Hurting others who hurt you
Locking them behind bars
Fighting fire with fire
Only spreads the flame
Breeds more hatred
It has to end somewhere.
A parent hurts a child
The child grows up to be a father
The father hurts his daughter
A continuous cycle
Down the family tree
It has to end with me.
They hurt us
We hurt them
I hurt you
You hurt me
I hurt myself
The hurt ends with me.
I identify immensely with the INTJ type descriptions, the Enneagram 5, and now the Fearful-Avoidant attachment style. It all explains so much; they make up who I am.
I see my words in the descriptions, notions that I’ve tried to express — the push-pull, the hot and cold. This blog almost reads like an anthology of the fearful-avoidant attachment style. The people that I dislike: I’m better off without them. The few people that I do like: they’re better off without me. I am broken, I am damaged, I am deteriorating, I am decaying, I am unworthy. No matter how much I wish and yearn for closeness, I will never allow myself to get there, even if I come close to it. I must let them go, I don’t want to bring them down with me. They deserve better, I am undeserving. It all hurts so much.
ISFP 9 father used to beat me and call me “useless”. ISFJ 2w1 mother’s always anxious and would call me “a horrid child”. Being called “useless” stung the most, probably because I’m a type 5, and a 5’s basic fear is being useless and helpless. Being hit intensified the helplessness and the outlook that my body’s a cage, tightening the bars, making me run inwards as a way to escape.
Being spanked is so deeply violating to Rationals (NT children); they see this abuse of their body as an unforgivable assault on their autonomy, and their indignation is extreme and permanent.
— David Kiersey, Please Understand Me II
How maladapted I am, how distorted my thinking is. But this is how I perceive things, these are the perceptions I live with. I question why I’m still here. Is it just mere cowardice? I admire the ones who took the leap, I admire their strength. Until then, it’s all loops and cycles and sinking into despair.
1. Unstable, fluctuating/confused view of self and view of others
People with losses or other trauma, such as sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence may often develop this type of attachment and tend to agree with the following statements:
They tend to feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness, and the mixed feelings are combined with sometimes unconscious, negative views about themselves and their attachments. They commonly view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their attachments, and they don’t trust the intentions of their attachments. Similar to the dismissive-avoidant attachment style, people with a fearful-avoidant attachment style seek less intimacy from attachments and frequently suppress and deny their feelings. Because of this, they are much less comfortable expressing affection.
2. Imagine feeling lonely inside and craving love and affection. Then you meet someone wonderful. You are full of joy and excitement. Now you can feel whole and good like you know you should!
But several months later, when your romantic partner throws his or her arms around you and tells you that they love you, you experience a flood of anxiety and a sense of impending doom. You try to act happy, because you know that is how a “normal” person would feel. But you have a hard time hiding your anxiety. You try to fix it by explaining, but this effort only makes you sound off-balance and needy. Across the coming weeks, you feel increasingly squirrelly, start to pick up on signs that your partner is having second thoughts, and get that awful feeling in your gut . . . you know, the one you spend your whole life trying to avoid. As the relationship begins to implode, you just want to scream, “What the heck just happened?!”
What happened is that you ran straight into your own defensive wall, that part of your personality which is trying to protect you and keep you safe. Of course, this defence is not a rational process; it is housed deep in the emotional centers of your brain and is automatically triggered by signals from the environment. It does not care about your rational thought processes or your adult need for love and affection. It would rather you be sad and lonely than injured.
As adults, they will simultaneously desire closeness and intimacy and approach potential attachment figures (close friends or romantic partners), but then become extremely uncomfortable when they get too close to those partners and withdraw; hence the message given to others is “come here and go away.”
3. Fearful-avoidant attachment (also called disorganised) is an insecure form of relationship attachment which affects around 7% of the population. It is a combination of dismissive-avoidant and preoccupied-anxious attachment styles. Those with fearful-avoidant attachment believe that they do not deserve or are unworthy of love. However, equally, they do not trust needing another person for fear that they will be rejected. Fearful-avoidant attachment is the result of severe childhood trauma, emotional neglect or abuse.
During childhood, the key emotion experienced regularly was fear. The parents (or caregivers) may have been physically violent, abusive, suffering from PTSD, personality disorders, or been severely depressed. When looking for comfort the child would be met by a frightening or frightened parent, who would scare or confuse them and be unable to soothe them. In other words, the person they sought comfort from was also the person who caused them pain.
“Constantly inundated by an avalanche of intense emotions, the disorganised person learns to dissociate from them, essentially detaching from their emotions. As the disorganised person detaches from their emotions, they become less able to recognize, manage, or control these emotions. The more they detach from the emotional self, the less they are able to learn from experiences, the more vulnerable they become to repeating past mistakes and miscalculations. The more they repeat past mistakes and miscalculations, the more this cycle is intensified and the less grasp on self the disorganised person is able to maintain.”
Characteristics
Typically the following types of behaviour will be present:
The above characteristics result in a similar end result to that of dismissive-avoidant attachment of avoiding close relationships altogether. However, unlike dismissive-avoidants, there is a low-self esteem that deep down something is wrong or unacceptable about them.
“Due to the self-consciousness that a fearful-avoidant person experiences, they become dependent in relationships and may struggle with separation anxiety. They have difficulty building trust and often avoid conflict. They avoid displaying emotions and being vulnerable with their partners unless they are certain they will get a positive response. After entering into a relationship, those who are fearfully attached tend to be insecure and have more invested in the relationship than their partner. They tend to internalize problems in the relationship as being their fault and assume a passive role within the relationship. Due to all of the worries and fears experienced getting to know someone and that persist through their relationship, fearfully attached individuals often try to physically and emotionally avoid intimate connections with others.”
4. The fearful-avoidant (sometimes called anxious-avoidant) shares an underlying distrust of caregiving others with the dismissive-avoidant, but has not developed the armour of high self-esteem to allow them to do without attachment; they realise they need and want intimacy, but when they are in a relationship that starts to get close, their fear and mistrust surface and they distance. In psychology, this is called an approach-avoidance conflict: at a distance the sufferer wants to get closer, but when he does, the fear kicks in and he wants to withdraw. This leads to a pattern of circling or cycling, and the fearful-avoidant can often be found in a series of short relationships ended by their finding fault with a partner who seems more threatening as they get closer to understanding them.
The early caregiving of a fearful-avoidant type often has some features of both neglect and abuse (which may be psychological—a demeaning or absent caregiver, rejection and teasing from early playmates.) A fearful-avoidant type both desires close relationships and finds it difficult to be truly open to intimacy with others out of fear of rejection and loss, since that is what they have received from their caregivers. Instead of the dismissive’s defence mechanism of doing it alone and covering up feelings of need for others by developing high self-esteem, the fearful-avoidant subconsciously believes there is something unacceptable about them that makes anyone who knows them deeply more likely to reject or betray them, so they will find reasons to relieve this fear by distancing anyone who gets too close. As with the dismissive, the fearful-avoidant will have difficulty understanding the emotional lives of others, and empathy, while present, is not very strong—thus there will be poor communication of feelings with his partner.
5. The following thoughts (or similar ones) were associated with disorganised attachment:
In both romantic and non-romantic close relationships, you can have similar thoughts and feelings, as well as these:
Thoughts about Self:
Thoughts about Others:
6. The person with the fearful avoidant attachment style is a highly internally tumultuous being. They live in a constant state of ambivalence. However, the dichotomy that exists in the way they attach to other human beings is a continual source of anxiety and chaos. The person with a fearful avoidant attachment style is in a constant state of push and pull.
If they feel rejected, they pull in and cling harder out of fear of losing the person they are attached to. But, once they get in too close, they pull back out of fear of being hurt. The driving force behind the fearful avoidant attachment style is fear.
They are afraid to be in a relationship and be hurt, yet they are afraid to lose the relationship, because they might get hurt. That leaves the other partner constantly wondering what comes next and with a steady stream of mixed signals.
People with a fearful avoidant attachment style often keep their emotions on hold. Not wanting to show all their emotional cards, they fight hard to keep their reactions and feelings in check to no avail. When they finally give in and can’t hold their emotions in, they appear to explode to those around them. They tend to be unpredictable and come across as moody.
Their assumption is you must cling hard and seek out the person you want to be attached to, to get their emotional needs met. But, once they get in too close, they pull back out of fear of getting hurt. At the root of their behaviour lies the fear of rejection and vulnerability. So, they lose on both sides of their attempt to get their emotional cup filled.
The fearful avoidant attachment style individual struggles to find stability in a relationship. So, they tend to experience extreme lows and highs. Afraid of being abandoned by the people that they want most to be attached to, they struggle once they find what it was that they thought they wanted. It is the very intimacy they think they crave and forces them to retreat and pull back.
7. Individuals in this quadrant share the Dismissive type’s misgivings about others, but have not developed the armour of coolness and self-sufficiency that allows Dismissive types to live without attachment and bonding. Consequently, Fearful-avoidant types recognise in themselves a need for intimacy and close relations with others, but as soon as they start to get close to others, they also find that they have mixed feelings about the whole ordeal and start fantasising about breaking it off because they “want their space again.” In short, they are neither at ease in solitude nor when close to others.
Because of their simultaneous need for and mistrust of intimacy, Fearful-avoidant types have had to spend their lives learning how to skillfully handle other people; continually manoeuvering so as to keep others close and available, yet at the same time out of control and powerless to harm the Fearful-avoidant type.
Individuals of this type are often high-achieving and competent adults, but on the inside, they tend to suffer from periodic bouts of low self-esteem and be plagued by a sense of hollowness at their core. Fearful-avoidant individuals are frequently very good at finding legitimate fault with others and sniffing out their weaknesses as a way of protecting themselves against being disappointed by others, but on the downside, this hypervigilance also tends to lead to skepticism and overly paranoid tendencies.
INTJargon 