Imagine feeling lonely inside and craving love and affection. Then you meet someone wonderful. You are full of joy and excitement. Now you can feel whole and good like you know you should!
But several months later, when your romantic partner throws his or her arms around you and tells you that they love you, you experience a flood of anxiety and a sense of impending doom. You try to act happy, because you know that is how a “normal” person would feel.
But you have a hard time hiding your anxiety. You try to fix it by explaining, but this effort only makes you sound off-balance and needy.
Across the coming weeks, you feel increasingly squirrelly, start to pick up on signs that your partner is having second thoughts, and get that awful feeling in your gut … you know, the one you spend your whole life trying to avoid. As the relationship begins to implode, you just want to scream, “What the heck just happened?!”
What happened is that you ran straight into your own defensive wall, that part of your personality which is trying to protect you and keep you safe.
Of course, this defense is not a rational process; it is housed deep in the emotional centers of your brain and is automatically triggered by signals from the environment. It does not care about your rational thought processes or your adult need for love and affection. It would rather you be sad and lonely than injured.
Attachment theory can give us even deeper insight into this process.
In childhood, the attachment system increases anxiety when the young person stays too far away from parent; the resulting discomfort then impels the child to re-establish proximity.
Imagine what happens, however, when the parent you are seeking comfort from is himself frightening or frightened. If the parent yells at the approaching child, or even worse becomes physically abusive, then this “attachment figure” is just as scary as whatever the child was running from in the first place.
A terrified parent (who may themselves be an abuse victim) also cannot adequately soothe a distressed child. In either case, the attachment system does not serve its intended function.
The child cannot escape the anxiety coming from the environment and cannot be soothed by the parent. To make matters worse, the parent’s behavior might actually increase the child’s anxiety and impel the child to once again approach the scary parent.
Children raised in such environments will become hyper-vigilant for threat cues (like those with anxious/preoccupied attachment) and simultaneously avoidant of interpersonal closeness and intimacy (like those with avoidant/dismissing attachment).
When observed under laboratory conditions (in Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” paradigm), these children can be seen to approach the parent, only to freeze and withdraw or wander about aimlessly.
In a similar vein, as adults, they will simultaneously desire closeness and intimacy and approach potential attachment figures (close friends or romantic partners), but then become extremely uncomfortable when they get too close to those partners and withdraw; hence the message given to others is “come here and go away."
Of course the person with this "fearful” attachment style is not likely to be fully conscious that they are enacting this process and may feel extremely misunderstood and victimized in professional, friendship, and romantic relationships. This person may not perceive that they are actually the one doing the distancing and rejecting.
