#99 Attachment Styles & Break-Ups
In today’s episode, we’re talking all about attachment styles and break-ups.
Break-ups are difficult no matter who you are, but understanding how different attachment styles affect one's experience can offer valuable insights into the emotional landscape post-separation. Attachment styles, an aspect of psychological theory, play a critical role in how individuals process relationships and, subsequently, the end of those relationships. Here, we delve into the contrasting experiences of anxious and avoidant attachment styles during break-ups.
Anxious Attachment: The Struggle with Loss
For those with an anxious attachment style, break-ups can feel extraordinarily challenging. Individuals with this attachment style often place a high value on connection and see their relationship as an anchor, contributing to their sense of safety and identity. This dependence on the relationship can lead to a tendency to prioritise it over other aspects of life, such as friendships, hobbies, and even career goals.
When the relationship ends, the anxious person might feel an overwhelming sense of failure and loss. This isn't just the loss of a relationship, but also the loss of their perceived source of stability and purpose. The immediate reaction can involve a frantic need to reconnect, as the void left by the relationship feels too daunting to face alone.
It's common for those with an anxious attachment style to become preoccupied with their ex-partner post-break-up. Actions like checking social media for updates or looking for signs of their ex's current emotional state can become all-consuming. This obsessive behaviour is a way to manage the overwhelming emotions of rejection and uncertainty. However, this only serves to delay the necessary process of healing and personal growth.
Avoidant Attachment: Seeking Relief in Solitude
Contrastingly, individuals with an avoidant attachment style have a different experience. For avoidant individuals, relationships can already feel like a substantial emotional labour, detracting from their preferred state of independence and aloneness. As a relationship becomes strained, the avoidant person's instinct is to withdraw, feeling drained and overwhelmed by the emotional demands placed upon them.
When a break-up occurs, the primary response for an avoidant individual is often one of relief. The end of the relationship signifies the end of the stress and the return to a more comfortable state of solitude. This sense of relief does not necessarily mean they didn't value their partner or the relationship; rather, it indicates their low tolerance for prolonged conflict and heightened emotional states.
In the immediate aftermath of a break-up, avoidant individuals might engage in activities that distract them, such as socialising more, immersing themselves in work, or picking up new hobbies. These activities serve the purpose of avoiding the emotional reckoning that follows a break-up, providing a temporary shield against the feelings of loss and sadness. However, it is common for the emotional impact to surface later, potentially weeks after the separation.
Misunderstandings and Projections
The diverging reactions of anxious and avoidant individuals can lead to significant misunderstandings. Anxious individuals may look at their avoidant ex-partner's apparent ease post-break-up and assume they never cared about the relationship. On the other hand, avoidant individuals may interpret the anxious person's heightened emotional state as excessive or irrational.
These projections are based on each attachment style's approach to emotional processing and coping. Anxious individuals assume that if their ex-partner truly cared, they would also be in a state of visible distress. Meanwhile, avoidant individuals may fail to understand the depth of the anxious partner's emotional investment, leading to further miscommunication and misinterpretation.
Focusing on Self-Healing
For both attachment styles, the key to healing post-break-up lies in redirecting focus from the former partner to oneself. For anxious individuals, this involves shifting their energy from the relationship to building a stronger sense of self. Developing self-worth, self-respect, and self-trust can create a more secure emotional foundation, reducing the need to cling to a partner for stability.
Avoidant individuals, meanwhile, could benefit from fostering a deeper emotional awareness. Instead of strictly avoiding the discomfort that follows a break-up, facing those feelings and understanding their roots can lead to more meaningful personal growth. This involves recognising their tendencies to withdraw and working towards more balanced ways of managing emotions and relationships.
Conclusion
Understanding the nuances of how different attachment styles experience break-ups can foster empathy and self-awareness. While an anxious attachment might lead to feelings of intense loss and fixation, an avoidant attachment may initially result in relief and later sadness. Both experiences are valid and form part of the complex tapestry of human relationships. Ultimately, the journey through a break-up can be an opportunity for profound personal development, teaching us to build healthier and more secure connections in future relationships.
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Episode Transcript
Stephanie Rigg [00:00:04]:
Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode we are talking all about breakups and specifically how different attachment styles, people with different attachment patterns are likely to experience and respond to breakups. So I know I say this at the start of every episode, but this is something that I get asked about a lot, particularly from my anxious attachers. No surprises there. And people wondering a why breakups feel so intensely hard for people with anxious attachment patterns, but also desperately trying to decipher what their often avoidant leaning ex partner is thinking, feeling why would they do this? Why aren't they doing that? And while you would know, if you're familiar with my work, my approach that I usually will politely decline to join you in analysing and hypothesising about someone's behaviour, why would they do this? What does it mean when they do that? I think that playing that game actually just keeps us more stuck and so I usually opt out of that and gently discourage you from spending too much time and energy in that, spinning around in the hypothesising.
Stephanie Rigg [00:01:44]:
At the same time, there are some clearly observed differences in the way that folks with anxious attachment patterns tend to process and experience a breakup compared with those who have more avoided patterns. And I think that in having a conversation around this we can cultivate greater understanding and be less inclined to project our own way onto the other person's behaviour and interpret accordingly. So I think again, and we do this all throughout relationships, right? All throughout the life cycle of a relationship. I think without conscious awareness, we do tend to project and receive someone's behaviour as what it would mean if we did that, notwithstanding that we're coming from completely different places, we have completely different sensitivities and values and all of those things. We put ourselves in their shoes and then construct meaning and it tends to give a very inaccurate and distorted and one sided view of things, which, spoiler alert, usually makes things worse because we then craft these painful stories out of it. So
I'm hoping that in today's episode I can give you a bit more context for that and probably more of an insight into that avoidant experience post breakup, so that you can understand that, depersonalise it a little and hopefully keep your eyes on your own paper, stay in your own lane a little, and support yourself as best you can. If you are going through a breakup, or maybe you've been through a breakup and you've had a lot of unanswered questions and wondered these same things, so hopefully I can give you some insights there. Before we dive into that, a couple of quick announcements.
Stephanie Rigg [00:03:31]:
The first being you might have heard me announce that I'm holding a Live Master class in a couple of weeks time on Building Trust. So this will be a 90 minutes. Although in the past I've tended to go a little overtime, so probably 90 minutes to 2 hours. Live Masterclass where we'll be talking all about trust, both self trust and relational trust, how to build trust, looking at trust wounds, rebuilding after infidelity, whether you've got kind of legacy trust issues from a previous relationship, how to learn to trust yourself more, intuition, all of those topics will be woven in. Even as I'm saying this, I'm wondering how I'm going to fit it all into 2 hours. But anyway, that's what we're going to do. If you'd like to come along to that. I would love to see as many of you there as possible.
Stephanie Rigg [00:04:17]:
There will be a recording that you'll have access to afterwards as well. If you're unable to join Live or you just want to revisit the material and you can find the link to that in the show notes or directly on my website. Second quick announcements just to share the featured review, which is I've listened to a few episodes and already learnt so much.
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Stephanie Rigg [00:04:55]:
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Okay, so let's dive into this conversation around attachment and breakups. So I've spoken at length on the show and elsewhere around anxious attachment and breakups and I'll give a bit of a recap on that for anyone who needs a refresher. Or perhaps if you haven't listened to me speak about this before. For anxiously attached people, breakups tend to be very, very challenging. We know that for anxious folks, connection is a very, very high ranking need and the relationship tends to be our anchor and our source of safety. We really lean on the relationship as giving us identity, as giving us purpose. We tend to orbit around that and really prioritise the relationship above the other pillars of our life.
Stephanie Rigg [00:06:03]:
And while that's not, oh, you're so anxious and clingy and needy because of those traits or preferences, it's normal. I would say that folks with secure attachment patterns also find their relationship to be a source of security and comfort and stability and they prioritise it. And that's not an anxious trope. Anxious folks tend to over index on their relationship to the exclusion of other areas of their life or to the detriment of other areas of their life which can be neglected in favour of putting the relationship first. Above. All else, and particularly if a relationship is under stress or strain, the anxious person will up the ante on how much time and energy they are devoting to being around their partner, trying to fix the relationship, thinking about the relationship. All of your internal resources are going to be funnelled into like Operation Save This Sinking Ship, right? And so the irony there being that as you keep ramping up your efforts, as the relationship becomes more and more strained, if you do then find yourself in this situation of a breakup, the relationship has ended, you've expended all this energy trying to save it and you're left really empty handed. And it can be a double edged sword because you feel this sense of failure that you weren't able to salvage the relationship and at the same time you then turn around and look at the rest of your life and there's not much happening because you became so laser focused on the relationship.
Stephanie Rigg [00:07:47]:
And you might have neglected friendships. You might have isolated yourself. You might have stopped doing whatever else you usually do. You might have abandoned your regular routines or become disengaged from work or any number of other things because you were so focused on the relationship and trying to stop it from ending when it was feeling really dire. And so for the anxious person, there are so many different layers of struggle here. Not only have they lost this anchor and this safety blanket, but there's a sense of failure, there's the sense of the unknown, of uncertainty. All of these things are big triggers for people who struggle with anxiety and usually try and manage that anxiety through control and creating predictability, through focusing on another person and their needs. All of these patterns that are pretty common among most anxiously attached people.
Stephanie Rigg [00:08:47]:
You've got all of this kind of energy that you are used to heaping onto someone else and a relationship and all of a sudden you don't know what to do with yourself. And that can feel just incredibly uncomfortable and you can feel almost frantic and panicked and very, very overwhelmed by that experience. Being in the void of all of that is just deeply uncomfortable. And so many anxiously attached folks will just spin out after a breakup and feel this overwhelming urge to reconnect with their partner. Not knowing how your partner is thinking or feeling, if you're not in contact with them, that is also likely to be incredibly difficult. So all of a sudden, this person who you're used to having access to and you're accustomed to feeling entitled to speak to them and to know how they're feeling and to know what they're doing and who they're spending. Time with and all of those things, all of a sudden you kind of overnight you lose jurisdiction over that and that can feel again for someone whose tendencies to create safety via a level of control and oversight feeling. Like you've just lost power there and that you no longer have any right or entitlement to know what they're thinking, to know what they're feeling, to know what they're doing with their time, who they're seeing, all of those things that is likely to send you into spirals of stress and panic and anxiety and jealousy and all of those other things.
Stephanie Rigg [00:10:19]:
And I think that behaviours like stalking their social media and when have they been online and who have they been talking to? Oh, did they just start following this person? Is that some all of that stuff, which I'm sure you're listening and some of you will be sheepishly raising your hand and going, yep, that's me done that. I get it, you are not alone. A lot of people do. I've done that before. It's a really easy trap to fall into just feeling like we need to gather information to somehow arm ourselves because that's just what we know to do. But of course, none of that is really helping us. And as always, the healing and the growth and the thing we really need, the medicine that we need, even though it's not what we want, is to turn from our obsessive focus on the other back to ourselves. Go, okay, I am feeling all of these big feelings.
Stephanie Rigg [00:11:15]:
I'm feeling scared, I'm feeling lonely, I'm feeling rejected, I'm feeling a sense of failure and humiliation and shame and loss and grief. And instead of being with those feelings, I am trying to fix or distract or avoid or get away from the immense overwhelm that comes with all of that big emotion because we don't trust ourselves to be able to handle it right, because we are so accustomed to the other person providing the safety. So I think that the very best thing we can do, as much as it's the last thing that we would do by instinct or impulse is actually to just focus on ourselves and try and release the grip, to surrender to the fact that we are no longer in control of this person. Not that we ever were, but we really now, as I said, we don't have jurisdiction over that anymore and obsessing over them and what they're doing and what they're thinking and what they're feeling is very much our way of trying to create a sense of control when we're feeling out of control. And so I think the best thing we can do is offer ourselves a more adaptive strategy which is going to be focusing on us. That is really the task of people with anxious attachment patterns, whether you're in a relationship or not, if you want to really work on healing and growing and cultivating a greater sense of security. You need to rebuild the foundations within yourself because that's where you are perhaps underdeveloped because you've been so accustomed to focusing on the other person. You need to start laying those bricks of self worth and self respect and self trust and self compassion, self esteem.
Stephanie Rigg [00:12:58]:
Those are the things that allow you to stand on your own. 2ft. To go to relationship with a strong sense of self and really love with an open heart rather than love someone with a lot of fear behind it and a need to control and grip and cling and all of those things. So that is your work and I really think that a breakup is a beautiful opportunity to take stock and to really look at that and go, okay, what are the lessons learned and what is next? That turned into a little bit of a soapbox pep talk for my anxious attaches. That was meant to be a quick setting of the scene. But anyway, we're now going to talk about the avoidant experience, which spoiler alert, is not what I just described in 99% of cases. And of course I will give the caveat that I should have done this at the start that of course everyone's different, right? To say like anxious people do this and avoidant people do that, universally categorically, the end overly simplistic. So this is not gospel, this is not universal, but it is often true in a general sense.
Stephanie Rigg [00:14:05]:
And that is to say that for avoidant leaning folk you'll recall I was saying, as a relationship becomes more strained towards the end, anxious folks dial up the intensity and they ramp up their attempts at fixing, saving, controlling, getting closer, problem solving. One more chance they might engage in more conflict and more demands in this desperate effort to get engagement and to turn the ship around. Avoidant folks, as things get more strained, become more and more overwhelmed and it just SAPS them of energy. It's like it drains the battery so fast because avoidant folks really value relational harmony and for them to feel like a relationship is just constant work, that is a very exhausting experience. I think it's exhausting for anxious folks as well, but it's not exhausting in the sense of like I can't do this, I'm out. Anxious leaning people tend to roll up their sleeves and want to do that work kind of relentlessly rather than walking away and deciding it's too much. For avoidant folks, I think that that just becomes more trouble than it's worth. And reminding ourselves that there is a really different baseline in terms of need to be in a relationship and if aloneness is comfortable, that is the comfort zone.
Stephanie Rigg [00:15:37]:
For a lot of people with avoidant patterns, the being in a relationship is the thing that is challenging them. And so as soon as the relationship becomes consistently tense and strained and conflict ridden, and they're feeling like they're under attack the whole time or like they're constantly being dragged into a three hour long conversation every other day where someone is highly emotional and you're going around in circles. That is not what an avoidant person, they don't get a lot out of that and that can just very quickly tip the scales in favour of this isn't working, this is costing me more than it's giving to me, it's too much, it's too exhausting, it's not working. And so when the relationship has been like that in the lead up to a breakup, the first thing that most avoidant people are going to feel is a sense of relief. There will be this sense of like, okay, I was feeling all of that stress and now that stress is alleviated and I feel free again and I feel relief and it's not like free, woohoo, I'm going to go out and sleep with a bunch of people. I mean, some people might do that and whatever, but I think that to suggest that it's freedom in the sense of, oh, now I'm single, like it's party time. I don't think that that's true. I think it is just a lifting of a huge emotional burden that comes with relational tension over time.
Stephanie Rigg [00:17:06]:
And so for avoidant folks, there is this sense of probably peace and relief retreating to an environment of aloneness where they feel like they're back in control and they don't feel like a failure and a disappointment. Someone's always upset with them and wanting things from them that they can't give. And so you might see that an avoidant person after a breakup is likely to seem pretty fine, particularly at the start. So they might seem to be pretty okay. And you might see them socialising a lot, they might distract themselves because like you, they don't know how to be with those big emotions that might be underneath that relief, but their way of coping with that. Whereas the anxious person tries to get away from those emotions by obsessing over the intellectualization of them and trying to find information and focusing on the other person and trying to solve the problem. Avoidant person tends to avoid and distract and numb. So they might go out and socialise a lot, they might throw themselves into work, they might take up a new hobby or something.
Stephanie Rigg [00:18:17]:
They might just go all in on other areas of life in a way that from the outside, if you're looking at them and you're following them on social media or whatever, you might look and just see them seemingly being fine and looking even like they're thriving. And that's probably pretty excruciating for you if you are more anxious. Because again, as I said at the start, you are interpreting what you are seeing through the lens of what it would mean if you were doing that. So for you, if you a week after a breakup were out socialising heaps and maybe going on a trip or all of those things are unfathomable because you're in this really dark place, you're going, wow, for me to be in that place, I must not care at all. I would have to not care at all. I would have to not miss them at all. I would have to have not even really loved them. I didn't value the relationship.
Stephanie Rigg [00:19:09]:
That's the only way that I could be ready for all of that. But that is just such a projection coming from a very different starting point and a very different experience and emotional landscape and way of coping with things. So while that's likely to be the avoidant person's initial experience, what will often happen is that a few weeks might go by, a month might go by, and then they might start to kind of really come to terms with what's happened. And that initial experience of relief might become something a little bit more sad, or having that grief come up, probably not in the same intense, overwhelming or consuming way as anxious person would, but still like having the, oh, that's sad, I miss them. And this is where you'll see people reaching out or they might like your Instagram story or send a casual message saying, hey, how are you? And I always get anxious attaches going, why would they send me a message? Why would they do that? I haven't heard from them for three weeks and all of a sudden they get this random message. Often that is what's happening, that they've kind of come through the fog of that initial period and realised what's happened. And again, people go, oh, if they missed me, does that mean we should get back together? You know, a lot of you would know that my take on that is not that getting back together is a bad thing or that you should never do that. But I think it's got to be based on a whole lot more than missing each other.
Stephanie Rigg [00:20:44]:
Because that's just going to lead you right back to where you started and you'll be in the same patterns and the same dynamics. As soon as you have that temporary relief of getting back together, you haven't actually resolved anything substantively. There's a really good chance that you'll be right back where you started. But that is kind of the arc or the trajectory that you could expect from a lot of folks with avoidant patterns is that they will seem to be fine and then they might have a bit of a hangover. But it's kind of a delay because of that initial experience of relief and feeling like, oh, thank God I'm not in the midst of that really high conflict, intense, overwhelming dynamic, which is what the tone of a lot of these relationships are right before a breakup. So I hope that that's been helpful in giving you a bit of a sense of those contrasting experiences. Again, I offer that with a view to helping you depersonalise and maybe cheque yourself on those projections and those stories you're telling yourself about like, oh, that's what their behaviour means, they're fine. That means that I'm pathetic and I loved them more and they never cared about me again.
Stephanie Rigg [00:21:58]:
That just really adds to our suffering and is not helpful at all. If this episode is something that you are really needing right now and you're in the midst of a breakup, definitely cheque out my Higher Love course. It's a breakup course. It's very comprehensive and it also has a bonus masterclass called Attachment Styles and Breakups, which is about 45 minutes and is more of a deep dive on the conversation we've had here today. And you can use the code Phoenix to save $150 on Higher Love, so you can enter that code at the checkout and you will save $150. So sending so much love to anyone who is going through a breakup. I know that it's tough. In a couple of weeks time, maybe next week, I'm going to do a Q and A episode all on breakup.
Stephanie Rigg [00:22:44]:
So covering a few different topics because it is one of the areas that I get a lot of requests for support from, from people who listen to the show and who follow me on Instagram and all of those things. So keep an ear out for that if that is something you're going through at the moment. Otherwise, so grateful for you all being here and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys. 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 a five star rating. It really does help so much.
Stephanie Rigg [00:23:26]:
Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.