they were able to get back on track and more consistently stay on track. Now, their sessions are spacing out less frequently. However, I continue to be a resource for continuing consolidation of their gains.
Conclusion
It’s taken me longer than I wish to write this article and for those who’ve been waiting for it, let me apologize for the delay. When I learned EFT, created my website, and posted my other articles, Google searches picked up my articles, and I was amazed at the responses I got from around the globe. Also, my practice filled up with couples and when I became an EFT supervisor, more and more therapists seeking supervision in EFT approached me.
I want to say clearly that while the couples where one or both partners have a Fearful-Avoidant attachment style often experience more chaos and difficulty, it is very possible for them to change their dance. One day on the fly, I made up the term, “disconfirming experience” and that became a touchstone for one such couple. As Albert Einstein said, “All knowledge is experience, everything else is just information.” Co-creating those disconfirming experiences over and over in therapy enables couples to co-create them at home. As that happens repeatedly, new “implicit knowledge” that relationships are safe and reliable overwrites the old “implicit knowledge” from past traumas. In fact, brain studies show us that new neural pathways actually get developed. Many couples have said something like this: “I had that moment when I realized there was a lever, there was a way I could send the train to the other track rather than it staying on the track it’s always gone on.”
Another important emotional shift is that the loneliness of emotional need is undone and replaced with connection. The new possibility is that in emotional need, there is someone who is accessible, who cares, and who is able to be responsive. That’s the most important “disconfirming experience” any of us can have! That’s what can happen in EFT. And it can happen for you, too. It may take a skilled EFT individual and/or couple therapist, and it may take more time than other couples would need, but it’s very, very possible.