Is My Partner Avoidantly Attached?
If you’re reading this, you might be feeling alone and confused in your relationship. You are someone who puts in effort and fights for your relationship, only to feel like your partner will never care as much about you as you care about them.
Rather than a partner who doesn’t love you, you might have an avoidantly attached partner. Maybe you know this and are wondering if anxious avoidant relationships can work.
In this post, I’ll help you identify common signs of avoidant attachment in a partner and explore ways you can move forward together. If you need support working through patterns as a couple, inquire about couples therapy availability.
What is an avoidantly attached style?
What is avoidant attachment? Attachment styles and attachment theory come from developmental psychology. Very basically, the theory is based on the idea that humans need connection to others as part of their evolutionary survival strategy.
When our connection to others feels threatened, we develop ways to protest that disconnection. We first learn these protective responses in childhood when we experience disconnection from caregivers, and many of us unconsciously carry those patterns into adulthood.
Because the strategies are a general threat response, avoidant attachment in men and avoidant attachment in women tend to present similarly.
Most commonly, the protest strategies are either hyper-activation or deactivation (i.e. fight or flight). An avoidant attachment style falls on the deactivating side of the spectrum. In other words, it’s a learned coping mechanism formed in response to past experiences.
Signs your partner is avoidantly attached
Below are some avoidant attachment examples you can expect in a relationship.
Avoidant attachment deactivating strategies may look like:
uncomfortable with conflict
resist emotional closeness
exceptional at compartmentalizing
long to feel adequate
can i help my partner change their avoidance?
If you recognize any of the above qualities in yourself or your partner, the first thing I want you to know that the attachment style is not your fault.
We develop attachment styles early in life, long before we meet our adult partners. However, close relationships often bring those deeply rooted patterns to the surface. Your partner’s ability or inability to connect through their own attachment insecurities does not determine your worth.
We all have autonomy over our own mental health. Changing any behavior, including attachment styles, is up to that person. But if your partner is motivated to work with you to improve your relationship, together change is possible. Remember, you are not responsible for fixing each other.
Because these patterns are so unconscious, changing them is difficult. Real change requires first an insightful awareness that these patterns exist. From this understanding, you can release old coping strategies and create a new dynamic in your relationship. Avoidant attachment healing is possible.
Emotion focused therapy, or EFT, is a cutting-edge model of couples therapy and avoidant attachment therapy based on attachment theory. The treatment will help both partners understand their own behaviors and emotions, even before they were in avoidant attachment relationships. Remember, these patterns originate early in life.
Working with an relationship therapist can help you and your partner to identify the coping strategies you both use when you experience threats to your connection. This avoidant attachment treatment can help you create new ways of interacting with each other that don’t leave you shut out.
