Avoidant attachment tends to have a bad reputation. If you scroll through social media, you may find posts equating avoidant attachment with coldness, selfishness, or an outright fear/disinterest in vulnerability and intimacy.

While avoidantly attached individuals do tend to struggle with intimacy, the reality is far more nuanced than many of these stereotypes suggest.

Avoidant attachment develops as an adaptive strategy—just like all forms of insecure attachment. The adaptive strategy for avoidantly attached individuals prioritizes self-sufficiency over vulnerability because, at some point, depending on or relying on others didn’t feel safe. 

This does not mean people who lean toward avoidant attachment are incapable of vulnerability, intimacy, or long-term, connected relationships. It just means they relate to closeness differently.

In this post, we’ll unpack five of the most common misconceptions about avoidant attachment and the research-backed truths behind them. Whether you’re avoidantly attached, in a relationship with someone who is, or just curious, these insights might shift the way you see avoidance—not as a personal flaw, but as a learned response that, with awareness, can evolve.

Do you often feel like you’re pouring yourself wholly into a relationship, only to find yourself second-guessing yourself, craving more closeness, and feeling like you're chasing someone who pulls away? Or perhaps you’ve experienced the opposite—longing for space, desiring independence, or feeling suffocated by a partner’s constant need for reassurance and connection. If this sounds familiar, you may be experiencing the complex dynamics of anxious and avoidant attachment styles. These two styles tend to attract each other - creating a relationship that can feel like a constant emotional tug-of-war.

Complex and challenging relationships with parents are one of the many struggles adults today face and seek guidance and healing around in our therapy offices. These struggles are often born from experiences and dynamics of childhood that continue to influence the parent-child relationship in adulthood. Sometimes, these dynamics are very evident, and other times they may be more subtle and hard to correlate with current experience. Being able to identify and understand how childhood experiences have affected us and our relationships is often crucial to improve maladaptive patterns and cycles we may find ourselves in. Below are a few ways early childhood dynamics can create problems and some tips for navigating them.

When considering how to approach relational challenges, one area of exploration that may be helpful is identifying and processing past trauma, often stemming from early attachment experiences. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is commonly used for healing individual trauma, which in turn can heal attachment wounds that come from it. Below we will discuss the relationship between EMDR therapy and attachment theory, and how combining these two lenses can help facilitate profound healing.

Do you feel like nothing you do ever enough to satisfy your partner? You are intentional and put exerted effort into pleasing and making your partner feel loved, only to feel like the goal post keeps moving. You are not alone in feeling this way and it is not an impossible issue to navigate. This is a common dynamic when one person in the relationship has an anxious attachment style. An anxiously attached partner may struggle with feeling secure in the relationship, leading to the internal belief that "I’m not good enough." If you find yourself loving someone with this attachment style, understanding their needs and learning how to navigate their emotional landscape will help both of you feel more connected and secure.

f you are aware of attachment styles you may have noticed the person you are dating has some avoidant attachment tendencies. Don’t worry, many people have avoidant or anxious attachment styles, and they are more likely to be single, so you will often run into them in the dating pool. Navigating the world of romantic relationships can be challenging, especially when dealing with different attachment styles. However, armed with understanding and self-awareness, it's entirely possible to build a healthy and fulfilling relationship with someone who has an avoidant attachment style. Below you will hear tips from our expert relationship therapists to help you navigate the journey of dating someone with an avoidant attachment style.

An avoidant attachment style is characterized by a person who has a negative view of others and a positive view of themselves. Typically, this style develops when people have had more absent caregivers and have not had their attachment needs to be met. Due to not being able to depend on others to get their needs met, they may have difficulty opening up and trusting others.

Anxious attachment is one of four attachment styles that are thought to develop in our childhood and continued through our adulthood. These are based on patterns of behaviors that people have in relationships with others.

An anxious attachment style is characterized by a person who has a negative view of themselves and a positive view of others. Typically, this style develops when people have had their needs met inconsistently. Due to the inconsistency, they may worry about their needs being met in the future or if they are loveable enough to have these needs met.