#271: Fearful Avoidant Attachment: Guidance for Partners (Part 4)
When we talk about fearful avoidant attachment, we’re often focused on the inner experience of the person with those patterns: the longing for closeness, the fear of intimacy, the push-pull, the overwhelm, the shame.
But what if you’re on the other side of that dynamic?
When we talk about fearful avoidant attachment, we’re often focused on the inner experience of the person with those patterns: the longing for closeness, the fear of intimacy, the push-pull, the overwhelm, the shame.
But what if you’re on the other side of that dynamic?
What if you’re partnered with someone who has fearful avoidant tendencies, and you deeply want to support them — but you also find yourself feeling anxious, confused, destabilised, or like you’re starting to lose yourself in the process?
This is a delicate relational dynamic, particularly if you lean more anxiously attached. The connection can feel incredibly deep and meaningful, but also unpredictable. One moment there’s closeness, intensity, and emotional intimacy. The next, your partner may pull away, shut down, disappear into themselves, or seem suddenly unsure.
And for someone with anxious attachment patterns, that inconsistency can be profoundly triggering.
The Risk of Over-Functioning
If you’re anxiously attached, you may be especially prone to stepping into the role of caretaker, fixer, or emotional manager in this kind of relationship.
You might find yourself monitoring your partner’s mood, trying to prevent them from withdrawing, tiptoeing around their sensitivities, or working overtime to keep the relationship stable.
And while that may come from a loving place, it can easily become self-abandonment.
When your relationship starts to orbit around someone else’s fear, chaos, or dysregulation, it becomes very easy to lose touch with your own needs, boundaries, and inner steadiness.
Supporting someone does not mean organising your entire life around their struggles.
Why Fearful Avoidant Dynamics Can Feel So Intense
Fearful avoidant attachment often carries a blueprint that says: I deeply want connection, but connection is dangerous.
So when closeness builds, part of them may crave it — while another part becomes overwhelmed by it.
That can create a familiar push-pull pattern: they come close, the connection feels beautiful and deep, and then suddenly they hit the brakes.
For the anxious partner, this can activate a very old wound: connection is here, but it might be taken away at any moment.
That anticipation can lead to hypervigilance, protest behaviours, emotional spiralling, or an urge to pull the other person back as quickly as possible.
But this is where your own work becomes essential.
Be the Anchor — For Yourself First
One of the most supportive things you can bring to this dynamic is consistency and steadiness.
Not because it’s your job to heal your partner. Not because you should have to be the “mature one” while they struggle. But because being grounded serves you, too.
If your partner is dysregulated and you join them in the chaos, the whole relationship can become unstable. Their withdrawal triggers your panic, your panic triggers their shame or overwhelm, and both of you end up reinforcing the very patterns you’re trying to heal.
Instead, your work is to remain connected to yourself.
That means noticing when you’re starting to over-function. Noticing when their mood becomes your mood. Noticing when you’re trying to control their emotional state so that you can feel okay.
You can care deeply without becoming consumed.
Hold Boundaries with Compassion
A fearful avoidant partner may carry a lot of shame around relationships. They may already believe they’re “bad at love,” that they hurt people, or that they’re better off alone.
Because of that, it can feel tempting to soften everything, excuse everything, or avoid naming hurtful behaviour because you don’t want to push them further into shame.
But compassion without boundaries is not love. It’s self-abandonment.
You can say:
I know this is hard for you. I can see that you’re struggling. And I also can’t be in a relationship where you disappear for days without communication.
Or:
I love you, and I want to work through this with you. But I won’t continue to tolerate outbursts, withdrawal, or behaviour that repeatedly hurts me.
This kind of loving accountability can be deeply supportive. It creates guardrails. It communicates: I see your pain, and I also respect myself.
Don’t Make Their Healing Your Job
A relationship can absolutely be a container for growth. Ideally, both partners are invited into deeper awareness, responsibility, and security.
But there has to be a shared commitment.
If your partner brings their fears, wounds, and coping strategies into the relationship, and you respond by burying your own needs so you can hold everything for them, the relationship becomes imbalanced.
That imbalance often leads to resentment, exhaustion, and a sense of powerlessness.
You are allowed to have needs.
You are allowed to have deal breakers.
You are allowed to say, This is what I require in order for this relationship to feel safe and workable for me.
That is not abandoning them. That is staying connected to yourself.
The Healthiest Support Starts With Self-Honouring
Supporting a fearful avoidant partner is not about tiptoeing, fixing, chasing, rescuing, or endlessly accommodating.
It’s about bringing steadiness, honesty, compassion, and boundaries.
It’s about inviting them into a healthier relational vision — without dragging them there.
It’s about recognising their struggle while also refusing to make yourself smaller in order to keep the peace.
Because the most secure relationships are not built on one person sacrificing themselves to stabilise the other.
They are built on mutual responsibility, emotional honesty, and the willingness of both people to grow.
And sometimes the most loving thing you can do — for them and for yourself — is to stop participating in the patterns that keep you both stuck.
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[00:01:12]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode we are talking once again about fearful avoidant attachment. This is part four in the series that I've been doing over the past month or two around fearful avoidant attachment. If you are just joining us for this instalment, you might want to go back and revisit parts one to three first. Part one was all about the inner world of fearful avoidant attachment. Part two was all about how fearful avoidant attachment tends to manifest relationally. Part three was about healing fearful avoidant attachment.
[00:01:47]:
So where to focus if you are wanting to heal those patterns? And this part four is going to be all about what you can do as someone's partner. As in if you are partnered with someone who has fearful avoidant patterns, how you can support them in their healing, in feeling secure, but also how you can support yourself to best navigate that relational dynamic. Because it's not always easy and it can bring up certain challenges for you, particularly if you are someone who leans more towards anxious attachment, which will often be the case, particularly amongst folks in my audience, which tend to be overwhelmingly, anxiously attached. So today's episode is going to be all about that, how you can support someone in their healing. And I do think that we ultimately want our relationships to be a container for growth for both of us and for the relationship itself. But as I Said, I think we have to have certain guardrails in place for ourselves, if nothing else, because so many of us with anxious attachment patterns who can be drawn to people who struggle in relationships with their own demons or, you know, intimacy, fears, those sorts of things, we can be drawn towards that and then find ourselves in these codependent kind of dynamics where we are caretaking or over functioning or really orbiting someone else's struggle, chaos, drama. And it's easy for us to lose ourselves in that process and then that feeds into our own patterns around self abandonment, around self loss. And that can be part of our own work.
[00:03:24]:
And for a lot of us with anxious patterns, that's a huge part of our own work, is catching ourselves when we're starting to do that and learning what a healthier and more balanced way of being in relationships might look like. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get into it, a final reminder that tomorrow I am hosting a free live workshop on understanding anxious attachment protest behaviours. At the time of recording, which is still a good few days out, we have over 1200 people registered. So I'm really looking forward to it. I am going to have to upgrade my Zoom subscription to accommodate all of those people, but I'm really looking forward to gathering with so many of you and I'm really chuffed that so many people are keen to come along and learn from me about anxious attachment protest behaviours. For those who aren't familiar or don't know if that's something that you might want to come along to. Protest behaviours are all of those things that we do when insecurity takes over, when we're feeling really unsure in our relationships and we're trying to elicit some sort of reassurance, we're trying to test our partner, we're trying to restore connection, but we often go about it in ways that are really counterproductive and can actually, actually push someone away.
[00:04:33]:
I think if you're listening to this and you know that you do that, all of those quote unquote sabotaging behaviours that, you know, afterwards, when we can maybe see a little clearer, we go like, oh, why did I do that? Why did I spin out of control? Why did I spiral? Why did I act out in that way? Of course, in the moment, it feels so overpowering. And so this workshop's going to be diving into why we do that. What's really going on underneath the surface? What needs are we trying to meet in those moments when we're feeling so powerless of control. And what would it look like to approach all of that in a healthier way so that we don't feel this sense of panic and desperation and need to get something from our partner that oftentimes they're not in a position to give us. Or at least the way that we package up our needs and kind of hurl them at our partner makes it really hard for them to meet us in those moments and give us the reassurance that we're craving. So I'm going to be talking about all of that at this workshop. I would love for you to come along. If you haven't yet registered and you're listening to this episode when it's coming out, definitely jump in and register at the last minute.
[00:05:39]:
There should still be space for you and I really look forward to hopefully seeing you there. Okay, so without further ado, let's get into the fourth and final instalment of this deep dive series on fearful avoidant attachment. So, as I said in the introduction, I think we need to break this into two sections. And that's, you know, what we can do as a partner to support the person who has fearful avoidant attachment. How we can create a sense of safety and security for them in recognition of the fact that their blueprint around relationships is heavily skewed towards suspicion, mistrust, a fear of intimacy, a sense of deep vulnerability, really longing for closeness, but absolutely fearing it. And so we get all of those push pull behaviours that we've discussed in the previous episodes around this. But I want to first start with the caveats and the guardrails because I actually think that that's more important, arguably, than what you can do for them. I think you have to go into, yes, what can I do for them? How can I support them? First, knowing that you are going to support yourself, because that's the ball that's easier for us to drop as people with more anxious attachment patterns.
[00:06:52]:
And as always, I share this with so much love and compassion and personal experience. So this is. None of this stuff is something to be ashamed of. And it's not about, you know, shifting blame around. It's just recognising how our own stuff can play into dysfunctional dynamics that we ultimately don't want for ourselves. But sometimes we have a bit of a blind spot around, you know, our role in creating or perpetuating the dynamic. So I think one of the really big pieces that we have to watch for in relationship with someone with fearful avoidant patterns. Again, I'm mostly Talking to anxiously attached people.
[00:07:31]:
Here is the codependent, over functioning, tiptoeing piece. So someone with fearful, avoidant patterns is likely to bring with them a level of internal chaos or volatility, as we've talked about. They'll come close and there'll be this really enthusiastic deep connection. They'll want to really rush in and go deep. And the connection might feel so amazing, sort of like this soulmate quality of like, I see you and you see me, and this feels so good to us both. But while the person with anxious patterns is likely to just keep putting their foot on the accelerator, off the back of that deep connection, and wanting to continue to deepen and get even closer and spend all of our time together, it's almost like when the fearful, avoidant person touches that depth, something in them says, hit the brake or pull back, right? And so while you're both going in the same direction and at the same pace up until a point, the person with fearful avoidant patterns then suddenly lurches on the brake. And there can be this whiplash as they then pull back. And that pattern can play out again and again over time.
[00:08:39]:
It can be cyclical. It's not just something that happens early on, but there can be this sense of going close and then pulling back because their system doesn't fully trust in the closeness. And what that does for the person on the other side, naturally, is create a level of anticipatory anxiety as you are bracing for them to pull back. So every time you then get close, you're waiting for them to pull away. You're waiting for the connection to be withdrawn or taken away, which of course, is really painful and touches into some of your oldest wounds. As someone with anxious attachment patterns, if you've been around here a while, you will have heard me speak about how that inconsistency and unreliability of connection is really at the heart of the anxious attachment pattern and blueprint. You know, the connection is sometimes there, and when it is, it feels amazing, but it always seems to be taken away from me. And I don't know when that's going to happen or why it happens.
[00:09:37]:
And so I become really, really hypersensitive to everything that surrounds the relationship. And I'm just waiting for something bad to happen and working overtime to try and prevent that. And so that is a really easy pattern for you to fall into in relationship with who comes close and then pulls away. And because the closeness is likely to be really real and really deep and really nourishing and feels so good. That really will mirror your original blueprint around relationships. So that's something to really watch for. Because of course, whenever we're in a relationship dynamic that does mirror our earliest family system or our earliest blueprints around love and relationships and connection, naturally we are going to default to all of the ways that we learn to protect ourselves and make the most of a less than ideal situation. Which is to say, it's really hard to shift into something healthier when you are up against something that mirrors the old way.
[00:10:39]:
And so it's going to take a lot of really intentional work for you to shift away from that, to not just be sucked into your part of that dance in response to someone whose own patterns and their own inner world makes them likely to come close and then pull away. Because it's just so easy for you to go into that, that thing of massively over functioning and trying to solve their moodiness or bring them close or go into detective mode when they pull away slightly or they're being slightly uncommunicative or you feel like you can't reach them, your system's going to go into overdrive. And if you just follow that impulse to go into overdrive, then that's going to lead you to very familiar places that you probably don't want to go. So I say all of that just to acknowledge that that's a tricky backdrop to be working with. And for anyone who doesn't really know me or know my relationship, I have historically had anxious attachment patterns. My partner Joel has fifth flavour patterns. So, like, I know this dance very well and it's still something that I have to monitor in myself because that wiring, that architecture to sort of lean towards, if Joel is ever withdrawn into himself, even temporarily, like, that impulse still arises in me. And I really have to watch that and not follow the trailhead, because I know where it goes and I know that it doesn't actually serve me or him for me to then go and sort of hover over him and try and bring him out of himself.
[00:12:14]:
That's not my job. And so that sort of leads me into what to do instead. And I think that one of the most effective and supportive things that you can do for yourself and for your partner is to really try and embody consistency and sturdiness. So because someone with fearful, avoidant patterns has this imprint that relationships are untrustworthy. And as much as I want them, they also cause me great pain. And so I have to be wary of them, I sort of have to fear them and protect myself against them, even though I really actually desire to have that close connection. And because they have likely experienced unpredictability in a way that was quite unsafe. So by contrast.
[00:13:04]:
Or to distinguish from anxious attachment, which was probably overall safe, but there was something unreliable. So there was like, I didn't always know if I was going to get my needs met, but I sort of got them met enough of the time to develop a positive association with love and connection. For fearful avoidance, there tends to be something that felt really unsafe. So that can range from childhood trauma and abuse to other things in the family system, where it was just very chaotic, very dysregulated. Maybe parents had their own mental health struggles, or there was a lot of financial insecurity and just high stress all the time. And a child absorbs that. And it sort of tunes their nervous system to this constant hypervigilance and sense of this isn't safe. And I can't really rest or trust even at the same time as I feel really vulnerable and reliant on the people around me, but they don't seem to have the capacity to help me.
[00:13:58]:
And so recognising that something you can do as the partner of someone with that attachment style is embody safety and sturdiness and consistency. Because the last thing that their system needs is to feel like they're in a roller coaster of unpredictable, volatile emotions and outbursts and all of the things that is likely to mirror their earliest environment and therefore is likely to entrench them in their patterns. And so you might be thinking at that point, well, why do I have to be the one to embody safety and sturdiness for them? Why shouldn't they be doing that for me? And I understand that. I really do. So often people will say to me, like, why do I have to be the one who's emotionally mature and patient and regulated? Why shouldn't my partner be doing that? And of course, we don't want to be doing that for them. We want to be doing that for us. Right. It doesn't actually serve you to be erratic and volatile and have these big outbursts and be dysregulated.
[00:14:57]:
So I guess I'd just put to you that you're doing, doing that. Yes, that's going to be supportive for them, because having that safety is going to allow them to build more trust over time in the fact that relationships can be consistent and reliable and safe and predictable. But equally, you need that lesson as well. And it actually serves you to be embodying that safety and that sturdiness and that's a huge part of your work anyways, kind of learning to be your own anchor. So I think that that's a big piece of. For both of you, but that will be really helpful for someone with fearful avoidant patterns is to feel like you are sort of rock solid rather than feeling like you join their chaos. If they are in this sort of tornado of conflicting emotions and they're dysregulated. If you sort of jump in the whirlpool with them and then the whole relationship gets sucked into whatever is going on with them and you start mirroring their dysregulation, that's not helpful.
[00:15:59]:
It's not helpful for you, it's not enjoyable for you. But that is going to just entrench all of those cycles that I was describing earlier. So as much as possible you want to remain anchored even in the face of their dysregulation. And again, that's a practise for anxiously attached people, no matter who you're in relationship with. Because it's so easy to get sucked into the codependent thing of feeling like their moods are your moods or that you need to solve every emotion that they have that feels like it threatens the relationship. Your work is actually, actually to not be unaffected by the person you're in a relationship with. I don't think that's realistic, I don't think that's biologically what goes on. Naturally we are going to absorb some of the energy of the person we're in partnership with.
[00:16:42]:
But there needs to be some level of boundary there so that you don't feel like this porous sponge that takes in all of their stuff all of the time. Because that obviously makes you so invested in controlling their emotional state and how they are that you lose yourself. That's just, just, you know, that is the self abandonment spiral that so many of us get sucked into. So we need to be able to find some level of separateness and emotional delineation so that we don't take on all of their stuff as ours and make it ours to solve because we're uncomfortable with it or it makes us feel threatened in some way. I think another really important piece, and this is certainly something that I've practised in my own relationship and it sort of flows from what I was just saying is having clear boundaries and standing up for yourself and doing that in a way that balances compassion. So as we've talked about in the previous episodes in this series, fearful avoidance tend to carry a heavy burden of shame. It's really easy for them to collapse into the storey of, I'm just bad at relationships, I always hurt people, I'm better off alone and go into that sort of shaming, blaming storey that allows them to kind of have an exit and retreat into themselves. And I think it's really important for you, in light of that tendency to be able to see someone in those moments and not call them out, but not rush in to try and pull them back off the ledge.
[00:18:08]:
And again, to really hold your centre and hold your boundaries, but do that in a way that's really compassionate. So being able to say to someone, I see how hard this is for you. I know that this is uncomfortable, I know that this is pushing you to the limits and I want to be able to help you, but I can't be in a relationship where you disappear for days or weeks or I can't be in a relationship where you don't speak to me or where you get really angry and have these outbursts or whatever the thing is that feels like it's threatening the relationship or it's not working or it's dysfunctional or you both know that it's like, just doesn't belong in the kind of relationship that you want. And as a side note, people with fearful avoidant patterns will often act out in those ways that we would kind of put under the umbrella of sabotage, self sabotage, because there is this piece within them that's like, well, if I sort of blow it all up, then at least the person didn't leave me. At least I can feel some sort of warped sense of control over the situation. Because feeling out of control, feeling powerless, is such a terrifying thing for someone with those patterns who have this imprint that, like, love is dangerous. So being able to kind of call someone out, not in an accusatory way, not in an attacking way, just saying, like, this can't go on and actually meaning it. And I think, again, this is one of the real growth edges for someone with anxious patterns in this relationship dynamic because your instinct is to hold on and you tend to go into this spiralling place of like, you can't do this anymore, and pleading and begging and getting really emotionally expressive and all of that.
[00:19:58]:
You really lose your power when you go into that mode. And again, I say this so lovingly. Your power doesn't come from pleading and begging with someone to stop doing something. You need to be able to say from this really grounded place, this can't go on. I will not continue to tolerate this the next time. X, Y, Z, thing happens that's going to be a deal breaker or whatever other consequence. It doesn't have to be the relationship ending, but really having a boundary, having these constraints in place so that someone does start to experience loving accountability for their dysfunctional behaviours. And I think lovingly calling someone in almost and saying like, I love you, I get this is hard, but that's just not on, that's not okay.
[00:20:49]:
And it wouldn't be loving for me towards myself, I wouldn't be respecting myself if I continued to put up with that. And I don't think it's actually helping you either because that's, you know, shitty behaviour that can't go on. And I actually think that that's one of the best things that you can do to support someone with fearful, avoidant patterns in your relationship is to have those parameters in place and to be able to have those conversations from this sturdy place within you, from this sense of, you know, self honouring and seeing the human in front of you who you love, who's struggling and also recognising that you know you're not going to go into this place of tiptoeing around their sensitivities and continuing to allow to swollen their dysfunction and to hurt you in the process, you know, just because you understand why they're doing it or you see the struggle right. Again, I think that's really the risk for anxiously attached people is we go so heavy on the compassion for them and their childhood trauma and their intimacy fears, and so it becomes organised around them and their fears and their capacity and then, you know, we do inevitably lose ourselves in the process and end up resenting them for it, notwithstanding the fact that we were such a key piece in setting up that status quo. So having a sense of your own deal breakers and your own requirements and the things that you really need in order for the relationship to feel workable and standing behind that. I think that so often when I'm supporting students in my programmes in these relationship dynamics and it is very common, the anxious and fearful avoidant combination that seems to be one that comes up again and again, and particularly when there's this really deep connection that then feels so hard to let go of because you've tasted that. And so everything within you just wants to get back to the connection rather than let go of it. And so you naturally become very motivated to bring them back or to try one more time, all of those things.
[00:22:59]:
I really do think that so much of the work is in having a sense of conviction and being quite steadfast in what I know I need in order to feel okay in a relationship and inviting someone into that vision and being really clear around it, and to the extent that they see that and recognise that and want to join you in that and they have a similar vision, then sure, you can absolutely work through both of your baggage, so to speak, that you might be bringing. But there needs to be a sense of joint endeavour there. If it is them bringing all of the baggage and then you just stuffing your baggage in a closet so that you can hold their baggage for them, not sustainable, won't work. And you then become so, as I said, invested in controlling them and making them be happy and making them love you and making them emotionally stable that the relationship becomes so skewed and so imbalanced and they have all the power, one bad mood can totally railroad the whole thing and send you spiralling out of control. It's just not a healthy way to be in relationship. And so we do have work to do there ourselves in terms of the way that we show up to that and really taking responsibility for how that can lure us into our own patterns and really being quite firm with ourselves around like, nope, I'm not going to do that because I know what that does to me. And it also doesn't help help your partner. It doesn't help this person that you love and care about for the whole relationship to be organised around their chaos and their struggle because that will keep them in it and kind of almost enable them to be in the volatility because there are no guardrails.
[00:24:44]:
They're stopping them. There's no accountability. Okay, guys, so I'm going to stop there. I really hope that this has been helpful. Thank you for all of the beautiful feedback that you've sent in about this series so far. I'm really glad that it's resonated with so many of you. And as I said, final reminder about tomorrow's workshop shop. I would absolutely love to see you there to connect with you, to answer your questions.
[00:25:06]:
But otherwise, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you again next time
Keywords from Podcast Episode
fearful avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, attachment patterns, healing attachment, codependency, over functioning, self abandonment, self loss, relationships, intimacy fears, protest behaviours, emotional regulation, safety in relationships, consistency, sturdiness, boundaries, childhood trauma, emotional chaos, push pull behaviours, trust issues, unreliability, hypervigilance, self sabotage, relationship dynamics, emotional maturity, relationship blueprint, self honouring, deal breakers, loving accountability, emotional delineation
#270: How to Remain Hopeful After Heartbreak & Bad Dating Experiences (Ask Steph)
#270: How to Remain Hopeful After Heartbreak & Bad Dating Experiences (Ask Steph)