5 Ways to Support a Fearful Avoidant Partner
In today's episode, I'm sharing 5 ways to support a partner with a fearful avoidant (AKA disorganised) attachment style.
The fearful avoidant attachment style is often considered the most complex and challenging of the attachment styles, characterised by a conflicting push-pull between wanting intimacy and fearing it.
WHAT WE COVER:
the betrayal wound and the importance of honesty & openness in building trust
striking the right balance between compassion & firm boundaries
how to make the fearful avoidant feel loved & appreciated
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
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Episode Transcript
0:00:38.09 → 0:01:20.06
So this episode has been much requested and has been a long time coming. I recorded a couple of episodes last year that were how to support an anxious partner and how to support an avoidant partner. But I never quite got around to doing a standalone episode for the fearful avoidant partner and I think it's fair to say that there are enough differences and points of distinction between fearful avoidant and a more classic dismissive avoidant attachment that it's very much worthy of its own episode to dive into those. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I'll say at the outset that this is very personal because I am in relationship with someone who has a fearful avoidant attachment style.
0:01:20.09 → 0:02:00.21
So this is very much drawn from personal experience and I have run these five tips past my partner, Joel, and had his sign off. So I've got my in house consultant on fearful avoidant attachment. So there you go. You can know when you're listening to this, that not only does it have that tick of approval, but it's also very much coming from the perspective of me and in my relationship, having found ways to navigate and create healthy, secure connection, despite those attachment, fears, insecurities and what could be described as quote unquote, problem behaviours. Although I don't really like that term, but you know what I mean.
0:02:00.36 → 0:02:41.50
Me, of course, having done a lot of work, but definitely leaning anxious in the way that I experience my own attachment fears and behaviours, and my partner very much being in that fearful avoiding camp, we've managed to overcome those starting points and build something really beautiful. So I give you these tips, not as a hypothetical, but really as almost an audit of what has worked really well for us. So I thought I'd share that, just to give a little bit of extra context and take it out of the abstract a bit. Before we dive into that, a couple of quick announcements. The first being that Healing Anxious Attachment, which is my Signature Course, is opening for enrollment in less than two weeks.
0:02:41.63 → 0:03:02.70
At the time of recording, there are over 900 people on the waitlist, which is amazing. I'm so touched to see how many people are interested in the course. For those who are new to the podcast and to my work, there are a lot of you recently. Healing anxious attachment is my signature course. It's an eight week programme, but you have lifetime access to all of the materials.
0:03:02.81 → 0:03:41.54
This will be the fourth time that I'm running it and it really distils down everything that I know, teach, have practised myself and have guided so many other people through in moving from anxious attachment to a more secure way of experiencing relationships. So it's a very powerful programme and I highly recommend jumping on that waitlist via the link in the show notes if you're interested. Being on the Waitlist will just ensure that you get first access when registration opens and you'll also save $100. So if you're interested, definitely join the Waitlist just to give yourself the option. One stores open in less than two weeks.
0:03:42.15 → 0:04:00.69
The second quick announcement is just to share the featured review, which is are you listening to my thoughts? I swear, it's like Stephanie knows exactly what I'm thinking and feeling and what's happening in my relationship. I've never listened to a podcast, audiobook or read a book that is this in line with my headspace? Everything offered is so incredibly helpful to the anxious mindset. So glad I found this.
0:04:00.73 → 0:04:09.43
Thank you. Thank you for that review. I always laugh when people say that because I do hear it a lot. Are you inside my head? How do you know exactly what I'm thinking and feeling?
0:04:09.59 → 0:04:47.29
And the honest answer is because I have had the same thoughts and feelings most of the time when I'm giving examples, they're drawn from my own experience. So you can rest assured that I have been very much there in the trenches with you. And to the extent that it feels like I'm inside your head, it's really just because I'm inside my own and I 100% understand what it's like. If that was your review, please send an email to podcast@stephanierigg.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my master classes. Okay, so with all of that out of the way, let's dive into five tips for supporting a fearful avoidant partner.
0:04:47.47 → 0:05:19.50
And just before I get into these five tips, I want to say that this is not about one person doing all of the heavy lifting in a relationship in terms of providing the emotional support, providing the stability, providing the regulation. Of course, we want to have a level of balance there. We want to have a level of investment and participation on both sides. And I know that the common complaint from anxious people is, why do I have to be the one supporting them? When are they going to support me?
0:05:19.68 → 0:06:01.48
I totally understand that. And as I mentioned earlier, this is one of a series of episodes. I do have episodes around what you can do as the partner to an anxious person to be more supportive. So it's not intended to suggest that it is your job to create safety for your partner, that it's your job to stabilise them, that it's your job to manage their emotional experience, their woundedness, their behaviour. It's not your job and at the same time, of course, in a relationship, we want to be supporting our partner and we want to be creating the space for them and us to grow and thrive together.
0:06:01.58 → 0:06:35.30
So it's one of those areas where both of the things can be true, it's not your job. And I would say that in a healthy relationship, we do want to be interested in the ways in which we can support our partner. With that being said, let's dive into these five tips. So the first tip that I want to offer you is this in your relationship with your fearful avoidant partner, prioritise honesty, openness and demonstrable trustworthiness whenever you can. So most fearful avoidant people have a strong betrayal wound.
0:06:35.44 → 0:07:15.35
Now, they might not have this in a conscious way, they might not say like, oh yeah, I've got a betrayal wound, I think everyone's going to betray me. But there does tend to be this sense of people can't be trusted and this real sense of guardedness and wariness around what it means to trust someone. So for a lot of fearful avoidant people, they will experience a resistance to that, a sense of if I trust you, you're going to hurt me. And if anything, the closer we get, the more power you have to hurt me. And so I'm even more wary of trusting the people that I really love and care about because of that power that they have to hurt me.
0:07:15.42 → 0:07:58.32
And that really stems from the origin story. For most fearful avoidant people is some sort of early environment where they were simultaneously drawn to and afraid of their primary caregivers. So I need you and I depend on you and I want to be close to you, but when I'm close to you, I feel like I can't trust in the safety of that connection and I need to pull away because I feel afraid. So there's this sense of the people who I'm closest to and who I love most and who I need are also the people with the power to hurt me most. So because of that, there is this real sense of guardedness.
0:07:58.46 → 0:08:39.02
And so in being the partner to someone with that wound, the way that you can be sensitive to it and to really support them, to heal that wound, is to be really honest and open and trustworthy by showing them, I have nothing to hide, I'm here, you can depend on me. And that's not going to be to your detriment to do that. I'm not trying to trick you, I'm not trying to betray you. And certainly to the extent that you show yourself to me or you depend on me, I'm not going to make you regret that, right? I'm not going to use that against you in any way.
0:08:39.12 → 0:09:26.32
I'm going to prove myself as being a safe space for you to be vulnerable and to really build that trust in both directions. So prioritising that honesty, openness and trustworthiness. And I would say kind of as a corollary to that, not being judgmental of them at all, really allowing them to let down their guard and be themselves will be really supportive and really healing for them. Okay, the next tip that I want to offer you is encourage your partner to voice their needs and boundaries proactively rather than reactively or once there's been some kind of rapture. So if you've been around for a while or you've gone back and listened to that episode around supporting an anxious partner, I gave a similar version of this.
0:09:26.45 → 0:10:02.42
So when it comes to needs and boundaries, this is an area where the fearful avoidant very much exhibits traits of both anxious and avoidant attachment. And they kind of pull from each and swing between extremes. So what I mean by that is initially a fearful avoidant person will typically suppress their needs, not voice their boundaries. Try and people, please try and make everyone happy. I don't want to upset anyone by asking for space, for example, oh, if I ask my partner for space, they're going to take it personally and they're going to get upset with me and I don't want to hurt them.
0:10:02.44 → 0:10:32.39
So I just won't ask for space. I'll just go with whatever they want, right? So that's the more typical anxious response of kind of fawning of deferring to the other person, of just going with the flow because I don't want to rock the boat. But what happens to the fearful avoidant is ultimately they reach boiling point and they get to this point where they really do need whatever it is they need. They need space, they need time to themselves, but they snap.
0:10:32.73 → 0:11:25.21
And so they then have this big response, and that snap tends to come out as a more avoidant response. So they might pull away, they might get angry, they might withdraw, they might try and leave the relationship, but it'll be this really big disproportionate response because they've been suppressing and suppressing and the volcano has been rumbling and then comes the eruption. Now, where that differs from an anxious person is that while anxious people tend to also suppress and then erupt, the eruption tends to be in an effort to connect. So it's this sense of, you don't even care about me, subtext, please care about me, please meet my needs, please see me, please listen to me. For the fearful avoidant, it tends to be you're trying to control me or you don't care about my needs and that's why I need to get away from you because you're not safe.
0:11:25.31 → 0:12:19.84
So you can see how they diverge in that respect and how the fearful avoidant leans on their more avoidant parts and their more avoidant strategies at the point of trigger. And that's when they pull away and have a big defensive and protective response. So all of that to say, if you as their partner, can really proactively, create a safe space and create a culture in your relationship where it is safe to talk about needs and boundaries and safe to express those and really honouring each other's needs and boundaries, then that is going to be really supportive for your partner. And again, that's going to help them in unlearning the old way, which can lead to really destructive behaviours and relearning something that's a bit more self responsible and conducive to healthy relationships. So what we wouldn't want to be doing here, for example, is making them feel bad for needing space.
0:12:19.99 → 0:12:51.15
Right? Again, I keep coming back to this example because it's definitely been one in my relationship. When we were first dating, my partner did feel really reluctant to voice his need for space because he was worried he would upset me. But what that would lead to is him not voicing his need for space but then reaching a point where he just had to take space but he wasn't communicating to me. And so I was left thinking that something was wrong because he was having this bigger reaction to the fact that he hadn't asked for what he needed.
0:12:51.35 → 0:13:28.34
And so it's almost like the part of him that really needed that space was just grabbing the wheel and driving the bus off a cliff because it felt ignored. And so we've now gotten to the point where we're able to talk about that and negotiate it and it's not threatening to either of us anymore. And that allows us to navigate our togetherness and our separateness in a way that meets both of our needs and that doesn't feel stressful or intimidating for us to talk about. Okay? So the next tip that I want to offer you is this find the middle ground between compassion and firm boundaries.
0:13:28.53 → 0:14:21.12
So this is really universal relationship advice. I've often talked about the need to toe that line between compassion for other people's pain and firm boundaries and accountability for poor behaviour. And nowhere is that more true than in this kind of relationship dynamic with someone who can have a lot of volatility, who can have a lot of reactivity, and who can engage in destructive behaviour. So what we want to do here is go, okay, I'm not going to make you into the villain, I'm not going to throw insults at you, I'm not going to say that there's something wrong with you. I can understand and have compassion for the inner turmoil that you're experiencing and how hard this is for you at the same time as having really clear boundaries around the kinds of behaviour that are not acceptable to me that don't work for me in relationship.
0:14:21.65 → 0:15:08.97
So an example of that might be if your partner does get triggered and pulls away and gives you the silent treatment for five days right, you can go, okay, I understand that you're in some sort of storm internally and that must be really hard and at the same time, that really doesn't work for me. That's not fair to me and it causes me a great deal of anxiety to feel like I can't reach you, to not know where we stand, for you to be refusing to engage with me. And so going forward, if we're going to be in this relationship, we need to find a better way of navigating that situation where you are really triggered that doesn't just leave me scrambling and alone and anxious. Right? So it's that combination, right.
0:15:09.01 → 0:15:30.96
I recognise that this is hard for you. I recognise that you might not be trying to hurt me, but that is the result of this behaviour and so we need to put some boundaries in place. So it really is that thing of can I have compassion for you without creating excuses for you? And as a side note, if you're more anxious, the boundaries piece is absolutely essential for you. And that will be your growth edge.
0:15:31.02 → 0:16:03.04
Because your tendency once you learn about their struggles and the things that are hard for them, your tendency is probably to overcompensate on the compassion and maybe let the boundaries go to go, oh, it's just because they are feeling this thing, or because they're scared of that or blah, blah, blah, right? Yes. We can absolutely have that empathy and compassion while also going, yeah, great, you're scared and this is how that makes me feel and that doesn't work for me. Right. We don't want to lose ourselves in the process of being compassionate and empathetic.
0:16:03.17 → 0:16:30.00
So have compassion while also holding onto those firm boundaries. That is both for you and for them. This is really important, okay. In my relationship, having those firm boundaries with my partner when there have been moments where he's engaged in behaviour that hasn't worked for me, that's been really important for me in not losing myself, right? In not, again, just suppressing my stuff in order to caretake for him or to accommodate his ups and downs.
0:16:30.06 → 0:17:07.22
But it's also been really, really important for him because it creates a level of accountability and there's actually a lot of trust and respect that is baked into a firm boundary, communicated with love, because it's saying, I'm here, I see you, I love you. And if we're going to make this work, here's what needs to happen, right? It is actually a commitment to making the relationship work rather than an effort to control someone or dictate to them how they have to behave or whatever else. Right? And having that firm loving boundary has been really helpful for my partner, in course, correcting him and going, okay, fair enough.
0:17:07.83 → 0:17:35.50
When I behave like that, that isn't fair to my partner. And I do love and care about this person and I don't want to jeopardise this. So it can kind of emerge as the voice of reason that brings the fearful avoidant back to centre and clarifies for them. What it is they really want and really encourages them to take responsibility in a way that feels safe. So the boundaries are for both of you and are really, really important in making this relationship work.
0:17:35.63 → 0:17:53.07
Okay, so the next tip is show that you recognise how much they care. Because they do. I mean, of course there's going to be individual variation. I can't speak for every single relationship and every single person, but on the whole, people with a fearful avoidance attachment style are deeply caring. They really are.
0:17:53.11 → 0:18:46.85
They're very emotional and they do care about the people they love so much. So when they're in relationship and they feel like they're being told all of the ways all the time that they're doing it wrong and that they're not enough or that they keep making mistakes, they keep hurting someone, they can feel really demoralised. And that really feeds into their inner critic, which typically is pretty relentless, their sense of guilt and shame, which runs rampant. And that can really lead them to pull away from a relationship and they pull away often from a place of I don't want to hurt this person, I see how much I'm hurting them. So they can have a lot of, as I said, that inner critic, that self blame, that sense of brokenness and defectiveness can be really profound for their fearful avoidant.
0:18:46.93 → 0:19:42.03
So what you can do as their partner to support them and to counteract some of that self criticism, that they tend to be pretty harsh on themselves, is really show that you recognise how much they care. Show that you recognise their effort, the ways that they show love, the ways that they show up for you, all of the things that you appreciate, admire, respect about them. Because I can tell you that internally, the scales are tipped so far in favour of all of the negatives and that will be irrespective of what you're doing. That will be their internal dialogue in 99% of cases. So if you can really lead with showing them how much you really care for, respect, admire, appreciate them, that's going to be really healing for them and will go a long way in helping with all the other stuff, right?
0:19:42.12 → 0:20:05.16
Cultivating trust, allowing them to feel safe, to voice needs and so on and so forth. So be proactive in voicing those things. Now, again, that's good relationship advice across the board, but it's certainly really important in this case. And last but not least, as much as possible, try to be patient with them. Now, I know that that might feel like unfair advice and I get that.
0:20:05.34 → 0:20:48.21
And that advice is 100% subject to the need to have firm boundaries, the need to create accountability, the need to advocate for yourself. I'm certainly not suggesting that your patience should mean making excuses for bad behaviour, for breaches of trust, for anything like that, but within reason, can you be patient with your partner? Can you understand how deep this stuff runs? Can you understand that when they are acting out, they are acting out from a place of visceral fear and that it will take time to repatten that and to rewire that and to rebuild that and learn new ways of being. So it's not something that's going to happen overnight.
0:20:48.26 → 0:21:39.62
It's not something that they can just flip a switch off the back of one conversation that you guys have about needs and boundaries and all of a sudden it's going to be fixed, right? If you've listened to my work for a while, you know that for you author them, this stuff runs deep. And it is, it's visceral, primal, fear based stuff and it's often not the domain of our rational brain. So giving them some grace and being patient while, as I said, still having boundaries and still creating accountability, but not saying, I told you not to storm out of the room when you get frustrated. Yes, of course, in an ideal world, we'd only have to have those conversations once, but again, within reason, I think we have to be understanding of the fact that it does take time to shift these things.
0:21:39.72 → 0:22:32.06
And the more that we can foster that change from a place of love and acceptance and care and respect, the more effective that's going to be. And I promise you that whatever frustration you have with your partner pales in comparison to the frustration they have with themselves. That is, again, I would say true in 99% of cases. For the fearful avoidant, they really are so hard on themselves. And so, as much as possible, if you can be patient, if you can show them that you're not going anywhere, that you're there for them, that you love them, you see them and you accept them, while also striving for growth together and separately, that will really pay dividends for your connection and your bond together.
0:22:32.51 → 0:23:01.72
So I hope that that's been helpful. Whether you're listening as someone in relationship with a fearful avoidant partner, whether you are fearful avoidant yourself and you might want to share this with a partner, or whether you're listening as a bystander, and it might just give you some food for thought in your own relationship. So, as always, I'd be super grateful if you could leave a five star rating or a review. It really does help so much, but otherwise, I look forward to seeing you later in the week for our Q and A episode. Thanks guys.
0:23:03.21 → 0:23:25.76
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.