The Attachment Dance

I'm going to talk about the relational dance of the insecure attachment styles today. So, I'm going to describe exactly what happens when you're in a relationship when you have an insecure attachment style and your partner has an insecure attachment style. And I'm also going to describe how unfortunately you can become very vulnerable to limerence with this particular pattern.

And by way of introduction, I am Christine. I am in private practice in the UK. I am a registered member of the BACP, which is the British Association of Counselors and Psychotherapists, and I also work online. I teach internationally, and the classes and the groups that I do, they are the reason really that I've set up this channel. So if you've come through those classes, if you come through groups, hopefully this will be really interesting for you, and anybody else obviously, if you want to watch this, you're you're very, very welcome to.

So, I'm going to describe in four stages exactly what happens when you have, as I said, an insecure attachment style. I'm going to be describing it like this, okay? Just because usually I have a diagram. My diagram is two kind of circles. So, hopefully I'll make sense of it when I when I'm kind of using my hands here. So, what I'm going to talk about is when someone has an anxious preoccupied attachment, when they're in relationship with someone who has a dismissive, avoidant attachment. This is the kind of the the most common pairing that you will see between the insecure attachment styles. But I'm also going to describe what it's like if you're fearful avoidant, because if you're fearful avoidant, you will see that you really identify with the anxious cycle as well as the dismissive avoidance cycle.

Okay. So, what happens when two people with an insecure attachment style get together? So if you imagine someone who's anxious and someone who's dismissive avoidant, and you will know what this is like because usually there is this incredible chemistry between the two styles. There's this real sort of energetic pulse between you. It's like kind of two magnets finding each other. And I've often have had clients who sort of said to me, "Why, why does this always happen to me? Why am I always ending up with an avoidant?" And it's equally the same with avoidants kind of saying, "Why am I always with someone who's anxious?" And really, what's happening is this incredible pull towards being with someone who, when you are with them, you will experience your core fear. This is usually completely unconscious.

But of course, if you are someone who's anxious preoccupied, your core fear is abandonment. Now, how will you experience abandonment in relationship? Well, the easiest way to experience abandonment is to be with someone who's an avoidant, because they will trigger your abandonment. Now, this is unconscious. This is not something that we're kind of actively seeking consciously, but unconsciously, there's this there's this incredible pull to repeat the pattern of childhood. And it's the same thing with someone who's dismissive avoidant. Your core fear is engulfment. That's the feeling of being smothered. So the easiest way to experience engulfment in relationship is to be with someone who's anxious. As soon as you're with someone who's anxious, they'll be smothering you. They'll be asking for so much reassurance, and you'll feel really, really smothered. And that's how you're going to feel your engulfment.

Now, none of us actively kind of think, "Oh, there's a gorgeous person. I'm going to go out with them so that I can feel my core fear." You know, usually you're not aware of that, but that is the unconscious pull. We're trying on on an an unconscious level to replicate what happened in childhood and therefore in adulthood to try and put it right, to try and fix it. Unfortunately, usually what happens is we just repeat the cycle again and again and again, because it's like going into kind of sleep when you're in these relationships. Your behavior becomes automatic, and your partner's behavior becomes automatic, and you repeat this cycle. And when I describe this particular cycle that happens, you're probably going to recognize yourself very clearly in this.

Um, just very quickly, if anyone is interested in where this work is from, it's from the work of a therapist called Pia Melody. I absolutely love Pia Melody's work. Um, she was doing this work about 30 years ago. So most of the information that you see now in terms of the pattern of what happens if you're anxious, the pattern if you're avoidant, it comes originally from her work. As far as I'm aware, okay, somebody might want to correct me on that. There might be another route, but the work that I do and the training that I've had that's come from Pia Melody's work, and I my background is in addiction recovery, and many, many therapists who have a background in addiction recovery, many counselors who've got that same background, we're kind of charting our back our work back to to Pia Melody's work.

Okay. So, like I said, when you kind of get together, someone who's anxious and someone who's avoidant, and you've got this incredible pull between you, this sort of magnetic pull, what's happening is that the anxious person is absolutely putting the avoidant on the pedestal. You have this sense of like, "Wow, you know, this person is gorgeous. They're amazing. They're so attractive. Wow." And you're often very attracted to the avoidant's charm and charisma. There's this real sense of this incredible pull towards that person, and it feels very, very exciting.

Now, if you're dismissive avoidant, what you're doing at this stage is you're thoroughly enjoying being adored by the anxious partner, and you are using your charm. Okay? And possibly not every single avoidant is charming. Many of you are. And as a dismissive avoidant, and also fearful avoidant, you have an incredible ability to attune to another person. You can read a room. You are hyper-aware of the other person. And what you're doing at the first stage in a relationship is you are twinning with your partner. You are really kind of attuning to them. You are giving reassurance. You are love-bombing them. And it feels incredibly good for the anxious person to be love-bombed.

Now, at this initial stage in relationship, the anxious person is really becoming very addicted in many ways. So just be aware if that's kind of happening to you. It's addicted to the reassurance, addicted to the thrill of the attunement from the anxious partner, sorry, from the avoidant partner. So just be aware aware if what I'm saying is really resonating. It can feel like you have to have this person, and obviously with limerence, that is what's happening. You become compulsive. You become addicted to the person, and it's often the quality of the attention that you're getting from the dismissive avoidant that kind of creates this incredible feeling of, "This person is just exactly what I need. They understand me perfectly." And you can often seem for the feel, sorry, I can't speak today. You often feel as if you're seen and understood on the most incredible level. And it feels like you haven't been seen or understood like this before.

And this is because at stage one, the dismissive avoidant is giving you this incredible attunement. The hyper-attunement that the dismissive avoidant gives, if you've looked at the other videos that I've done, this is from parentification. So for a dismissive avoidant, somewhere in childhood, they have been parentified. They have had to take care of an adult or siblings. So they're very, very good at attuning to other people and attuning to the needs of their partner. You know, that's something that they can do incredibly well. And when they get into relationship at the beginning stage of relationship, this is what they're doing. They're offering that hyper-attunement that they learned when they were children.

Now, what happens at stage two? If you stay in this relationship, actually, before I get to stage two, very quickly, I want to describe to you something that happens for the dismissive avoidant in terms of limerence. That's different from the anxious person in terms of limerence. If you're anxious, that first stage is activating your limerence, and the longer you're in relationship with this kind of person, the deeper your limerence becomes. The closer you get to someone, the more intense your limerence is. It's different for the dismissive avoidant. They often feel limerence before a relationship. And at the first stage, when they're kind of getting to know someone, that's when they feel the intensity. That's where they feel the excitement. You know, that's that's all kind of going on for them. The problem for the dismissive avoidant is that the longer they're in a relationship, the less comfortable they are in it. And also, they switch off from limerence about the primary partner and they start to have limerence, very often, about somebody else. And they're trying to kind of cope with intimacy, very often by using limerence about someone else. I know this is going to sound very strange to you if you're anxious, but this is what the dismissive avoidant is often describing. That sense of, you know, in order to stay in relationship, I have to be in fantasy about someone else, otherwise it's kind of too difficult. And the reason it's too difficult is because the feeling of closeness is very triggering for them. It triggers that core fear of being, you know, engulfed.

So, what's happening at stage two in the relationship? Say you've kind of got together, you've had the love-bombing stage, and you kind of you settle into, "Okay, so we're together. We're actually, we're in this relationship." Now, this stage can feel quite stable. And what it looks like is that someone who's anxious, you are longing for reassurance from your partner. This feels like the primary engine that you have. You're really kind of seeking reassurance. So, you're asking for reassurance. And what you're doing in return is that you're offering adulation, adoration. You've got the dismissive avoidant on the pedestal. And what's happening for the dismissive avoidant at stage two is very, very different. What you're doing is that you are offering reassurance. You're giving reassurance to your partner, and you are receiving adulation.

Now, these two stages, what we can describe them as for the anxious person, we talk about when you are infantilized. It's almost like you become a child at stage two in this relationship. You have a real sense of like, "I want, I want reassurance. I want connection. I want support, and I think my partner, the avoidant, is just absolutely amazing, straight on the pedestal, you know, I think they're absolutely incredible." So it's reassurance and adulation that you that you're receiving and giving. And the dismissive avoidant, this parentification that I'm talking about, this positioning, you know, from childhood of, "I'm in charge." This is the automatic process that happens to you. So you are parentified at stage two, and so you're giving reassurance from a position of superiority, like you are telling your partner how how to be. You are supporting them. You are understanding them. And you feel strong and capable when you're able to do this. You know, you don't want to have any sense of weakness. If you're dismissive avoidant, it's not something that you enjoy. You know, you love the the kind of the feeling of power. For you, the feeling of being in the one-up, that's where you feel safe. Power makes you feel safe. For the someone who's anxious, you feel safe in the one-down position because that's where you're seeking reassurance, and that feels really, really good. And this power imbalance is very important in this particular kind of relational dance. It is what creates all of the issues in this in the in the relationship.

So, stage two, like I said, it can feel quite stable. It can feel like everybody's getting their needs met. The underlying abandonment and the underlying engulfment, those are your core fears. Abandonment for anxious, engulfment for dismissive avoidant, they're not being worked through. But that feels okay at stage two because you've got the workaround of reassurance and adulation. This is what you're giving each other. And often clients have said to me, you know, "I don't really know what went wrong in our relationship because we had a good relationship. It worked, but then suddenly it stopped working." And it's true. Stage two can feel really quite stable.

Stage three, which is when things stop working, there's a very specific reason for this. And this is because when you are under stress, if you have an an insecure attachment style, your attachment pattern is activated very intensely. So when you're not stressed, you know, you're not so aware of your attachment pattern. When you are stressed, it becomes very, very activated. And it becomes activated in one of three ways. So if I'm anxious, when I am stressed, I cannot self-regulate. I'm not able to self-regulate, and I'm so aware of that. I feel like I have to have reassurance. I have to have support from someone else. If I'm dismissive, avoidant and distressed, I cannot co-regulate. I cannot ask for help. I cannot ask for support. I feel absolutely I must withdraw into myself. I must take care of my own feelings. I must be on my own. There's a real sense of kind of just, you know, no, I'm I'm withdrawing. I'm I must be internal. I must take care of myself. And if you are fearful avoidant, for those of you who've seen the other videos that I've done, you have an internal switch. And what happens to you under stress is that you move towards a person for reassurance. That doesn't feel like it's working. Then you move away and be on your own, and that doesn't feel like it's working either. So you have this push-pull relationship between trying to kind of co-regulate with someone, move towards them, get reassurance, try to self-regulate, try and manage things on your own. And so you're really oscillating between one and the other.

Now, the major problem with your stress pattern, apart from the fact that it is stressful for you to have it, is that unfortunately, it deeply triggers your partner's stress pattern. It deeply triggers their core fear, and their stress pattern in turn deeply triggers your core fear. This is why stage three gets incredibly difficult for you. And if I can just describe what that's like. If I'm anxious, when I'm stressed, I will notice that I become more dependent, and I will immediately be seeking more reassurance. I'll need more reassurance. It feels like I can't I can't cope on my own. And you'll also notice that your self-esteem starts to decrease. You start to feel deskilled and less able at doing things. And as soon as you feel that, you move towards your avoidant partner for reassurance.

Now, this is problematic for the avoidant partner. At stage two in the relationship, they could give you reassurance. There was a balance. At stage three, when you ask them for more reassurance, this is when the dismissive avoidant starts to get very stressed themselves, and they get triggered by the partner's request for reassurance. This is the point where they kind of they crack, in a way, and they start to feel engulfed. The engulfment fear starts to surface for them. And when that happens for a dismissive avoidant, they immediately shut everything down. They cannot share their feelings. They cannot co-regulate in any way. They cannot be present, really, with with the partner. It feels like, you know, I have to self- I have to self-regulate. And you're wanting to withdraw. And the reason that this is happening is you're feeling a whole series of feelings that are indicative of you being dismissive, avoidant. And the feelings are disgust, revulsion, contempt, and hatred. These are really intense feelings that are triggered for you when you are engulfed or when you feel engulfed.

Now, as you kind of shut down to kind of protect yourself from that, what's happening to the anxious partner is that they see you shut down. They see you do that, and it feels like stonewalling to them. And what they do when they see a partner, you know, stonewalling, is that they immediately move towards you for more reassurance. They don't have the ability to self-regulate. It doesn't really occur to them that they could self-regulate. You know, that's not on their radar. They're not aware of that unless they've done a great deal of therapy. So what they do is immediately move towards you for more reassurance.

Now, as they do that, that activates that kind of terrible feeling of engulfment even more. You're just feeling absolutely awful at this stage if you're dismissive avoidant, and you start to feel so much disgust and revulsion towards your partner. I know for you, those of you who are anxious, this might be painful to hear, but it might be useful to for you to know exactly what's happening for the dismissive avoidant. They're often not able to express that, and that's another reason that they withdraw even more. And what's happening for the dismissive avoidant as you start to exclusively self-regulate. It's not that you lose confidence. It's very different from the anxious partner. For the anxious partner under stress, as I said, your your confidence reduces. For the dismissive avoidant, your self-esteem improves. This is because self-regulation skills give you a lot of confidence, but it's not really in a good way, unfortunately. You become arrogant. You become grandiose. You become dismissive. This is why you're called dismissive avoidant. And at this stage in the relationship, stage three, when you are feeling very smothered by the partner, this is when you start to dismiss the partner and you start to say things like, "You're too needy, you're too demanding, you're asking for too much reassurance, back off. You know, you need to take care of yourself."

Of course, if you're anxious and you hear that and you are stressed, you're not able to do any self-regulation skills at that point. It's incredibly painful for you to hear that. You often feel a great deal of shame. But the dismissive avoidant is feeling so full of kind of the feelings of disgust and revulsion, and they're trying to get the partner kind of as far away from them as possible. And eventually, what they will do because it will feel so overwhelming is that they will leave. That's stage four.

Now, for a dismissive avoidant, when they leave a relationship, they feel one thing. They feel relief. They do not feel abandoned. Okay? They don't have a core fear of abandonment. So the end of a relationship can feel really actually very regulating. And the reason for that is that they've moved out of their core fear, which is engulfment, and they've moved into this place of, "Ah, I'm on my own," which obviously they prefer because they can self-regulate on their own. They enjoy that feeling. So very quickly, they feel so much better. In fact, they tend to feel better as soon as the relationship is over. They feel relief. They feel free. They feel like, "Oh, thank goodness that's finished. The engulfment is gone." And they're actually generally quite quick to move on in terms of a relationship.

Now, unfortunately, stage four, if you're anxious, this is completely different. Okay? This is agony for you. It is absolutely terrible. And the reason for that is because your core fear is abandonment. And what's happened to you at stage three, you might not have got as much reassurance as you wanted. Usually at stage three, reassurance, you know, is a battlefield for it if you're anxious. But nonetheless, there was someone that you could try and get co-regulation from. And you are anxious preoccupied. You're preoccupied with the partner. So you're trying at stage three to get lots and lots of reassurance. At stage four, there was no one to co-regulate with. The partner has gone. This is devastating for you because that experience triggers the early abandonment for you. When you were little, in a key way, you will have experienced rejection or abandonment. That's why at the end of a relationship, it feels absolutely terrible because that surfaces without reassurance, which is what you're relying on. You start to feel the the feelings of abandonment. And the other thing that's happening is you you're anxious preoccupied. So when you are stressed, you cannot self-regulate. You you're not able to self-regulate. So this is when you have absolutely no way of regulating at all. You have no co-regulation. You have no self-regulation. And this is agony for you. It is absolutely terrible. And this is the point very often that anxious clients get into therapy or get into counseling because it's too painful for them. It's just it's unbearable, and it feels like, "I have to get help. I have to get support." And thank goodness you do get into sessions and you do see someone who can help you with the abandonment fear.

Now, the other thing that happens at this stage, if you're anxious preoccupied, is it is highly likely that you will go into limerence. Remember, limerence is a self-soothing mechanism. It's something that happens to try and protect you from difficult emotion. And that's why, because the abandonment is so overwhelming, that it's highly likely that you would go into limerence. And if you do go into limerence, it's usually completely focused on your partner. It's completely focused either on, you know, trying to kind of get euphoric recall. So you're thinking about the partner, you're thinking all about all the nice things. You might be going into strategy to try and get the partner back, but your focus is the partner.

If you are someone who's fearful avoidant at the end of a relationship, you might not be in in um limerence about the partner. You might find that you go into limerence about someone else to try and help you through this experience, because it's so painful. That's something that I've seen a lot with fearful avoidant clients who just kind of, you know, becoming obsessed by somebody else to try and kind of take the pain away, because the abandonment can feel so painful for you.

Now, that's the kind of the stages one, two, three, and four. Now, sometimes, and you'll be aware of this, sometimes an avoidant does come back. Okay? If you're a fearful avoidant at the end of a relationship, you have a real push-pull. You know, for for you at the end of relationship, you might feel the relief, but very quickly your abandonment is triggered because you have abandonment, and that means you reconnect to the relationship, and then you pull away, and then you reconnect. So you may see that push-pull. If you're fearful, with dismissive avoidant, once they cut off, they tend to kind of really cut off and and they leave.

Now, if an avoidant does come back, if you do reconnect with someone and you get together again, unfortunately, you would just start again at stage one. So that's stage one, where you know you have this kind of the love-bombing stage, and the anxious person is putting the avoidant on the pedestal. The avoidant person is really enjoying being adored. The avoidant person is twinning with the anxious partner. That can happen again if a couple gets back together. Unfortunately, you know, you just start again at stage one, and then you kind of carry on around the cycle without doing the underlying work of abandonment and engulfment. You would just begin again.

And the work really is, I mean, it's probably very obvious to all of you who are watching this, if you if you've been to classes or groups, the work very much is, okay, so it's it's a process of working on the abandonment if you're anxious, working on that underlying abandonment so that you don't have to repeat the cycle. Working on the engulfment if you're dismissive avoidance so you don't have to repeat the cycle. And obviously for fearful avoidant, it's working on both of those core fears.

Okay, I think that's everything. I hope that makes sense. Just very quickly, um, another thing to remind you of is that the stages where you're very, very vulnerable to limerence are stage one and stage four of the cycle, when you attach and when you detach. This is this is kind of, you know, the the most difficult thing for you really, particularly if you're anxious preoccupied or if you're fearful, you know, because attaching, you tend to attach very, very quickly if you're anxious preoccupied, and you invest a great deal in the relationship very, very quickly. And the end is really, really overwhelming for you because, you know, your any kind of early abandonment is going to get triggered, and it feels like you've been abandoned in the present day as well. It feels like the partner has left, and there can be a great deal of frustration and sadness about the fact that an avoidant partner leaves and does not feel what you feel, what you feel, and they're not going to. You know, they don't have a core fear of abandonment. They're not frightened of abandonment. So, it can feel very painful. You can think to yourself, "Surely, surely this person loved me as much as I love them. You know, I'm in agony. That's kind of showing how much I value this relationship, and they're not showing it."

So, I'm going to speak more in other videos about that, about the cutoff that happens for dismissive avoidant, you know, and what really is is the difference there. Um, but thank you for watching. I hope that was helpful. And and also, I I just want to shout out again to to Pia Melody, because obviously she is the reason that I'm describing this.