Ask a Queer Therapist: Is it my Avoidant Attachment Style, or is it Time to Break Up?
“I’m struggling in my relationship with my partner and feeling like I need space and maybe even to break up. My partner is saying that I’m just avoidant and have an avoidant attachment style. How do I know the difference between my avoidant attachment style and being unhappy in my relationship?”
Dear Stay or Go,
Let’s start with the basics. For those who may not know, attachment theory was developed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1950’s. In an overly simplistic way, attachment theory is a theoretical framework for understanding the ways in which infants and young children develop emotional attachments with their primary caregivers, and how disruptions in those early attachments might then impact how we experience relationships in our adult lives. The most commonly recognized attachment styles are Secure, Anxious, Avoidant and Disorganized.
People with an avoidant attachment style may be seen as avoiding emotional intimacy, can be highly independent and self-reliant, might be conflict avoidant or think highly of themselves. Is this true for everyone with an avoidant attachment style? Of course not.
Now back to your letter. I’m just going to assume that you agree with your partner that you have an avoidant attachment style, but I’ll admit that I wrote a whole paragraph interrogating that issue, then deleted it. I do, however, want to mention that you say it’s your partner’s opinion that the issue is that you’re “just avoidant and have an avoidant attachment style,” and without having any other context, to me that reads as a bit dismissive. Now maybe your partner is correct, but if the two of you were seeing me for couples therapy and you brought this issue up and your partner responded with, “this is just their avoidant attachment style,” I would want to explore that statement.
Specifically, why does it seem difficult for your partner to consider that, perhaps, there are things in the relationship that are making you unhappy?
Having an avoidant attachment style doesn’t mean that you can’t have issues in your relationship. However, if your first instinct is to break up with your partner rather than try to work through the issues that are making you unhappy, your partner might have a point.
You might have an avoidant attachment style. You also might be unhappy in your relationship. These two things are not mutually exclusive, so I think it’s also important that we keep that in mind.
But the question of how do you know if you’re being avoidant vs unhappy can be quite complicated. People with avoidant attachment often flee from relationships when the level of emotional intimacy becomes more than they can tolerate, so phrases like, “Trust your gut,” for example, don’t apply in these situations because your gut might be an unreliable narrator. Or perhaps better put, you might not know what story your gut is narrating.
Your gut (nervous system) is giving you data: something is off, I’m feeling deeply uncomfortable/unhappy/dissatisfied. Your mind is developing an interpretation of that data: I need to end this relationship. But feelings aren’t facts, so while you’re right to pay attention to these feelings, you need to slow down so that you can really tune in to understand what they mean: I know that I don’t feel happy (or safe, fulfilled, satisfied etc) right now. I feel like this has something to do with my relationship. I’m not sure why, or what these feelings mean, yet. I need to understand more about these feelings so that I know what to do.
If you’ve never explored these questions in therapy, I highly encourage you to start doing so now (and even if you have, it sounds like now is a good time to get some extra support). Understanding your attachment style is a good place to start, but ever since the book Attached came out in 2010, people have become armchair attachment theory experts, underestimating how much more complicated the work of healing attachment wounds really is. I’m not saying this is you, just something to think about. In order to work through the questions you’re asking yourself about your relationship, you need to do real, deep work to address the activation in your nervous system that occurs when you’re faced with emotional intimacy, and that is difficult to do on your own. There are many therapy modalities that do this well (IFS, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, AEDP) and one may resonate more with you than another.
I just spent another twenty minutes writing an exercise for you to try that might help you explore some ways to tune in to whether or not the issues you’re having are about your attachment style or about the relationship, but I kept picking at it and deleting parts of it because it just wasn’t sitting right with me. The reason is because of what I just named above–this really isn’t an intellectual exercise, and people with avoidant attachment styles tend to lean into intellectualizing, so I don’t want to encourage that. I don’t know how long you and your partner have been together. If it’s long enough to consider couples therapy,* and you haven’t yet tried it, you might want to consider it. This would be a good place to explore some of the questions you might be wrestling with:
What are the issues you’re having in the relationship?
Are you each really hearing what the other has to say, or are you dismissing each other’s concerns, fears and frustrations in service of your own (different) framework of how you understand the relationship?
Are each of your needs being met–physically, emotionally, socially, sexually?
Do you feel valued by each other?
And the list goes on. You don’t need to be in couples therapy to have these conversations, but if you’re on the verge of a break up, it will probably be easier to talk with someone skilled at facilitating these types of dialogues.
Ultimately the question you're contemplating is both about you and about this relationship, so ideally you’ll be able to explore it equally from both sides. It’s important that you and your partner give yourselves the time and the space to understand your own needs and desires separate from the relationship, and that you have the time and space to explore those things together. It will definitely take a lot of work, but if you can get your nervous system to feel regulated (enough) in the face of emotional intimacy, and therefore trust your gut to be a reliable narrator of the story it’s telling you, that’s when you’ll have the answer to your question.
Warmly,
A Queer Therapist
*Note: It’s certainly not my place to decide how long folks should be in a relationship before they consider couples therapy, but from my experience if a couple “needs” therapy to stay together and they’ve been dating less than a year, they should probably just break up.