What is Insecure Avoidant Attachment?
Take a moment to think back on yourself as a child. Think about your relationships with your parents or caregivers. What were they like? Did you feel safe and secure around them? Was your heart met with delight? Were your desires honored with curiosity and healthy discipline? Did they attune to you when you were upset or crying? Did they comfort you and bring you back to a calm or regulated place? Insecure-avoidant attachment defined To ask the question, “What is insecure-avoidant attachment?” is to engage these core areas and narratives around desire, delight, safety, attunement, and curiosity. More specifically, it is to engage these core places where the need was not fully met by a parent or caregiver. To have an avoidant attachment is to ultimately avoid the need or desire for dependence on anyone. It is what it sounds like: avoiding attachment altogether. However, the avoidance doesn’t simply end there. People with an avoidant attachment style have learned over time to make themselves distant from their own emotions, wants, and desires. As we will see in this article, this behavior is not random. Meaning, the process of avoiding attachment has been shaped, molded, and formed through repeated interactions. It is a narrative embedded in a person’s beliefs about themselves and about how they navigate wanting intimacy in their relationships. And this is the narrative: “I am alone and on my own. I cannot depend on anyone to meet my needs.” It is an embodied narrative of deep loneliness, despair, and a longing to be seen and known. It is an internal state that is marked by abandonment and suppressed desire which can be traced back to childhood. How it comes about As we develop from infancy to childhood and into adulthood, we start in a vulnerable place. [...]
