"Fearful Avoidant Attachment: Traits, Triggers & Relationship Patterns"

In this episode, Shazmeen Bank delves into the complexities of fearful avoidant attachment, exploring its origins, traits, and the emotional struggles faced by individuals with this attachment style. The discussion highlights the impact of childhood experiences on adult relationships, the oscillation between anxious and avoidant behaviors, and the importance of understanding and healing from these patterns. Shazmeen emphasizes the need for compassion towards oneself and others in navigating relationships, particularly for those who identify as fearful avoidant. The episode concludes with insights on fostering vulnerability and emotional intimacy in relationships, encouraging listeners to embrace their journey towards healing and connection.

Takeaways:

• Fearful avoidant attachment is characterized by a push-pull dynamic in relationships.
• Individuals with fearful avoidant attachment often oscillate between love and fear.
• Childhood experiences significantly shape attachment styles in adulthood.
• The Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) offers insights into attachment beyond infancy.
• Fearful avoidants may struggle with self-soothing and emotional regulation.
• Vulnerability is a major trigger for fearful avoidants in relationships.
• Fearful avoidants often have a deep desire for connection but fear abandonment.
• Understanding attachment styles can foster empathy in relationships.
• Healing from fearful avoidant attachment requires self-awareness and compassion.
• Relationships with fearful avoidants can thrive with patience and understanding. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Fearful Avoidant Attachment
• 6:01 The Formation of Fearful Avoidant Attachment
• 12:12 The DMM Model and Its Insights
• 18:17 Navigating Relationships with Fearful Avoidants
• 31:14 Healing and Moving Forward
• 36:28 Understanding Fearful Avoidance and Its Triggers
• 42:05 Emotional Intimacy and Its Challenges
• 46:49 Addictive Behaviors and Emotional Regulation
• 56:53 Healing and Growth for Fearful Avoidants
• 1:04:44 Building Awareness and Emotional Connection

Transcript

Shazmeen Bank (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Love Better. And this is your host Shazmeen Bank and you know that you can bank on me. And today's topic, I'm really excited because we're talking about fearful avoidant attachment. And we're going to discuss how fearful avoidant attachment was formed. What are the traits? What are the triggers? And what does someone experience when they're in a relationship with someone that's fearfully avoidant? And what does

the fearfully avoidant person experience in a relationship themselves. And if you are somebody listening to this episode and you're fearfully avoidant, I want you to be able to listen to this episode with a lot of compassion and care because there is a science to how your attachment was formed. And a lot of people I know that are anxiously attached and they're listening as well, they're different.

types of anxiously attached people listening. They are some anxiously attached people listening thinking, I really want to learn about my fearful avoidant because I care about them so much. And if I can understand how they operate and where this attachment form of them stemmed from, then I have more empathy and compassion towards why they're behaving the way they do. And then obviously the most common set of the next rule of people are the people that are really

exhausted and have been hurt by being in relationships with someone that's fearfully avoidant. They've really experienced a lot of the push and pull dynamic and can feel like I lost myself, I'm exhausted, they cut me out, it was so cold. The difference in somebody with a fearful avoidant and somebody with a dismissive avoidant is dismissive avoidance, they seem to not have this very deep

empathy and they don't seem to move towards emotion and a lot of compassion when things are going wrong in a relationship. They can really ice you out because they're able to really ice out their emotions and really become numb to how they feel or the loss of you because the story they're formed is a lot more safer for them to move into. Somebody with a fearful

avoidant attachment release the person that tends to come back after breakup a lot more because they oscillate a lot between anxiously attached and being avoidantly attached. They oscillate a lot between fear and love and hence the name fearful attachment style or also known as disorganized attachment style.

It's pretty interesting when we look at the word disorganized, I would say it's disorganized about whether they want safety or they don't, whether they can trust or they cannot trust, whether they should go all in in a relationship or not. Their emotions and their logic is constantly never fully integrated. They're either on one side of the spectrum, which is living entirely logical and performing from logic.

or fearful avoidance really then move into the emotion and captivate the side of warmth and love and safety on the other side. Believe it or not, fearful avoidance are honestly really exhausted. They're exhausted of not understanding themselves better and really feeling very demonized by the amount of comments. When we look at

TikToks or anything on social media that's discussing avoidant attachment. Fearful avoidance can come into the comment section and literally it's like putting your toe into the cold water and then pulling right back out. It's because they already live with so much self-hatred or self-blame and self-shame and guilted themselves into something is deeply wrong with them and why they're so unlovable.

And yet they crave love and find love and push it away. So they're already tormenting themselves so deeply about this attachment style and not knowing a lot of the times that they have the sort of an attachment style. And then when they come and see people demonizing them, because people are in a lot of pain and have been hurt so much in a relationship with the push pull dynamic.

and the ability to have really lost themselves to try and hold on to this fearful avoidant lover, they now are exhausted and will find also a safe space to be able to vent a lot of that pain that has not been processed or healed or worked with someone in therapy or coaching. So I can understand when a lot of the messages come in, it stems from pain. You can see the intention and yet,

It pushes fearful avoidance away from ever wanting to do the work. Because if in public, if in people's eyes, they are so evil and so bad, then they move into a corner and punish themselves even more. So this episode's really important that fearful avoidance can start to give themselves so much empathy and compassion with being able to understand why they have the traits they do.

What was it like growing up in their childhood? What are some of their triggers? And then how does this move on into the relationships they have? And then most importantly, how can they start to heal? Because believe it or not, fearful avoidance want to have deep encompassing relationships, especially one with themselves, which is the most important. And anxious attachment and fearful avoidance,

actually have a lot more in common than you would believe. First of all, they're both insecure attachment styles. And while anxious attachment might come in with a lot of love, a lot of warmth and loyalty, a lot of breath to be able to put the other person first and abandon self, the fearful avoidant is really learning to leave self, move away from self to be able to trust to come into the relationship. So both

really have some traits that you'll see are actually mirroring each other, but they just respond to them in very, very different ways. Now, when we look at how fearful avoidance came to be or were birthed, fearful avoidance really were studied by Baldwin and Mary Ainsworth because they looked at the strange situation in which children

were brought in with a caregiver, their mother, and put in a room to play with the stranger. And then you would have the caregiver or the mother walk out of that room. And they studied the response of all the attachment styles, but I'm talking about fearful avoidant today. And the fearful avoidant child would play around the room with the stranger sitting in a corner watching them. So they were very aware of the stranger and then very aware that

the mother caregiver was there. And then after two to three minutes, the mother would leave the room. And what was interesting was there was no sort of screaming tantrums or the child showing distress when the mother left. The child noticed the mother leave and continued to play around, interacted with the stranger, played with their toys. And then when the mother came back after about five minutes,

the child continued, whether the mother was there or the mother was not there. Now, the theory of attachment style with the Mary Ainsworth study was between the infancy of zero to two. What I loved about researching this topic really deeply was I came across the DMM model, which was the dynamic maturational model.

And this model was studied further by a lady called Patricia Krittiden. And she worked in close proximity to Mary Ainsworth, but I loved her work was very fascinating, a little bit complicated. So I will keep the complexity out and give you a general explanation on what the DMM model was. So she took to studying attachment style past infancy.

So really being able to understand how children responded to their caregivers as they continued to grow. what was very interesting about the fearful avoidant was noticing how you had to survive a parent. Now,

Fearful avoidance very much could have grown up with a parent that was narcissistic, that was alcoholic, that was verbally or physically abusive, that suffered with bipolar disorder. They could have had a parent that was just absentee. They could have had a parent, one of them, was highly attuned to what they wanted and then gave them love, took it away. And then they could have had another parent that was

a lot more abusive, a lot more angry all of the time. And so what happened with the fearful avoidant is they developed a strategy. And this strategy was for one parent, I had to be something. And for possibly another parent, I had to be something else. So for example, you could have had a kid that grew up and they grew up learning that my emotions don't matter. I have to shut down.

I have to focus on myself. I've learned that if I express my needs, I express any sort of anger or neediness as a child, I met with a lot of aggression and I'm told literally either abusively, verbally, or through silent treatment and abandonment that no one is paying attention to you. And so this child learns to really rely on self.

self-soothe, whether it's the right way to self-soothe or not, but really be independent on self. Then you have another child that in the same sort of scenario will display their emotion, will show that they're upset, will show that they're angry, will have big emotions to be able to get attention and to be seen. This child could be met when they're having those massive big screaming emotions with a lot of attention and a lot of love.

And then other times they're not met with the same attention and the same love. So this child also then grows up feeling and understanding love's very inconsistent. It shows up and can soothe me and then doesn't show up and I don't know how to self soothe myself. So I'm left in inconsistent fear. So the child is just always oscillating between always trying to get reassurance and validation from the outside parent.

because they do receive it. Unlike child A, who doesn't receive it, who shut down straight away, who's really told there's no room for you and your big emotions, there's a whole world, adult world going on out here, sort yourself and fix yourself.

So the DMM model really moved away from being able to understand just labels, labels of attachment, which is your secure anxious and your disorganized or dismissive, to really understanding behavior and survival of the child with

the caregivers or the parents very often with the closest person, is the mother, because the mother is the person that will sustain that child as well through breastfeeding or eating. so the child will always naturally grow closer relationship with the mother, unless also you have the child that's been put up for adoption, for example, and this child never really got a chance to latch on. Very often now,

putting that child more into dismissive state, the child learned different survival strategies to be able to cope with having to be very independent or look after themselves or sometimes also take on a parenting role of looking after a sibling if they've been put up for adoption. So somebody that was also very fearfully avoidant literally grows up with a sense of, I cannot really trust my environment.

I cannot trust my environment to meet my needs because as a child, I really don't know what those needs are, but I know that I'm displaying emotions and trying to put and make sense of what I'm experiencing and going through. You're not met with a parent that comes and sits down and helps put all your big emotions into words and then create space to be able to make this fearfully avoidant child

really feel safe in what they're feeling and being taught that those feelings are very normal. This fearful avoidant child, the word being fearful, really grows up with a lot of fear. They end up growing up with a fear of love. They do not trust it. And they could have grown up with a lot of trauma where they were beaten and they were hurt. And this child desperately wants love. They want

be loved, they have a lot of love inside of them. And the interesting about what's the DMM model is it really shows fearful avoidant in a very different kind of a light because you have this fearful avoidant child that learns a strategy of survival. Let's say, for example, the strategy is in order to get mom's love, you learn

how to be big in emotion, you learn how to kick and scream, you learn how to probably please mom, to soothe mom when she's going through a lot, you are hyper vigilant to what mother is going on with. And you learn that if you show a great sense of emotion and apathy towards your mother, you get love, you get seen. Let's say in the same scenario, your father's hardcore militant

doesn't show affection, doesn't show love, doesn't hug you, doesn't kiss you, doesn't express the I love you's a lot. And you're never really rewarded for any sort of behavior. So you learn with father in order to be accepted with him because your hypervigilance as a fearful avoidant notices father's very stoic or very angry or very unpredictable or extremely unsafe.

So you develop a different way to be able to attach with your father, which is to be angry, to be someone that doesn't show emotion, to be someone that's hyper independent, to be someone that fits his model all in order to survive your father and get some sort of love attention or the ability to be seen by father as well. And so...

What you see is the fearful avoidant then develops the avoidant strategy and they develop the anxious strategy. Anxious serves in a certain way to hold on to mom's love. Avoidance is a way to be able to not have to deal with the love they do not receive from the parent whose love they crave the most as well, which is someone that's extremely alcoholic and could also be triggering the anxiety and the avoidance at the same time anxiety of

I love you, I see you, I nurture you, I care for you, I feed you, I'm fully present for you, aware of what you're going through and will sit down and hold space for you, confusing the child. And then if you go through your alcoholic phase or you leave the child with a grandparent and you're out partying and living your life and doing whatever it is you're doing as that kind of a parent, then when you come back into the child's world really angry,

exhausted, tired and frustrated, the child is now learning mom or dad is safe, but then they're also not safe. So there's this deep inconsistency inside of them. This child is now learning to have behaviors to survive their environment. So what this child has done is they've learned that mom and dad are either someone that is safe and reliable and stable or

somebody that is unsafe, someone I need to be fearful of, someone I need to be terrified of. And so I'm learning behaviors to live and survive in both this environment. I'm learning these behaviors literally to survive both parents in one environment. And it is taxing and exhausting on the child, but they have no choice because they have to survive the environment.

So what I really like about the DMM is it teaches you that here is a child that really had to learn how to adapt to their environment. And what I like about the DMM and attachment theory as well is there's a science. It's a science to attachment, which means we have to take a very deep breath, especially all the pained, anxious people out there.

words feeling, we go again, I have to be empathetic and I have to be understanding of my partner. Well, this works for people that really want to be in relationships because you have to also be able to understand. Fearful avoidance very much will attract somebody that's dismissively avoidant or they very much will attract someone that's anxiously attached.

if they constantly oscillate between anxious and avoidant, fear and love, come here, go away, secure partners very much will eventually turn around and say, this is not something we're able to sit down and work on. I've tried. Anxious people will very much go into how to abandon themselves deeper to understand

someone that's fearfully avoidant even more. And so we have to be able to understand these attachment styles attract each other. And very often we end up marrying into these attachment styles. And just because we have started to understand them even better after the book attached from 2020.

We can't turn around and say, my God, I just discovered you are fearfully avoidant. need to divorce you. And you are dismissively avoidant. I need to divorce you. What I find powerful is if all of you end up having an insecure attachment style, including somebody that's more anxiously attached, your first focus obviously is in as someone anxiously attached to really

self-soothe and move into becoming more secure because then you're holding a lot of breath and safety for yourself. And that breath of oxygen gives you a lot of safety to hold for your partner. Now, when we are discovering that we're fearfully avoidant, really understanding the science of this is how I grew up. I grew up trying to survive my parents.

I grew up adapting behaviors so I could be loved and not rejected. And the DMM really looks into how you learn to survive these strategies and form different behaviors to survive as a child, and then looks at how these impact your adult relationships as well.

So the DMM really focuses on how you are either effective or cognitive. You're either noticing emotion, body signals, facial expressions, or you're moving into logic, memories, and how things should have been, or verbal explanations of things.

that really comes from the child being able to process information in dangerous environments and really be able to make sense of what they're able to go through. So it's not really just sitting with how the child bonded with the parent from infancy of zero to two, but it's really now being able to take a deeper study and look at the changes and adaptations that...

we made along the way, even in dealing with our caregivers, our primary caregivers, also our teachers, just the constant adaptation to behavior and that adaptation that primarily was happening in your

toddlerhood and growing up. So being able to see that in order to survive mom or dad, the inconsistent love is a fearful avoidant. Then I also know how to take that into the external world, which is now when I have teachers that could display the same sort of traits as a mother or father. You very much know if you're the student that's the high performer now in order to be seen and get loved.

Or you understand that I need to sit at the back of the class and disappear because I seem to have attracted a parent that a teacher that is representing a parent to me internally that's terrifying me. And you could have the teachers that are also physically abusive. And so this child is really constantly reframing this model, even in that sort of a school environment, because

These are authoritative figures and you don't really have this chance to voice back or answer back. And if you do, you're reprimanded or you're punished. So somehow fearful avoidance are always taught you don't have a voice. Your voice also very much does not matter. And so they go sometimes the other extreme way, which is developing left hemisphere of the brain, which is to become more performative.

become more logical, operate from achievement, being a very high achiever, someone that does extremely well in school, extremely well in sports, extremely well in business. And the other side that flops is obviously the side where it needs a lot more emotion. It needs intuition. It needs you processing how you're feeling, thinking about that.

they don't venture into that world because their formative years were not a place where they were told this is safe and you can feel. What's also interesting with a lot of fearful avoidance is when they look into their childhoods, a lot of the times they'll say, my childhood was fine. It was perfect. Nothing was wrong.

really, yeah, I got smacked and I got hit because I was a bad child, because I was naughty. So very intrinsically, their ability to blame themselves for why they were reprimanded. And they'll very much turn around to say my childhood was fine. It was actually pretty amazing. And it's only when they will start a couple of sessions will they come back and go, my God, Jasmine, I remembered something, but

I didn't know how to process this or put emotion into something that now I recall was not so healthy or not so great. So there was one particular person that allowed me to share their story that says they were always getting beaten up in school by a teacher. And when they went home to share that story, they had a parent that shouted and screamed at them for not being

dressed and showered because they had to rush off to religious school. And they remember thinking now that their hands were so swollen and the teacher had beaten them so badly that when they saw the car that particular day, their parents' car was home earlier. And on that particular day, they were so emotional and in so much pain and in school, they can't cry.

In school, they had to suck back those tears and act like, can take this and I'm strong.

But now what's happening is suddenly they come home and they see the parent and they're thinking, you're home, I'll get love. I don't know what I'll get, but I'm, I'm going to show you vulnerably what happened to me. And the parent shouts at them. And this person said that happened a lot. And it's only when I sat back from the sessions and the meditations and doing some of the deep inner work that I started to realize I actually grew up very lonely.

I had siblings, but I learned to play on my own a lot. I learned to pull away because that was a lot more safer. I learned not to really go into deep relationships with my friends. So in school, I had good friends. had friends I could laugh with. I had friends I could have a joke, be naughty with or bond with. But other than that, when I got home, I went off and I played Barbies or I kicked the ball or I was drawing.

but I wasn't really engaged into really deep bonds with my friends. So you'll find a lot of fearful avoidance as adults don't really have very close buddies or very close intimate female relationships because they are really scared of being seen and they have such a deep shame point. And the shame point was I wasn't loved. I wasn't seen. I wasn't enough. It was

core wounds of I will be abandoned. It was core wounds of I'm constantly going to be rejected. And so these amazing fearful avoidance grow up really feeling if I get close to someone, they will see me and they will see the shameful parts of me that were rejected. And so when they get into relationships, they really do want love. They want

connection, they crave it more than the dismissive avoidant. They think about and fantasize about relationships. And this is why when you do fall in love with a fearful avoidant, you will very much turn around and say they were very open, they were vulnerable, we got so close, they had the ability to be a certain way that made me sometimes be confused and think that they were securely attached or anxiously attached.

I never sort of felt a lot of push and pull. But then as we got more intimate, this person that had the ability to open up to me, talk to me, tell me about their traumas. And this is also because the person that they're in a relationship with really wants to be in a relationship with them. So they have the breadth and the beautiful depth to create space and safety for this other person to talk and open up and

share what they've been through because that's what love is to this other person is sharing is creating warmth and a space because you feel their pain and you want them to have a safe space to finally take it out. And you want to be the person that rescued them from their deep dungeon and put them in a castle. And you want them to be able to see that and recognize that at some point. The thing with fearful avoidance is they do.

But when they move into the castle with you, they never let go of the dungeon. They're always somehow oscillating between being able to be there with you. And then when they're terrified, they run back into the dungeon. And in the dungeon, they know how to conquer that extremely well. That's a world where you don't have emotions. You don't have to your way through things and feel things. In the dungeon, it's all war.

achievement, it's being able to get down and be a warrior, whether you're male or female, and get things done. So these fearful avoidance, when they're in a relationship with someone, this person has the ability to say, my fearful avoidant was not like this when we first got together. They were so warm and encompassing. And they showed so much of themselves to me that now

I feel I want that all the time. And it's almost over time, like you got the cake, but over time, each time they pull away, they take a piece of that cake with them, leaving you with a little bit of those breadcrumbs. So you did experience the deliciousness of them. And then holding onto that really tightly, not wanting to let that go. Every time they pulled away, you lost a piece of them and a piece of them and a piece of them.

But the pieces you still have of them, because of your beautiful openness, because of your wonderful way to see people, what they have left in you to you is still beautiful and we can do something with this. We can rebuild. Don't pull away from me. I got you. Like I will always hold my hand out like this and hope that you bring that cake right back piece by piece. It's okay.

And that's when fearful avoidance also tend to learn, I really have someone amazing. I've got a beautiful partner, but I just can't seem to sometimes grasp why I behave the way I do. And you behave the way you do because you had to take on such a challenging role. So young, so early in your life, and you had to scientifically adapt to survive that environment.

And as you grew up and you go into adult relationships, it's almost like your avoidant attachment, your fearful avoidant attachment was just rumbling at the surface. And then when you get into a relationship with somebody is when all of your deepest fears come out and you are wanting to be loved and seen.

but you don't know what they are loving and seeing. And that disconnect is because you didn't have your primary caregivers love and see you in a way that felt all encompassing and so nurturing. And you didn't have caregivers that stopped in their tracks to make you feel visibly loved, to hold, nurture, kiss.

Just be present with you. Just sit with you. You didn't have to do anything. And something we should recognize about fearful avoidance is they are so hypervigilant. They're hypervigilant to their anxious partners. They're hypervigilant to the dismissive partner because they either will attract the mother or the fathers whose love they crave the most. So.

Watch this, when a fearful avoidant attracts a dismissive avoidant and they attract someone very stoic, someone that can be iced out, someone, I'm not really diving into this world of feelings. I'm, you know, going to play on the surface level back with you. They are attracting either the father or mother who was more colder and whose love was harder to attain and get. When the fearful avoidant

attracts the anxious person. They are attracting a love they craved the most as well. They're attracting a love that comes easy. They're attracting a love that they don't have to perform for, but they are always hyper vigilant to at what point am I going to get rejected? At what point are you going to abandon me? And these are the three things that are so in common.

with the insecure attachment style of someone anxiously attached.

The anxious person is also terrified of being rejected, is terrified of being abandoned and is constantly hypervigilant. Because remember the anxious person was hypervigilant to see when am I getting love, when am I not? When is it consistent? When is it not? I'm trying to make sense of the consistency. I'm trying to make sense of last time I did the same thing and I got love, this time I did the same thing and I didn't get love. Whereas in the fearful avoidance, hypervigilance is

Probably, am I in trouble, when am I not? When will I get hit, when will I not? They live on eggshells, just like the anxious person can eventually live on in a relationship with them. The fearful avoidant lives on eggshells, wondering when could something go wrong? When will things get bad between mom and dad, and it's gonna come out on me?

When will dad get drunk or mom get drunk and things go wrong and it comes out of me? When do the adoptive parents not want me, not love me anymore and my behavior is too much for them and I'm put up for adoption again? They are constantly hyper vigilant to when love will be taken away from them as well. And they store that in their nervous system that love is not safe. Love is not dependable.

External love is not dependable. Internal love, which is my own, is dependable, but I don't play into the world of emotions, even myself. Go ask any fearful avoidant you are dating that has not been in therapy or coaching. What are your needs? They will go, uh, my needs, my needs are, I want us to like stop fighting. Okay.

What are your needs? What do you need from me? I need you to stop fighting with me. Okay. ⁓ yeah, but what are your needs? Yeah. Every time we fight, it scares me because they've never been given a beautiful platform to say, what do you need? What do you need from yourself? Not what do you do to survive yourself and your environment? What do you need?

from yourself to be wholesome, to feel whole as a human being? And what do you need from a partner? Because fearful avoidance very much come into relationships as performers. They come in to make you happy. They come in playing one of those roles again, again, oscillating between do I need to be avoidant and pull away because things are getting loud and...

I'm not comfortable with loud, loud triggers me. Loud triggers my nervous system instantly because it reminds me of home. At home, when things got loud, I got hit. At home, when things got loud, mom was hit. At home, when things got loud, it meant things are bad. It's a dark day and you hide. And so you will have fearful avoidance that say when the anxious person starts to shout,

or gets activated or is coming for me to have these conversations, my nervous system on its own just goes into dorsal. Shut down, numb out, deactivate, done. I cannot handle this because you are replaying something my nervous system lived through in my childhood and I didn't know how to name it, make sense of it.

Put words to that emotion, heal it, digest it, process it. And so my nervous system just knows loud, screaming, all of that is eventually going to mean either I'm going to get rejected, I will get hit, things will go wrong, and the relationship's going to end. Very much why. Fearful avoidance, self-sabotage, very good love, especially after deep levels of intimacy.

You can have a situation where you're in a relationship with someone that's fearful avoidant and they opened up, they were wonderful. You're going through a great phase and they are the kind of person that will text you at two in the morning and profess their love for you. And then they don't talk to you for two days and you're thinking, what happened? It's because they are able to come into themselves, get very vulnerable, want to connect with you because they want to give love.

They want to experience a closeness, but then they get ashamed and they think maybe you're not, it's not that deep as my 20 year old son would say. They will probably turn around and think it's not that deep for you. Maybe the way I'm viewing the relationship, maybe the way in the dating phase, I'm thinking of the relationship. I'm coming in strong. I'm coming in hard. I want to get vulnerable. Maybe you're not taking it that way. Maybe the 2 a.m. message was too much. Maybe.

calling you 20 times in the beginning was too much, maybe wanting to spend all my time with you in the beginning was too much, because you can very much date a fearful avoidant that can want to do breakfast, lunch and dinner with you multiple times. They don't always need to run off to their space. I definitely, sorry, as I stretch, I definitely will look at attachment styles in dating, but you can very much have this avoidant partner that

is showing up wanting to be with you all the time. And then you're thinking, what the hell happened? Why did they back off? What changed? What changed sometimes is you could have had sex. They could have been deep, intimate exchange. They felt extremely vulnerable sharing things with you that they've never ever told anyone. And suddenly you wake up and you feel a cold draw.

But you're thinking everything should be okay because they just shared all this unbelievable stuff with me or we made love and we had unbelievable sex and I don't understand why they're pulling away. They are slowly shutting you down and shutting you out because they are now terrified that what comes next for them is abandonment and rejection.

It's what their nervous system knows. And in the business world, in the professional world, they can take hit after hit after hit to a certain extent as well. Take all the finances away from a fearful avoidant and you will cripple them. Take a relationship away and they will process that slowly because they are high performers. They've had to put themselves on a pedestal to constantly bring something in. And that's why for masculine energy, masculine men,

who are fearfully avoidant, a lot of the times they will be unbelievable providers. They will give you everything. It's almost their duty to give you, to keep you financially safe and provided for. And that in turn allows them to feel that I don't have to emotionally give you a lot because I'm providing in my value system, which is I'm keeping you comfortable. I love you. I give you a driver. I give you the house. I give you the chef. give you...

the nannies, whatever I can provide to make you as comfortable as possible. And if you take that away from them, and now they have to dive into emotion and feeling and process failure on that side and process failure in their relationships, they can't do both. They will go unbelievably depressed. They will be extremely suicidal because they can be failing emotionally in the relationship, but providing and keeping you happy.

So somehow they're not really failing. And this is just some of the examples when you're dating somebody fearfully avoidant, their love for you, they try to show it in different ways as long as it's avoiding emotional intimacy. It's avoiding emotional intimacy because they don't know what that looks like. And when you show them what emotional intimacy looks like,

To them, they're registering, their nervous system is backing off because they're waiting for a fight, they're waiting for this to go wrong. And they are so defensive in their nature because they've been criticized so much in their childhood that when they can look at a loved one bringing a problem to them, wanting to talk to them in the most simplest way, beautiful way, they can X you out.

Because for them, they're thinking, I'm getting criticized. What comes after criticism, rejection, abandonment? Let me go into the safety. Let me run. And that's why a lot of the times they can come at you because that's again, their survival instinct is to protect themselves, to defend themselves. It is so hardwired intrinsically in them. And I talk to so many fearful avoidance and I hear from so many fearful avoidance who turn around and say, I don't know why I do that. Like,

I know my husband, my wife, my girlfriend, or my boyfriend is not having this conversation to hurt me. I know that when I retreat, deactivate and go into my safe zone, I can really have the cognitive ability to sit down and think about what was that conversation? What was the story I was making? The protector in me immediately comes out. The protector saying this person's wrong.

It's their ability to literally shut off the prefrontal cortex that is

reasoning, making sense of what's going on and they can go into Their amygdala, which is fight, shut down, here's a threat, pull out our swords, put on your vests, we are going to war. And the other partner is literally sitting across them saying, I just want to talk to you about what happened the other day really hurt my feelings. And if we could address it.

And you have the other part of the brain that's saying war, war, let's defend ourselves. And you have the prefrontal cortex going, no, no, no, guys, please just take a second. Just relax. That's not what we're doing. The nervous system, could you relax? Could you take a deep breath for me? I don't know why you're shutting all my organs down to go into war with this one person that loves me the most and is just trying to have a conversation with me for our love and relationship to grow.

That's literally what they're going through in their minds. They're fighting two parts of their own brain to be able to just have a conversation with you. And so they immediately think everything is criticism because that's how they grew up. They immediately think they need to learn how to deflect and defend themselves because that's what I did to survive. To survive, I deflected the fact that I needed love.

I deflected the fact that I was soft. I deflected the fact that I needed vulnerability and I had to defend myself that I don't need those things. I'm okay. I'm good. I'm on my own off into my own little shell as a turtle. And that's why they deactivate and they pull away a lot of the times a fearful avoidant after rupture can end up pulling off into that little shell for a long period of time because first they just need to not think about what happens.

They need their nervous system to calm down. They need to slowly, because they go into dorsal, you can't, in the nervous system, you can't go from dorsal straight into the parasympathetic nervous system into a ventral state. You have to slowly come out of it, slowly stretch out of it. It's like a bear coming out of hibernation. They don't come out of hibernation and start hunting everything. They come out of hibernation and they look around.

They stretch out, they start to feel safe in their environment. They've been cooped up in a cave for a long time. What's going on in the world outside of me. And then when everything seems safe and calm, now I can start to process and logically think about what's going on. And slowly when I learned to get help and get coaching, learn how to emotionally make sense of what my partner is saying. Because

You can only meet someone emotionally. You can meet someone so logically for such a long time, you're not going to have a fulfilling relationship. You can meet someone verbally for a long time, but the intimacy aspect or fearful avoidance is what really needs to grow. But they are terrified of intimacy. They're terrified of physical intimacy. They're terrified of emotional intimacy.

That's why a lot of avoidance can end up having a lot of addictive behaviors where they're either addicted to a lot of sex with strangers, non-committal relationships, one-night stands, anything that doesn't display emotion. And when fearful avoidance tell you it meant nothing, it really meant nothing. You are telling someone anxiously attached it meant nothing to someone anxiously attached. We don't do one-night stands.

We don't sleep around. We don't get addicted to pornography because we need human connection, consistent human connection that creates consistent safety. So if you're a woman, the body can open up because it feels safe enough to consummate, to create life, to make love. So fearful avoidance, very often when I work with them and they've tended to have affairs or straight, when they turn around and tell their partner,

It didn't mean anything. I'm literally counting to three until the other partner gets infuriated and bombards them with 50,000 questions because the anxious attachments operating system is what do you mean? It didn't mean anything. Sex intimacy is huge. You connected with someone. You slept with them. Did you orgasm? You can only do that when you feel something for somebody. Were they better than me? Were they not? I would never do that unless they some sort of an attraction.

was that they anxiously attached people cannot understand how things can just be no strings attached. And that's why also for someone that is fearfully avoidant, a lot more I've seen in my practice, ⁓ not practice, but coaching is they are very attuned to wanting to run away to pornography because there's no emotion in that world.

It's very self-soothing. When they feel they are down, they don't know how to regulate their emotion. They don't know better ways to raise up the dopamine. Pornography never lets you down. It will release the right amount of dopamine you need for a while. Obviously, if you listen to Andrew Huberman, he really discusses dopamine powerfully, but it will release the right amount of dopamine for a while naturally.

body gets accustomed to that dopamine is not enough. And that's why pornography gets pushed and pushed and pushed starts off with the excitement of just watching it, the simplicity of whatever you're watching and then goes into crazy variety. And sometimes some of the people saying, I can't even believe I'm watching that kind of pornography. It's not even what I would want, but the dopamine now from what you started with to what you need is much higher, but it's dependable.

Whereas in the dependency on a fearful avoidant being dependent on making another person consistently happy for them is too terrifying. They don't have the self belief that they are able to achieve that and do that. But they don't understand fearful avoidance have this beautiful empathy. You have this amazing intuition to connect to people. You have this amazing compassion.

you cry way more than a dismissive avoidant. Fearful avoidance will probably be crying in the cinema to ⁓ a really vulnerable or beautiful movie. They will be crying to something they watch on TikTok because emotion is right there on their sleeve. They just don't live in it very long. And that's why the anxious person gets really excited when they see these little vulnerable sides of their partner and their

constantly. The game is always how much more as an anxious person do I create more and more and more more safety for you to open up more and more and more and more at the exhaustion of every time I think we've reached a point where I've created so much safety. I've proved to you that the things you've told me, I didn't throw them in your face. I proved to you that whatever you opened up to me, that's all I wanted. I wanted no lies. I wanted you to be vulnerable. Tell me the truth.

I created a really safe environment as an anxious person. I self-regulated. I breathed through a meaning, a multitude of meanings I could have made in that moment, a multitude of reactions I wanted to have. You have no idea the 20 times I wanted to wring your neck for the things you've told me. I didn't do that. I was stoic. I was calm. But what kills the anxious person is they go and put in all that work to create that safety.

And they get this little information in from the fearful avoidant and they know that it's not the full story. They know that they need to create so much more safety, so much more vulnerability and they are exhausted and they're depleted. And this is where some of now these little ruptures are always starting to happen in the relationship. The anxious person is feeling drained and resentful. The fearful avoidant is just hoping

that resentment doesn't spill over because somehow they know they're messing up. And when they're done deactivating, they know how much they've messed up. That's why they can come and raise the bar really high. See you with a lot of love, send you off with a lot of love, fill you up with a lot of love. The conversations are hearty, the conversations are vulnerable, but the fearful avoidant has to understand they are always coming into relationships.

even with themselves, with a barrier. There is a barrier that says, I will open up to you and I will let you see parts of me, but you're never really going to get a wholesome feel of me. Even if you come hug me, there's something between us. You come speak to me, there's something between us. You want more intimacy, you want more connection, there's something between us. And

Fearful avoidance, when they have a partner that can end up getting pregnant, they can end up feeling and spiraling into anger because they can almost feel like their freedom was taken away from them. Or if they're the person as a fearful avoidant that got pregnant, they can end up feeling, I'm now trapped. I'm stuck. I can't leave. can't go. And this is not where I want to be.

Where I want to be is I wanted the choice. I wanted to make the choice to be with you. So things like that, they just sort of have this ripple effect where the fearful avoidance is always in a shell. And that shell covers the whole part of their body. The anxious attached person, their parents, their friends are only ever experiencing the head of a turtle. Because if you think about fearful avoidance and you put them into the metaphor of a turtle,

The meat is always protected. The heart and the soul is protected by a shell. And when the turtle, the tortoise comes out of the shell, that's when it's looking for love. It's looking to see who abandoned me. And true to a turtle, the process is slow. The ability for the turtle to stretch out and break out of that shell, or if not break out of the shell, learn to get on a skateboard.

And healing is you now are not so slow around you with love and vulnerability and openness and rupture and coming back together and repair. You now can get onto a skateboard and find the tools you need to be able to lean in to your partner. It's pretty interesting because you have the hailstorm, which is the anxious attachment. They can be loud. They can be protesting and that's only after they have really surrendered.

They've really surrendered to what they wanted, really surrendered to the quietness of themselves, surrendered to the relationship, tried to behave, tried to please the partner in a multitude of ways, cannot seem to win and then they erupt. anxious attachment can be triggered and is always triggered by the deactivation, especially when massive ruptures happened with the fearful avoidant. The fearful avoidant has to pull away.

leaving the anxious person feeling vulnerably abandoned. And as the fearful avoidant pulls away, they're also feeling abandoned because they're thinking, I want you to chase me. I want you to come. But the minute I see you do that, I'm in the hole really quick. Boop! My head's gone back into the shell. But there's something that lets them know, ⁓ you're there. You want me. You're right outside the shell. You're knocking.

Okay, I just, I need to get a grip of myself. I need to move out of my head. I need to move into my heart. I need to feel my soul. What the hell is the soul? Okay, no, the heart is intimidating me. My wife or girlfriend or husband has taught me to tap into intuition. What the hell is intuition? All I know is how to be logical. What is logic about this moment? This person loves me and it can take a while sometimes for the fearful avoidant to deactivate to be able to feel safe in an environment.

Nothing is personal. An anxiously attached people can take it extremely personal. Of course, you're in a relationship, you're there to connect, you're there for closeness. But when you learn that my partner is behaving the way they do because of science-backed theories and attachment, they are only reacting a certain way because their nervous system

was wired and learned to fire a certain way for a number of years to keep them protected. So them not opening up to me is not something I take personally. It's not because of a lack in me. It's not because I'm worthy. It's not because they could open up to someone else. Well, they did better with an ex boyfriend or girlfriend. It's not personal. It's their journey to be able to start to say, I'm no longer that child, toddler.

teenager responding to a parent when I had nowhere to go or no way to just leave and survive. I adapted to be able to live in that environment. And in order to live in that environment, I had to build a really tough shell around me. Because if you take the shell away, then I'm pretty vulnerable. Then you can poke me and I'll get hurt. Then you can expect me to feel

exposed to you, a turtle without a shell is literally asking for someone else to protect it and cover it. And they've never ever learned that. They've learned the survival strategies of the little turtles that are walking

to ocean and the sky is full of someone ready to pluck at them, pick at them, bully them, eat them. Not everyone has Moana in the cartoon with her little leaf making sure you get to the water safely. But in a relationship, the turtle has the Moana and the Moana is thinking, here I am, I got the leaf, I got you. All I wanna do is love you and take care of you and kiss you and nurture you and let you know you're the most special thing.

But the turtle's thinking, no, ⁓ I'm not focused on that. I'm focused on all the danger around me. I'm focused on the millions of birds that want to eat me. And I'm not focused on being grateful there's someone sheltering me to get in. I'm just focused on, need to get in to protect myself. Need to get into the water to protect myself.

So when we look at some of the traits of, so when we look at summarizing some of the traits of the fearful avoidant, they can start off anxious in a relationship, almost feeling very secure, but they can turn avoidant pretty quick when vulnerability is threatened or they opened up too much and now they're just terrified so they will sabotage.

They have trust issues that are completely masked as hyper-independence and not needing anybody to be able to rely on. They have a very deep fear of abandonment and being engulfed in a love. They need to always get away from that kind of a love. They're terrified of it, yet they want it. That's what they seek out. That's what they attract. It's part of...

survival, telling them that that's the wounding that they need to be able to work on is engulfment can be very beautiful. Engulfment is connection. Engulfment is almost becoming one while holding your autonomy. You don't have to lose it. You don't have to lose your sense of self in order to be in a relationship. You're bringing a whole sense of self that someone appreciates and wants to join their sense of self with you. They don't understand that.

they run away from any sort of engulfment.

And they have this intense shame that I'm too much, I'm unlovable, I will be fully rejected. Tony Robbins talks about too universal. Fears that we all have is I'm not good enough and I will not be loved. The anxious person holds that very true to themselves and so does the dismissive avoidance.

Fearful avoidance really fall hard. They can fall in love quick, fast, and then they can fall out of love as quick, leaving the other person startled, confused, reading through text messages, wondering what the hell went wrong with this kind of love. They can be in and out as quick as they came in and quicker when they have a sense of

this person's falling hard for me and they're looking for more of me. They're looking for a deeper level of commitment. In my mind, that means who I am is not enough. I've never tapped into this deeper person that they want. I cannot offer that to them. So I'm completely out.

Triggers for someone fearfully avoidant, you have to be able to remember is emotional vulnerability to them equates a fear of their safety being questioned. They feel naked, they feel seen. So vulnerability to them is something they're not going to dive into with you at all.

Another massive trigger for them, believe it or not, is them being ignored or abandoned. They go into panic and that's when the anxious attachment starts to come out and they will start to chase you in a relationship because fearful avoidance move from anxious to avoidant. When the anxious partner is anxious, they move more into avoidant. When the anxious partners had enough and they're pulling away, they move into anxious.

come right back in, swoop you and not lose you. So they're constantly in this big sort of rocking boat, back and forth with their emotions. I want you, I'm terrified of keeping you, I don't know if I can, am I worthy of you? Please don't leave me. I think you should leave me because I'm not worthy and I have a lot of shame inside of me. You are the only person that's ever truly seen me and loved me and been this loyal to me.

I didn't have caregivers that even gave me that level of attention and love. How can I feel safe in that love with you? How? Make my brain make that make sense to me because love is felt in the body. Love, I know we say is a verb, it's a doing, but you do something that creates someone to feel something in their body. And all fearful avoidance felt was fear, was terrified.

was eggshells. They accustomed to feeling love as something, the body that's so uncomfortable. I am not diving into love. I can dive into a relationship. I love you. You love me. Let's shake hands. And when I'm feeling vulnerable and open, then I will show you love like you've never seen. When I'm done, I'm going to pull away, but I want you to not chase me, not ask questions because it makes me feel criticized. It makes me feel less than it puts me in pain because I know I'm hurting you.

I know I should give more. don't know how to do that. So that's how they play the game in the relationship.

You have to understand the reason they don't trust love is not because of you. They don't trust love because it never stayed. It was never consistent. It was never warm. It was never nurturing. It was never something that felt like home for them. So when they don't trust you will stay, when they don't trust to invest in the relationship, they're just doing what their attachment style and the sense of how they behaved.

has taught them to behave.

Avoidant partner will probably end up truly in a relationship leaving someone like they're in a roller coaster. And this is not to put any avoidant down. This is really a great opportunity for you to be able to say, okay, wow, I can see that is going on inside of me and it's something that I need to work on. It's something I need to grow. So how do I start to begin to heal my fearful avoidant?

How do I start to heal my fearful avoidant attachment? Well, the first place is for you to be able to start becoming aware, aware of the person in front of you, aware of the relationships you have, starting to be able to just pay attention to who am I close to, who am I not close to? Do I play some games in the relationships where I show up as my best self, but I never actually get very vulnerable?

I'm able to do business with people, but I don't know how to maintain or grow relationships with people. can very much get on the phone and be like, Hey, yeah, so this is what I'm talking about. This what we need to do. You're not very much someone that nurtures relationships, knows about some of your peers or the people you work with, their families, their children, the name of their dogs. You just, you don't go there. So it's being able to start to say, what are some of the

close relationships I have with myself, so my mom, my dad, brothers, siblings, partner. I'm in another circle, a very important relationship is me too. And then an extended circle of friends and family and coworkers. The first circle you need to pay attention to is one with yourself. So being able to be aware of what emotions are coming up, when do I feel like pulling away, what's going on inside of me.

Can I place a feeling in my body that is making me feel uncomfortable? You are already such a wonderful self soother. So one of the things I would tell you is to really deeply breathe through some of the scary conversations or scary emotions you're feeling and sometimes being able to see the conversations over in five minutes. When you can stay present, when you can disengage from the voice in your head, the

protector lives here. The protector is always at battle, always at war, ready to go, ready to protect you. But there's another part of you that lives in your heart, a very soft, nurturing, kind person that needs to grow that muscle now. You need to be able to focus on the person in your heart, give that person a name, put a color or a shape.

make a sound to who this person is in your heart. We know the protector is always logical, has got you to survive the professional business world. Great. But in order to survive the intimacy and emotional connection, you're going to have to lean in. Leaning in is into your heart. What's this voice say? And this voice can feel scary. It can feel uncertain because you've never paid attention to it.

So it could sound very different. I wouldn't overwhelm a fearful avoidant with seven steps you could do. I would first start to just tell a fearful avoidant, pay attention to these circles. What do you need? What is mostly important to you? Have you ever stopped to think about what you need in a relationship and the fact that if you need something from a relationship means you need to be in one, need to be vulnerable in one.

You need to be exposed in one. And sometimes it's powerful to be rejected for showing up as yourself because then only then do you really attract the partner. That's never going to make you feel shamed when you can open yourself up in a way that feels beautiful and feels vulnerable to you. I would start to pay attention to sensations in the body, emotions that pop up. I would pull out onto your phone the wheel of emotion.

start to get comfortable with some of these different emotional names, other than sad, angry, unhappy, find different emotions that you can feel and put words to and make you go, wow, I never thought I would be feeling that. So getting comfortable with that and leaning into your heart, what does this voice have to say? So the next time you want to shut down in conflict or you want to pull away,

I would lean in and say, okay, I know what you have to say. I get it. You're always ready to go and take me away. What do you have to say? What are you telling me to do? I want to trust this voice. And that's just how simple I would keep it for this first session of you learning where your fearful avoidance stemmed from. And if anyone's anxiously attached and listening, I hope this really helped you also understand.

your partner's behaviors backed by science. It's not about you. It's not personal, but they do have a beautiful sense of responsibility to grow and to heal so that you can have the beautiful relationship that you both deserve to have because you've experienced deep love from your fearful avoidant and it's not a game. They're not trying to hurt you by loving on you and showing up for you and pulling away.

a mechanism of survival that they need to start training their nervous system is not necessary at this age anymore. And if you're anxiously attached and you're listening, then when your focus moves into healing your insecure attachment to be more secure as well, you will see that you will really be able to hold more space for them because your own autonomy, your own need to do things on yourself,

for yourself, with yourself, will pull them in closer. Will make them feel, I want to be around you too. I want to do some of the hobbies you're doing. I want to, just sort of depend on you because your energy to me isn't seeming so volatile. Not that you are volatile. It's just your connection and ability to not take abandonment can create a nervous system to be volatile. But with that said,

I just want whoever's listening to take a deep breath in ⁓ and we just exhale together. And I will dive into a lot more of the complexities of anxious attachment and avoidant attachment in relationships. I will look into fearful avoidant, dismissive avoidant in relationships, how to make these relationships thrive and grow. Because like I said,

Just because we realize our attachment style doesn't mean we are divorcing the person in front of us. So with that being said, thank you for listening to another episode. You can find me on TikTok @shazmeen_bank

 Instagram @Shazmeenbank. I post content there every single day. And you can email me shazmeen@shazmeenbank.com for my Q&A every Thursday, whatever questions you have you want sincerely answered.

I got you. And with that being said, my beautiful, if you're watching, beautiful spotlight decided to die. That's on me. I probably didn't charge it. But with that being said, I love you guys. Thank you for tuning in to listening to the Love Better podcast. You can watch me on YouTube, on Spotify, or listen to me on Apple and whatever amazing other places Buzzsprout sprinkles me on. I love you guys.

And thank you, excited that we are now building a community together. This is your host, Shazmeen Bank, and you know that you can bank on me.