#155 Fearful Avoidant and Anxious Attachment: Key Similarities & Differences
In today's episode, we're diving into fearful avoidant (AKA disorganised) attachment and how it differs from anxious attachment.
We’ll explore how both types are driven by a fear of abandonment and intense emotions, yet differ in their approaches to intimacy, conflict resolution, and communication.
Whether you identify with one of these attachment styles or are in a relationship with someone who does, this episode will give you valuable insights into the dynamics at play and how to navigate them for healthier connections.
Fearful Avoidant and Anxious Attachment: Key Similarities & Differences
Understanding attachment styles is crucial for anyone looking to improve their relationships and gain insight into their emotional responses. Two attachment styles often discussed together are anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment. While they share some similarities, there are also significant differences that impact relationship dynamics and coping strategies.
High Anxiety About Relationships
A common thread between anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment is the high level of anxiety experienced in relationships. For both, relationships often do not feel safe. This anxiety can manifest differently, though. Anxiously attached individuals tend to feel preoccupied with their relationships, continually seeking reassurance and closeness to soothe their anxiety. Fearful avoidants, on the other hand, experience similar anxiety but may internalise it more, leading to erratic behaviours—sometimes drawing close to their partner and other times pushing them away.
Fears of Abandonment and Rejection
Both attachment styles harbour deep fears of abandonment and rejection. For anxiously attached individuals, this fear drives them to over-function in relationships, always striving to maintain closeness and avoid rejection. Fearful avoidants, however, might adopt an “I’ll leave you before you leave me” mentality, ending relationships pre-emptively to avoid the anticipated pain of abandonment. This self-protective strategy is a stark contrast to the anxious attachment’s drive to preserve relationships at nearly any cost.
Struggles with Voicing Needs and Setting Boundaries
A significant challenge that both styles share is difficulty in voicing needs and setting boundaries. Anxiously attached individuals often fall into people-pleasing and approval-seeking behaviours, avoiding conflict in an attempt to secure their partner’s affection. They might quietly resent unmet needs but continue giving and compromising. Fearful avoidants also struggle here, but their approach is slightly different. They might initially also over-give, but their resentment can explode into anger, causing them to view their partner as an adversary. This can lead to dramatic confrontations or sudden decisions to end the relationship, highlighting their fear of betrayal.
Emotional Regulation Difficulties
Emotional regulation is another area where these attachment styles demonstrate both similarity and difference. Both exhibit difficulty managing their emotions, experiencing extreme ups and downs. Anxiously attached individuals often look to their partners to regulate their emotions, feeling out of control when they perceive any threat to the relationship. This can create a sense of urgency to fix any issues immediately. Fearful avoidants, while also struggling with emotional regulation, direct their fear more towards perceived personal threats. This can result in fierce anger and volatility, driven by a deep sense of personal danger, which differs from the anxious attachment's relational focus.
Low Self-Worth and Shame
Low self-worth and shame are core wounds for both anxiously attached and fearful avoidants, but they manage these feelings differently. Anxiously attached people try to compensate for their low self-worth by seeking validation from their partners. They believe that if they can get their partner to love them deeply, it will resolve their feelings of inadequacy. Conversely, fearful avoidant individuals often avoid intimacy to shield themselves from confronting their shame. They might push people away, adhere to a narrative that they're better off alone, or leave relationships to avoid getting hurt.
Navigating Personal Development
Despite these challenges, individuals with both attachment styles are often driven to seek personal development. The feeling of being broken or not good enough can motivate them to explore self-help resources and look for ways to understand themselves better. For anxiously attached individuals, this journey often emphasises finding security in relationships. Fearful avoidants, while also seeking to understand themselves, may focus more on protective mechanisms and building internal resilience.
Understanding the Differences
While there are clear overlaps, the differences in how these attachment styles handle anxiety, fear, and self-worth can significantly impact their behaviours in relationships. Anxiously attached individuals cling to closeness and relationship security, often to the point of self-neglect. Fearful avoidants, in contrast, might sabotage closeness and push people away to self-protect. These strategies can lead to misunderstandings and complicated relationship dynamics, often leaving both parties feeling hurt and confused.
Conclusion
The similarities and differences between anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment offer valuable insights into relational behaviours and emotional coping strategies. Understanding these nuances can help individuals recognise their patterns, navigate their emotional responses better, and work towards healthier relationship dynamics. Recognising these patterns is the first step towards making informed changes that lead to more secure and fulfilling interpersonal connections.
Questions for Discussion & Reflection
How do you tend to cope with anxiety in your relationships? Do you find yourself leaning towards seeking closeness or pushing people away?
Reflect on a scenario when you felt deeply hurt or rejected in a relationship. How did you respond to those feelings of abandonment or rejection? Did your response align more with anxious attachment or fearful avoidant attachment strategies?
Are there instances where you've found it particularly challenging to voice your needs or set boundaries? How did this impact your relationship and your personal well-being?
Think about a time when you experienced extreme emotions within a relationship. How did you manage these emotions, and what effect did they have on your relationship dynamic?
Reflect on your self-worth and any underlying feelings of shame you might carry. How have these feelings influenced your behaviour in relationships, and what strategies do you use to cope with these emotions?
Have you ever found yourself over-functioning in a relationship to avoid feelings of abandonment? How has this affected your sense of self and your relational dynamics?
Consider a time when you may have distanced yourself from someone out of fear of being hurt or exposed. How did this affect the relationship and your emotional well-being?
Reflect on your journey of personal development. What drives you to seek understanding of yourself, and how has this journey influenced your attachment style and relationships?
How do you perceive and deal with threats to your emotional safety in relationships? Do you notice any patterns that align with anxious or fearful avoidant attachment?
In what ways do you either yearn for validation from your partner or push them away to protect your self-image? How do these behaviours connect to your deeper fears and insecurities?
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Join the waitlist for Healing Anxious Attachment
Check out my couples course, Secure Together (& save $200 with the code SECURE)
Save $150 on my Higher Love break-up course with the code PHOENIX
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:29]:
In today's episode, I am going to be talking all about some key similarities and differences between the anxious attachment style and the fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style. Now, I get possibly more requests about fearful avoidant attachment than anything else, which is saying something given that, a, I get a lot of requests about a lot of things, and, b, that the vast majority of my audience falls into the bucket of anxious attachment. But it is really one of those areas that seems to be maybe underdeveloped in online literature and content around attachment theory, and an area that I know a lot of people have an interest in and really identify with aspects of the fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style. And I'm really looking for resources specific to, attachment style, and I'm really looking for resources specific to that attachment style, because it can kind of get sidelined a little in favor of anxious and avoidant attachment being the 2 dominant insecure attachment styles. And I think that's in part because it's thought to only represent around 5% of the population, so it's obviously the smallest category, although I am a little skeptical as to those statistics. But nevertheless, I am heeding the call in this episode today, offering some insights into the ways in which anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment differ. I did do an episode ages ago, probably 2 years ago, about dismissive avoidant and fearful avoidant attachment and the ways in which those two differ.
[00:01:57]:
So if you're interested in kind of that side of the street, you can search for fearful avoidant attachment in the podcast, and you should be able to find that old episode as well. Okay. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Before I dive into that, an announcement, today is the day Healing Anxious Attachment is open for registration for the 8th round of the program. If you were already on the wait list, be sure to check your emails for the link. And if you didn't make it onto the wait list but you are keen to get in on the early bird pricing, you can still join that list by submitting your email on my website. That should be all relatively easy to find. But, yeah, I would love to see you inside the program.
[00:02:36]:
It really is, in my mind, very worthwhile. Of course, I'm biased. I recognize that. But the 2,000 plus students who've been through the program in the past 2 years can also attest to its value. And so if you're someone who struggles with anxious attachment and you are ready to really commit to making a change and gifting that to yourself, I'd highly recommend that you check it out, and join us now that registration is open. Okay. So let's dive into this conversation around key similarities and differences between anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment. Now I do wanna say at the outset that this is far from being an exhaustive list.
[00:03:11]:
You know, I sat down and brainstormed 5 and stopped there because it was getting long and unwieldy, and I think it'll be a long episode anyway. But I could have easily kept going because, obviously, this stuff is multifaceted. And, you know, I also wanna say at the outset, be wary of labels and generalizations. Now that might sound a little bit, I don't know, hypocritical given that I am speaking about a body of work that has labels and categorizations as a key part of its framework. But I suppose more so a reminder that you don't need to fit into a box. So you might listen to this and go, oh, I see that aspect of myself here, but I'm more aligned with that attachment style over there. I have so many people saying to me, like, is it possible for me to be this? And really, anything's possible. Right? You know what your experience is, so don't feel like you need to decipher yourself, and make yourself make sense, in the context of any given framework.
[00:04:10]:
Rather, we're just looking to understand I've said this before, you might have heard me frame it in this way, how have I learned to keep myself safe in relationships? What are the strategies that I have learned to respond to the relational environment that I find myself in? Okay. That's really all we're talking about with attachment styles. It just so happens that most of the time, people will have a fairly consistent set of strategies that fall into a broad style or pattern. But if you feel like you mix and match and maybe is different in one relationship to the next or one area of life compared to another, none of that is something that you need to solve for. It's all just about recognizing the patterns that we see in our own lives, figuring out how they might be inhibiting us from experiencing the kind of relationships that we want, and learning ways that feel more adapted to where we want to go. Okay. So the first similarity between anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment is that they both experience high anxiety about their relationships. So that might seem fairly obvious, but, really, that is core to anxious attachment, obviously, that there's a lot of preoccupation with the relationship and a lot of, kind of, stress and anxiety around the relationship, and so too is that the case for fearful avoidance.
[00:05:26]:
So while it might not look exactly the same way, and there may be some more internalized anxiety among fearful avoidant attachment, both attachment styles will experience a lot of anxiety around relationships in a general sense that relationships are not safe. The origin story of fearful avoidant versus anxious attachment can be quite different, but there is this common thread of not being able to trust in the safety of relationships, and therefore experiencing a lot of anxiety around relationships, intimate relationships in particular, this sense of something bad's gonna happen. I can't really rest in this space of the relationship. Now where they differ from each other in this respect is that most of the time, anxiously attached people will deal with that anxiety that they experience around their relationship by trying to get as close as possible. Right? They're trying to eliminate any distance, any gap, any uncertainty. They try and pull their partner close and keep them there. It's very much a control strategy in terms of how can I soothe this anxiety that I feel? And for the anxiously attached person, control comes with proximity and closeness. For the fearful avoidant attached person, what you might see is more of a either hot and cold strategy.
[00:06:36]:
So maybe I deal with my anxiety by pulling you close sometimes and pushing you away other times, or it might be, more consistent distancing strategies. They might lean more towards that avoidant end of the spectrum in, you know, I experience so much anxiety, but the way that I deal with that anxiety is through pushing away, through isolation, through avoidance. Right? You'll not see that very often among anxiously attached people, that they deal with their anxiety by pushing someone away, and to the extent that they do push someone away, it's usually a test to see if that person will pull them back. You know, I say to you, I can't do this anymore, only so that you beg me to stay, and that's really what I'm hoping for. Whereas the fearful avoidant, if they're pushing someone away and saying, I can't do this anymore, they might really mean it in that moment because that is their self protective strategy is to push the other person away. Okay. The second similarity between fearful avoidant and anxious attachment is that both attachment styles will share some core wounds, and in particular, fears around abandonment and rejection. So this is very much at the heart of anxious attachment.
[00:07:39]:
You will have heard me speak about that before, this fear of abandonment, that the person we love is maybe going to leave us literally, as in leave the relationship, or just not be there for us when we need them, so we're going to feel kind of emotionally abandoned or dropped. This is also common among fearful avoidant attachment, although maybe it might be less front and center. And what's really key here is that, again, the way that they process that fear or work with that fear for anxiously attached people, the fear of abandonment leads us to over function, work overtime to try and, you know, do everything humanly possible to prevent that abandonment from happening. So again, really trying to keep our partner close. Whereas the fearful avoidant attached person might have such a profound fear of being left, being not good enough, being rejected, that they're much more inclined to adopt a I'm gonna leave you before you can leave me kind of strategy. So they might end the relationship because they're so convinced that if my partner sees who I really am, then they're gonna leave me anyway. So I might as well do that first and maintain this sense of control over the situation and avoid the pain of rejection, the pain of loss, and so they're more likely to process that fear through distancing, through, you know, I'll beat you to it kind of thing. That's very unlikely to happen among anxiously attached people, who, as we've talked about, very rarely initiate the end of a relationship.
[00:09:15]:
And oftentimes, if an anxiously attached person does leave a relationship, it might be to go to another relationship. So they they don't often step into the void just because they're unhappy in the relationship. Okay. The next similarity between anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment is both really struggle to voice needs, to set boundaries, to advocate for themselves in a healthy, secure way in relationships. So, again, we've talked about this a lot in the context of anxious attachment on the show. You know, that I'm just gonna try and be easygoing, people pleasing, approval seeking, trying to fit in, trying to be liked. All of that is well established in the context of anxious attachment, and you may see that as well in fearful avoidant attachment to a point. And I think that this is really the key distinction, is that whereas anxiously attached people will just do that indefinitely, over give to the point of burnout, and they just keep going and going and going.
[00:10:12]:
While they might quietly be resentful and quietly harbor these stories of, it's so unfair, woe is me, victimhood around, my needs aren't being met, and people violate my boundaries, The fearful avoidant person is much more likely to snap, so they give and give and give, and then they might have this big moment where they almost become enraged, and the other person is seen very much as the enemy, as the person who's taking advantage of me. So that person who they've been giving to, who they've been boundaryless in respect of, all of a sudden, they are seen as this kind of villainous character who's out to get me, who is trying to hurt me. And we can really see the fear of betrayal that so many fearful avoidants have coming up there and driving, oftentimes, a really big response to feeling taken advantage of. And that's, again, where there's a bit of a fork in the road between anxious attachment and fearful avoidant attachment is, you know, the fearful avoidant might have a big blow up and blow up a relationship, and that can be not just romantic relationships, but friendships or work, might have a big falling out with someone because this story of, this person doesn't respect me, they're taking advantage of me', all of those things can feel so big and so true and so threatening to the fearful avoidant, and that tends to trump whatever value the relationship had. That self protection drive tends to trump that. So we can see there that for the anxiously attached person, no matter how resentful they get, there tends to be this override of, the relationship is still my priority. Even if I'm really unhappy in the relationship, even if I do feel like I'm being taken advantage of, I might stay in it and try to persuade and convince and beg and plead with my partner to show up for me to meet my needs, all of those things, but it's likely to be in more of a kind of fawning way rather than a big fight response, which is what we'll typically see with fearful avoidant attachment. Okay.
[00:12:13]:
That leads nicely into number 4, which is both struggle with emotional regulation and can experience really big extreme emotions. So we know that for anxiously attached people, emotional regulation can be very hard, and there's this sense of, you know, I derive my sense of safety from the relationship feeling okay, from my partner being happy with me, and provided that everything's okay there, I can feel relatively calm. But as soon as I perceive a threat related to my partnership, I start to feel very dysregulated, very out of control, and feel this overwhelming sense that I need to do something in order to fix the situation. Right? It's like, oh no, I'm, you know, on the Titanic and hurtling towards an iceberg, and I need to do something urgently, otherwise everything is going to come crashing down, and the panic can ensue there. For the fearful avoidant, it's probably not quite as directly related to a threat to the relationship. It's more likely to be, I'm perceiving a threat to myself, and oftentimes the relationship will be that threat, or your partner will feel like, this person's out to get me, they're going to hurt me, they don't respect me. There's just some sort of danger that I can't put my finger on, and I need to do something. And that can feel very visceral, and again, very urgent, and can drive really extreme emotions.
[00:13:37]:
You'll often find for fearful avoidant attachment that anger very quickly becomes almost rage, and it's like this you know, very, very big emotional response and can feel like a lot of emotional volatility. And certainly, inwardly, that is what a lot of fearful avoidants will describe, that the internal sense of chaos and feeling out of control is really pronounced. So while they share that emotionality, again, and this is a common theme that you'll see in the way that they differ, is that anxiously attached people do tend to have this sense of, like, big emotions, but I'm using my big emotions to try and get through to you. I'm using my big emotions to try to convey to you how much pain I'm in, in the hope that, you know, you'll change your behavior and you'll see me and everything will be fine again. Whereas, for someone with fearful avoidant attachment, the big emotions can just be kind of unbridled expression of fear, rage, overwhelm, whatever it might be. But it's typically not in this sense of I need to express my feelings, but ultimately in a way where I'm still trying to bring you closer. Again, it really might just be, like, a blowout of emotion and a really strong feeling of this person is my enemy. It's not so calculated, almost, in the way that it can be with anxious attachment of, I'm I'm trying to get through you.
[00:14:57]:
I'm still even though I'm so angry at you, you're so upset or inconsolable, I'm still really, like, yearning for you to wrap me up and tell me everything's gonna be okay and that you love me and you understand. It's not like trying to get validation from them. It is really just pure anger, and it's much more driven from this place of feeling personally threatened by the other. That makes sense when we consider the context, the kind of origin story of fearful avoidant attachment, which is typically the people closest to me were also threatening in some way, so there is this real internal struggle around trusting in the person that we love most. Okay. And the 5th and final similarity and difference is that both anxiously attached people and fearful avoidance will typically struggle with low self worth and shame. So a sense of there being something wrong with me, but fearful avoidance in particular will usually have some sort of story, whether it's front of mind or not, that they're broken, that they're bad, that they're defective, there's something wrong with them, and that can obviously drive a lot of behaviors in relationship. We've talked about that a lot on the podcast before.
[00:16:05]:
So that's a common thread that anxiously attached people and fearful avoidants will share. As a little side note, this is also perhaps what drives both attachment styles to typically be seekers, I would say, of, like, trying to understand themselves. That feeling of brokenness, there's something wrong with me, why is everything so hard for me, can often drive us to look for answers, and so anxiously attached people and fearful avoidants will often be very geared towards personal development and that kind of stuff, because they do have this hunger to understand themselves. Now, where they differ in terms of this low self worth and shame is, I think anxiously attached people, again, common theme here, try to make that feeling go away by trying to get someone to love them and choose them. So, if I can get my partner to really love me, you know, I can be the best partner in the world, and, you know, my partner will think that I'm amazing and will live happily ever after, then I won't have to feel unworthy and unlovable. I won't have to come into contact with that shame because I will have resolved it via getting someone to want me. Right? That tends to be the anxious attachment story, whether it's conscious or not. There's this sense of the way to resolve that wound within me that I am not good enough is to make someone think that I am good enough.
[00:17:27]:
And if I get that validation from them, then maybe I don't have to feel that way anymore. Whereas for the fearful avoidant, I think it's more likely that you'll see someone who struggles with shame and low self worth pushing away anything and anyone that might bring them into contact with that shame. So because the shame is so powerful and so overwhelming, and they're perhaps a little less inclined to attach to people and outsource all of their self worth to what one other person thinks of them, they tend to be a little bit more protective of their self image. That's the the avoidance streak coming in. You might find a fearful avoidant saying things like, I don't want to hurt you, you deserve better than me, or I'm better off alone because all I do is hurt people, I'm so broken, I'm so messed up. It's just best that I don't try in the first place, whereas anxiously attached people pretty much always gonna try and keep trying and keep trying and keep trying, because they do just have such a strong blueprint that, like, love is the answer, relationships are the answer. And no matter how broken they feel with respect to relationships, there is just this very, very strong imperative within them to seek out relationships and to feel comforted by intimate partnerships. Whereas, I think the fearful avoidant is more likely, of course, this isn't going to be true in every single case, but more likely to defend against those feelings of low self worth and shame by blocking intimacy, blocking closeness, whether that's through kind of staying away from relationships, more serious ones, or sabotaging them as they get more serious, more intimate, all of those things, they can just be more of a reluctance to go down a path that would require them to come into contact with that shame and that low self worth. So they may have stronger defenses against that rather than deploying the anxious strategy of just getting someone so close and trying to resolve it through relationship in in a sense of getting someone else to convince me of my worth. Okay. So those were 5 similarities and differences between fearful, avoidant, and anxious attachment. As I said, I feel like I could keep going easily with another 5, maybe I'll have to do a part 2 of this one. Let me know if this has been helpful, and I will certainly consider doing a follow-up or elaborating on these topics because I know, as I said, that there is a lot of interest in it and a lot of appetite for more content on fearful avoidant attachment. So do be sure to let me know if this was helpful. You can send me a message on Instagram.
[00:20:02]:
You can if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave little comments underneath individual episodes. And I should say, if you are someone who identifies maybe partly with anxious attachment, partly with fearful avoidant attachment. I always get questions when I'm launching Healing Anxious Attachment, my program, can you take that program if you're more fearful avoidant? I get that question so much that it's actually in the FAQs on the registration page. In short, I've had a lot of people take healing anxious attachment who either at the outset or, you know, partway through realize that they identify more with fearful avoidant. My honest answer is it's a course for anxiously attached people, and all of the examples are geared towards anxious attachment. But the core tools and practices that I teach in the program are the same ones that I'd be teaching for fearful avoidant attachment. So things like nervous system regulation, things like reprogramming of core beliefs, communication skills, boundaries, all of this stuff is common among the healing process for any insecure attachment style, I would argue. So there's certainly a lot of value still in the program to be gained by someone who maybe identifies more with fearful avoidant attachment, but you may just find that the examples don't fully land with you because they're speaking to the anxious attachment experience.
[00:21:18]:
And as we've talked about today, there are some key points of difference, particularly in how you respond to the fear. So while you might identify with the fear, the way that you, you know, have learned to deal with it might be slightly different. Okay. So thank you so much for joining me. Again, really hope that this has been helpful, and do let me know if it has been. But otherwise, I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks, guys.
[00:21:42]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you wanna 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 5 star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
On Attachment, attachment styles, relationship coach, Stephanie Rigg, insecure attachment, anxious attachment, fearful avoidant attachment, disorganized attachment, attachment theory, healing anxious attachment, relationships, intimacy, emotional regulation, boundaries, self worth, abandonment, rejection, origin story, personal development, low self worth, shame, nervous system regulation, reprogramming core beliefs, communication skills, people pleasing, core wounds, trust issues, emotional volatility, control strategies, relational anxiety, attachment patterns.