What is avoidant attachment?

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1:16For years, many people have relied on humidifiers for better skin, sleep, and overall wellness. But traditional models? Bulky, mold prone, and difficult to maintain. That's where Canopy Humidifier comes in. Recommended by leading dermatologists, Canopy is a completely reimagined humidifier designed to elevate any space, offering the ultimate in skincare and wellness benefits. Canopy's clean moisture combats dryness, dullness, and fine lines while strengthening the skin's barrier and boosting the effectiveness of topical skincare products. With its sleek design, Canopy is the cleanest and easiest humidifier on the market.

1:48With its unique technology, cleaning is as easy as popping it in the dishwasher. Go to GetCanopy.co to save$25 on your Canopy humidifier purchase today with Canopy's filter subscription. Even better, use code PODCAST at checkout to save an additional 10 % off your Canopy purchase. Your skin will thank you. Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a psychologist and this is Complex. I want this podcast to help you sift through all the content that's out there about our psychology and state of mind. You know what I mean. The stuff that tells you what's wrong with you, not what's right with you.

2:32So hopefully you can feel reassured and live a calmer, healthier and maybe even happier life. In this episode, I'm exploring attachment styles, in particular the one we call avoidant.

2:51Now, what do I mean by avoidant? Well, maybe you get cold feet about three months into every relationship. Or perhaps you get the ick and find yourself ghosting people without much pause for thought. Attachment describes the way we form meaningful relationships. As babies we learn to attach to our parents or primary carers and this is essential for our survival. And it's all well and good if they respond consistently and lovingly. But if they don't respond in a predictable or positive way or they're often absent or unavailable then we don't learn to attach very well at all. So this is a really fundamental topic in psychology, and trust me, this is going to be a great episode.

3:44We'll be hearing a story from a listener, and I'll be inviting an expert guest to join me. Together, we'll unpack the topic and pass on some insight and information to help you manage yourself with a bit more self-awareness. So, let me be your guide through the dark tunnel of misinformation to the bright lights of understanding.

4:07Okay, let's get going. I've invited clinical psychologist Dr. Fatumata Jatta to explore what a void and attachment looks and feels like and how it can get in the way of togetherness. Hello, Fatumata. Hello. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. Could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? I'm a clinical psychologist. I am the lead psychologist for a West London NHS crisis service and also have my own private practice. I do some teaching and other bits and bobs at Royal Holloway University as well. But most of my work is around early life experiences that are difficult and still impacting people into their adulthood.

4:58So attachment is a big topic for me. And would it be fair to say that your own background, your kind of multicultural upbringing has a role to play in why you're so interested in early life and attachment? Yes, it's a big part of it. There are other strands to it as well. One of them being that I went to boarding school in this country, which is part of the multicultural background. So I'm from the Gambia in West Africa, but grew up in Italy and then went to school in the UK. my mother lived in America for most of my childhood so I was separated from her at the age of 13 and I was separated from my dad from the age of 10 to 13 for three years so you know you can hear like the emotion in my voice just even now as I talk about it but because yeah it did impact who I am and my childhood was very privileged in many ways but also you know there was a lot of it that was really difficult because of this painful separation from both my parents at different times and siblings as well because my siblings and I were separated at different points too.

6:07Thank you and you really touch on how that thread stays with us you know it's a long time ago you've got lots of clinical experience you understand the theory and it's all still there with us and I think that's really important for listeners because I think people can think about these ideas about childhood and early life and dismiss them as if they're gone now. I'm a grown-up, it doesn't matter. But they sit within us and they do shape and motivate the way that we connect as adults.

6:36Now, there are four different categories of attachment types and for everyone listening, you will fall into one of them. And I hope to be able to explore them all in future episodes of complex but today we're focusing on the avoidant type and it's not just about whether you want to escape every intimate relationship you're in, it's also about how it's preferable to rely on yourself rather than anyone else. Now you might be listening to this and think you know I don't have any issue with self-sufficiency and being totally independent but if you're wondering why relationships feel so hard for you, then you might be able to relate to this story from a listener.

7:23Fatimata, I'm going to read their story out aloud to you. Please let me know what you think. And for the sake of privacy, I'm going to call this listener Leanne. So Leanne says, I'm a 30-year-old woman living alone. I've been successful in my chosen career, but yet again my boyfriend has left me he says I'm aloof and unemotional he feels he can't get through to me I think he's being too needy and asked too much from me but now I'm beginning to realize that there may be some truth in what he describes I often feel cut off when out socially and I found it hard to share with others about how I feel.

8:08What are your initial responses to that? That, you know... You look really moved. I am moved because I can sympathise with this person's experience and that I think it's a really tough one because that's kind of what all couples therapists are dealing with. Their attachment style would have been activated and they would have felt kind of, you know, maybe, yeah, my boyfriend's too needy. This is too much for me. And in the detachment, in the breakup is where maybe some of those feelings of wanting and needing connection come up. And there's a real, I think, difficulty sometimes in having, you know, something that you want, but you struggle to get.

8:52And for the listeners, we're trying to clarify this topic. So what would you say is the difference between a healthy independence and an avoidant attachment? It's the relationship to closeness. So secure attachment is I feel comfortable being close and I also feel comfortable being independent. But I'm also able to trust that I can be okay with others. And avoidant attachment is I don't need others. um i'm good by myself and i'm better by myself and i am good good good and in fact others like feel oppressive and you know make me uncomfortable but i'm a social creature so i still need people but i don't really want them too close i think there's often a terror my word people will describe it as an expectation of being smothered they think if they get too close to someone that person is going to completely overwhelm them, take over their personality, demand too much of them, and they will be completely lost.

9:58And I think it's often that word, the risk of feeling smothered, that is a real indicator that there's something happening here in the attachment style. It's a huge one. And it's really interesting how often an avoid, and we haven't gone into the other attachment styles, but there's one called anxious, which is kind of what it says on the tin, which is someone who kind of really needs a lot of reassurance and is anxious about the relationship and where they sit in that other person's mind. And they often end up together in this push-pull chase between one another, the avoidant person moving away and activating the anxious person who goes after them, which then drives the avoidant person away.

10:38And it's so complicated and it's so painful very often. Yeah, very. It's one of those paradoxes, I suppose, because you'd think, well, why are they attracted to each other? Why don't they find people that are similar to each other? but of course two avoidants can't connect because there's not enough there and two anxious people might be able to connect but generally speaking anxious people are more attracted to and triggered by avoidantly attached people because it mirrors their early life experiences and that's what they're trying to resolve in the relationship and leanne's story is very moving and i suppose what i would want her to hear is that she's not on her own the research tells us that roughly a quarter of us are avoidantly attached.

11:25So this is something that we are absolutely able to think about and work with and hopefully we can give Leanne a little bit of support and guidance in the rest of this episode. So that's why we're here. Let's get into the complexity.

11:43Certainly for a psych nerd like myself, the history of attachment theory is very, very interesting. So we owe it in large part to Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby. And in the 60s, Mary Ainsworth started her observations of mothers and babies in Africa and then developed the Strange Situation Protocol, which is incredibly moving and informative to watch. And then John Bowlby built on the early research in animal studies. So Lorenz looking at how basically fixated on the first moving object in their worlds. And then from this, we get this really rich understanding of how human attachment develops very, very early on.

12:25Yeah, absolutely. If we go back to Mary Ainsworth's strange situation, in those experiments, they would leave mothers with their children and they'd be playing in a room together. And then they ask the mother to leave the room and they see the response that the child has. And it's probably worth me describing a little bit of what that difference is. So some children, when their parents left, were clearly very distressed. They would go towards the door, they would look for her, they would cry. Whereas some babies, the avoidant babies, would almost act as if they hadn't even noticed that she'd gone and would continue to play by themselves and perhaps wouldn't mind being soothed by a complete stranger.

13:03Whereas the more securely attached babies really wanted just this one person. They wanted to connect with their mother the person they knew and felt safe with yeah and it's a sense of like all of them i think showed a little bit of distress you know my primary caregiver is gone the avoidance much less so on the outside but the securely attached children would calm down sooner once the caregiver came back into the room and the differences are really striking aren't they yeah when you're watching it as i remember watching as a student thinking that is such a stark difference between the responses in the babies.

13:40Yeah, absolutely. And what we see in adult research is that you have a similar phenomenon, but it becomes not your parent, but your primary relationship. So usually that's a romantic relationship, but we can attach to other people as well. We can attach to therapists, we can attach to friends, we can attach to colleagues as well there's an adult version of that experiment that i find really fascinating and it's something again to do with creating a stressful situation of a sort and then this time using heart rate monitoring to see whether the person is showing distress and what they found with avoidantly attached people is like on the outside they looked fine then they looked calm but their heart rate showed the same similar levels of distress as it did for the anxiously avoidant people.

14:35I find that really interesting because when you speak to avoidance and even the way they might see themselves for a very long time, it's like, I'm fine. I don't need, I don't, yeah, I'm good. Yeah. What would you say if you could boil it down into three or four key characteristics of avoidant attachment, what would people be looking out for? A difficulty or discomfort with intimacy. I might suggest also a consistent pattern in the way their relationships end. I often see a kind of, it's three months in and then I'm gone. Or I always go for the same person and ends in exactly the same way. This kind of the repetition in the way that things end.

15:23Yeah, and I would say the feedback often that you have from others in the relationship is that you might be disconnected or aloof or not there as much as is needed. An avoidant will most likely blame the other person for that, whereas an anxious person is more likely to blame themselves. an avoidant is more likely to say well they're too needy and they're too much then the other thing is a difficulty once the relationship is gone having some very ingrained strategies for dealing with that like i'm just going to bury myself in work i'm just going to bury myself in holidays so i'm just going to you know um date again and not not worry about it i'm not going to mourn as we might say therapeutically I'm not going to reflect on it it's done it's over I'm out of here I've turned away yeah so and and I say this compassionately that despite the kind of protests of somebody with this attachment style that they're absolutely fine and everything is cool it does come with costs and I think we can agree that it's it's not good for us yes um and i think compassion is really important because i think often in the literature maybe avoidance can be misunderstood i think it's the real tragedy of avoidant attachment styles which is that their outer shell is so convincing that people don't assume they need help people won't check in on them they're the the strong friend they're the one that's fine they're the one that's always got it together and so no one actually recognizes the vulnerability or the need or the sadness.

17:05And so that just really drives home that feeling of being on my own, being alone. And also, well, if nobody cares about me, then I shouldn't care about other people. Yeah. And so much of, you know, behavior is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So you believe that, you know, no one can be there for you. And so you don't go to people when you need them. And that reinforces the belief that no one can be there for you and so on and so forth. Okay, so shall we wind it back to childhood and babyhood? Because I think we have a really good sense of what it feels like for the adult and what it might look like for their adult partner.

17:47But what are the characteristics of those early relationships that might create this kind of attachment response? The key characteristic is that the child hasn't felt that the caregivers have been enough of a safe space. And so the child has felt that they have had to get on with it by themselves. And sometimes that's through actual things that have happened, like, you know, parents are separated and they literally have to get on for themselves. But sometimes it will be more subtle things, like perhaps you know parents are fighting or preoccupied with illness perhaps you know understandably and we often think about that as preoccupation so the parent might physically be there but psychologically they're preoccupied with something else because what we really want ideally is there to be enough space in the parent's mind for the child to exist and have needs but if the parent is preoccupied with something in their own lives that might be alcoholism or other substance misuse it could be a difficult relationship it could be financial issues it could be mental illness postnatal depression it could be poverty all sorts of different things can mean that that space in the parent's mind is taken away and taken over and the child just doesn't have access to them yeah so there'll be lots a child has an anxious parent and the anxious parent might be anxiously attached most likely with an avoidantly attached partner because that's the dance and then relies on their child for that attachment and the secure attachment and that's a really difficult spot for a child to be in because they're going to want to provide that to their parent but at the same time they don't have the skill set the emotional support within themselves to be able to tolerate that.

19:53And that's where often a lot of feelings of, you know, oppression and being smothered come from. Yes, absolutely. I have to abandon my wish for connection because I've been so disappointed or let down or left without. Yeah. And children are so vulnerable, their brains are not fully developed. The only thing that's available to a child because they don't have theory of mind yet which is the ability to understand that what happens to you is not just about you it's about all these other things is it must be because of me because of me so in that abandonment they go it's because my needs are too much my needs are you know a burden a burden it just becomes needs are a problem whether they're mine or anybody else's needs are a problem altogether yeah and i always talk about it as sort of like children having the same basic humanity but some children will grow up to be okay with that you know like when i cry people are there for me it's okay for me to cry other people go my tears there's something wrong with them people can't handle them people get angry when i get angry people People get upset, people turn away.

21:05Yeah. And it's the same humanity to begin with. So that injustice is why I feel so passionately about my work. Thank you. And you describe it with such warmth and compassion. I can feel it just sitting here across from you. You know, I just want to make a really important point that we're not here blaming parents. Because, of course, every parent was a child at one point, you know, and their parents were a product of their childhood and so on and so forth. so in a way you know a lot of the time is you know generational work yes absolutely this is about explanation not condemnation we just want to have a bit more clarity on what your experience might be and where it might have come from so that you can use that self-awareness to make the right choices ask for the right help move in the right direction

21:57so if you're listening to this description and you recognize a little or maybe a lot of what we're talking about. And, you know, we want to remember Leanne's story and her question. How as adults do we start to shift how we attach and relate? What is lovely about it is to realise that attachment isn't set. It can change throughout your life. And there are a number of ways. Really, it's mostly about exposure to safe relationships. and so that could be through a romantic relationship that's really healing it could be through friendships that are particularly strong and you know present and it could be through a therapeutic relationship as well whether it's with a therapist or you know another kind of professional that's often what we're doing and also because the things that partners or friends might find particularly difficult to handle or accept when they're engaging with somebody with an avoidant attachment style we as therapists aren't going to take personally for the majority we're looking out for all the information around can this person connect and it's not necessarily that none of those issues come up the question is can they be repaired or discussed if they come up that's that's the difference yeah what we can do in therapy is deal with that head-on I notice that you haven't paid for that last session what is what is that about?

23:24Maybe you want me to know that you don't find this valuable. You know, and we can take that head on in a way that other relationships can't. I think it's fair to say this is an incredibly complex issue. And this is why I really do suggest therapy is a really great place for people to start thinking about their attachment styles. Yeah. And everywhere, you know, it shows up at work. It shows up especially with authority figures. So if any of you are struggling with your boss or, you know your manager or your supervisor again think about attachment because some of those attachment feelings come up there too what I love about a conversation like this and what I hope is really valuable to the listener is attachment styles are important to the way that we relate but also we can change them we can shift them you have more power over how your relationships go than you think.

24:23And what it just takes is a little bit of knowledge and awareness and to know where to take your questions. But we do have to end. So I'm going to thank you again, Dr. Fatima Tajata, for discussing avoidant attachment theory with me today. Oh, you're so welcome. I really enjoyed it. And thank you to everyone listening. I hope this episode has turned on a light bulb for you about yourself and about your relationships. And as you know, I am on a mission to clear up the mental health space. Psychology is a fascinating topic and I want Complex to be your trusted place where you can learn to take better care of yourself.

25:03Do let me know what you want me to explore on the show and why. Email your questions to complex at bbc.co.uk. We might use what you us, but we will make sure that we do so anonymously. Please also note that I can't answer you personally. So if you have a concern about a mental health or medical issue, then I strongly urge you to seek expert help. And if you want details or further support with some of the issues raised in this podcast, you can find them at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line. And the link is also in the show notes on BBC Sounds. And that's it. My thanks again to Fatimata and also to Leanne whose story we looked at today.

25:44And of course, thank you to the lovely team at Loftus Media. Producer Kirsten Lass, Assistant Producer Katie Chandler-Clark, Researcher Grace Revel, Technical Producer Reuben Huxtable, Digital Editor Richard Berry, Science Editor Rami Zabar, Studio Engineer Felipe Rojas, Sound Engineer Ruth Rainey, and at BBC Sounds, Assistant Commissioner Izzy Lee Poulton and Commissioning Editor Rian Roberts. I'm Kimberley Wilson Thank you for listening Take care and go gently The first unexplained death What do you mean you don't know how he died? Can Rita and Jazz solve the murder, or will the murderer find them first?

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27:54Go to GetCanopy.co to save$25 on your Canopy humidifier purchase today with Canopy's filter subscription. Even better, use code PODCAST at checkout to save an additional 10 % off your Canopy purchase. Your skin will thank you.