The first step I use to transform avoidant attachment
For everyone involved! ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED april 24th 2023
Let me start this piece by saying that before we start to actually talk attachment, that we will not want to be in committed attachment with absolutely everyone we meet or even a lot of people in our life (depending on if you have a large circle or not.)
Sometimes someone presents as avoidant because they just don’t want to be in close attachment with a certain person, or because they simply don’t have capacity for many devoted attachments. It’s a tough truth to be with for everyone, lots of feelings can come up, but I promise for the long-term, it is better to be aware or even name it - as kindly as possible - than to try to make an attachment relationship work when not all involved are actually *interested* in it.
Attachment demands devotion and presence and interest. If you are not down with that, or if it feels annoying, be honest with yourself about it. You’re not a bad person for it, just a whole one.
And it is completely normal that you have space for certain people and not for others. Compatibility is precious and mysterious all at once for a myriad of reasons.
Okay, so let’s say, everyone involved is interested in devotion, presence and interest with each other.
Great - now we can actually see what everyone’s attachment styles actually are.
Now let me also say before I go deeper into this, that almost no one on planet earth, me very much included in that, is 100 % secure attached. In fact, maybe no one is? I surely have never met a 100 % secure attached person. So I am not writing this piece from a space of being more enlightened nor from a place of we must get to 100 % secure attachment at all times for optimal health. It’s more so written from a place of, hey maybe this could feel a little bit easier or better for everyone? Maybe our trauma doesn’t have to run the show constantly? Maybe we can feel a bit more free?
Most of us are injured in relationship at some point or another and that creates protective responses in our nervous system in our relating with others. So this is not like a superiority thing - no one is better if they have a certain kind of attachment or not. It’s basically just about what we’ve been through and also what we’ve had access to, or interest in, in terms of healing or learning. Relating in a secure way feels better for our nervous systems sure, but if we didn’t receive this in development, it’s elusive until we learn about it and then practice it many times to get the hang of it. We are all just trying to make it through the week yknow? Alright, compassionate disclaimer said, let’s get into it…
If you or someone is still presenting avoidance despite really wanting to have these elements present in the relationship, the best thing to start off with is the untrue belief that relationship means you have to forgo your identity, your needs, or your mattering.
It seems common that the biggest belief issue that turns into a somatic one for avoidants is that they cannot exist at the same time as someone else. That they cannot take care of someone else at the same time as taking care of themselves.
But the tricky thing here is that if someone is avoidant attached, this belief does not feel untrue at all. It actually feels like the truest thing ever discovered and depending how deep the trauma goes, you might be met with all sorts of different resistance to the challenging of this belief.
Avoidant folks have historically kept themselves safe believing this exact belief.
So, what do we do with this, if we are avoidant ourselves or if someone we love so deeply is avoidant?
Well, first. We start with compassion. We start by validating why it makes sense to feel this way and we can even work with the belief directly and go, I really understand you feel and think this way and how true it feels because this is what happened to you as a child or in this specific relationship that traumatized you.
Then, we go slow. We start to help the avoidant person regulate within the relationship. We start to point out that the other person is not as vile as the avoidant attachment makes us think gently.
They may not be trying to:
⁃ make us abandon ourselves
⁃ Have us not matter anymore and take up all the space
⁃ Hurt us
⁃ Control us
⁃ Take away our agency
⁃ Make us give up everything we want
Of course, sometimes, yes, people do this to us. So, it’s important to not be like oh the avoidant attachment is so wrong all the time. More so approach it with, could there be another story? Are we sure this is the final story?
In short: curiosity around narrative.
Could there be a crack somewhere in the narrative that shows us otherwise?
Often, I find when avoidant folks (if they are in healthy relationship) are given the option to just slowly without pressure see if the avoidant narrative is as true as they initially thought, they themselves (without need for convincing) start to realize oh my god, my partner just…
⁃ wants to spend time with me because I’m so valuable to them
⁃ Cares about both of our well-being deeply
⁃ Wants to repair with me when they hurt me if I give them the chance to
⁃ Wants to involve me in their inner landscape out of need for connection
⁃ Really digs that I have opinions and thoughts and wants to listen to them
⁃ Appreciates my need for alone time and my own interests because (most likely) they are independent too and have their own hobbies as well
It is really powerful to disrupt our usual narratives that our attachment styles speak of. This can be applied to any attachment style, not just avoidant.
Sometimes, yes, these narratives serve us, so we aren’t trying to make the narratives bad, we like the warnings to avoid danger, but in the context of post traumatic growth, the healing becomes and… are we sure this is the only narrative possible? Is the narrative as accurate as we think it is? Is there room (even just a tiny amount of room) for another consideration?
And sometimes when we ask those questions, we do figure out, oh wow this is as accurate as I thought, and that’s still okay because it means we are seeing reality and can move from that place. And then other times, when we ask these questions, we liberate ourselves from an old way of seeing life that doesn’t serve us in our reality at the moment any more.
Now, it’s important to name that if you’re anxiously attached, the abandonment, rejection, and even humiliation that you can potentially feel from an avoidant person may make you react and actually reiterate why the avoidant deems intimacy unsafe on both varying levels of unconscious and conscious awareness.
So, what is your first right step if you are in a relationship with an avoidant and you’re anxious?
In your case, you may want to test out stopping trying to convince the avoidant first. I know that sounds counterintuitive and potentially scary but hear me out for potential benefits.
If you, yourself, can go to the part of you that is triggered by the abandonment, rejection, etc. of the avoidant (because no one is saying that’s not happening - this is typically what avoidants do to stay safe) … and stay with yourself and offer yourself what you need, you’re going to get further ahead as YOUR own first step.
This can look like:
-Any kind of discharging exercises; a walk to cool down, jumping on a rebounder, stimming
-Containment
-Heating your adrenals
-Journaling (the journal pen to paper type or speaking out loud to a voice memo if you’re more that style)
-Dancing in a non-instructed way to music that makes you feel good or powerful
-Having a snack
-Drinking some water
When you are resourced, you can then navigate what you need from your partner in the relationship (doesn’t have to be a romantic one either) and make direct asks and see if they are available for it clearly, instead of projecting both your historical hurt which gets amplified by your current hurt - which usually just makes the avoidant feel stronger in their narrative.
What’s interesting is that we assume the anxious attached person is the most panicked one in the attachment, but it’s often the opposite. Avoidant attached people tend to get very panicked when attachment demands are made of them. In what I have observed, significantly more actually. So, if you’re anxious, it serves to have both compassion for yourself for feeling hurt and attending to that in a healthy self-resourcing sort of way, AND also having compassion for how panicked your person is. It is scary for them, and they may not be as open about their feelings as you and you might falsely assume that they are stoic because they don’t show it the same way or in ways you recognize. The resistance an avoidant has to an anxious is in fact, one of the biggest ways we can tell they (they = avoidants) feel threatened and panicked.
The anxious attached person is terrified their needs will go ignored and unmet and completely tossed to the side too, but it shows up different.
I find one of the most potent ways to soothe some anxiety for everyone involved is to remind ourselves, and each other, that the relationship doesn’t have to mean what it meant in childhood, or even in a past adult relationship that was traumatizing for you. Everyone is just trying to stay safe, so if we can slow time down, and go small bit by small bit, we are going to be okay and we are going to figure this out. Solutions will be found!
I find the orientation alone that solutions could potentially be found relaxes everyone and we start to be more open minded about seeing each other more clearly.
This is a secure way of relating - we are on the same team! And when we forget, we can remind each other and ourselves of this fact.
Secure attached people can meet the intensity of the anxious and be like hey girl, thank you for making a demand. I hear you and why it’s important to you. Here’s where I’m at, here’s what I’m available for, etc. does that work for you? What would, if not? I’m open to compromises or something I haven’t thought of yet. A secure person may not always love the intensity of an anxious person, or may find it at times harder to navigate, but they are surely not panicked the same way an avoidant is. They know no one can make them sacrifice themselves entirely and sharing and involving another person in their sense of self doesn’t feel super scary because it does not ask them to cease existing.
A secure attached person meets the panic of an avoidance like hey girl, I can tell you’re really freaked out by my demand. Just want you to know there is space for both of us in this and you matter just as much as I matter in this. Can we arrive somewhere that would feel good for both of us? Fighting with you is not fun for me either and I want to know what we both need so that we can find a solution where no one gets left behind.
I always like to remind an anxious partner in an anxious- avoidant relationship to imagine themselves in the shoes of someone who feels scared shitless to share themselves or to let their guard down because they think they will not get any needs met as soon as they start to meet someone else’s needs. It’s obviously not true and the anxious person can see that and go ohhhh, okay. That’s their POV because of the engulfment they endured - and that is scary. I would also probably feel like I would not want to meet anyone’s needs if I thought it meant mine didn’t matter anymore. The empathy for how painful the engulfment or objectifying their partner went through was usually goes a long way and takes pressure off both people to relate even just a tad more securely.
And I like to remind the avoidant in that pairing that their anxious partner has had countless amounts of times where they needed something and no one cared enough or no one had any availability, and their partner in the dynamic often had to take on unreasonable amount of maturity or responsibility. So for them, it’s hard to sit with the possibility that this may happen again and it feels super fast and frantic in their bodies too trying to prevent that from happening as the pain of abandonment is so real. I find that when the avoidant feels into how lonely, sad and strong their person had to be, empathy grows and understanding increases and again, there is a bit more secured ways of relating that come online.
Even if at first, we go, “what would a secure person do here?” and simply try it out, it brings us closer to what we want, and further away from recreation of past dynamics that hurt us and the people we love.
Now these are just first steps, they are not the whole process. I am also not guaranteeing these work for everyone in every context, nor do I believe it would be wise to assume that or play that out without proper discernment and skill, but I do know that for me, these first steps go a long way whenever I am running into an attachment issue in my own relationships that feel overwhelming.
What is important to note for me is that these first steps usually, at least in my own life, help to de-escalate the conflict to a space of being able to move through an issue without massive historical triggers in the way, and distorted projections that aren’t useful, if both people are generally able to co-regulate (this doesn’t work with someone who has untreated or unacknowledged narcissism for example), and if both people are willing.
I have found in my own life that it also only works when both the avoidant and the anxious person do their part equally – the jobs are a bit different but the follow through is just as important and equally felt if either person drops the ball.
It’s hard to have a peaceful attachment healing when it’s only one person who does the work and the effort. Or only one person’s history and validation of that history matters.
But if two people are willing, devoted, interested and present and see the value of being on the same team for health, hot damn! That’s the magic sauce.
SPECIAL INTERESTS OF THE WEEK(ISH)
1. In my last letter, I shared about Devany’s substack which I have been loving. I got her “Your Wise Animal Body” deck recently and I HIGHLY recommend it for everyone who loves nervous system health work. I had been wanting a deck like this for AGES. So glad Devany has made it.
2. Chloe Hayden, the actor who plays Quinni on Netflix’s Heartbreak High, wrote a great book called DIFFERENT NOT LESS that I just read. Also, for those who haven’t seen heartbreak high, some of it is intense due to other plotlines in the show, but it has FOR CERTAIN (I mean according to a lot of us), the best autistic representation known to current and historical media yet in it. There was not one moment where I felt like, “meh, that’s not me!” or “ugh, there are so annoying with the way they are coding this” – like for example in the wilds how they did autistic coding for Nora was stereotypical and annoying or even in Atypical how they code Sam (though I personally love Atypical and I look over the issues, I know not everyone does). Heartbreak high was like WHAT? OMG? YES! EXACTLY! Kjhsjhsdgjsdg – excitement. That was due to both a collab between writers of the show and Chloe’s advocacy and activism for the community. Thanks Amanda for recommending heartbreak high to moi! Anyway, I really highly recommend the book different not less – definitely going on my fav of the year book list!
Source: netflix! Can’t tell you how many times me and my special interest friend (shannon) have sat in a bath tub like this when I was over stimmed.
I recently got a tarot reading from Sterling Moon – who is neurodivergent friendly and compatible – I was like give me guidance that is as practical as possible and I can surely say I recommend her greatly.
I have been extremely into Jeanna Kadlec’s astrology for writers. Jeanna did a class that combined two of my favourite special interests – astrology AND art history called Saturn in Pisces where we got to look at all the art made in Saturn in Pisces time over different eras, and know about artists who have Saturn in Pisces – like Mary Oliver, which makes so much sense as to why I relate to Mary O so much and have her poems all over my walls, because she was always talking to the animals and the ocean and realizing god is the sunrise – that’s so Pisces in Saturn – I can confirm. Some highlights from class for me were this painting called “Judith Beheading Holofernes” that was made in the 16th century – a woman is simply cutting off the head of her rapist.
We also saw the weird and outlandish art that Frida Khalo made during Pisces Saturn times, and it was so awkward and truthful and no one liked it that much. #Relatable.
I also really enjoyed knowing the Bronte sisters got a lot of PEP in Saturn in Pisces time, exposing themes of domestic violence in their art.
Definitely feel so well taken care of by Jeanna’s work and it’s so cool that it’s astro geared especially for writers – I don’t know of anyone else doing this niche so happy to have found it!
As always, if you liked this newsletter, please heart it, send it to a friend who you think would dig it, or reply to me telling me why you liked it - it makes me feel like I am not writing to a void and we are in reciprocal relationship and I love that and makes me want to write more! xxx
I end this letter with a poem I return to by Mary Oliver whenever I forget this is a spiritual existence on a physical plane…
The Sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?