Avoidant Attachment 101

Call Her Daddy

This episode of Call Her Daddy dives into avoidant attachment, exploring its psychological roots, behavioral patterns in relationships and friendships, and the emotional toll it takes

Key takeaways

• Avoidant attachment is a survival strategy developed in childhood when emotional needs were consistently ignored or punished.
• The core belief of avoidants is that relying on others leads to abandonment, suffocation, or control, so they rely solely on themselves.

Main topics

• Definition and core beliefs of avoidant attachment
• Childhood origins: emotional neglect, overburdened parents, enmeshed parenting

Notable quotes

If I rely on you, you will eventually let me down, you will suffocate me, or you will control me, and therefore, I must rely solely on myself to survive.

We invented the ick over here in avoidant land.

Conclusion

Understanding avoidant attachment is crucial for breaking cycles of emotional distance and isolation. While it may

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another gorgeous, beautiful Sunday session of Call Her Daddy. So last Sunday session, I decided to open up the conversation around attachment styles. And I basically focused the entire conversation on anxious attachment. Again, for anyone who didn't watch that episode or needs a quick refresher, At its core, an attachment style is your subconscious blueprint for how you behave, communicate, and react in close relationships. It's how your brain reacts to intimacy and threat. And there are... four attachment styles. There's secure attachment, anxious, avoidant, and fearful slash disorganized. If you think you may have anxious attachment, I talked about this the other week, and that episode is definitely for you. So if you missed it, you should go watch that. But this episode may also be for you, okay? Because the reality is if you have anxious attachment, you quite often are most attracted to someone who has avoidant attachment. You two just, you can't seem to stay away from each other, even though you probably should. Today, we are going to start off by discussing avoidant attachment. We have gotten to avoidant, we hit anxious, and now we're about to cruise into a new lane. So. Avoidant attachment. If you are currently dating someone who acts like expressing an emotion is similar to a physical threat, or if you are the person who suddenly gets the ick and runs away the second someone buys you flowers, this is... This is your wake-up call, okay? We are going to dissect exactly what avoidant attachment is, the silent emotional toll it can take on you, and how it can completely ruin, essentially, your relationships and significantly have a lasting impact on your self-esteem. Buckle up, baby. So let's start with, let's define this. Avoidant attachment is a subconscious defense mechanism where your brain equates intimacy with danger, okay? If you have avoidant attachment, your core belief is, if I rely on you, you will eventually let me down, you will suffocate me, or you will control me, and therefore, I must rely solely on myself to survive. So, In dating, you, you know, you're the ultimate escape artist, okay? You want love because you're obviously a human being, that's natural. But the second that you start to actually get it, your literal alarm system goes off in your body. And psychologists call this deactivating strategies, okay? These are basically the subconscious tricks that your brain plays to force. distance between you and the person you are dating or the person that you are getting close to. Now, if you are an avoidant, you probably have a lot of moments where You see people online being like, oh my God, I like got the ick and I could like never talk to them again, right? And you're like, no, no, no, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie, you have no idea. We invented the ick over here in avoidant land, okay? Because essentially avoidance can get the ick over literally nothing. Someone that you are dating takes you on an amazing weekend trip. oh, it's beautiful. It's gorgeous. You are feeling, oh my God, incredibly close to them. And then suddenly you look over and you're like, oh my God, the way that they are chewing is so disgusting. I have to end it. I can never see this person again. I have to break up with them. I will never be able to get past that. I can't unsee that. Like, obviously that's not a deal. Well, someone chewing so disgusting, maybe deal breaker, but Usually these things are not actual deal breakers, but it is your brain trying to protect you from getting close to people. Okay. Another example that comes to mind for an avoidant is the X fantasy. And this one is like so psychologically fascinating to me. So basically the X fantasy is like. An avoidant person will stay obsessed with an ex from three years ago who was emotionally unavailable and they convince themselves no one will ever compare to that ex. And why the avoidant does this is because it's basically like fantasizing about someone who is unattainable is completely safe because they can't actually hurt you. And you're not actually going to have a relationship with them. So it's like this perfect middle ground. You'll never get hurt. And you'll never actually have to be with them. And so another thing avoidance can do frequently is they use the pullback technique, which is like basically you can have an amazing, emotionally intimate night where you both open up. Right. And then the very next day you take 12 hours to text back and you act incredibly cold and you basically need to reset your boundaries because that closeness, it made you feel way too exposed. It was way too much for you. Speaker 1 (5:52) So why does this happen? Like how does someone become an avoidant? How does someone have avoidant attachment? So at its core, an avoidant attachment style is a survival strategy that a child's brain develops to protect themselves from emotional pain. So to anyone that you think maybe this is something that like applies to you, basically when you're a baby or a young child in distress, your biological instinct is to seek comfort from your primary caregiver, right? Whoever raised you. But if those caregivers repeatedly rejected, ignored, or minimized your emotional needs, then Your brain as a baby or a child has to make a quick calculation of like, okay, if I'm reaching out for help and that only leads to rejection or coldness, I'm gonna stop reaching out and it's probably safer to just rely entirely on myself. Maybe you're someone who had a parent who would use emotional minimization. And what I mean by that is like, They kind of like had that mentality of like pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right? In your household, maybe it's like physical needs like food and shelter and safety may have been met, but emotional needs are treated as a weakness and inconvenience or in some cases like you're punished essentially, right? And so... That could look like you're six years old and you fall off your bike, let's say, and you scrape your knee and you start crying hysterically. And instead of your parents picking you up and comforting you and making sure you're OK, your parent sighs, roll their eyes and says, stop crying. It's not that bad. You're fine. Go inside and clean yourself off. Also, it could be if you were a child and you were sad, let's say, about a friendship at school. Maybe your parents told you, stop being so sensitive over it. It's not that big of a deal. And so understandably, the lesson that you learn from that is, okay, my parents do not want to deal with my big emotions. And if I show sadness or fear, I'm basically met with frustration or rejection. And so I must hide my pain to keep their approval. And so that is kind of one childhood environment that can then lead to having. avoidant attachment. Another one could be the overburdened or the depressed parent. So this dynamic basically can cause a role reversal because sometimes parents who are physically or emotionally unable to care for their children, whether it's due to depression, addiction, illness, extreme work stress, whatever it be, As a child, let's say you lived with a single mother who was suffering from severe clinical depression, right? You quickly learned that if you cry or you ask for help, it visibly distresses your mother or makes her withdraw further. So in order to essentially protect your parent and the dynamic, as a child, you started to act like a mini adult. You're... making your own meals, you know, your room, you're trying to have it be spotless and you're basically hiding any negative feelings so that they don't burden your parent or your parents. You're constantly worried about being a burden. And I want to make sure I'm clarifying like this is taught to you. Okay. And when this is taught to you, it registers in your brain. Got it. No one is coming to save me. In fact, I have to save them. And depending on others is a huge burden. And so, okay, I'm going to do everything myself. So that may relate to a lot of you watching. This one that I researched is a little less common, but it's a very powerful trigger to... avoidance, which is basically, it's kind of like on the opposite Richter scale. It's like the enmeshed or the smothering parent, if you had this. And it happens basically when a parent uses their child to meet their own emotional needs, aka they basically are completely ignoring the child's boundaries. And so an example of this would be you had an anxious parent who treated their child like a therapist and they are just constantly dumping their adult worries onto you as a child or their hover parents and they're hovering to the point where you as a child had zero privacy or personal space. And so at a young age, you felt physically and emotionally so suffocated by your parents intense emotional demands. And so understandably, this then taught you intimacy means losing my freedom. And if I let someone get too close to me, they will consume me and they will take away my autonomy. And so I have to keep people at a distance to survive. Speaker 1 (11:46) Those are a lot. So that's childhood. Now fast forward to you today listening, watching. That child has now become an adult who is incredibly good at being self-sufficient. But the shield. That