Building safety and intimacy with others
This article is originally available for Very Well Mind published on June 22, 2024 by Julie Nguyen.
Attachment theory suggests that our relationship patterns are significantly influenced by our formative interactions with our earliest caregivers. These early experiences unconsciously lay the groundwork for how we approach intimacy, resulting in secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful attachment styles. In particular, the avoidant attachment style is commonly characterized by hyper-independence, conflict avoidance, and emotional distance.
If you have an avoidant attachment style, there’s a tendency to nurture insecure relationships that enable emotional distance. The level of closeness needed to deepen a relationship may feel like too much, causing you to feel shut down and overwhelmed. However, change is possible. Let’s explore the origins of the avoidant attachment style and explore ways to heal and overcome its challenges in adulthood.
Identify Your Patterns to Break Them
Babies are born with an innate biological need to attach to their caregivers.Not only does depending on others maximize our evolutionary ability to survive, but it also provides safety and protection. When we are sad, fearful, and crying out in distress, we are motivated to reach out to our caregivers with proximity-seeking behaviors to seek reassurance, comfort, touch, and quality time. How our caregivers respond to our vulnerable stress forms our attachment style.
When caregivers respond consistently, this creates a secure attachment style where we believe we will be taken care of and can safely extend that trust to the world.
If our primary caregivers are consistently emotionally unavailable or unresponsive to our needs, we feel like it’s not safe to reach out to them for physical and emotional connection, which this leads to low trust and high avoidance of others.3 An avoidantly attached person subsequently learned how to fend for themselves and deactivate their proximity-seeking behavior which causes aloofness, alienation, and self-reliance.
Over time, you may distance yourself from others and focus on developing a strong sense of self. As a result, you may dismiss the importance of relationships to manage fears of intimacy and pre-emptively strike off rejection. The good news is your avoidance is not a fundamental part of who you are, but a way of being that can be deconstructed and rebuilt to support healthier and happier relationships.
Once you recognize your avoidant tendencies, you can practice building trust by giving people the opportunity to show up for you, and practice deepening vulnerability by opening up to others. Over time, you can become more comfortable meeting and sharing needs without feeling overwhelmed or dysregulated. Step by step, you can learn how to break free from your habitual avoidant behaviors developed from childhood.
Feel Safe With Intimacy
As an avoidant dater, you likely come across as autonomous, confident, assured, and easy-going. You know who you are, what you like, and can be low-maintenance because you prefer to take care of your own problems.
Since there is a struggle to share feelings and thoughts with others (out of a fear of being controlled, abandoned, or not wanting to rely on others), you might have to put conscious effort into staying engaged since your reflex is to pull away, which may lead to a history of shallow, short-lived relationships rather than deep, intimate, long-term commitments.
Here’s a common example: You’ve been seeing someone for a few months and they want to define the relationship. You may really like them but still feel an intense desire to push them away, which leads to hurt and confusion in your partner.
Some distancing tactics look like:
- Focusing on minor flaws and differences to excuse why you can’t get too close to your partner, and sabotage the growing connection. There’s an overemphasis on trivial, workable issues and not enough appreciation for valued commonalities and their positive aspects.
- Suppressing needs and not sharing what you need in a relationship because you don’t want to rely on your partner, or you don’t trust them to meet your needs. Subsequently, you may have extremely strong boundaries that prevent you from letting your walls down.
- Feeling like you have the “upper hand” in dating because you don’t succumb to big displays of emotions and let problems slide. Because you’re unaffected, you feel in control and that you’ll be fine no matter what happens in the relationship.
- Comparing your partner to unrealistic standards based on an idea in your mind about what love looks like. When they fall short or make a mistake, you doubt the relationship’s long-term success and fantasize about what it would be like with other people.
- Withdrawing when a relationship escalates, which is when conflict and deeper emotions may express themselves. Because you don’t want to be vulnerable, you might judge their vulnerability as demanding, suffocating, triggering, clingy, needy, or intense.
- Keeping conversations light so you can avoid excessive communication, making future plans, and stepping into emotional intimacy. Since you’re not opening up about what you mean to each other, they’re kept at an arm’s length.
This looks like saying, “I value what we have and want to be honest about what’s coming up for me emotionally. As you want more, I feel this urge to pull away from you. I’m working on this part of myself and could use your support. Can we talk about this, take things slowly, and check in with each other so we can understand where we are coming from? All of this is hard for me to say, so I appreciate your patience.”