Relationships are hard, but having an avoidant attachment makes relationships a hell of a lot harder.
Within attachment theory (which helps explain interpersonal bonding), it’s known that ~25% of the population uses avoidant attachment strategies to escape intimacy. Why? Because emotional intimacy and being vulnerable with a romantic partner causes them significant discomfort.
But why does it cause them discomfort? Prior experiences (usually stemming from childhood) instilled in them that their emotional needs would not be met by their primary caregivers. And when someone’s needs are repeatedly not met, they subconsciously suppress those needs rather than face the daily pain of rejection.
That learned strategy—to shut down when attempting to seek emotional intimacy—can persist long into adulthood.
Emotional loneliness is at the core of avoidant attachment
In the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, the author explains that:
What happens when … immature parents lack the emotional responsiveness necessary to meet their children’s emotional needs? The result is emotional neglect.
Emotional neglect in childhood leads to painful emotional loneliness that can have a long-term negative impact on a person’s choices regarding relationships and intimate partners.
The author further describes how emotional loneliness can develop in children:
Emotional Loneliness: Parents who are emotionally immature are so self-preoccupied that they don’t notice their children’s inner experiences. In addition, they discount feelings, and they fear emotional intimacy. They’re uncomfortable with their own emotional needs and therefore have no idea how to offer support at an emotional level. Such parents may even become nervous and angry if their children get upset, punishing them instead of comforting them. These reactions shut down children’s instinctive urge to reach out, closing the door to emotional contact.
For some people, emotional loneliness is their default state, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to transcend your pain and arrive at a place of secure emotional intimacy, which the author defines as:
Emotional Intimacy: [This] involves knowing that you have someone you can tell anything to, someone to go to with all your feelings, about anything and everything. You feel completely safe opening up to the other person, whether in the form of words, through an exchange of looks, or by just being together quietly in a state of connection. Emotional intimacy is profoundly fulfilling, creating a sense of being seen for who you really are.
So, if you are someone with deep emotional loneliness, how do you find and foster true emotional intimacy?
The remainder of this essay seeks to answer that question by examining the science of attachment theory, and by reviewing a variety of helpful therapeutic techniques (supplemented with examples from my own journey of healing from avoidant attachment).
For me, my deep inner loneliness likely developed from my parents’ neglect of my emotional needs.
My father traveled half the time for work, and when he was home, I had to deal with his occasional anger issues. Even when he was in a good mood, he preferred spending his free time in front of the TV watching the NFL and college basketball—attempts to connect with my father were frequently interrupted by him shouting, “Oh c’mon ref, that’s a bullshit call!” Through repeated experiences, I internalized that my emotional needs would not be met, so I kept to myself, locked myself in my room, and numbed my loneliness by watching YouTube all day.
As a stay-at-home mom, my mother was wonderful and caring. But during my adolescence she returned to work and had less time for me. And in the free time she did have, looking back in retrospect, I don’t think she had ever developed the interpersonal skills to be able to relate to me on an emotional level. Instead, our conversations were mostly about our daily surface-level experiences, rather than helping me navigate life’s emotional challenges. Again, through repeated experiences, I internalized that my emotional needs would not be met, so I isolated myself further and my inner loneliness grew.
As an aside: no parents are perfect. Mine provided for me physically and financially, and I am grateful for that. In many ways, my parents did a way better job raising me compared to their parents, so I don’t want to blame them for anything. When we become adults, it’s up to us to recognize that we now have the power to educate ourselves, become aware of our patterns, redefine our relationships with people (ie: parents, partners, and friends), ask for what we want to feel emotionally fulfilled, and learn to draw boundaries around behaviors that make us uncomfortable.
As a child you have no power, no idea how the world works, or what’s considered normal/healthy. If you happen to grow up in an emotionally insecure home, you have no choice but to adapt.
By numbing myself, I was able to avoid feeling my deep loneliness, but that strategy had unintended consequences later in life…
Deactivating strategies
Once into adulthood and starting to date, my original childhood strategy to avoid emotional neglect and rejection—by isolating and numbing myself—started manifesting through avoidant attachment behaviors, described in the book Attached:
Avoidants … feel a deep-rooted aloneness, even while in a relationship. Whereas people with a secure attachment style find it easy to accept their partners, flaws and all, to depend on them, and to believe that they’re special and unique—for avoidant people such a stance is a major life challenge. If you’re avoidant, you connect with romantic partners but always maintain some mental distance and an escape route. Feeling close and complete with someone else—the emotional equivalent of finding a home—is a condition that you find difficult to maintain.
The emotional and cognitive escape routes that people with avoidant attachment use are known as deactivating strategies:
A deactivating strategy is any behavior or thought that is used to squelch intimacy. These strategies suppress our attachment system, the biological mechanism in our brains responsible for our desire to seek closeness.
Here are some classic deactivating strategies from the book:
Saying (or thinking) “I’m not ready to commit”—but staying together nonetheless, sometimes for years
Focusing on small imperfections in your partner and allowing it to get in the way of your romantic feelings
Pining after an ex-partner
Flirting with others—a hurtful way to introduce insecurity into the relationship
Not saying “I love you”—while implying that you do have feelings towards the other person
Pulling away when things are going well
Leaving things foggy—to maintain your feeling of independence
Avoiding physical closeness—e.g., not wanting to have sex, walking several strides ahead of your partner
Unfortunately, I’ve used nearly all of the above strategies in my past relationships. It caused my partners to doubt my commitment to them, and to question their self-worth.
Today looking back, I feel ashamed for how I acted, and deeply regret the pain I unintentionally inflicted. Back then, I wasn’t aware of attachment theory, and I was just doing my best to connect with people (while subconsciously avoiding confronting the abyss of emotional loneliness at my core).
Healing from avoidant attachment
First of all, what causes a person with avoidant attachment to become aware of their patterns and to change their behavior? The authors explain:
People with an avoidant attachment style overwhelmingly assume that the reason they’re unable to find happiness in a relationship has little to do with themselves and a lot to do with external circumstances—meeting the wrong people, not finding “the one”. They rarely search inside themselves for the reason of their dissatisfaction, and even more rarely seek help or even agree to get help when their partner suggests they do so. Unfortunately, until they look inward or seek counseling, change is not likely to occur.
On occasions when avoidants reach a low point in their life—because of severe loneliness, a life-altering experience, or a major accident—they can change their way of thinking.
Take note [that healing from avoidant attachment will] require, first and foremost, increasing your self-awareness. But knowing about the thought patterns that deny you the ability to truly get close to someone is only the first step. The next and harder step requires you to start to identify instances in which you employ these attitudes and behaviors, and then to embark on the voyage of change.
Avoidant attachment strategies manifest in two primary ways to get you to disengage from emotional intimacy and closeness:
Negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, dread, anger, etc.) that can feel overwhelming and can cause you to walk away from intimate moments.
Thought patterns that psychologically justify distancing yourself from someone you’re becoming attached to.
Let’s examine what these look like in the beginning stages of a relationship.
When first starting to date someone, one barrier to intimacy for people is known (in Gen-Z parlance) as “the ick”. When people say they got “the ick” on a date, it means their partner did or said something so unsavory that it turned them off completely. Some icks are universally considered bad:
Being rude to waiters.
Acting stingy.
Poor communication.
But for people with avoidant attachment, insignificant imperfections can be amplified in their mind to justify not getting emotionally close to someone:
“They eat pizza with a fork and knife. I could never be with someone like that!”
Healthy response: People have emotional needs and this is normal for relationships.
“Their [insert physical feature] isn’t small [or big] enough.”
Healthy response: People are allowed to have physical preferences, but it’s good to remember that a perfect body doesn’t exist.
These perceived ‘imperfections’ can trigger negative emotions or deactivating thoughts, which make it more likely that an emotional attachment is never formed in the first place.
If the relationship somehow continues, the person with avoidant attachment will likely develop new thoughts that justify maintaining emotional distance from their partner.
When I used to have avoidant attachment, my mind would constantly invent reasons why a relationship would never work. When I would begin feeling emotionally close and vulnerable with a partner, my anxiety would spike and, without being consciously aware of what was happening, I would employ deactivating strategies to escape. My childhood strategy—isolating and numbing myself to avoid neglect and rejection—was covertly directing all my thoughts and emotions to try to protect me.
Once you’ve become aware of your deep loneliness and your maladaptive present-day patterns (which is usually done via therapy, reading books, and self-reflection), you can then change your behavior by learning and applying the following skills.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — Feelings are not problems that need to be solved. Feelings just want to be felt. So if we compulsively avoid negative feelings, like anxiety, we unintentionally make them stronger. But when we relax and sit in uncomfortable feelings, they get felt, processed, and then usually go away.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) — If we voluntarily expose ourselves to experiences that give us anxiety, and we prevent a response by refusing to perform avoidant behaviors, we train ourselves to tolerate the disturbing feeling. We learn that while the feeling of anxiety is unpleasant, it's not going to kill us.
Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) — Just like feelings, thoughts also like to be acknowledged and not suppressed. MCT suggests that we observe deactivating thoughts, and then label them non-judgmentally until they go away.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — We can identify an avoidant thought, weigh the evidence for whether it’s actually true, and replace it with a more realistic version.
The following is how I healed my attachment style.
During intimate moments, I became acutely aware of the anxiety in my chest, and then said the emotionally vulnerable thing anyway (ACT). After repeatedly choosing to endure the discomfort of intimacy, the intensity of my negative feelings decreased until they went away entirely (ERP).
For me, telling a woman that I loved her for the first time was immensely stressful (my brain screamed, “What if she rejects me?!”), but eventually saying that I love someone began to feel normal.
As for my deactivating thoughts, I began labeling them (MCT) or cognitively restructuring them (CBT). Over time, they also decreased in frequency.
How long does it take to heal from avoidant attachment?
The available research provides a wide timeline. Some people take years to heal, others only need a few months. It depends on how self-aware you are, the overall state of your emotional and mental health, and the amount of effort you dedicate to work on it.
When I began deliberately working on my avoidance, my anxiety around expressing intimacy went away fairly quickly, so I assumed victory!
"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished." - Daniel Gilbert
The avoidant thoughts, however, lingered for quite a while. But I continued using MCT and CBT to label and restructure them until they went away, too. Eventually, rather than just being able to occasionally show up in intimate moments, my emotional availability and expression became consistent.
The total time it took me to make significant progress—split between educating myself, making a list of my emotional and thought patterns, and practicing expressing intimacy with new romantic partners—was about 2-3 months. And progress steadily improved thereafter with continued effort to understand my patterns and replacing them with healthy behaviors.
What a healthy relationship looks like
It’s important to note that the lack of avoidant patterns does not automatically foster a healthy relationship. To become a securely attached partner, the authors from the book Attached recommend you do the following with your partner:
Be available: Respond sensitively to their distress, allow them to be dependent on you when they feel the need, check in with them from time to time, and provide comfort when things go wrong.
Don’t interfere: Provide behind-the-scenes support for their endeavors. Help in a way that leaves them with the initiative and the feeling of power.
Encourage: Provide encouragement and be accepting of their learning and personal growth goals.
In addition to those, the authors also recommend you develop a skill called effective communication:
Don’t be afraid to express your needs, thoughts, and feelings to your partner! What often happens when we’re dating is that we censor ourselves for different reasons: we don’t want to sound too eager or needy or we believe it’s too soon to raise a certain topic. However, expressing your needs and true feelings can be a useful litmus test of the other person’s capacity to meet your needs.
If you have avoidant attachment, being vulnerable and expressing yourself can trigger intense negative emotions and deactivating thoughts. But if you want to heal, that’s exactly what you have to do. You have to tolerate the discomfort in order to transition from your norm of emotional loneliness, to the much healthier place of emotional intimacy.
Two last concepts important for healing from avoidant attachment are: betrayal and trust.
If you are currently in a relationship and have acted avoidantly towards your partner, or looking to rekindle a previous relationship that ended due to your avoidant behavior, take note of this description from the book What Makes Love Last:
Betrayal is the secret that lies at the heart of every failing relationship—it is there even if the couple is unaware of it. Pervasive coldness, selfishness, [and] unfairness are evidence of disloyalty and can lead to consequences as equally devastating as adultery.
Rather than turning towards your partner and establishing emotional intimacy, people with avoidant attachment unintentionally betray their partners by not emotionally committing to them.
This is unacceptable.
Amends need to be made, apologies issued, and long-term behavior change demonstrated in order to establish the next concept, trust:
Trust removes an enormous source of stress because it allows you to act with incomplete information. You don’t subject your mind and body to constant worry, so the complexity of your decision making plummets.
Trust is not some vague quality that grows between two people. It is the specific state that exists when you are both willing to change your own behavior to benefit your partner. The more trust that exists in a relationship, the more you look out for each other. You have your beloved’s back, and vice versa.
On the topic of emotional avoidance, the authors lament:
Over the years I have seen too many people turn away from their partner and toss out a good relationship. I have come to believe that the greatest obstacle to love may be a sense of entitlement that leads people to exit a marriage because they “deserve” the “perfect” one. It’s got to be out there, somewhere. Right? To be blunt: it is not.
True love is woven out of honoring and understanding each other's unique gifts, vulnerabilities, and eccentricities. Your journey is not going to be like any other couple’s, and that’s how it should be.
[Love that endures comes from when] we love [certain qualities in] the other person, and can tolerate the faults they cannot change.
I’ll close with one last excerpt from the book Attached:
The most important take-home message from this book is that relationships should not be left to chance. Relationships are one of the most rewarding human experiences, above and beyond other gifts that life has to offer.
I agree. Love and relationships are a beautiful thing. To fall in love is a risk. A risk that can feel overwhelming to the emotionally lonely person with avoidant attachment. But that’s what courage is for. So go on, take a chance on love.
Relationships are hard, but having an avoidant attachment makes relationships a hell of a lot harder.
Within attachment theory (which helps explain interpersonal bonding), it’s known that ~25% of the population uses avoidant attachment strategies to escape intimacy. Why? Because emotional intimacy and being vulnerable with a romantic partner causes them significant discomfort.
But why does it cause them discomfort? Prior experiences (usually stemming from childhood) instilled in them that their emotional needs would not be met by their primary caregivers. And when someone’s needs are repeatedly not met, they subconsciously suppress those needs rather than face the daily pain of rejection.
That learned strategy—to shut down when attempting to seek emotional intimacy—can persist long into adulthood.
Emotional loneliness is at the core of avoidant attachment
In the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, the author explains that:
The author further describes how emotional loneliness can develop in children:
For some people, emotional loneliness is their default state, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to transcend your pain and arrive at a place of secure emotional intimacy, which the author defines as:
So, if you are someone with deep emotional loneliness, how do you find and foster true emotional intimacy?
The remainder of this essay seeks to answer that question by examining the science of attachment theory, and by reviewing a variety of helpful therapeutic techniques (supplemented with examples from my own journey of healing from avoidant attachment).
For me, my deep inner loneliness likely developed from my parents’ neglect of my emotional needs.
My father traveled half the time for work, and when he was home, I had to deal with his occasional anger issues. Even when he was in a good mood, he preferred spending his free time in front of the TV watching the NFL and college basketball—attempts to connect with my father were frequently interrupted by him shouting, “Oh c’mon ref, that’s a bullshit call!” Through repeated experiences, I internalized that my emotional needs would not be met, so I kept to myself, locked myself in my room, and numbed my loneliness by watching YouTube all day.
As a stay-at-home mom, my mother was wonderful and caring. But during my adolescence she returned to work and had less time for me. And in the free time she did have, looking back in retrospect, I don’t think she had ever developed the interpersonal skills to be able to relate to me on an emotional level. Instead, our conversations were mostly about our daily surface-level experiences, rather than helping me navigate life’s emotional challenges. Again, through repeated experiences, I internalized that my emotional needs would not be met, so I isolated myself further and my inner loneliness grew.
As an aside: no parents are perfect. Mine provided for me physically and financially, and I am grateful for that. In many ways, my parents did a way better job raising me compared to their parents, so I don’t want to blame them for anything. When we become adults, it’s up to us to recognize that we now have the power to educate ourselves, become aware of our patterns, redefine our relationships with people (ie: parents, partners, and friends), ask for what we want to feel emotionally fulfilled, and learn to draw boundaries around behaviors that make us uncomfortable.
As a child you have no power, no idea how the world works, or what’s considered normal/healthy. If you happen to grow up in an emotionally insecure home, you have no choice but to adapt.
By numbing myself, I was able to avoid feeling my deep loneliness, but that strategy had unintended consequences later in life…
Deactivating strategies
Once into adulthood and starting to date, my original childhood strategy to avoid emotional neglect and rejection—by isolating and numbing myself—started manifesting through avoidant attachment behaviors, described in the book Attached:
The emotional and cognitive escape routes that people with avoidant attachment use are known as deactivating strategies:
Here are some classic deactivating strategies from the book:
Unfortunately, I’ve used nearly all of the above strategies in my past relationships. It caused my partners to doubt my commitment to them, and to question their self-worth.
Today looking back, I feel ashamed for how I acted, and deeply regret the pain I unintentionally inflicted. Back then, I wasn’t aware of attachment theory, and I was just doing my best to connect with people (while subconsciously avoiding confronting the abyss of emotional loneliness at my core).
Healing from avoidant attachment
First of all, what causes a person with avoidant attachment to become aware of their patterns and to change their behavior? The authors explain:
Yep, what caused me to recognize my avoidant patterns was a difficult breakup.
Avoidant attachment strategies manifest in two primary ways to get you to disengage from emotional intimacy and closeness:
Let’s examine what these look like in the beginning stages of a relationship.
When first starting to date someone, one barrier to intimacy for people is known (in Gen-Z parlance) as “the ick”. When people say they got “the ick” on a date, it means their partner did or said something so unsavory that it turned them off completely. Some icks are universally considered bad:
But for people with avoidant attachment, insignificant imperfections can be amplified in their mind to justify not getting emotionally close to someone:
These perceived ‘imperfections’ can trigger negative emotions or deactivating thoughts, which make it more likely that an emotional attachment is never formed in the first place.
If the relationship somehow continues, the person with avoidant attachment will likely develop new thoughts that justify maintaining emotional distance from their partner.
When I used to have avoidant attachment, my mind would constantly invent reasons why a relationship would never work. When I would begin feeling emotionally close and vulnerable with a partner, my anxiety would spike and, without being consciously aware of what was happening, I would employ deactivating strategies to escape. My childhood strategy—isolating and numbing myself to avoid neglect and rejection—was covertly directing all my thoughts and emotions to try to protect me.
Once you’ve become aware of your deep loneliness and your maladaptive present-day patterns (which is usually done via therapy, reading books, and self-reflection), you can then change your behavior by learning and applying the following skills.
The following is how I healed my attachment style.
During intimate moments, I became acutely aware of the anxiety in my chest, and then said the emotionally vulnerable thing anyway (ACT). After repeatedly choosing to endure the discomfort of intimacy, the intensity of my negative feelings decreased until they went away entirely (ERP).
For me, telling a woman that I loved her for the first time was immensely stressful (my brain screamed, “What if she rejects me?!”), but eventually saying that I love someone began to feel normal.
As for my deactivating thoughts, I began labeling them (MCT) or cognitively restructuring them (CBT). Over time, they also decreased in frequency.
How long does it take to heal from avoidant attachment?
The available research provides a wide timeline. Some people take years to heal, others only need a few months. It depends on how self-aware you are, the overall state of your emotional and mental health, and the amount of effort you dedicate to work on it.
By the time I learned about avoidant attachment, fortunately, across the previous three years, I had already spent thousands of hours developing strong metacognitive skills and emotional regulation, had established deep/intimate relationships with friends, and had already greatly improved my relationship with my parents (who are considered our original attachment figures).
When I began deliberately working on my avoidance, my anxiety around expressing intimacy went away fairly quickly, so I assumed victory!
The avoidant thoughts, however, lingered for quite a while. But I continued using MCT and CBT to label and restructure them until they went away, too. Eventually, rather than just being able to occasionally show up in intimate moments, my emotional availability and expression became consistent.
The total time it took me to make significant progress—split between educating myself, making a list of my emotional and thought patterns, and practicing expressing intimacy with new romantic partners—was about 2-3 months. And progress steadily improved thereafter with continued effort to understand my patterns and replacing them with healthy behaviors.
What a healthy relationship looks like
It’s important to note that the lack of avoidant patterns does not automatically foster a healthy relationship. To become a securely attached partner, the authors from the book Attached recommend you do the following with your partner:
In addition to those, the authors also recommend you develop a skill called effective communication:
If you have avoidant attachment, being vulnerable and expressing yourself can trigger intense negative emotions and deactivating thoughts. But if you want to heal, that’s exactly what you have to do. You have to tolerate the discomfort in order to transition from your norm of emotional loneliness, to the much healthier place of emotional intimacy.
Two last concepts important for healing from avoidant attachment are: betrayal and trust.
If you are currently in a relationship and have acted avoidantly towards your partner, or looking to rekindle a previous relationship that ended due to your avoidant behavior, take note of this description from the book What Makes Love Last:
Rather than turning towards your partner and establishing emotional intimacy, people with avoidant attachment unintentionally betray their partners by not emotionally committing to them.
This is unacceptable.
Amends need to be made, apologies issued, and long-term behavior change demonstrated in order to establish the next concept, trust:
On the topic of emotional avoidance, the authors lament:
I’ll close with one last excerpt from the book Attached:
I agree. Love and relationships are a beautiful thing. To fall in love is a risk. A risk that can feel overwhelming to the emotionally lonely person with avoidant attachment. But that’s what courage is for. So go on, take a chance on love.