Fearful-Avoidant TRIGGERS: Managing The Shame Of Having Needs And The Guilt Of Taking Space

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel, or welcome if you're new here.

Over the past couple videos that I've put out on this channel, we've been looking at what happens when either we're having an attachment activation response. So, for those who are more anxious, when your attachment system gets really triggered, it can feel like you are desperate at any cost to get your attachment figure to pay attention to you and help you soothe your pain and return to regulation. Or, on the flip side, what happens for those who are more avoidant on the attachment spectrum and how an attachment system trigger can cause you to deactivate and feel as though you are only going to be able to self-regulate and feel okay and stress-free again when you have taken space from your attachment relationships and given yourself the opportunity to connect more fully to your own experience.

And today, what we're going to be talking about is the fearful avoidant attachment style and what it means to have both activation triggers and deactivation triggers.

So, the first thing I want to address is that one of the most common questions I get about attachment theory is: when you have a fearful avoidant attachment style, is it basically just being anxious sometimes and avoidant sometimes, or is it kind of its own beast? And my answer to that is yes and yes. Yes, as in you are going to get triggered similarly to how an anxious person gets triggered sometimes if you are fearful avoidant, and you are also going to get triggered the way an avoidant person gets triggered sometimes. But there's also a third thing that happens, which is that because your system is chronically shifting between different response patterns unconsciously, there are kind of meta-feelings that you are going to start having about your experience of the oscillation itself. So what I mean by a meta-feeling is a feeling that you are having about another feeling.

So generally, those on the anxious side of the attachment spectrum tend to be quite expressive about their feelings. And while they might absolutely sometimes regret things that they've said in the heat of the moment, those who are fearful avoidant, when in a deactivated state, are likely to experience extreme shame over the feelings that they had and expressed while activated. And then, on the flip side of things, those who are more purely dismissive avoidant in the attachment spectrum tend to crave a lot of freedom and independence from their relationships. And while sometimes they will absolutely feel remorse over the ways in which that impacts their partner's desire to be close to them, those who are fearful avoidant tend to experience a huge amount of guilt over the independence that they crave in a relationship. Because while they have that avoidant patterning online much of the time that tells them you will only be able to express yourself and be authentic and feel like yourself when you are not engaged in a close attachment relationship, they also have that anxious patterning of the anxious style online much of the time that tells them in order to be close to someone you have to give up your own wants and needs and values and kind of contort yourself into who this other person wants you to be.

And so there is a really big challenge that comes not just from experiencing each of these states, but also from oscillating between them and, in your differing states, having strong self-judgments about how you behaved or acted in the other state. So what we're going to look at today is some of the ways in which the fearful avoidant experiences both activation triggers and deactivation triggers in a way that is unique to the fearful style itself.

So, we'll start with the activation side of things. Before we go too deep into that, if you have not watched my video on anxious activation responses, which is linked in the description of this one, you might just want to pause the video now and go check it out because it will absolutely likely come in handy to employ some of those tools and strategies if you're finding yourself in an activated response. And so, that part can't be ignored. But then what we're going to look at here is essentially how to take care of yourself after you've experienced an anxious activation response and some of the judgments that might come up in you as a result of looking back on your past behavior once you've had a little bit of distance from it.

So, I mentioned early on, and we're going to go into this now, that the fearful avoidant often experiences a lot of shame over the fact that they a) have feelings in the first place and b) especially when they express those feelings, particularly if those feelings were not received well by the other person. So, like the dismissive avoidant, fearful avoidant is an avoidant style type. So what that means is that those who are fearful generally do have that same avoidant history of having their bids for connection, which includes showing any form of vulnerable emotion, rejected by their caregivers. And so there's a sense of shame that tends to develop around our attachment-seeking behaviors when we are avoidant in any capacity. And because the fearful avoidant might spend a lot of their time with those emotional responses that exist in them inhibited or even fully repressed, so they might not even notice walking around their day-to-day lives just how many emotions are happening for them under the surface until they get triggered. The fearful avoidant, like the dismissive avoidant, can often have a self-image that kind of prides themselves on their ability to deal with emotions well, which, for those on the avoidant side of the spectrum, often translates internally to being kind of stoic and unaffected by the circumstances of their lives. The problem is that when you get activated as a fearful avoidant and your system is now screaming at you to do those proximity-seeking behaviors to get your partner's attention to get your point and your feelings across, you are going to experience very strong instances of emotion. And those emotions might be even stronger for you than they are for those who are anxious because they are so frequently repressed otherwise.

So again, if you are anxiously attached and not fearful avoidant, it's likely that on a day-to-day basis, you are relatively aware of the subtle emotions that are arising in your system because you are physiologically wired around having that in your awareness. So, even though it's highly likely that you are doing a lot of conscious repressing of your feelings because you want to stay in connection with people and might have a story that bringing in too many of your own wants and needs is going to threaten your connections, it's often quite different for the fearful avoidant in that they are not as consciously aware of their own wants and needs on a day-to-day basis, particularly their wants and needs that pertain to other people. So, like the avoidant, the fearful avoidant is generally pretty aware of what they want to do and accomplish to keep themselves feeling resourced and okay. But often they're a little bit more tuned out to what their attachment needs are. And then when those attachment needs come online, they might come paired with this feeling of this absolutely has to be attended to right now. And the reason that is happening is because your system is aware of the fact that you naturally repress these things. And so when they do break through into your awareness, it feels very urgent to get them addressed because some part of you knows that if you don't address them now, they're going to go back underground and not get dealt with.

So, even though a lot of the traditional advice for working with anxious attachment triggers will be helpful for you as a fearful avoidant, there's something additional you're going to have to factor in, which is that if you want to lower the intensity to a manageable level of these breakthroughs of emotion, the most important thing you need to focus on is getting yourself sensitized to those emotions more regularly on a daily basis. And this is likely going to be completely counterintuitive to what you think you need to do as a fearful avoidant. Each attachment style tends to have its own kind of ideal of what healing looks like that is not quite accurate. And for the fearful avoidant, very often the idea is: once I am healed, then I will not be emotional anymore. So the emotions that sometimes break through and the needs that sometimes break through are often seen as the problem. And so it feels counterintuitive to accept that the way to work with these activation responses might actually be to more consciously integrate the things that come out when we're activated into our day-to-day awareness and our day-to-day life. So to make our attachment needs more conscious for ourselves, not less. But this is absolutely the growth path for the fearful avoidant, especially when it comes to those anxious activation triggers. They will not feel as urgent to deal with all at once if you can give your body proof that you are going to attend to these things in a different state.

So rather than exploding and then suppressing, you can start looking at the feelings and the needs that you have when you are in that state of feeling desperate for your partner's attention and co-regulation or when you are feeling really mad at someone and like you are finally going to tell them exactly what you think. What needs to happen in those instances is you need to be able to listen to that trigger and say, "I hear you. I believe you have information that matters, and right now might not be the best time for me to let it all out because I am feeling really activated. But I promise you, you being yourself, that I will deal with this tomorrow or the next day or whenever it is that I feel like I have returned to a state where I can deal with it in a more reasonable way." And the kicker here is that you actually have to do it, or else you will not believe yourself in those moments.

So, I remember this specific trajectory for myself where I started getting sensitized on a day-to-day level to more of what I wanted out of other people and my relationships and which boundaries I needed to set in order to feel okay in my relationships. And the more I did this and the more I actually sat down with the people in my life and had those hard conversations, the more I trusted myself when my body did have those hyperactive trigger responses come online that if I did not go scream at that person who I'm really pissed at right now, I would have a conversation with them the next day and actually express what my problems are in a way that gives it the best chance at those problems getting seen and addressed. So again, the more we start paying attention to and sensitizing ourselves to our own needs, particularly our attachment and relationship needs when we are not triggered, the less urgent it starts feeling when we are triggered to get our point across.

And one way to start sensitizing yourself to what your attachment needs are is to look at your 4F responses: your fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. When we find ourselves in a state of either being frozen and wanting to kind of withdraw from relationships or when we feel really angry at someone or when we're feeling really distracted and not present or when we're feeling super people-pleasing and like we just want to caretake someone, those are all indications that there might be something going on for us emotionally that's related to the relationship dynamic that our bodies are frantically trying to hide from us. So that doesn't mean that if you're having a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, that is the moment in which you want to go digging for that gold. But looking back on when you've had those responses and what your needs might have been in those moments can give you really good information about what your relational needs are that are generally obscured to you by your own avoidant psychology. And again, the more we can start surfacing those needs and bringing them into our relationship dynamics when we are feeling regulated, the less intense our disregulated episodes are going to start feeling.

And the other thing we want to look at here when it comes to our activation responses, if we do go through an instance where we just explode on someone and we are really not happy after the fact with how we dealt with that and we are having a shame spiral about it, what we want to really focus on is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, even if you do not like the way that you addressed a problem—maybe you were really mean to your partner when you brought up a certain issue you have, maybe you were really unreasonable or even manipulative about trying to get some need met—this is going to feel so counterintuitive, but it is actually really beneficial for your own healing and the health of your partnership for you to be able to separate out the feeling and the need that you had in that scenario from the actions that you took in your attempt to get it fulfilled. So, for example, if I got really angry at someone and I called them names, I probably absolutely want to go back to that person when I'm feeling calmer and apologize for how I expressed myself and for the ways in which I was unkind or out of integrity with myself. But what you do not want to throw out with the bathwater is the feeling that you had that led to that behavior.

So, one of my absolute all-time favorite quotes on anger in particular comes from the book *Why Does He Do That?* by Lundy Bancroft, who is someone who runs anger management programs, and he says that one of the things he always tells the people coming into his programs is: you do not have an anger problem, you have an abuse problem. And this is really important to separate out because anger is a natural human emotion that we all have and that we all need to find ways to express without causing undue harm to ourselves or others. Abuse is what happens when we do not have healthy outlets for expressing anger. So the point here is that we need to be able to parse apart the feeling that we had, which is a natural and normal reaction to being alive—things like anger or fear or desperation happen to all of us—from the action that we gave ourselves permission to take when we were experiencing that feeling. And we can take accountability for the actions that we took while keeping in mind that we still need to resolve the feeling that was present in a healthier and more direct way. Again, as a fearful avoidant, you are probably prone to thinking that the way to get rid of bad behavior is to better control your feelings and to make sure that you do not feel those things anymore. But in most cases, the problem is not that you are feeling; it is, in fact, that you haven't learned healthy ways of both accepting and expressing your feelings at a lower level. So by the time they've broken through your awareness, you might already feel out of control of them. But again, one last time, the emotion is not the problem. The emotion needs to be dealt with, just not necessarily in the way that you feel like dealing with it when you are triggered.

So that's one side of the spectrum for fearful avoidance: learning to integrate more emotion into your daily life and be aware of more of your attachment needs so that they do not only come out when you are triggered. And on the other side of things, you also need to get better acquainted with the parts of yourself that very naturally and healthfully need things like space and boundaries and to stay in connection with yourself when you're in close relationships. So again, fearful avoidants tend to have a lot of natural enmeshment patterning online that might be telling them things like: as soon as you are in a relationship, you are a bad person if you are doing anything other than giving your partner everything they need, caretaking your partner. I find that more so than any other attachment style, fearful avoidants are so caretaking. And there might be this patterning that comes online that just tells you: anytime you want to step back and take time and space for yourself or connect with yourself or find ways in which you are different from your partner that matter to you and nurture those parts of yourself, if you are doing any of that, you are being a bad person. And so then what happens? Because we all have a natural need for space and distance and to be our own person even inside of close relationships, that part of you that knows you need that space is going to start telling you you have to get out of this relationship so that you can connect with yourself again. And what that part needs to learn is that you can absolutely stay connected to yourself when inside of an intimate relationship; it's just going to take some practice in how to navigate that.

So, when I look back on the years that I spent dating as a fearful avoidant, there were a lot of relationships I had that were on again, off again, on again, off again, with the breakups almost always being initiated by me when I felt smothered and like I needed space to connect with myself, and then the getting back together also usually initiated by me when I missed the person and wanted to be with them again. And what is so painful to look at, because those dynamics caused so much pain and disorientation for both me and my then-partners, is that if I were to take any one of those relationships—so let's say one that was on again, off again for like 3 years—and if I were to look at the amount of time over that 3-year period as a whole that I spent with my partner versus the amount of time that I spent alone nurturing my relationship to myself, and I were to add it all up and take the average, so deeply ironically, it would probably average out to approximately the same amount of solo versus partner time that someone in a secure relationship would naturally have. It's just that secure people are attuned to when they need space on a day-to-day basis and have no problem carving out that space and taking it for themselves with respect to their partner's needs. And so instead of getting totally enmeshed with their partner and then needing to be totally separate from them in order to self-regulate, they are just able, on a day-to-day basis, to have a mix of partner time and alone time and to keep their connection to themselves alive inside of a partnership while also taking lots of time to spend with their partner in an unenmeshed way.

And so this is another kind of relationship ideal that might need to die for you as a fearful avoidant: this idea that once you have gotten rid of all of your pesky feelings, then you will be available for full-time caretaking in your relationship. When in reality, you need both your own feelings and you need to take space for yourself to nurture your connection to self within any relationship if you want it to be healthy and sustainable. So, you really have to go through a journey of learning that it's okay to attune to what your feelings and needs are and to both negotiate those needs with your partner when that's the appropriate route to take, but also to spend time alone nurturing your connection to yourself when that's the appropriate route to take. And as long as you are feeling chronic shame over the fact that you have feelings and needs, as well as chronic guilt over the concept of needing to be your own person, even while in a relationship, you are probably going to be stuck flip-flopping between these extremes that cause so much disorientation for you and the people that you get close to.

But, of course, this all comes from a deeply unconscious place. And just like any of the insecure styles, nobody with fearful patterning is consciously trying to behave this way. It's just a natural response pattern that was once adaptive in a certain set of circumstances that, as you grow up and start looking at things from a more zoomed-out, enlightened perspective, you have the opportunity to start changing.

So the moral of all of this is that if you are fearful avoidant, yes, you are going to have anxious triggers and you're going to have deactivation triggers, and you are going to want to look at how to deal with both of those. But you're also going to want to look at the meta-feelings that come up for you in response to both of those because, until you are able to accept and integrate the fact that there is wisdom to both of your triggers and in both states your body is desperately trying to get you to pay attention to something it needs, it's only once you can start seeing the wisdom in that that you can actually get onto the path of healing towards a more secure style where you are no longer trying to deal with relationships through chronic self-abandonment and instead can be aware of and good at advocating for your needs the same way you tend to be pretty good at listening to and accommodating for your partners.

All right, that's all I'm going.

To say on the topic for today, but as always, let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, feelings popping up as you go through this video. Please leave them in the comment section below.

I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon. [Music]