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Busting a myth before we begin
Disorganised attachment gets a bad rep.
Social media posts frequently present this attachment style as the worst – like there’s an attachment league table where one style is ranked over another. Which is simply ridiculous.
Is it a complex attachment style? Yes.
Is it more complex than anxious attachment, or avoidant attachment? No.
Why Is It Called Disorganised Attachment?
AKA fearful-avoidant or unresolved attachment in adults, the word disorganised originally describes what happens in childhood, when our attachment system has no reliable way to organise itself around a caregiver’s way of being with us.
The person we depend upon for safety may also be frightening, frightened, unpredictable, or simply unable to respond to us in ways we can make sense of at the time (Fisher, 2021). That's an impossible bind for a little person.
When a child's emotional world gets flooded by ongoing stress, they simply do not have the capacity to process it. So if what was disorganising in childhood remains unresolved in adulthood, it’s seen as an unresolved attachment style.
One thing to note before we dive in - the word disorganised describes the attachment experience in childhood, while unresolved describes how those experiences can remain with us as adults (Wallin, 2007).
When our internal alarm doesn’t switch off
When experiences remain unresolved, our body can continue responding to situations in the present through patterns of stress learned a very long time ago.This is why understanding the stress cycle is so important in disorganised attachment.
When stress has been chronic and relational, we can ping-pong between states: highly activated and scanning one moment, frozen or unable to respond the next, then numb, dissociated or collapsed when our capacity is exceeded. This is repeatedly seen in symptoms, such as:
Severe anxiety.
Panic attacks.
Hypervigilance.
Racing thoughts.
Difficulty sleeping.
Sudden numbness.
Dissociation.
Feeling detached from our body and being unable to work out what we're feeling.
Memory gaps.
Going blank in conflict (freezing).
Overthinking everything and then feeling absolutely nothing.
Ferocious self-reliance.
Perfectionism.
Shame-based identifications.
An critical internal voice that rarely shuts up.
Wanting intimacy and feeling suffocated when we find it.
Longing to be cared for and feeling a little freaked out when someone does care.
There is considerable overlap between the effects of complex developmental trauma and what is clinically known as Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or C-PTSD (Li, Y., et al., 2026).
I struggle with framing the impact of overwhelmingly difficult childhood experiences as something that is disordered. I tend to refer to these symptoms as complex stress. Not to minimise their impact, but because these symptoms make total sense when we understand them as the lasting effects of what someone has lived through.
What is complex stress?
When stress has been chronic and relational, we can ping-pong between states: highly activated and scanning one moment, frozen or unable to respond the next, then numb, partly dissociated, or collapsed when we hit our capacity (Ogden et al., 2006).
Strangely, this can also mean that someone becomes so accustomed to danger that real danger doesn't always consciously register as danger.
When you've spent much of your life navigating volatile or unpredictable relationships, you can get pretty good at handling other people's explosions, sudden changes in mood and unpredictable behaviour. In fact, they feel comfortably familiar to some of us.
The O.G. of Keep Calm and Carry On
So, how do we end up mastering that cool and collected exterior while inside we feel a nervous wreck?
Well, it’s pretty logical: we’ve become masters at masking. However, being able to cope because we’re used to coping with something isn't the same as being unaffected by it.
Eventually, all that coping takes its toll. At that point there may be no fight left.
Thinking rationally? No can do.
Socialising? Impossible.
We go numb, detach, or simply flop when we’re alone and the exhaustion wipes us out.
For people who function remarkably well through the working week, this can even resemble going MIA at weekends: withdrawing, sleeping, cancelling plans and barely moving. Less a self-care retreat and more a nervous system that has finally run out of steam.
Which creates another bewildering contradiction: how can I cope with so much, yet be completely floored by something so irritatingly insignificant?
Maybe we've spent much of our lives stressed, leaving a very thin layer of capacity between I can cope and I can't cope anymore. Maybe because the tipping point has been a long time coming …
When care is scary: living in an impossible bind
Babies protest. They cry, reach, pull away, become angry, scream no, and cling. These are how a brand-new human lets the people around them know two things: how they’re feeling and what they need.
And if those needs don’t get met? They adapt.
They adapt for as long as they need to receive care, which means preserving some form of connection with caregivers is non-negotiable.
But what happens when the person we need for safety is also frightening, unpredictable, neglectful, intrusive, overwhelmed, unavailable, or unable to respond to us?
We are left with a tiny person who may be unable to seek comfort from the very person they depend upon for it. This is an impossible bind.
This is what makes an attachment system disorganised: the impulse to seek closeness and the impulse to protect ourselves from it exist at the same time.
The big question is then: what happens if staying connected demands we hide our needs?
Holding paradox
To those closest to us, these contradictions can be really hard to understand. No wonder our adult relationships can feel like really hard work! Yikes. And, of course, the ones we have with our family can be the hardest.
After a parent has pushed every last one of our buttons, we might think: That's it. I am DONE! I will not let you treat me like this anymore. Then in the same breath, but I love you, so if you ever need me, I’m here.
We can want nothing more to do with our caregiver and love them. We recognise how deeply they've hurt us and feel compelled to protect them. Feel enormous anger, followed almost instantly by guilt for having felt it: I’m angry! But I don't want to be angry with you because I love you.
Remember that word unresolved? Is it making more sense now?
When experiences of trauma and loss that haven’t been fully processed, they often continue to disrupt how we make sense of ourselves, our relationships, and what happened to us (Wallin, 2007). This isn't confusion. It’s two paradoxical truths that are incredibly difficult to hold at once.
Take anger, for example. Feeling angry isn't the same as acting anger out.
Yet when expressing anger or protest once threatened our relationship with a caregiver, even feeling angry can become frightening.
Just because we're not showing anyone that we're cross, annoyed, angry, livid, etc. it doesn't mean we don't feel it.
Anger that couldn't be safely expressed can become much trickier to recognise as anger. Perhaps it comes out sideways: nit-picking, making a point, a passive-aggressive dig. Or perhaps we barely recognise it at all. There are countless ways a feeling can make itself known without ever announcing its name.
How someone safe and sound can feel outright weird
The same person can look completely different in intimate relationships.
We might actively want a partnership and be affectionate, considerate, and loving. Yet we may not find it quite as easy to take the same in from our partner. When someone's kind, emotionally available, and clearly interested in us, we don't necessarily feel that much inside. We think it's great. But there's no feeling of ah, lovely.
Annoyingly, we can get weirded out by that, and an uncanny distancing can seem to emerge … as if this perfectly pleasant experience is happening over there, to someone else. Someone like me, but somehow not me.
That strange distance leaves us with another paradox: danger (or drama of some kind) feels normal, whereas safety (or at least the absence of drama) feels weird.
Why on earth might that be?
Okay, if we’d learned to predict relationships through unpredictable relational dynamics, doesn't it make sense that we're kind of waiting for something to happen that breaks the calm, easy, steady vibe? To me, it does. And it does to many clients too.
And so to another good question: What does a safer - or more secure - relationship feel like when so far connection has come with vigilance, unpredictability, or self-abandonment?
Integration: When parts begin to make sense together
Working therapeutically with disorganised attachment often begins by getting curious about experiences and symptoms that previously seemed unrelated.
But what if they’re not separate, or necessarily symptoms of something wrong?
What if they all have a reason for being there, as parts of us that adapted?
This is where integration begins to make sense. Rather than deciding which feeling, reaction, or version of ourselves is the real one, we gradually develop enough steadiness to meet more of our experience at the same time. The frightened part. The fiercely independent part. The angry part. The part that aches for care.
No one part is more or less real than another. Each has its place in our lived experience, and some developed for very good reasons. Coming to know them as different - not better or worse - means less of ourselves needs to be shoved down and split off.
Now, feeling what we’ve previously pushed away within the safety of therapy isn't the same as acting it out. We don’t need to hit a pillow to release anger. We don’t need to break down into floods of tears to feel sadness and loss. We can let something be felt. Safely. For a moment.
We’re talking about justice. Anger. Need. Fear. Longing. Desire - even feelings of hate. All of these belong and all are welcome in therapy. Even when they feel uncomfortable.
Tempting as it may be to somehow rise above difficult feelings and glide into a more serene, pleasant or “spiritual” space, bypassing emotions rarely works.
Standing in the spaces
The psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz reflects on different psychoanalytic perspectives in his brilliant book Love's Labour (2025, pp. 111–112). He outlines several core ideas about the point of therapy; the why behind our work. From Melanie Klein, it’s to tolerate ambivalent feelings and experience the world with less fear and fragmentation. From Jacques Lacan, it’s to accept there is no cure, no final possibility of a happy wholeness. And from Thomas Ogden, to become ourselves - fully and richly us.
Taken together, I think these offer something gloriously human compared to the idealised images Insta offers of someone in a meadow with arms outstretched to show they feel ‘whole’ and ‘healed.’
Free yourself from the past! Heal your wounds! Feel whole again … These can leave us feeling pretty crap when our own healing doesn’t quite tally up.
If you’re in London, integration comes with fewer sunflower fields and is generally more mundane.
The Myth of Healing
Leonard Cohen (1992) puts this better than I ever could (obviously) …
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
Perhaps we don't become people living without contradiction.
Perhaps instead we become people who are curious about why contradictions exist.
Perhaps we even become a teensy bit fond of the parts we previously found impossibly difficult.
Perhaps what becomes possible is a little more room to stand amongst all of it.
The psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg (1996) called this “standing in the spaces”: developing enough room to inhabit different experiences of ourselves without one having to completely erase another.
Multiplicity doesn't mean fragmentation or feeling divided in our Self. It feels surprisingly ordinary. Refreshing if not completely rad.
We have a little more capacity. A bit more recognition. We’re able to notice I'm scared without immediately running from it. Recognising we’re angry without needing to act it out. Discovering a need and letting it be there until we decide what we want to do about it.
Gradually, we start matching what we feel with what we think, say, and do.
Maybe we abandon ourselves less as we learn to stay connected in relationships where someone shows us not tells us that they are trustworthy and really do care about us.
Who knows? Everyone's journey is different ...
References
Bromberg, P. M. (1996). Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32, 509–535.
Cohen, L. (1992). Anthem [Song]. On The future. Columbia Records
Fisher, J. (2021). Transforming the living legacy of trauma: A workbook for survivors and therapists. PESI Publishing & Media.
Grosz, S. (2025). Love’s labour: How we break and make the bonds of love. Chatto & Windus.
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Li, Y., et al. (2026). Adverse childhood experiences and the diagnosis of ICD-11 post-traumatic stress disorder or complex post-traumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and three-level meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 27(3), 1089–1108.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. 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.