Fearful Avoidant Attachment: 10 Key Signs and Traits

[00:00:00]hey guys heidi preeb here i have lost track of how many times i've recorded this video now because i am so hell-bent on getting it right and the reason why i want to get this video right so badly is because i think one of the number one misunderstandings of attachment theory if not the number one misunderstanding of attachment theory is the idea that if you have both anxious and avoidant traits you must be fearful avoidant no no no no no no no no yes the fearful avoidant has traits of both the anxious style and the avoidance style however so does every style so anxiously attached people will borrow avoidant behaviors and will feel avoidant sometimes avoidantly attached people will borrow anxious behaviors and will feel anxious sometimes and securely attached people will absolutely feel both anxious and avoidant depending on what situation they're in fearful avoidant attachment is its own beast when it comes to attachment so yes there are anxious and avoidant elements to this style but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to fearful avoidance so it's not just that you feel both ways at different times there is this deep ongoing internal struggle in terms of your own goals direction and motivation for the fearful avoidant that is not there in the same way with the other styles so when we're figuring out what our attachment styles are we have to look not at our behaviors but at the motivation behind our behaviors so the anxiously attached person might feel let's say avoidant if they're in the wrong relationship they're with someone that they don't really want to be with but they're afraid of being alone so they might feel kind of freaked out and avoidant until they find the relationship that they actually want to be in but once they're there they will be gunning for that long-term security that intimacy that hit of togetherness that they constantly want versus the avoidant could actually feel let's say anxious in a relationship where they are entitled to take a huge amount of space and where they don't really need to show up in an intimate and emotionally connected way they might feel anxious about losing that relationship because they know this is probably my only shot at having a relationship where i can function in the way that i prefer to function without compromising my attachment system and learning to be emotionally intimate so you have to look not at the behaviors people are taking and not even just at the feelings that people are having but at the motivation that is driving those feelings and behavior and when we get to the fearful avoidance style you'll see that the motivations of this type are quite disoriented and that is what characterizes it as different from the anxious or the avoidant style is that internal disorientation about am i supposed to be going right or left am i supposed to be wanting love or wanting independence there is a chronic sense of distrusting the self but also not ever being able to put trust in other people so we're gonna go over how all of that plays out and in this video i am going to be making a lot a lot of distinctions between the fearful avoidant and both the anxious and avoidant styles because again these behaviors can be seen across a range of different attachment styles but what we're looking at here is why the fearful avoidant is doing what they're doing and what their internal experiences relative to the other attachment styles and of course it's me so i will have a bunch of metaphors sprinkled through this video that hopefully are helpful but we'll see so sign number one that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style and this is the kind of classic one you crave intimacy desperately but you have a deep and intense fear of committed relationships so what you'll really often see with fearful avoidance is that they want closeness they want connection it's not like the avoidant style where when you meet them they're kind of cold and a little bit distant and it takes them a long time to warm up fearful avoidance often arrive in relationships with warmth with presence with emotional intensity in a lot of cases but most of them have early experiences of enmeshment so what that means is that from a young age a lot of fearful avoidance kind of internalized the idea that to be in a relationship means to give up my independence and my sense of self and to give endlessly of myself to the other person so there is this struggle that goes on in the minds of the fearful avoidant because they are people people they really like close intimate connections but they are very afraid of losing their sense of self in a relationship so they make this deal with themselves a lot of the time that i'll go into a relationship i'll get that hit of intimacy i'll get that sense of connectedness but i'm going to pull back and i'm not going to enter into this relationship long term because to be in a relationship long term would mean to lose my sense of self and i don't want to do that so they kind of look at relationships as like short term solutions to emotional pain that they feel or to a sense of needing intimacy but unlike the anxious style they don't want that relationship to continue long-term they're very afraid of the relationship lasting so what you'll often have as your internal experience as a fearful avoidant is it's kind of like saying okay i really want to go to the store but it's cold outside right so i'm just going to bear the cold until i get to the store and for the fearful avoidant relationships are kind of like saying okay i really want intimacy and closeness but i know i have to give up my sense of self to do it so i'm just gonna bear the separation from myself for as long as i need to be in this relationship but eventually i'm gonna need to return to myself and they haven't learned that you can integrate your sense of independence and your ability to be emotionally close with someone which is what the securely attached individual knows however unlike the anxious style who doesn't have that same sense of independence and that strong sense of who they are outside of a relationship the anxious style can feel kind of relieved when they're like merging their identity with someone else right because it's kind of like finally i'm getting some help regulating myself and figuring out who i am and on the other side of things the avoidant doesn't ever really give up their sense of self inside of a relationship they keep their boundaries pretty strong even within a relationship but the fearful avoidant engages in that sense of merging but misses the person they are when they're outside of a relationship when they're in one so you often see them entering into a lot of short-term relationships breaking things off when things get intense or panicking in their long-term relationships and kind of chronically looking for the exit signs even if they love someone even if they're happy to be with someone there is this sense of i can't be my full independent self in a relationship so i have to always know when this is going to be over that sense that you know this will end is a big feeling of relief for the fearful avoidant because they're like once this ends i get my sense of self back and that can feel like either a win-win situation or a lose-lose situation and by win-win lose lose i mean like internally depending on the day the mood they're in the needs they have what's being triggered for them but essentially what you need to know is that the fearful avoidance tends to only feel comfortable in relationships where there is an expiry date an end date or when they can at least tell themselves i'm gonna get out of it at this point the idea of long-term commitment even to someone they really love is terrifying sign number two that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style you ricochet between overtaking responsibility in a relationship and undertaking it so this is a bit of a complex concept and i'm gonna spend a lot of time on it because it really matters so we'll talk about this a little bit more as the video goes on but the fearful avoidant tends to have very unhealthy relationships and the reasons why are myriad and complex but for now what you need to know is that you will often see a sense of kind of disorientation with the fearful avoidant they might not admit this but they often feel like i don't know if i am an abusive person or if i am being abused and they often feel like in relationships i know this is toxic i know this is unhealthy but one day i'll think that it's all my fault and the next day i'll think it's all my partner's fault and i can't really figure out where the truth is like who's good and who's bad and the reason why is because they're switching between anxious and avoidant world views so in the anxious world view i kind of like to think of it as having one sense of emotional gravity outside of the south so the anxiously attached person places a really big emphasis on what's happening in their relationships and in the world outside of them because they believe that one's internal reactions are a direct response to what's happening in the world so there can be this blind spot around the inner world for the anxiously attached person like they might think if someone yells at me if someone calls me a mean name i'm going to be sad that's just cause and effect like there isn't as much of a mediating factor of the individual's emotional regulation system whereas on the flip side an avoidantly attached person might be actively getting verbally abused and they're just kind of like wow that person's an like something's going on with them and there isn't that same sense of because someone says something to me i have to emotionally react to it there is a very clear sense of differentiation between self and other for avoidantly attached people but with anxiously attached people there is almost no differentiation so they tend to think like if someone does something mean to me if someone is rude to me if someone upsets me then of course i'm going to be emotionally upset right until they start working on their attachment wounding they don't realize there is the opportunity for me to pause reflect and choose my reaction and this is why for anxiously attached individuals i find that this is the type most likely to kind of be like my partner's a narcissist my partner's a psychopath because there's this thing called psychic equivalence where basically you believe that the extent to which you're feeling bad must reflect the extent that the situation you're in is unhealthy and victimizing you but often what's happening is that the anxiously attached person might be having a trauma response or an emotional flashback where let's say they're in a situation where they're having a fight with their partner and it is triggering these feelings from like early early childhood and they are feeling overwhelmingly negative and hateful towards themselves and like they'll never get anything right and they don't understand that that's an internal reaction that isn't coming from the outside so they think i must be feeling this bad because my partner is so terrible to me because they automatically think that their emotions are a genuine reflection of the situation they're in so that's i think a lot of the reason why we get a lot of anxious people like pointing the finger a lot and calling other people like toxic and gaslighters and narcissists because that sense of psychic equivalence which is the extent to which i feel bad inside must be a reflection of how unhealthy my environment is is very very natural for them especially if they've never learned about like trauma responses and emotional flashbacks and how our limbic like animal brain gets activated in interpersonal situations and reminds us of the past and this is also why anxiously attached people idealize their partner so much right because they can also have emotional flashbacks that kind of feel good like someone they have a crush on will take an interest in them and suddenly they feel like oh my god i can relax into the feeling that i'm worth loving and that feels so good and like such a relief from my regular suffering that it must be because this person who is loving me is an absolute saint an angel like sent down from heaven the best person on earth and they will over attribute their positive feelings to other people as well so with the anxiously attached style we see that blind spot in the sense of they don't realize much of the time that their emotional experience is being mediated by their own brain their own physiology their own hormones and they often think that any emotion i'm feeling is a direct reflection of my environment now with the avoidantly attached person you will have the absolute opposite of this the avoidantly attached person tends to feel very cut off from or differentiated from their environment and their center of emotional gravity is very much internal meaning even if someone is sitting there throwing insults at them it's not that this will never hurt it will hurt and often it will hurt on kind of an unconscious level that they don't necessarily realize and take the time to process but the avoidant person is more likely to kind of be sitting there in observation mode going huh this person's very upset that's interesting i wonder what's leading them to be upset there will be a sense of that person's emotion belongs to them and my emotions belong to me so they won't necessarily think that someone being rude to them means they have to be upset they can rationalize with themselves and go well does it really matter to me what that person's opinion is if no there's no need to be upset about what they think of me even if it's insulting and while this sounds like a kind of stoic and zen state it actually does cut the avoidant off from the ability to feel interpersonally in a really deep and connected way and that can lead to some really intense struggles with loneliness depression substance abuse and all sorts of other negative outcomes for the avoidant type but this sense of i am completely responsible for all of my own emotions and what everyone else does is their business is kind of that inherent mindset of the avoidant type so avoidance while they might look down on people they might make judgments of other people you are very very rarely going to find them saying something like oh that person made me feel sad that person made me upset because the avoidantly attached person believes that they are radically responsible for their own internal emotional experience so they can say like oh that person yelled at me and then i internalized what they said and now i'm thinking of myself in a different way like there's this sense of being able to observe one's emotional experience but there's not the same connection between the self and the environment the same way that you see for the anxiously attached type or you see this in a healthy way with a secure type right so the secure type has kind of an inner emotional center of gravity but they can also kind of share in someone else's center of gravity so they're able to both have a dynamic interplay emotionally with someone else where they can kind of feel what someone else is feeling and really feel connected to them in real time like they're kind of flowing together emotionally but they don't lose their sense of self in that process so the secure person is kind of like yeah when there's green flags when everything feels good i can flow with someone else's energy but at the end of the day i always know that my emotions belong to me and if i feel hurt or upset by something i can take care of that within myself or i can talk it out with that person depending on what's appropriate right there is this ability to discern between when self-care is needed and when relational repair is needed and often with a securely attached person you see them doing both but with fearful avoidance you see them doing neither so what will often happen is the fearful avoidance will have this internal sense of gravity and so they'll be in a relationship and they'll be like okay i understand that i'm choosing to be in this relationship which means i need to suppress all my needs because that's a belief that they tend to have that you can't have needs in a relationship i need to give this other person what they want and i need to forget about what i want now you will also see this in the anxiously attached style and we talked about that in the anxious attachment video but what will eventually happen with the fearful avoidance is that the sense of resentment might build up again similar to the anxiously attached style and they might explode suddenly the anxious part of their attachment system is activated and they'll be like well if i'm giving up all this stuff for you you need to do this this and this or else i'm not going to be happy and they can suddenly be angry that they've been doing so much and giving so much and this other person isn't giving them what they need in return now again this kind of mirrors the anxious experience anxiously attached people will also very much relate to that but what's different is that often after that happens at some point the fearful avoidance will go into deactivation mode and when they are in deactivation mode it's like their center of gravity has completely returned to inside of the self and they might look at their actions and go oh my god why did i do that what was i why was i trying to get something out of someone else i'm responsible for my emotions i'm responsible for my experience of life me trying to change someone else or get someone to give something to me is completely controlling absurd i must be emotionally abusive and to be fair they can be emotionally abusive any of the insecure styles are very likely to be emotionally abusive towards their partners in some way whether or not it's intentional usually not but the fearful avoidant because they ricochet between these two mindsets is the most likely to notice that they are behaving very differently in different situations and because they are kind of cut off from half of their reasoning at any given point in time they can feel very confused almost about who they are and what their intentions are so to compare with the anxiously attached person let's say they explode at their partner right afterwards they might realize oh i really overreacted there i went too far i let my emotions get the best of me i should go apologize and repair and find a way to make this right with my partner i mean that's generous like they might also double down and be like i was right but you know that's a risk of anyone just being a person but then the avoidantly attached person also at times can't explode on their partners but they're also more likely to kind of pull back retreat and go okay why did i do that you know i had a strong emotional response and it's definitely my fault because one is always responsible for one's emotional responses so what do i need to change about this situation to make sure it doesn't happen again do i need to stop being with this partner because obviously i get quite frustrated around them and it's not fair for me to be with someone who i feel frequently frustrated around or something like that right so even if again the reasoning is not that generous the difference is that for the avoidantly attached person they'll always be looking at their own inner experience and why they chose to do that versus the anxiously attached person will always be looking at the situation right so even when they're apologizing they might kind of be like yeah i felt really upset because this this and this has happened in our relationship i didn't react the proper way and i really went overboard right but they still feel connected to the emotional part of themselves that led to that reaction in the first place it's still active enough in their psyche for them to be able to understand why they did what they did but when the fearful avoidance is in deactivation mode they might feel like i can no longer feel connected to the emotion that i had in that situation i feel like i went crazy i feel like i was not myself and so they might look at their behavior through like a very logical very almost psychological stance and then they might feel like overwhelming guilt overwhelming feelings of like i need to completely change my act i need to really figure out what it is within myself that reacts in these intense strong emotional ways and they'll feel like i must be crazy something must be really wrong with me because when they're deactivated they can't access the emotions that they were feeling in that situation and they can't properly process the fact that there is an interplay between themselves and the other person that is creating an emotional loop they believe when they're deactivated like the avoidant that nothing their partner does can affect them that nothing their partner does really has to do with how they're feeling and so they will overtake responsibility for the relationship maybe like believe that they're the narcissist they're the abuser they're the sociopath but then when they're activated again those emotions come back so it is this kind of vicious cycle and often something you'll notice if you talk to a fearful avoidant over a long period of time is that they feel very disoriented because they know something's wrong in their relationship but they really don't know where to put the blame one day they think it's all them the next day they think it's all their partner and it's a very disorienting experience where they have a lot of trouble integrating their emotional self which has the center of gravity outside the self and believes that other people impact the way they feel and their inner self where they have that internal center of gravity and they believe that everything i feel i am responsible for and the outside world doesn't affect me at all it is a very difficult experience to kind of ricochet between those two extremes and not have a linear sense of where is my center of gravity located right for the anxious style it might be like eighty percent of the time my center of gravity feels like it's outside of me and other people are always impacting the way that i feel and the circumstances of my life are always impacting the way i feel but twenty percent of the time i have that kind of internal groundedness and for the avoidant it might feel like the opposite right like 80 of the time i feel really grounded internally and like i am responsible for my own reactions but maybe 20 of the time things really get to me but for the fearful avoidant it might be closer to the center right so they don't really know should i invest in my relationships should i invest in self-work and that can be very confusing and disorienting which leads us to sign number three that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style and these will start going faster from here on out i promise you feel like you don't deserve a healthy relationship because you see your own bad behavior so clearly and you kind of have this core belief that you are bad and not worthy of healthy love now this again is differentiated from the anxious and the avoidant attachment style so the anxious attachment style might have low self-esteem right it's common to not necessarily feel like as capable or as desirable as other people if you're anxiously attached and there will always be that insecurity there but you do tend to feel when you're anxiously attached like at my core i'm a good well-meaning person who has a lot of love to give and that love could be wonderful for someone else and i want to be able to give it to someone and to receive it in return and on the other side of things you have the avoidantly attached person who tends to believe you know maybe i'm not the most emotional person but i'm definitely solid and stable in my resources and there's a lot i can practically offer to other people if i choose to have a relationship with someone but with the fearful avoidant because they're so aware of the fact that they have these strong emotional impulses but they also have this fear of commitment and they're very aware of when they're manipulating people they tend to believe i am bad something is wrong with me i ruin people's lives i should not be with a healthy person now is this true it is not any more true for the fearful avoidant than it is for any of the other attachment styles right so all of the insecure attachment styles are prone to having unhealthy relationships what's distinct about the fearful avoidant is that they really do tend to see themselves at least after a period of time as the common denominator but they might feel helpless because they so don't understand their own psychology that they're just kind of like well if i keep doing bad things it must be because i am a bad person so they have enough clarity to notice the patterns of their life and to see themselves as the common denominator there but they don't have enough self-awareness to understand that there is a reason why this is happening for them and it's more to do with triggers and to do with the way that their brain neurologically formed than it is to do with them having bad intentions i actually think that inside of every fearful avoidant person there is like this ball of pureness like this this sense of wanting so badly to love and to be loved and to give something positive to the world and to receive positive things from the world because there's like this little child that still lives in them right and their adult self is confused and disoriented and doesn't know which way to turn but it's not because they are inherently bad it's because they just got so wired for self-protection so early on but the good news is that if they choose to nurture that kind of good pure well-meaning part of themselves that is where all of the healing ends up coming from right it's about growing that like ball of light that i see inside of insecurely attached people just bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until you can apply good intentions even when you're in a messy situation and you can trust look i am a good person i don't want to hurt people i don't want to hurt myself but i'm really struggling right now so where can i compromise where can i meet my own needs but also not actively make things worse for other people and that is what the healing journey ends up looking like for the fearful avoidant and as they go on that journey they start to understand people are not all good or all bad and they are not all good or all bad people are complicated relationships are complicated morality is complicated our individual self concepts are complicated right but with the unhealed fearful avoidant you do really tend to see this mindset of like i'm a bad person the love that i have to give is toxic and bad and i can be really abusive in a lot of cases so they tend to see themselves as not deserving of healthy love and so if someone tries to give it to them they're going to reject that person last thing i will say the anxious style might relate to what i just said as well but for them it's more about the fact that they will see someone trying to give them healthy love as needy because they're looking for a person who actually isn't very emotionally available because they perceive avoidant people to be kind of inherently needless and their unconscious mind goes oh there's a person who could take care of my needs because they're not preoccupied with their own so with the anxious style when they meet let's say a secure person and the secure person like shares their own emotions with them the anxious person might be like ugh like i don't want that and they think it's because oh i'm feeling avoidant but it's often actually because they feel like i want someone to be completely emotionally available to attend to my needs so i'm going to be a little bit put off by someone who expresses their own needs to me even if it's in a perfectly healthy way now this is different than the fearful avoidant will feel more along the lines of like oh i see goodness in you i see good intent in you if you get close to me i'm gonna like contaminate you with my badness right so it's an avoidance of secure healthy love but for different reasons again the motivations behind the same behavior stems from a different place sign number four that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style is that you always want other people to go first when it comes to intimacy vulnerability and opening up so something that distinguishes the fearful avoidant type from either the anxious or the avoidant type is their approach to intimacy and getting close to people so with the anxious style because their emotions and their center of emotional gravity is so outside of the self if you will they don't always see something as intimate or vulnerable the same way that a secure or someone on the avoidance spectrum would they just kind of feel like well i'm talking about what's happening for me and what's happening for me is what i'm reacting to emotionally so it doesn't necessarily feel all that intimate or invasive for them to share their feelings with someone else they just kind of see it as like well i'm just telling you what's going on and on the flip side of things avoidance might feel like no matter how close they get in relationships they're always going to keep a certain level of emotional distance from the other person and the secure person kind of feels like there's an interplay of this energy for them so their center of emotional gravity is definitely internal they feel like they're in control of their responses the majority of the time but they can also kind of get into tune with someone else emotionally if you will so what that means is that the secure person is never really giving over ownership of their emotions right they're never truly putting their entire well-being and heart in someone else's hands and saying please keep this safe they're kind of going i'm okay with myself but also i like when we can engage with each other i like when we can share in the experience of life and when we can have an influence on the way that one another feels and thinks and so there's almost this natural sense of collaborative loving energy between secure people and the people that they choose to surround themselves with they never really lose themselves in a relationship and they always feel independent but they really recognize that people affect each other and we have to be conscious and thoughtful about what we say to other people and also about what kind of people we surround ourselves with because we do emotionally react to the people in our lives and why not make it as easy as possible by making sure that we're surrounding ourselves with healthy loving people who probably aren't going to make anything harder than it has to be for us now with the fearful avoidant they kind of feel like i can either keep my center of emotional gravity inside of myself or i can give it up and hand it over to someone but if i do that i need to be really sure that that person isn't going to hurt me so they tend to be a lot more guarded when you first get to know them even though they'll probably come in with a lot of warmth a lot of presence a lot of attention and it can actually feel like you're connecting very deeply with the fearful avoidant when you first get to know them and then you might walk away kind of realizing like oh i didn't actually learn that much about them but i feel really connected and the reason why that happens is because the fearful avoidant really wants deep connections they want that hit of intimacy they want to understand and feel understood so they tend to be pretty good naturally at making other people feel comfortable and safe to express themselves and to talk about kind of deeper things with them but the fearful avoidance doesn't want to go to those same places in themselves until they're sure that the power dynamic in the situation is tipped in their favor and the reason for that is because fearful avoidance believe that people are kind of naturally inclined to hurt each other to betray each other if it makes sense to they don't have that kind of belief in the common good nature of man right they kind of think everyone's out for themselves and so i have to make sure that if i am handing over any sort of vulnerable information about myself to someone i have to know that either i have something worse on them so if they spell my secret i can spell theirs or i have to be reasonably sure that let's say that person really likes me maybe a lot more than i like them so it's not as big a risk to share something with them because i know that they're probably not going to hurt me because my rejection of them would hurt them right so they're kind of always evaluating what's the likelihood that this person is safe for me to open up to but unlike the secure or even the anxious style they don't look for markers of safety like oh the person is warm and kind and comforting that can be there for sure but it's more likely to be this person has already showed me all of their cards so now i can flip over mine knowing that they don't have anything up their sleeve that they could defeat me with emotionally so to speak and something i find really interesting is that i think there can also be this tendency for fearful avoidance to kind of have almost like a public persona that is true to their inner world or that hints at something very deep within them or even like the way that they interact with people again because they're so warm and open and engaging it can be really easy to mistake this type for secure at a first glance because they don't have that kind of cold withdrawn nature of the avoidant but they also don't have that kind of frantic emotional energy of the anxious so they seem kind of common regulated but then if you try to go a little bit deeper with them they won't open up the same way that a secure person will at least definitely not right away right it'll take them a while to really feel like okay i now know you better than you know me which means it's safe for me to start disclosing a little bit more to you but often there can be like this disconnect where people approach them expecting them to be really warm and open the way a secure person would be and then get kind of confused when like the fearful avoidance isn't offering that actual experience of emotional intimacy they might be comfortable asking you questions and getting to know you really well but it's going to take them a long time to share anything that's going to be actually vulnerable for them even if they've already kind of hinted that that's in there somewhere so you also generally will see this in terms of who pursues versus weights to be pursued and there are exceptions all across the board with this but generally speaking i've seen that anxiously attached people tend to be a little bit less worried about rejection because they really do believe internally like i am a warm loving person who has a lot of love to share with someone so i'm going to go out and kind of like try to give that love to people and see who's interested and see which of the people who i take an interest in reciprocate but with the fearful avoidance what i think you'll see more often is that they wait until someone takes an interest in them and they can be reasonably sure that they're not going to get rejected to start reciprocating emotion so they can be less likely to do the chasing because again chasing someone and trying to form a relationship with someone requires showing vulnerability and showing vulnerability is very difficult for the fearful avoidant they have a lot of boundaries up their center of gravity is naturally located internally until they decide it's time to give it over because they see it as kind of a safe bet but you're really not going to see that early vulnerability with the fearful avoidant the same way you might with anxious or secure types sign number five that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style is that you can be very rational and logical and you can also be very emotional and emotionally reactive but not at the same time so this creates kind of a very confusing jekyll and hyde situation for the fearful avoidant but also for the people who know the fearful avoidant and this can get very confusing for the fearful avoidance peers and first i'll explain a little bit more about what this means so if you are anxiously attached what that means is that essentially early on you really learn to trust your internal felt experience of living so you learned my emotions are a pretty good predictor of what's going on in my environment and you learn to focus on that so heavily that you trust your feelings and your empirical experiences a lot more than you trust kind of detached analyzation right and if you have an avoidant attachment style the opposite happened so early on you found that your emotions were not a strong predictor of what was going to happen in your environment and they weren't that useful to focus on so you learn to over rely on looking for cause and effect and trying to figure out like which rules and logical principles govern the world now the problem is that if you only rely on one of those things it gets really difficult to make informed decisions and inform judgments because let's say you're only looking at the emotional side of things you might completely neglect the fact that choosing something that makes you feel good over and over again or chasing the kind of people who make you feel good over and over again but maybe aren't giving you the kind of commitment you want is a bad strategy you don't think of the way that you're approaching your life in terms of strategy you just think of it as i follow my heart and so you rarely pause to figure out like what mechanically isn't working here where is my strategy that i don't want to call a strategy but that absolutely is one going wrong and on the flip side of things if you're avoidant and you've learned to rely on logic and discount the way that you feel you're really going to have trouble feeling your way out of problems that actually require the integration of emotion because not everything in life functions in a perfectly rational way especially relationships with other people but if you're not in touch with what you want and what you feel on a deep level logic is not going to get you out of a lot of situations so you end up seeing a lot of logical distortions in the avoidant type the same way you see emotional distortions in the anxious type because it's kind of like each type is over relying on a certain area of their brain where actually a different type of processing is needed to solve that problem so you get really strange kind of neurotic thought patterns in both the avoidant and the anxious style now with the securely attached individual they're able to integrate emotion and logic so what that looks like is let's say a secure person really wants something like a job or whatever and it's not necessarily the highest paying job it's not necessarily the job that gives them the most linear route to where they want to go professionally but they know day-to-day that job is going to provide me with a lot of satisfaction they're able to integrate emotion with logic by going okay i'm going to make this choice and i'm just going to be aware of the fact that it's not necessarily going to be making me as much money as i might want so i might need to look for supplemental forms of income and it's not necessarily going to help me advance as quickly as i might like but quality of life is really important to me and liking the work that i do every day really matters to me so i'm going to compromise a little bit on the logic and just be aware of that and be aware of what i might need to do to supplement that in order to prioritize that quality of life and then on the flip side of things let's say there is something that requires them to rely on logic a little bit more so let's say they want to go back to school and they know that's going to make me super busy super stressed i'm going to feel really overworked and a bit under resourced for a year but i can withstand that discomfort i can put aside my desire to feel good for a while because i know that in the long term this is going to be a really positive outcome for me so secure attachment is able to balance logic and emotion and find solutions that either account for both ones or just allow them to choose one with an awareness of what problems that's going to cause for them in the other area and then they can holistically manage their well-being by being aware of everything that goes into it now if you are fearful avoidant the problem is that you have access to both distorted emotion like the anxiously attached person and distorted logic like the avoidant person but you haven't learned to integrate those things the way a secure person does so you might be able to say like i really want this job it really lights me up and i know it's not the best choice but i'm just going to choose it anyway but when you are activated in your anxious attachment system and you are making decisions based on emotion and emotional distortions you don't take the logic into account you're kind of not thinking about that when you're in that state right so you can make a series of emotional decisions without even being aware of the fact that this is going to cause major problems for me in another area and this tracks with the experience of the anxiously attached person but then what happens is when you are deactivated when you are shutting down from your emotional attachment system and you go into avoidance mode you're now going to look at your life and be like oh my god i've only been making these terrible emotional decisions what am i doing now i need to get my life together and then you will go into only logical decision making and for a period of time you will do only what makes sense you will cut yourself off from emotion you will kind of starve yourself emotionally and what distinguishes this when the fearful avoidant does it from when the anxiously attached person does the same thing because the anxiously attached person will do this sometimes the fearful avoidance feels good when they're in deactivation mode like it kind of feels like a relief like finally i'm on my own i'm not bothering with these relationships i'm independent i'm choosing what matters i'm prioritizing what's logical but later on at some point they will get triggered back into their anxious activation strategies and then they might flip to the other extreme and go back to making only emotional decisions and the problem is that this is very disorienting because it makes it really difficult for you to keep pursuing a linear direction for your life right because you're always trying to over rely on one form of reasoning without integration of the other and i've noticed that an area this really shows up for a lot of fearful avoidance there can be this pattern a fearful avoidance speaking very negatively about their relationships about their partner and they'll speak about their relationship with what seems to be like a very high level of self-awareness so they can go to their friends or their colleagues or their family and be like yeah here's x y and z reason why my relationship isn't going to work here's what i need in the future here's where that doesn't align in my relationship but then they will continue this pattern of being in really chaotic relationships because if they are always activated in their anxious attachment system when they're with their partner they're not thinking about the logic when they're making decisions about their relationship so it can be this kind of split where people who know the fearful avoidance kind of feel like i know this person to be very rational and self-aware and measured but for some reason they just keep making these decisions that are kind of the opposite of what they talk about wanting so from the outside it can look very bizarre like why is this person continuously choosing something that they can sit in front of me and tell me makes them miserable it's because when they're discussing the situation they might be deactivated and relying solely on distorted logic where they believe feelings don't matter and only what makes sense is what's important but then when they're activated they're making decisions from distorted emotion where they're thinking logic doesn't matter i just have to follow my heart at all costs because it feels so intense when i'm in the moment so of course the path to healing for the fearful avoidant becomes integrating these things and recognizing even when you're really emotionally activated it might not be the time to make a decision you might want to make a decision at a point where you're able to factor in both how you feel and what makes sense and find the average of those things over a long period of time and i really do think that when it comes to attachment healing for the fearful avoidant it takes a very long time to be able to integrate those world views and so it might be worthwhile for a period of time to decide like i'm not going to make any decisions right now i'm going to wait and try to stay conscious so that when i'm emotionally activated i can remind myself there's a rational part of this that i'm currently neglecting to think about and when i am deactivated i can remind myself there is a strong emotional component to this that at this moment i'm neglecting to think about and over time you can learn to bring those things together and like the secure person factor them both in have an internal negotiation about what makes the most sense for you at this point given these seemingly conflicting interests and then figure out how to take an average of what you want as opposed to ricocheting from one extreme to the other sign number six that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style you are highly aware of power dynamics at all times now we have already talked a little bit about this when it comes to when the fearful avoidant will and will not open up but this is an important one because from a very young age fearful avoidance kind of learned you have to be strategic in your approach to people right they have that negative view of self negative view of others so they tend to have this belief that at the root of every single relationship is an inherent power struggle now i want to contrast this with how the secure person looks at relationships which is of course everybody has their own interests at heart and everyone is looking out for themselves but people have lots of opportunity for healthy and happy collaboration and people are capable of making each other's lives better by compromising and prioritizing each other because each person brings something special to the other's life but because the fearful avoidant kind of looks at relationships as like i can keep my center of gravity or i can hand over my center of gravity and they don't understand that you can keep most of your center of gravity but outsource like 25 of it so that you can flow interpersonally in relationships they're always kind of on the lookout for like who has the greatest hold over a given situation whether that is in a friendship a work relationship a romantic relationship it is always present and always in the back of their minds and again this is how they choose when to open up when to self-disclose when to start trusting people for the fearful avoidant because they have such an inherent sense of distrust in other people the kind of closest that they get to trust really is the feeling of it would hurt you to betray me right so if they can see that someone else's interests are aligned with theirs to the point where it would be harmful for the other person to betray them because it would cause a cascade effect that would topple back on them that's kind of like the closest a fearful avoidant who is unhealed comes to trusting someone is the recognition that like we're aligned in such a way that you hurting me would hurt you so now i can relax a little bit and hand over some of my center of gravity to you but if that is not present if there's someone who they perceive to have their own interests at heart and not the fearful avoidance they are highly unlikely to be trusting and on the flip side they're always going to be kind of looking for like leverage points what do i have that someone else wants what does someone have that i want what might someone be trying to get out of me what am i trying to get out of other people so they can be hyper aware both of what they have to offer that other people might want and vice versa and that again is not conscious it might not even be something that consciously enters their awareness at any point but it will come out in terms of who they feel comfortable around versus who they feel a little bit more on edge around and who they don't want to relax around that's often a situation where they feel like the power dynamic is shifted out of my favor and so i have to pull back and make sure i'm keeping my own center of gravity close right this can actually i'm getting a little bit off topic but this can actually be how the fearful avoidance feels when they're very attracted to someone especially if they don't know if that feeling of attraction is mutual they might feel a little bit consistently on edge because they're kind of like oh i can tell that i want your approval but you don't necessarily want my approval so unlike the anxiously attached person who in that case might feel like okay well i'll go show that person that i can give them things that i can add to their lives that i can be very loving and warm and maybe they'll start to approve of me the fearful avoidant might be like okay i have to figure out how to be good enough for that person in some objective way so that they come to me so that the power dynamic starts tipping in my favor once i know they're attracted to me and then i can open up and get to know them so it's kind of this constant game of like not wanting to go first and so if the fearful avoidant wants something from someone they have to figure out how to shift the power dynamic in such a way that they won't be losing control by pursuing something with that person sign number seven you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style you have a hard time making decisions because your feelings are very inconsistent now this is once again a theme that we've kind of gone over quite a bit in this video but i really want you to think about how disorienting it is to only really be in touch with either your reactive emotional side or your cold kind of calculating logical side at a time and i think that as the fearful avoidant gets older and they start to recognize their own patterning a little bit more and really see what's happening in terms of that ricochet between the emotional side of their lives and the more logical controlled side of their lives they can develop a really great self-awareness around this and start to understand just because i feel like i really want something right now i might not feel the same a week from now a month from now a year from now and so they can at least begin to acknowledge i have a very chaotic experience of how i make choices and so i might want to wait a really long time to kind of make sure that something i'm thinking about doing is something that i'm going to feel consistently aligned with right but that requires them being able to keep that awareness even in the moments when they're feeling really strongly about something and that's very difficult and there can also be this case of almost not pseudo self-awareness but where they can kind of recognize parts of themselves but forget how it feels in the moment to play out those parts of themselves so let's say you'll have a fearful avoidant going into like a career path where they're like i'm going to be a public speaker or something because i know i have these deep emotions and i have a lot of wisdom to share but then they get to the point in their career where they would have to actually be vulnerable actually show up in a way that they find to be a bit scary because they're not sure that the power dynamic is tipped in their favor and then they're gonna freak out deactivate go back into avoidance mode and suddenly feel very kind of cold and closed off and like they can't pursue that path and so there can be like enough self-awareness that they believe they can do it all like i can have a career or a relationship that combines emotion and rationality but they forget that they're not necessarily choosing when they show up with emotion and emotional awareness and when they show up with logic and reason and so again until that integration starts to happen and they can do both at once it can be really difficult if they commit to anything that requires them to access a certain part of their personality on a daily basis including relationships right so there can sometimes be this sense with the fearful avoidance of like i can't trust myself because a decision i make one day i might wake up a week from now and just be like i cannot access the part of myself that i thought was going to be able to do that and so in the long term you might learn to distrust yourself and really feel like i can't make good decisions for my life i'm constantly in personal or interpersonal chaos because i might make promises to people in good faith and then freak out and not be able to keep them but not know why and again it's because you're having that ricochet between your anxious activation strategies and your avoidant deactivation strategies so you don't always know which you you're gonna get a week from now a month from now a year from now and that makes it very difficult to plan your life because often the plans that you make in good faith whether that's looking at someone and saying yes i will absolutely commit to this relationship or whether that's staring down yourself in your more deactivated periods and going i'm going to clean up my act and get really emotionally healthy and i'm not going to give in to these strong emotions anymore you are not factoring in the other side so the more you become aware of that inner disorientation the more difficult you might find it to make major decisions because you just don't know what you can and can't depend on yourself to follow through on sign number eight that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style you read other people really easily so this one can be a really big pro right a lot of fearful avoidance are really into people-oriented fields where being able to really deeply understand and unpack the human psyche is an imperative to that field or they'll bring that awareness into other fields right i know one fearful avoidant person who became one of the best poker players in the world because they were so good at reading my new facial expressions on other people and little subconscious like ticks and tells that they had that they were able to use that information to become exceptional at telling when other people were lying or bluffing so this can be a really cool skill even though it formed because of a maladaptive environment so basically early on for the fearful avoidance they learned that what other people say is not always accurate is not always true so i have to learn to watch for all types of information that might lead me on to what someone is thinking or feeling now where this differs from the anxious strategy because the anxiously attached person does also have that hyper vigilance around others behavior is that the anxious person can get kind of blinded by their idealization of other people whereas the fearful avoidant that can happen for they can have a lot of limerence they can't idealize people the same way the anxious does but where the fearful avoidance kind of has the advantage here is that they're a lot more comfortable looking at the negative parts of themselves so often with an anxiously attached person it's really difficult for them to admit to themselves when let's say they're being manipulative or they're trying to get something out of someone else but the fearful avoidant is a lot more comfortable admitting to themselves i'm being strategic i'm being manipulative here so it's easier for them to also spot when other people are doing those things right so they tend to be pretty good at understanding how the power dynamics are playing out in a given situation what people's motivations are and why and when people might lie or show up dishonestly as well as which delusions people might be holding about themselves right because they have that ability to kind of switch back and forth between the anxious side of things where they do feel like at times they're seeing the world through rose-colored glasses they're idealizing people they're fantasizing and inventing stories in their head and then going into that deactivation mode where now they're recognizing all of that stuff that they do for what it is they have both sides of the spectrum right they can see the areas in which other people are deluding themselves over relying on emotion or under relying on emotion and having thought distortions because they've accessed both sides of that spectrum ironically the only people that fearful avoidance tend to be really bad at reading are secure people who are operating from a place of i'm okay i have empathy for myself and trust in others and that mindset is so foreign to the fearful avoidance that they might kind of feel like come on like what's your game plan like what strategy are you using here when they meet a securely attached person who's not using a strategy they are just truly being honest and showing up authentically in their interactions with people but it's difficult for the fearful avoidant to believe that someone doesn't have a strategy because they were raised in an environment where to survive you really had to have interpersonal strategies sign number nine that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style you are frequently upregulated and you might even be addicted to emotional highs now this can be true of any of the insecure styles so fearful avoidant avoidant and anxious are all going to try to regulate themselves in kind of counterproductive ways at times but what happens specifically for the fearful avoidant is that they have both the need for emotional intensity that the anxious style has which means they often put themselves in situations that are very emotionally volatile but they also have the inability to handle and process and be vulnerable about negative emotions that the avoidant style has so when the anxious style puts themselves in these like emotionally intense volatile situations they often deal with their negative emotions by seeking out support by going to friends or family members or their partners and asking for co-regulation but the fearful avoidant doesn't understand it's not really in their psyche in the same way that other people can help you with your problems and help change the way that you're feeling so they'll put themselves in these kind of emotionally intense situations and feel deep pain or deep grief when something goes wrong but they don't know how to co-regulate properly so they don't necessarily feel comfortable being vulnerable about what they're going through with other people so what they do is they try to make themselves feel better by balancing out that extreme pain with an extreme emotional high and this can look very different depending on the person depending on the pain and again all of the styles will choose unhealthy coping mechanisms in certain situations but with the fearful avoidant you will often see kind of an entire lifestyle that is oriented in a slightly more extravagant than normal way like they might have a breakup and they need to go like travel the world for six months they can't sit with their pain but they feel it right as opposed to let's say the anxious style who might go through a breakup and they feel that pain like it is really intense and raw for them but as soon as they find someone else like a new partner or even a really comforting friend who can be really present with them they're able to move on from that pain actually a lot quicker in most cases because they do process it even though it feels so overwhelming and so unbearable at the time and with the avoidant they're not good at dealing with negative emotions but they tend to put themselves in less situations than the fearful avoidant and anxious style that would cause them to get really hurt right because they don't do that vulnerability they don't do that kind of enmeshment in relationships so they're less likely to be experiencing that level of emotional pain in the first place but with the fearful avoidant they tend to put themselves in very emotionally triggering situations than not know how to deal with the triggers in a healthy way and so they might need to chase some extreme high extreme ambitious goal because they need a distraction from their pain when they feel it they can't just sit with it now to an extent once again all of the styles that are insecure will do this gabor mate actually wrote a wonderful book called scattered minds where he talks about the connection between adhd or inattentive thinking in general and disorganization of the attachment system and i also want to point out that we see things like substance abuse issues and mental health challenges represented across the range of insecure styles so it's not that the fearful avoidant is the only one who deals with pain maladaptively it's just that there is this specific pattern where they experience pain kind of on the same level as the anxious style but their ability to co-regulate is similar to that of the avoidance so they have to constantly try to find ways to make themselves feel better from this pain that they believe is being inflicted upon them by interpersonal situations and that is a really hard thing to do so that's why we often see these kind of extreme attempts to make themselves feel better by chasing these really big highs all right last sign sign number 10 that you might have a fearful avoidant attachment style is that you love really hard but you struggle to make room for the other person in your life so fearful avoidance is really characterized by a need for control you are afraid of what will happen if you let go of control over your own life your own routines the things that you want for yourself but you want that intimacy that comfort of having another person you can go to and share your life with so whereas the anxious style is a lot more willing to make compromises and to really kind of figure out how they and their partner can fit their lives together because again their sense of self and their emotional self kind of exists outside of the self anyways so they don't have that much that they're trying to hold on to in terms of their independent needs and identity they kind of feel like well i'm half of a whole so i'm looking for my other half but the fearful avoidant feels like i am a whole i'm fine on my own they tend to think that they can live their lives alone and a lot of them will stay out of relationships for very long periods of time that's another kind of clear distinction between fearful avoidant and anxious anxiously attached people tend to feel very uncomfortable out of relationships they can like force themselves to be single and white knuckle through it but they tend to feel more comfortable in a relationship the fearful avoidance tends to feel like they are the most themselves the most regulated the most calm when they are on their own but then they want that intimacy right they feel themselves wanting a hit of closeness so what they'll try to do is form a romantic relationship that does not force them to compromise in any capacity and this is also how the avoidant acts however the avoidant isn't looking for the same degree of emotional intensity right so they might have relationships that kind of look a little bit more transactional on the surface because they truly are because they truly are just looking for someone who they don't have to go super deep with but the fearful avoidant wants the experience of emotionally being as close to someone as you would in like a long-term committed romantic relationship but they don't want to give up control over the way that they're running their life and all of the hobbies and interests and patterns and routines that they have formed for themselves around that internal sense of gravity so partners of fearful avoidance can often feel like they have to kind of constantly give in to what the fearful avoidant wants because they can be kind of rigid and uncompromising in relationships but they want that emotional intimacy right and this can lead to some controlling behavior all the insecurely attached types are controlling in their own ways so basically like anxiously attached people can try to get their partner to do certain things and act certain ways towards them and show up in certain ways that give them a steady stream of validation regardless of whether or not that is authentic for their partner and then the avoidantly attached person can kind of refuse to compromise to the extent where their partner always feels like they have to be showing up and doing everything the way the avoidant person wants it because the avoidant is just so unwilling to change their ways and this is also true of the fearful avoidant but the difference is that they want a much higher degree of emotional intensity than the avoidant wants so they're more motivated to be a little bit more controlling over their partners the way an anxiously attached person might because they're trying to keep that person in their orbit without compromising where their center of gravity is they haven't learned how to compromise how to understand what's important to them and what's not so there can be this tendency to like get super enmeshed in a relationship maybe in the early to middle stages of the relationship and then pull back and be like well if we're doing this long term if we're committing to each other here's what i need for my life you can fit yourself to that or not but i'm not going to make major compromises and that is a defensive strategy that they don't realize they're doing but it really does stem from that fear of like i can't let my center of gravity go permanently and they don't know like the secure person knows i can know what i want and show up for myself and give myself the things i want and also choose to devote a certain amount of time and energy and attention to growing a relationship with someone because that adds a great deal to my life and sometimes it's worth giving up certain things that i would do if i were on my own in order to get the benefits of sharing my life with someone and the overall average of that can be happier than the overall average of living my life alone but again that process of being able to integrate what you want emotionally and what logically makes sense is not something that comes naturally to the fearful avoidance so they have to really put conscious and intentional work into making that integration happen over a long period of time in order to start healing from this style all right that is all i have to say today about the fearful avoidance attachment style i hope that this video was helpful for you guys at least in starting to understand the distinctions between why all of the different styles do the things that they do right very often the behavior overlaps when it comes to fearful avoidant anxious and avoidant attachment styles but the motivation for that behavior is very different depending on the style and the fearful avoidance definitely has the most disorientation in terms of what their motivations are right they're constantly kind of reacting to like the polarized demands of their own mind now there are many different theories on fearful avoidance and in future videos i'm going to talk about in particular the dynamic maturation model of attachment which talks about how disorganized attachment systems actually have a high degree of organization to them we just haven't studied them intricately enough until the dmm came along to really understand what the disorganized individual is aiming for so in the dmm a lot of people who would be classified as disorganized in the traditional model of attachment would actually be classified differently in this model so that's a really interesting one that we're going to explore in future videos but for now i wanted to give an overview of what it feels like internally to have a fearful avoidant attachment style and remind you that healing is so possible the brilliance of attachment styles is that we always have the opportunity if we are willing and able to do the work to move towards security so fearful avoidance can get so much better if you are living with a lot of these signs and symptoms of fearful avoidance and life feels very difficult for you i promise you it can get so so much easier if you're willing to show up and do the work so if you want to see more videos like this and if you want to start talking about how to heal your attachment style make sure you subscribe to this channel i put out videos almost daily at this point where we talk about personality types attachment styles and everything else that kind of goes into the kaleidoscope of who you are as a person and how you show up in the world alright until next time i love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and i will see you back here again soon [Music]