Questions to Assess for Fearful Avoidant Attachment

1. Do you perceive intimate relationships as dangerous?

I wouldn’t necessarily term it as ‘dangerous’ per se, but definitely scary, nerve-racking, anxiety-inducing, and overwhelming. It feels so vulnerable and exposed and intense and open to hurt and pain.

2. Do you sometimes become frozen or immobile in relationship with others — times when you feel you cannot move in any direction whatsoever?

Yes, I become paralysed when it gets too overwhelming for me. I’m unsure of what to do or say, how to do or say them, and my voice may not even work. My mind’s just racing through the inner turmoil and my heart’s pounding from all the emotions and anxiety.

3. Do you often struggle with mixed messages from other people (for example, “Come here, go away”)?

I think I tend to give off mixed messages more so than the other way round, but yes, I tend to perceive mixed messages from others as well, even if it might not be so.

4. Do you sometimes experience an inexplicable fear when you reach a certain level of intimacy with others?

Yes, because now they could really hurt me deeply, because now I could — am going to — lose them eventually, because now they’ll see just how damaged and unlikable I am and not like me anymore, because they’re too good for me and I know I should let them go so they don’t get bogged down by me. And I’ve never come close to this, but the next scary part is when it gets physical. I don’t know how badly I’d react to that, but it’s really scary and anxiety-inducing for me.

5. When others approach you unexpectedly, do you have an exaggerated startle response?

I guess so, more so internally, I think. I’m not sure how much of it is external. Because what do they want from me and because of social anxiety.

6. Have people complained that you are too controlling?

They used to but not in recent years. I was and can be controlling, but I’m too exhausted for it right now, which I guess is good in a way as I’m not as obnoxious.

7. Do you often expect that the worst will happen in relationships?

The worst? I don’t think so, but I am fearful of it, that it’ll become that way. I always expect that the relationships won’t last for long though, because they never have and I’ll never let it last. It’s a pretty bleak self-fulfilling loop.

8. Do you feel close relationships may trigger dysregulation that is difficult to manage?

I’m not sure what dysregulation is, but from just briefly skimming through this and this, I don’t think so. I just get overwhelmingly sad and/or anxious, and it’s very much internal — I don’t really react externally or have emotional outbursts. But I guess it does trigger a lot of internal turmoil that’s difficult to manage, if that counts.

9. Do you struggle to feel safe with your partner, even when a big part of you knows they are trustworthy?

Yes, I’d think so. I have trust issues.

10. Do you often disconnect, dissociate, or become confused in relationships?

I don’t identify with dissociation at all and I find it hard to comprehend what exactly it is. I don’t think I become confused in a bad way, I just think deeply about and question certain things that perplex or interest me. I think I do disconnect though, swinging from hot to cold and giving that “come here, go away” mixed message.

11. When it comes to past relationships, do you have a difficult time remembering them or discussing the feelings you experienced?

No, not at all. Discussing my feelings may be difficult but in the sense of whether I trust the person I’m discussing it with and how much time I have to process my thoughts and feelings and put them to words.

12. Do you sometimes have substantial memory blocks — periods of time or significant events that you can’t remember?

No.

13. Do you experience unpredictable sudden shifts of state (for example, switching from joy to happiness to fear and anger)?

Internally, yes, and more so to sadness and anxiety and fear. There’s a lot of internal turmoil. Like the few people I met whom I clicked with instantly, I was aware of how happy and excited and comforted I felt about such a rare find, to meet someone else who’s on the same wavelength, how special they are, how special it was. But then I’d be overcome by an intense sadness and emptiness as well, picturing the end before it even begins, knowing that the end of the relationship is just round the corner, knowing that it wouldn’t last. Then the social anxiety slips in and takes over, and I worry about and agonise over every thing I say and do out of fear that they won’t like me the more they get to know me. I’d be fearful of them hurting me too, be it physically, emotionally, or verbally. And all of this inner turmoil is in the span of one conversation.

14. When triggered, do you become stressed or confused by complicated instructions and arrangements?

Yes, but I don’t think it’s any more than the average person’s reaction to such when they’re in distress.

15. Do you sometimes feel set up to fail and unable to solve problems?

Yes, all the time in a way, because I set myself up for imminent failure. I’m never good enough.

16. Have you experienced deep longings to connect with others and then inexplicably want to get away from them?

Deep longings to connect with others — always, all the time, 24/7. An inexplicable want to get away from them — sometimes, but it’s complex. Maybe it’s when I feel like they’re pushing for something that I cannot give or am not comfortable with giving at that point in time. Maybe it’s when I feel too overwhelmed or too sad that I don’t want to burden them or annoy them by repeating my same sad loops over and over again to them. But a lot of the time, I feel like it’s them who want to get away, even if it’s just for a short break (which logically and rationally, I know is fine and normal, but emotionally, I take it as a rejection and I’m extremely hypersensitive to rejection — which is my issue, not theirs), because I’m too intense and sad all the time. And then I feel that if I really care for and about them, I should stay away from them and seize things between us for their benefit, because they’d be better off without me.

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Excerpts from The Power of Attachment:

They can also “escape when there is no escape” by dissociating and disconnecting from pain altogether.

Internal Conflict and Confusion

The disorganised adaptation comes with a lot of confusion — cognitive, emotional, and somatic. This makes sense when you consider that the fundamental issue with disorganised attachment is that two major biological drives are in constant conflict. We’re instinctually driven to connect with others, but we’re also programmed to avoid danger and to survive. When there’s excess fear in our original patterning, we can feel that relationships are fundamentally dangerous, and yet we long to connect. Often this shows up in ways that are difficult for us to understand. One minute we feel available for intimacy and connection, and then in the next we feel triggered or terrified that something is going to go horribly wrong. The intimacy itself may trigger the feelings of threat from our original attachment scenario. When this happens, we can get stuck in approach-avoid dynamics that are quite confusing to us and to our partners. As I mentioned earlier, the attachment system is always operating. As we gradually rely on our partners more and they depend on us, we become each other’s primary attachment figure and feel more trust about not losing the relationship. As our attachment system recognises the other person as more permanent, this can connect us to our memories of our other primary attachment figures. Sometimes the beginning of the relationship works well, but with disorganised attachment there can be a trigger for danger when intimacy hits a certain depth. Suddenly these intimacy triggers pop up, and we’re frightened of our previously comfy partners. Most of the time, this involves body memories that don’t have any particular story attached to them. All of a sudden we feel terrified of someone we also love deeply, and this can be incredibly confusing to everyone involved.

Overwhelm and the Freeze Response

The freeze response is a hallmark of disorganised attachment, but it is also common in people of all attachment styles who have suffered significant trauma. When the attachment system is at odds with our survival instinct, it’s a recipe for experiencing a freeze response. You may have heard of the freeze response referred to in different ways: Peter Levine uses the term “tonic immobility,” and Stephen Porges calls it a “dorsal-vagal freeze.” In this highly charged condition, part of us wants to move forward, and part of us wants to move away. Imagine trying to drive your car like that! You put one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake and what happens? The engine revs and revs, but the car is working against itself, nobody goes anywhere, and you could burn out the engine over time. From the outside, it just looks like somebody sitting in a car that isn’t moving. They might even look relaxed. But when you examine the situation closely, you see that there’s an incredible tension created from contrasting impulses. The sympathetic nervous system wants to act strongly and defensively, and the parasympathetic nervous system is trying to put the brakes on. A freeze response might look stationary and passive, but it’s a state of incredible arousal. It’s an extreme state of being “stuck” that’s typically fraught with fear, dissociation, and immobility — even paralysis. In this condition, it isn’t uncommon for people to lose their ability to hear or speak (the cranial nerve that activates the voice box and/or the inner ear can actually shut off). At the very least, people who live with this adaptation can have difficulty communicating their distress and staying present when it happens.

Walls that keep the hurt in

Play with perceptions and perspectives change
          Stand in a different position and things look different
                    Peer at it from a different angle and you have a different perspective

Water runs through hands 
Slips through fingers 
Finds new curves
Carves its own path
     Try and grasp it — it just slips away
So you contain it
Keep it hostage in a bucket 
That way it can never flow away 
It stays stagnant
It remains contained

In cars, I look out the window
At the world passing by
At the people
Wondering about their lives
Their stories
Unable to reach them
     But am I really looking at them and at the world
     When all I see is a reflection
     A reflection of my thoughts, my perceptions, my views 
     A metaphor for my life
     Observing behind a glass panel
        Unreachable
        Untouchable

A strength and a vice
A strength is in and of itself a weakness 
A weakness a strength
I am here but I am not
I am on this earth but in a world of my own, encased in glass
I walk through crowded streets but I roam alone
I toe the line, always in limbo
Neither here nor there 
Just in between
Safe from hurt but hurting from safety
The walls I’ve built to keep the hurt out
Are now walls that keep the hurt in
That contain the hurt
Like a bucket of water
Stagnant
Never flowing
Contained
Like a disease
It shouldn’t be released
It should be kept contained
Kept away
     So I roam the streets
     Walking round the loops in my head 
     Looking at my reflection on the glass panel 
     With the world behind, in the distant background

What once was

“So my read on you huh?  You don’t like letting people get close to you, which is why you don’t want compliments.  However, you aren’t completely against it as you give compliments out, just not accepting them yourself.  Close at all?”

“Awesome.”

“Really?”

“First one, not quite, at least I don’t think.  But that shot right through my core, mind you.”

“I wasn’t trying to offend you.”

“It wasn’t offensive, just accurate.  The first one, both are true, but not linked.”

“You don’t want to let people close to you because you are afraid of them leaving or hurting you?”

“Many, many reasons.”

“Such as?”

“That may be one.”

“Bad relationships in the past?”

“Relationships in the broad sense, yes.”

“So you don’t want anyone to get close to you because you were hurt by friends or partners in the past.  And you’re afraid of opening up to people because you feel like they’ll just leave again.”

“Not just that, but for many reasons.”

“Is that the main reason?”

“Good question.  I’d say no.”

“Afraid of getting close to me?”

“It’s not a simple answer.”

“Explain it.”

“It’s difficult.  I could get you to define what exactly you mean, for one.”

“As in hard to explain, or difficult for you to talk about?  I mean in general, try to explain?  It’s okay if you fumble your words or whatever.”

“It’s both hard to explain and difficult to talk about.”

“I won’t force you.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s just fear alone, and not just you but everyone in general.”

“Well I’m here for you, if you’ll let me be.”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“It can be if you let it, y’know?”

“Don’t think it works that way.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s more complicated than that, it’s much more complex.”

“Explain it to me.”

“If it’s that simple of an answer, there’d be less suffering in the world and people would use it as a quick fix to their problems.”

“Sorry if I’m being annoying.”

“You’re not.”

“Ok.  […] What’s up?”

“Thinking; I always am.”

“What about?”

“About what you said, and why, and how, and leaps to other connections.”

“Oh?”

“It’s how my mind works.”

“I like it about you.”

“That, I will take. Thanks.”

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Conversations like this make me cry so much. The few people who read me so well. I don’t know how they’d go in person; they’d probably be cut short. I’d be overwhelmed and would just run off, or my voice wouldn’t work and I’d just be frozen, unsure of what to do or say but with my mind and heart racing and fighting back tears.

My Thirteenth Winter: A Memoir

As I became more anxious and fatigued with these night panics, I also became extremely self-critical. I always felt like I was ugly, fat, or out of style. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying to pick out clothes to wear. None of them ever seemed right and I would end up in tears crying and complaining to my mom. I was on a roller coaster emotionally. One look from a friend that I interpreted as critical, or an action I thought was a personal snub, would send me into a downward spiral of self-loathing and disgust. If I received a compliment or a good comment from a teacher, I would find myself on a short-lived high, but somehow I never felt like I owned the compliments I received.

My journal from this time is full of entries where I berate myself for not being smarter, or cooler, or better at having friends. Everything is my fault, my failing. Why else would I feel so alone even when I am spending time with friends? Why else would I be so afraid of things everyone else seems to take in stride?

Interestingly, I can remember that I continued to feel strangely superior as well. There are entries in my journal in which I remind myself that I am not like everyone else, that I am special, different, wise, unique — and that is why I always feel alone. I continue to feel like a heroine in my own story. And I tell myself that I was meant to be misunderstood, to be different, because I was meant for greater things. However, these words and ideas I used to comfort myself grew harder to hold on to.

The column of words is complete and I take it uncertainly up to Mrs. Williams’ desk.  She reads it quietly out loud.  “This is a poem, Sam.”

I smile despite myself, pleased, proud, but still disbelieving.  “Really?  You mean everything I have been doing so far can be turned into a poem just by changing the way it looks on the page?”

“Not everything.  But sections or paragraphs where you use imagery to describe scenes or thoughts and feelings — that can be poetry.”

I let this new revelation wash over me, sink in.  Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme?  It doesn’t have to be about love or anything like it?  Poetry is a concise way to express feelings or describe the world around you?  I am surprised by the idea.  I reluctantly believe her — what I write is poetry already.

I am old, the sun has set,

it is time for me to fade into the background of life;

Death has given me his cloak to wear.

Do not worry, for his cloak is warm, and the chill north

wind can no longer harm me.

I can feel my soul as it is pulled from me and

taken to a place where it can be at

peace forever.

It is time. My breath becomes the falling

breeze, and my body the solid

stem; my arms become the branches

reaching to a higher grace, and my

hair unfolds into leaves of light.

I have entered the forest of

eternity and stand as a tree should.

A sigh passes from my lips,

and all is still.

I am old,

and the sun

has set.

In the article, Dr. Baum explains how students can be both incredibly gifted and incredibly disabled.  At one point in the article, she describes this type of student and explains how they typically go unidentified as learning disabled:

The second group of youngsters in which this combination of learning behaviours may be found are those who are not noticed at all.  These students are struggling to stay at grade level.  Their superior intellectual ability is working overtime to help compensate for weaknesses caused by an undiagnosed learning disability.  In essence, their gift masks the disability and the disability masks the gift.  These students are often difficult to find because they do not flag the need for attention by exceptional behaviour.  Their hidden talents and abilities may emerge in specific content areas or may be stimulated by a classroom teacher who uses a creative approach to learning.  The disability is frequently discovered in college or adulthood, when the student happens to read about dyslexia or hears peers describe their learning difficulties.

I decided to slip off my shoes and wade out into the water. It struck me, as the quiet liquid inched up over my knees, around my thighs, and up to my hips, that for the first time, I am really living my life. I am not just watching people from the shore, but I am swimming with them.

She found her place. I’m still waiting to find mine.

Fearful Avoidance (Disorganised Attachment)

Excerpts:

• If you are someone who deeply yearns for love but you tend to feel desperately fearful of it — of being abandoned or rejected eventually — or that you’re not somehow deserving of it, and so as a result, you tend to sabotage your relationships, or your feelings tend to go from hot to cold very quickly before a budding relationship can even get up off the ground, then it’s likely that you are someone that is struggling with Disorganised Attachment (aka Fearful Avoidance or Anxious Ambivalent).
• 3 strengths of Fearful Avoidants:
  1. Capable of great empathy and emotional depths
     • But at the same time, you can be easily overwhelmed by that, and so, this makes it difficult to sort through and really comfortably organise your feelings and your inner states.  As a result, you might be a little bit sick of people saying things like “oh you’re too intense”, and it leaves you feeling lonely and isolated.  You don’t want to burden other people with your problems but you’re also probably in a desperate need of connection and you feel that very keenly.  So sometimes that leaves you feeling a bit confused about what your needs actually are and if you are just somehow slipping into someone else’s needs.  The boundaries are very confused there.  At the same time, because there’s such a sense of boundary confusion, the safest thing to do is to slip back into the most basic, simplest form of thinking about things and that is black-and-white thinking (e.g. yes or no, in or out, right or wrong).
     • There’s a hungry desire to belong and to feel seen but never quite feeling as if that is satisfied, never quite feeling as if you fit in anywhere.  And it’s important to realise that this hard line and critical voice that you carry, you probably often turn in on yourself.
     • (On romantic relationships:) After that initial infatuation phase, the shine starts to wear off and the unavoidable boring routines of life tend to step in and they demand your partner’s attention be divided eventually, and your attention be divided eventually.  This might send you reeling and you start to question the foundations of the entire relationship.  So as the intimacy deepens, which is getting into the routines of life and not needing the highs and the lows so much — your partner might be able to ride that and not think that something’s wrong, they just think that that’s the natural progression of things, whereas you start to think something’s wrong — so as intimacy deepens, the reality reveals itself to maybe be less romantic or dazzling than you originally experienced, and so then you start to distrust and doubt your partner’s affections.  …Or you start to get bored and then you wonder “what was the fuss all about?” and suddenly your feelings have switched from hot to cold.  And then your partner becomes increasingly confused and frustrated by your “moodiness” …and they accuse you of being “too intense” or “too much”. …And then you break up, only to feel that sense of achey yearning again.  Maybe it’s only days later and suddenly you regret your decision.  Typically, when you find yourself caught in that spin cycle, there are 5 ways that a Fearful Avoidant copes with those struggles.  Because they have higher levels of both anxiety and avoidance — which is: they have a high degree of ambivalence and conflict — they can swing back and forth between both activating and deactivating strategies.
       1. Black-and-white thinking
       2. Omnipotent notions (The idea that you somehow have control over someone else’s thoughts, feelings, or progression.  They tend to assume more authority than they actually have.  They fancy themselves a bit like mind readers — “I know I’m really good at manipulating people because I’m so empathetic”.  Sometimes they have an inflated sense of this, to the point where they kind of think they’re wizards and so they make predictions about a partner’s thoughts, feelings, or verbalisations and imagine what their reactions might be before they ever step into conversation with them because they don’t actually want that conversation to be an open loop, they want it to be a closed loop.  There are considerable strengths in order to determine what the outcome’s going to be before they even step into it.  But if, let’s say, things go wrong, then they take too much responsibility for that because they think they should have been able to control it, or they don’t accept any culpability at all.)
       3. Narrative discrepancies (Sometimes Fearful Avoidants, because they come from a more abusive, neglectful, traumatic background, the messages that were communicated in their upbringing were very confusing, so as a result, they may have some selective memory, there may be some idealisation, minimalisation, and dismissiveness going on that create discrepancies in their stories.)
       4. Overgeneralisation (That’s where you come to an erroneous conclusion where one trait, thought, action, or perception gets overgeneralised to prove your negative beliefs or expectations about yourself or the possibilities for love.  This overlaps with black-and-white thinking.)
       5. Vilification (When a Fearful Avoidant feels stressed particularly around a romantic conflict, they have a tendency to exhibit a little bit of a paranoid or defensive position and so as a result, they vilify their partners.  They sometimes, whether this is conscious or unconscious, presume that, at the basis of every partnership, there’s a power struggle and an unspoken jockeying for emotional control in the relationship.  So in times of distress, they assume that their partner has a malicious intent towards them, that their partner’s trying to assert power or control over them.  And so they just suit up, they armour up for battle.  And sometimes they even create these conflictual scenarios if they have experienced power struggles in game-playing as the only way to actually be connected to the people that they are attached to.  So they may need to create those scenarios in order to feel connected.)
     • Can be passionately expressive.  You may have a depth of passion and emotion that is hard to contain and so, creativity is something that may appeal to you, even if you wouldn’t describe yourself as “artistic”.  You might really get poetry, you really feel the music, you can get lost in a painting or a book or a movie, and you can understand layers of meaning that may fly over everybody else’s head.  This gives you, also, a taste for the sweetness of life, the spiciness of life.  Because they can tap into that in a way that a lot of other people miss out on.
     • When we have a strength, unless we are able to moderate it with flexible personal boundaries, oftentimes if we experience a strength within ourselves, we overexert it to the point where it steps into the shadow aspect of that.  For example, the shadow aspect of being very emotionally and passionately expressive, is that sometimes passionate feelings can be so big and so overwhelming that the experience itself loses its form altogether.  When that happens, it becomes hard to distinguish one emotion from another, or stimulation from response.  And it can lead to a sense of numbing out or feeling nothing at all.  So this expressiveness and expansiveness may be something that you demonstrate on a regular basis or it may just be an aspect of yourself that worries you, that you might feel too vulnerable at times, or you might slip into getting locked down with your emotions and you numb out.  You go from being highly emotionally stimulating and expressive to, all of a sudden, you’re just numbed out and you don’t have any feelings at all.  And that’s that hot to cold because you’re either highly concentrated or you’re way too diffused.  And that can create an internal anxiety in a sense of pressure as well. 
  2. Can be highly charismatic
     • Fearful Avoidants are extremely perceptive, most likely because they have spent a large portion of their lives to varying degrees of hypervigilance.  They’re a bit of a paradox in that they can accurately sense the emotions of other people even if it’s difficult to discern their own feelings and internal states.  As a result, they can read a room like nobody’s business.  And so, for some Fearful Avoidants, they apply that talent towards crafting this highly charismatic persona that they have.
     • The shadow side to that is it can be twofold (a double-edged sword?).  First is if a Fearful Avoidant wears that charismatic mask for too long, then they’re unable to trust the affections and the attention of the people that they have attracted.  So they can’t really know — “Do they love me for the mask or do they love me for me?  And you know, I’m not really sure what the difference is anyway.”  Secondly, this superpower can also frighten the Fearful Avoidant because then they might start to compulsively wield it over others, manipulating them to get what they want.  On the one hand, they could feel terribly guilty and shameful about that afterwards, but on the other hand, perhaps they don’t feel so guilty or shameful about it.  In fact, they might discover that they don’t feel much of anything.  That numbness can be even scarier because that creates a sense of derealisation, like nothing in life is truly real and so nothing in life really matters.  If a person gets stuck there, it can lead to forms of sociopathy or psychopathy.  To protect themselves from slipping down that hole, they rigidly hang on to and seek out what are basic but highly stimulating emotions like excitement, arousal, fear, desperation, anger, resentment, even violence and aggression.  And they repeatedly create scenarios that yield those feelings in relationships and/or in their partners.  
  3. A potential to experience deep compassion for another person and for all living beings, especially plants and animals
     • You can have these tremendously difficult experiences in your life and it can give you a level of compassion, a potential for deep, deep, deep compassion, and sometimes we can see this manifest through the ways in which we relate to nature as opposed to other people.
     • The shadow side of this form of compassion is that unfortunately, sometimes for a Fearful Avoidant, if they become overly identified with animals or pets and sometimes children — more helpless creatures — and they project onto that helpless creature, be it an animal or a child, all the weak and helpless parts of themselves that they now detest and reject because it was detested and rejected by their early attachment figures, that’s when we start to see the transmission of intergenerational abuse.  Remember, Fearful Avoidant attachment is the result of unresolved trauma and there may be a case — there may be many circumstances in which that is because there have been unresolved issues of abuse in the family system.