Anxious/Avoidant Attachment in Relationships

Most relationships have an anxious/avoidant dynamic. The anxious partner responds to anxiety by seeking connection, while the avoidant partner responds to anxiety by seeking distance. These are two sides of the same coin, and for the relationship to get better, both partners need to learn to take care of their anxiety without using the relationship to solve it. Both partners actually have similar levels of anxiety, so the avoidant partner is just as "anxious" as the anxious partner. 

Each partner feels uncomfortable in the relationship, but their instinctive response to that discomfort is opposite. The anxious partner wants to solve their discomfort through connection, while the avoidant partner wants to solve their discomfort through disconnection. 

If you are the anxious partner, think about the last time your partner refused to talk about an issue in your relationship. What did you feel in your body in that moment? Your avoidant partner was probably feeling the same kind of discomfort in their body, but their instinct is to go away from you instead of coming towards you. 

The solution is for both partners to learn to deal with their anxiety first and then offer a calm connection to each other. This is just as difficult for the anxious partner as it is for the avoidant partner. 

If you are the anxious partner, the connection you have been offering is actually a way of dumping your anxiety on your partner. It might feel like love, but it's not. 

If you are the avoidant partner, you already know that relationships require a certain level of connection. And you also know that you will have to deal with your own anxiety before you can offer any kind of high-quality connection to your partner. 

When you feel anxious or avoidant, notice what sensations are coming up in your body. For most people, there is a tightness or pain in the chest or an upset feeling in the stomach. When you feel these warning signals in your body, try not to act on the. Instead, see if you can make a place for them to stay in your body, knowing that they are not a reliable indicator of how you should handle yourself in your relationships. 

Ask yourself this question: Could I allow this sensation to be in my body for 30 minutes? Could I just feel this for 30 minutes without doing anything about it? Every time you practice tolerating this discomfort, you get better at offering a more solid and calm connection to your partner. This works for both the anxious and the avoidant partner. 

Where it comes from

Pursuers fear abandonment, and distancers fear engulfment. Both of these fears are appropriate for children, but are not applicable to adults, because adults can take care of themselves so well that they can’t really be abandoned or engulfed. Pursuers were usually raised by distancing parents who were busy, unavailable, checked-out or avoidant.  Distancers were usually raised by pursuing parents who were overbearing, hovering, and relentless. Parent-child relationships require a balance of togetherness and separateness, just like marriage. Children have no choice but to balance out their parents: if you have a pursuer parent or primary caregiver, you learn to be distancer, and if you have a distancer parent, you learn to be pursuers. As adults, we have the ability to grow out of these dynamics.

Seven steps for self-soothing

Here’s what you do during those twenty minutes:

1. Scan your body. Figure out where you feel your emotional discomfort on a physical level

2. Focus your attention gently on that place in your body, the place that doesn’t feel good. Usually this is somewhere in the chest/abdomen area.

3. Imagine holding that sensation gently and kindly, like you would cradle a kitten or a baby. This is how you self-sooth.

4. Give the unpleasant sensation permission to stay as long as it needs to stay. This is self-acceptance.

5. Realize that you will be OK even if the unpleasant sensation stays for a long time. When you were a child, you could not have handled such intensity. As an adult, you totally can.

6. Take a deep breath in through the nose. Fill your lungs up all the way. Then, once they are completely full, suck in a bit more air through your nose. Hold for a second, and then let it all out through your mouth. This is called a “physiological sigh,” you can look it up on YouTube. It’s been shown to decrease anxiety.

7. Every time you self-soothe, your body becomes less afraid of its own intense sensations. You become less afraid of your own intense emotions, and of your partner’s intense emotions. You become more capable of experience a calm, healthy connection with the person you love. You are becoming more capable of love.