How To Overcome Avoidant Attachment Style In Relationships

They hate weddings and detest Valentine’s Day. You choke on PDA. Every time you approach someone, lace up your New Balances and sprint in the opposite direction. If you just won that round of bingo, it’s possible you have what relationship researchers, therapists, and internet quizzers everywhere call an avoidant attachment style. And you’re probably looking for a way to overcome it.

As social scientists continue to shape more styles, there are four key attachment styles: secure, anxious, disorganized, and avoidant. These categories aren’t rigid definitions of how people relate to each other, but they can provide insight into our relationship patterns—romantic or not.

As you have probably guessed, someone with an avoidant attachment style is generally afraid of attachment. Christene Lozano, board-certified sex therapist and founder of Meraki Counseling, tells Bustle that avoidant attachment is synonymous with what are commonly referred to as “intimacy issues,” and refers to someone who has trouble fostering emotional closeness with other people.

But let’s get something straight: a specific attachment style doesn’t make you a bad person who needs “fixing.” And your attachment style is influenced by things that are largely out of your control. That being said, there can be times when your instinctive way of interacting with other people gets in the way of something good. Maybe you just met someone you really like, but something made you run away. You may have a pattern of pushing partners away with your apparent lack of interest or detachment. Whatever it is, there are ways to overcome an avoidant attachment style in your relationships and learn to accept the love and care of those around you. The best way to do that is to understand where your avoidant attachment might be coming from in the first place.

Avoidant attachments develop early.

Chances are, your attachment phobia didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Seattle-based relationship, intimacy, and sex therapist Claudia Johnson tells Bustle that avoidant attachment style is often a symptom of growing up with parents or significant others who were themselves avoidant of you early in life. Anyone whose guardian was not invested in their emotions is more likely to show signs of avoidant attachment as an adult.

Johnson gives an example: If you came to your mother with a stomach ache and she told you to find out for yourself, your childhood spongy brain absorbs this avoidance behavior.

“You’re essentially learning that you can’t rely on your caregiver,” Johnson says. “Whether you’re happy or sad or whatever’s going on for you, parents are going to be like *shrug*.”

These children learn not to share or open up for fear that their needs will go unmet anyway. As a result, “they learn to calm down in ways that may not be ‘productive’ or ‘healthy,'” Johnson explains. The independence they develop early on can come at a cost — sometimes pushing people away to protect themselves.

Your avoidant attachment could negatively impact your partner(s).

Lozano explains that you may show different attachment styles with different partners or in different types of relationships, and that attachment styles affect all of our relationships, not just our romantic ones. But she notes that they usually affect your romantic relationships the most because you and your partner only spend so much time together.

In a romantic relationship, the consequences of avoidant attachment usually revolve around your perceived need to keep partners at a distance. What happens with many avoidant people, Lozano says, is that their compulsive need to keep their distance can actually feed their partner’s anxiety and make their partner more “clinging” — which repels an avoidant partner even further.

The anxious partner exhibits what might be called “fear of abandonment” and is often consumed with worry that their partner will abandon them (and the more avoidant their partner is, the more real that worry can become). Lozano says about the anxious partner. But it is precisely this insecurity and this feeling of dependency that can trigger the avoidance reflex of an avoiding person. “They run,” she says of the avoiding partner. And so the cycle continues.

Johnson says that for some people with avoidant attachment styles, a partner who validates, acknowledges, and honors them can be really disorienting — even when the same behaviors seem positive to someone with secure or anxious attachment. Because these supportive and loving behaviors weren’t previously the norm, the avoidant partner could run away — leaving their partner confused and hurt.

Similarly, your avoidant attachment could also mean escaping attachment through chronic infidelity or abuse of a partner’s trust.

However, there is a difference between avoidant attachments and ethically non-monogamous relationships, says Lozano. “Being fluid with your relationships or having an interest in non-monogamy doesn’t necessarily mean you have a disorganized or avoidant attachment style.”

For one thing, safe, ethical non-monogamous relationships are not based on fear. An avoidant person’s desire for non-monogamous relationships is often rooted in a desire to have a “backup” relationship if their current one inevitably fails.

“There are a lot of people who can be in very healthy, thriving non-monogamous partnerships or who are open or poly, and they have very secure attachments,” says Lozano. Finally, a preference for non-monogamy that arises from a sense of security in oneself and one’s partner is very different from a preference that arises from a desire to explore future prospects.

How can I overcome my avoidant attachment?

Both Lozano and Johnson emphasize that your attachment style is more nuanced and complex than any internet quiz can decipher for you — and even if you exhibit avoidant attachment behaviors in one relationship, you’re not caught up in them in every other relationship.

Johnson says she’s heard clients say things about their potential partners like, “If they don’t have a secure attachment, I don’t want to get involved with them.” But secure attachment isn’t static, she says. “It’s all liquid. Depending on who you interact with, you may be more avoidant or more fearful.”

Still, avoidance tendencies can be really damaging to relationships—and like any other insecure attachment style, you can overcome these tendencies with compassion and curiosity about yourself and the impact of your past relationships.

The primary relationships you had when you were young offer clues to the attachment style you embody as an adult. You just have to listen to them. “When you were sad as a little kid, who did you go to?” Johnson asks. “Or if you got good grades, who did you party with? How was that received?

It’s likely that adults with more avoidant attachment styles learned early in life that it’s safer to hide their weaknesses from the people they love. “We all carry our wounds,” says Johnson. For avoidant adults, these wounds propel them in the opposite direction of intimacy and closeness.

Lozano and Johnson agree: The best thing you can do to overcome your avoidant attachment is to accept that your feelings—your joys, fears, hopes, and sorrows—make you a stronger, more compassionate partner. Once you’ve done that, you might find that you had nothing to hide after all.

Experts:

Christene Lozano, Certified Sex Therapist and Founder of Meraki Counseling

Claudia Johnson, Certified Relationship, Intimacy, and Sex Therapist