So Close, Yet So Far: Perspectives on Avoidant Attachment.
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Avoidant attachment is usually described through what we can see from the outside: emotional distance, self-sufficiency, discomfort with intimacy, difficulty depending on others, or pulling away when relationships become close.
The term comes from attachment research, most notably Mary Ainsworth's experiment called Strange Situation where developmental researchers observed secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised attachment patterns.
Of the four toddlers filmed, the one who seemed least distressed when they were separated from their mother and actively ignored them when they re-entered the room, were described as having an avoidant attachment style (Ainsworth et al., 1978).
That distinction - what we see from the outside doesn't necessarily tell us what is happening within - is essential when talking about avoidant attachment.
When closeness carries a cost
How we relate to one another is always on a spectrum, always subjective, and always uniquely contextual.
We’ve all felt pierced to our core by someone else’s gaze. Or frozen at a single word said - or a single word unsaid.
The very presence of another person can unravel us and undo us without warning (Butler, 2004). This concept outdates attachment theory and is written about by poets, painted by artists, and argued by philosophers because it is an experience that crosses time, place, and culture.
When I think about what makes us human, I come back to our longing to belong. To be moved and to move others. To mean something and to create something meaningful, together.
However, closeness is inherently exposing. Another person matters precisely because they affect us.
What happens when loving another person once came with too great a cost?
For some of us, love may not have felt loving. It felt intrusive. Demanding. Suffocating. Even somehow deadening.
This is the lived experience of avoidant attachment I want to explore. A relationship with love that exists in an almost impossible bind.
I think of this way of relating as caged love.
It’s when love isn't absent.
Nor is someone’s capacity for it broken in some way.
It isn't even really avoided either.
It's still there. It just can't move as freely as we want it to.
Shut down, not shut off
What I’ve noticed clients who self-identify as avoidant are often saying is something along the lines of, I never felt safe just to be me.
They often described a sense that their very presence upset, annoyed, or inconvenienced their closest caregivers. Some felt someone else's needs always seemed more important. Others were criticised for daring to show emotion. And others learned that showing distress was outright dangerous.
The common thread was learning to manage upset alone - and feeling excited or even proud should definitely be downplayed.
But pushing feelings down is quite different from not having them. A child has to stay connected to their caregivers. Where else can they go? What else could they do?
We may not have grown up seeing people who could be close and still be themselves. People who could stay with us when we were frightened, excited, ashamed, or simply having a hard day. We rarely experienced someone being with us, rather than trying to stop, fix, or avoid what we were feeling.
Avoiding intimacy and detaching can therefore do two things at once: preserve the connection while preserving ourselves (Cundy, 2019).
It’s easy to empathise with how challenging conflict can then become in our adult relationships. Not because disagreeing itself is a problem, but because nobody showed us that two people could remain connected if one of them was upset.
The irony is that many of us become highly competent elsewhere. Work. Achievement. Being the natural problem solver everyone turns to. The parts of life that ask us to do rather than feel are often where we finally experience confidence, recognition, and sometimes even love.
When self-sufficiency becomes self-preservation
If relying on someone once carried the possibility of disappointment, intrusion, or losing ourselves, then relying on ourselves makes perfect sense. We know the rules there. We know what happens next. No one can withdraw what we never asked them to give us, can they?
And yet, in the perfect logic of a growing child’s mind, there is a heartbreaking loneliness bundled in the bargain they make. They become so good at not needing that they struggle to recognise their needs. Or absolutely do recognise them but immediately toss them away.
It doesn't matter, they think, I'll sort it myself. They've got enough going on.
Or, I don't want to be difficult.
Avoidance Is Learned
This relational pattern deepens with time, and at times can look like a freedom-loving, wildly independent, and high achieving go-getter who reaches for the stars, and has no time for a relationship.
In others, it lives bang slap in the middle of a relationship that looks fine from the outside - but inside is void of intimacy and connection. Distance is cloaked beneath a nigh-perfect mask of performativity.
Some of us know quite clearly our fear isn't about the other person. Not really.
It's about disappearing inside any relationship where we risk losing ourselves - again. Here, our partnership threatens engulfment - and too much closeness leaves us feeling cold and turned to stone (Laing, 2010).
The variations of relational distance are almost endless.
Avoidance: how an adaptive attachment strategy can become an identity
In their work on developmental trauma, psychotherapists Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre (2012) describe how, for some of us, getting love while growing up became tangled up with pleasing, duty, burden, and even a sense of bondage.
Much of this begins before we have language sophisticated enough to explain it. We know something through experience before we can think about what it is we know.
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (1987/2017) described this phenomenon as an unthought known: a kind of knowing that is not thought. It’s a familiar experience that becomes known to us through the living of it.
As this was never a thought to begin with - it is an unquestioned behaviour - there is no belief driving it. That means it’s not ripe for a ding dong moment through an interpretation. It surfaces in experiences. In relationships.
This is how what started as a ultra smart specific adaptation can evolve into what resembles our entire identity.
Over time, I learned not to need can quietly become I'm a pretty independent kind of person.
No one came when I was upset becomes, I prefer dealing with things myself.
The father of attachment theory, John Bowlby (1982) described the implicit expectations we carry about ourselves, others, and relationships as our internal working models: what we expect relationships to be like, how other people will treat us, and what might happen when we dare to depend on them emotionally.
We rarely enter a new relationship empty-handed.
We arrive carrying every relationship that taught us what closeness might cost.
When love finally arrives
Avoidant attachment is a complex way of being, layered with what can appear to be paradoxical internal conflict. Yet it begins to make more sense when we see the broader relational dance beneath it: distance from Other = distance from Self = distance from Other.
Perhaps one of the stranger things about avoidant attachment is this: longing for love and receiving it are two very different experiences.
Someone stays - which we expected to feel would be a relief - and sometimes it does. Other times it feels downright terrifying.
Why?
Because receiving something now can bring us painfully close to knowing we once lived without it. Care can expose the absence of care. Being listened to can remind us of all the times nobody asked. Being allowed to need can reveal how completely we learned not to.
There is grief here from so, so much loss.
Not only grief for what happened, but for what didn't happen. The comfort we stopped asking for. The tenderness we wanted but learned to live without. The relationships we left before discovering whether or not someone may have stayed.
The Czech French novelist Milan Kundera once described love as “the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost” (1984, Part 5, Ch. 23). Kundera’s words point towards another possibility too: perhaps what we encounter through love isn't only another person, but parts of ourselves that feel distant, or even lost. Our softness. Our dependency. Our capacity to need without feeling awkward about it - or even ashamed of it. The part that wants to reach rather than retreat.
For those of us who love from afar, receiving love can awaken this loss as readily as absence does - and the presence of someone safe doesn't immediately make us feel safe.
What happens when we are met differently
If receiving love can awaken grief as readily as absence does, what does help?
Surprisingly, it isn't another person understanding us perfectly – nor selling our soul in a bid for the elusive notion of secure attachment in all our relationships.
In his seminal work on attachment and psychotherapy, David J. Wallin (2007) draws on decades of attachment research around something quintessentially human: that all relationships inevitably involve moments of misunderstanding, misattunement, and disruption.
Healing when intimacy has taught us to retreat might include coming to believe that someone can misunderstand us without rejecting us.
Similarly, that we can disappoint someone without losing them. Someone can be upset with us and stay connected to us. We can each have our needs without either one of us disappearing, or literally going M.I.A.
Reach. Retreat. Repair. Repeat.
Secure relating doesn't ask us to morph or merge. The work is developing an ongoing capacity to tolerate a rupture, repairing it, and reconnecting once again.
Therapy offers one relationship where this can be experienced directly rather than merely understood. Sure, a therapist and client will miss one another at times. Something lands wrongly. A silence feels abandoning rather than allowing, as it was intended. We misunderstand. We rupture … and then we talk about it, and repair as a team.
When those moments can be noticed, talked about, and repaired, a new possibility emerges. Not a relationship without risk, but an experience of relationship in which risk no longer automatically means retreat.
When love calls for something different
Maybe the question isn't only what did love once ask of me? It’s also, what could love ask of me now?
Healing the wounds of avoidant attachment may include …
Staying a little longer when every instinct says retreat.
Risking being misunderstood without immediately disappearing.
Needing without assuming it leads to suffocation.
Discovering that closeness and separateness might co-exist.
None of this asks us to surrender the independence that once protected us. The possibility is something gentler: that independence no longer has to protect us from intimacy.
Through relationships that show us, not tell us, that a rupture can be repaired, love gets a little more room to move.
Love is not absent in avoidant attachment: it has been caged by what showing love demanded of us once upon a time.
The truth is, we love Love.
References
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bollas, C. (2017). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Routledge. (Original work published 1987).
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Cundy, L. (2019). Attachment and the defence against intimacy: Understanding and working with avoidant attachment, self-hatred, and shame. In Masters in the Art of Defence: Shame and Defences Against Intimacy. Routledge.
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Laing, R. D. (2010). The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness. Penguin Modern Classics. (Original work published 1960).
Kundera, M. (1999). The unbearable lightness of being (M. H. Heim, Trans.). Faber & Faber.
Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. The Guilford Press.
Did something here land for you?
If anything you’ve read brought up a feeling, explored a pattern, or made you question something in your life, you’re very welcome to get in touch. We can talk about whatever came up and see if working together might feel right.