Healing Through an Avoidant Attachment Style

You Deserve To Not Fear Connection

This is an ongoing series I have relating to healing through attachment styles. See an accompanying article for the disorganized attachment below.

Avoidant attachment is characterized by aloof and emotionally vacant behaviors. These individuals can appear confident at first and can actively pursue love, but shy away or cut connections swiftly when relationships deepen.

This is because a deepening of romantic connection requires the involvement of emotions — which is the Achilles heel of the avoidantly attached.

But no attachment style is fixed. Secure individuals can become insecure just as insecure individuals can become secure. Attachment styles work on a continuum and no attachment style is a sentence to a life of repeated relationships.

I’d be lying in saying that healing any insecure attachment style will be easy — it certainly will not. As you’ll see in the next section, the origins of attachment styles occur early in childhood development which means the coping mechanisms developed have decades to imbed into habits that support an entire identity.

Though this is by no means a reason to not pursue healing your attachment style. In fact, doing so is some of the greatest personal development work you can do. Attachment styles don’t just impact our romantic relationships, but each relationship we have in our lives.

With that, I wanted to speak to healing avoidant attachment today.

The Origins Of Avoidant Attachment

As is the case with all insecure attachment styles, avoidant attachment styles don’t manifest without reason. Like their anxious and disorganized counterparts, avoidantly attached individuals also suffered trauma — albeit in a slightly different way.

Whilst anxiously attached individuals may exhibit mixed signals from their caregivers, leading them to their characteristic “clingy” behaviors in an attempt to keep love close, avoidant individuals aren’t modeled deep, emotional connections growing up.

Their caregivers may have been averse to them showing any emotion and scolding them when they do. Their caregivers may also have been avoidant themselves and model a hyper-independent lifestyle that teaches the child to become overtly self-reliant.

Trauma exhibited inter-relationally between the child's parents may also have taught the child that love isn’t a safe space but a place to fear or invest in with no success.

Over time and constant exposure to emotional opposition, the child learns to hide their emotions as a means to keep themselves safe. To be rejected by the person who you depend on for your survival is an incredibly potent motivator, so it’s only natural that they’d avoid the thing that is causing them harm.

Over time coping strategies morph into a second identity or false self. This false self; avoidant, emotionally vacant, and hyper-independent, becomes an identity the avoidant person lives through. Whilst we all occupy a false self to one degree or another — like in work, for example — the avoidant’s false self becomes their real self.

There is no delineation between the two, at least not consciously.

In part, healing through avoidant attachment involves the dismantling of an identity that has long kept them safe. Here are 3 tips on healing through an avoidant attachment style.

1. Healing Avoidant Attachment: Stepping Into Love

The only way to heal an avoidant attachment style is to gradually step into the one space avoidant people dislike the most — intimacy.

This brings a unique challenge to avoidant individuals as their healing runs through connection and not away from it. Anxiously attached individuals heal through building independence AWAY from their relationships, but avoidants have all the independence in the world — this isn’t an appropriate method of healing for them.

This is challenging as healing isn’t something an avoidant person can do alone. Sure, they can become aware of patterns, and limiting beliefs and work on regulating anxiety, but inevitably they will have to step into love.

It’s the one area that will trigger them the most.

This means working in tandem with their partners and a therapist on developing intimacy at a pace that is regulated and controlled for the avoidant person.

Intimacy will likely bring up feelings of anxiety and fear that will need to be regulated and managed in order to stop the avoidant person from running. For the avoidant, they need to learn to experience a love that is secure and healthy to re-model relationships in a way that their caregivers couldn’t.

It’s the biggest challenge an avoidant person will face, but the only way out is through.

2. Communication and Choosing The Right Partners

Open communication is paramount for avoidant individuals as being honest about their fears of commitment will allow them to work with their partners on developing intimacy.

Having an anxious partner — as is often the case with insecure attachment styles where avoidant and anxious people pair up — can prove challenging for avoidants because anxious people will find it difficult to understand their lover's desire for distance and space.

This means that choosing partners who can understand their situation and work with them is vital. Choosing the right partner doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges, but choosing someone who is demanding the avoidant’s attention and is unable to respect their current boundaries will only lead to more stress that will risk pushing them away.

It’s important to note that the avoidant person WANTS love, but their fear of emotional investment sabotages them. It’s important for an avoidant’s partner to recognize the avoidant’s growth areas and not be overly critical of them.

Patience will eventually allow the avoidant to begin trusting emotional connection as a safe space, but this can only happen if they are willing to grow.

This moves me to point 3.

3. A Commitment and Responsibility To Grow

As is the case with any insecure attachment style, in order to grow you need to be committed.

This is why having a support network including a therapist or coach, supportive friends, and the right partner is essential. As I noted above, an avoidant individual will need to restructure much, if not all of their identity —and this will be no easy feet.

The problem with avoidants is that their separation from emotion can ironically lead them to not see themselves as a problem. It’s always the partner being too needy, or other external circumstances.

Furthermore, it’s important for the avoidant to take radical responsibility for the relationships they have helped create and have likely seen fail. We all have parts to play in how successful or unsuccessful a relationship is — it takes two to tango.

Taking responsibility doesn’t mean being hard on yourself, either. Compassion is necessary to soothe us into growth and to stop us from chastising.

Final Thoughts

Healing your avoidant tendencies will be a challenge but is entirely possible.

If the above has related to you, your first mission will be to develop your self-awareness. Without the acknowledgment of our patterns we can’t begin to solve them. In reading this article and others like this, you are doing just that.

Seek assistance in a coach or a therapist who can help shed light on reasons why you may be avoidant to relationships. You can of course do this enquiry yourself but shifting through childhood trauma can be particularly challenging.

Inevitably, any discomfort brings with it an opportunity for growth — and healing insecure attachment styles is no different. Trust the process and watch your relationships change for the better.

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