On Being Avoidant (and the Universal Struggle of Being Human)
This could be your story, or mine, or anybody’s. Being human is hard, and what makes us who we are is very complicated. Being human and avoidant, makes up for the relatively smaller proportion of people, yet it is deemed very challenging to both the avoidant person and the people dealing with them be it family, friends or lovers.
How we were raised in our early years shapes who we become. Our caregivers play the most essential role in our childhood, believe it or not, even events happening when we were three years old can still affect who we are today. Our brains are primed to protect us at all costs, they take in information and build simulations and predictions to make sure that we are constantly alive and surviving in this world and are not risking getting ourselves extinct. So the avoidant’s brain did whatever is necessary to survive, they adapted well. What also follow are the school years, the early friendships they built, the bullying they may have been subjected to, their instructors and the school system; all these have a secondary but equally important factor into their development and shaping their attachment style and character.
Why we may have evolved to becoming avoidant or have been born with avoidant traits is not straightforward to answer. But one key element is how we were raised by our parents. The avoidant attachment style arises when one or both caregivers have failed to meet our needs at some point, or maybe one of them had rather oppressive presence in the house and strong role in society, such as military people, who do not often fall on the gracious end of empathy and emotional availability. This example is understandably very delicate, even though some of these people can be emotionally available at home, yet their role and job can portray otherwise to children, because they’re required to be tough and invulnerable against adversity and this is what the child notices on the external side.
Origins of avoidance
People can develop an avoidant attachment style when they learn that nobody came to them when they cried out, when their needs weren’t met, when their parents undermined their feelings if they were scared or needy, when their parents represented a strong and fierce figure of what the human being should be like. This creates high levels of anxiety, yet the human being is a smart creature, so the child learns that to survive, because their emotions would not be attended to and therefore ignored, they need to minimize the display of these emotions or get rid of them and any need for closeness and support.
The child may have been careful not to initiate any contact with their caregivers when they’re in their vicinity out of fear of rejection. The child would have prioritized logic over emotion, distancing themselves from their feelings and becoming self-reliant. Unfortunately, this does not solve the anxiety that developed, it only inhibits it for a while. It’s important to know that the independence that the avoidant adult displays is not really because of a desire to be alone, it is because they learnt that their needs won’t be met and that people would deny them or won’t be able to help, so they become scared and fearful of the inevitable destiny of being rejected.
The avoidant may turn out to feel that they’re sometimes superior to others, seeing other people’s neediness and closeness as unnecessary and something they would be relieved they don’t have. This isn’t out of arrogance or over-confidence; on the contrary, this is the brain’s attempt to keep the avoidant safe and equipped with a high self esteem. It protects them from the unconscious fear that other people may not or wouldn’t want to be there for them. This is not easy to detect, as the first conscious feelings an avoidant may have are arrogance and a lack of empathy, and they would describe themselves as such or be seen by other people as such; yet if we dig deep enough beneath the superficial layer of these feelings, we find out that it’s fear that governs their behavior rather than an elevated ego.
The birth order of the avoidant comes into play as well, many times when the child is the first-born, they get the direct attention of their parents. Then another one comes along and the attention drifts towards the new baby, and it can feel like a fall from grace. Their needs start to be catered for less and less, and their responsibilities grow to support their siblings; so they grow up to be the serious and more mature one of the family, enjoying being in charge. When this is coupled with an avoidant character, one of the coping strategies they start adopting to deal with the ever decreasing attention is to shift all the focus on work and being a perfectionist in everything. They hope that if they do everything perfectly and correctly, they will be seen as enough. The parental expectations in this case can exacerbate the situation, if they have high expectations of the avoidant to over perform or over achieve, the self worth of the avoidant becomes entirely tied to that but with a lot of anger directed towards those who have subjected them to such high standards in the first place. An avoidant wants to be disconnected and free of any expectations, yet those placed at an early age become irrevocably part of their persona and lifestyle, further distancing the avoidant from their parents at a later age.
Our drives as human beings are survival, connection, love and acceptance. Even those who seem entirely disconnected and prioritizing work, control and status over any sort of relationships, often reach that point as they have learned that this is how they gain approval or even the pinnacle of social acceptance. Again this is not so obvious at first and many people who know they’re avoidant might disagree because they genuinely don’t feel any affection or connection to anyone. But beneath this “disconnection” lies an intense fear of being abandoned and a strong desire to be approved of. Even their attitude of nonchalance around people plays to their favor because they know that being distant sometimes will make people around them think of them more and wonder about them.
Coping Strategies
The avoidant would be looking for any way to distract themselves from the need for human connection and from arising distress. The main five coping strategies of an avoidant are:
- Control: feeling they have control over their lives is imperative for their wellbeing. When someone takes control of every minute of their day, their schedule, their weekends and feel that they need to be on top of every (especially lonely) moment they go through, problems will arise the moment something unpredictable happens. Avoidants may be equipped to deal with unpredictability, but they don’t necessarily like it, in fact they dread it, because unplanned moments lead to undesired thoughts about themselves that they’re essentially and effectively trying to escape through being in control.
- Perfectionism: holding oneself to exceptionally high standards, judging and criticizing oneself when they fail to meet them. Believing one is also held to exceptionally high standards by other people as well, where self worth becomes tied up in the societal expectation. Even when they achieve a pay rise or some other milestone of success, they keep setting for themselves a bar that simply gets higher and higher. They can never reach a time where they say “this is fine as it is”, because then they would have to deal with all the unconscious thoughts about their avoidance traits and lack of self worth which they try to initially cope with by being perfect and accepted.
- Avoiding triggering places and activities: the avoidant person is most of the time not in the mood to seek or make meaningful connections. This entails avoiding outings or socializing with people which makes them feel better temporarily as they don’t need to engage and put in effort and risk getting close to people. Until the other person or the friend gets a different message that the avoidant is indirectly trying to say “I’m not interested in you and your outings” so they then stop sending their invitations. The brain of the avoidant does not always interpret this positively, after all deep down they don’t want people to stop liking them however hard they feel that they don’t care about people’s opinions so they resurface slightly to keep the connection ongoing.
- Numbing: avoidants would try to numb themselves for instance with alcohol and drugs to prevent and avoid emotions from arising or to feel disinhibited, relaxed and free from the emotional burden that often wakes up and harass them incessantly. They frequently find themselves with all sorts of thoughts about their ongoing lives and psyche, anxiety often builds up in them whereby they need to confront all the feelings they try to escape, and their obsession with being in control spikes sometimes that it becomes unbearable to just be still. So they reach out for the easiest drug or the hardest liquor that would make the world suddenly bearable and exciting.
- Instant gratification: how does the avoidant manage to enjoy their life without the need for human connection? Mainly through instant gratification. They can get hooked easily on behaviors that have addictive properties because these are the kind of activities that can provide enough intensity to mimic a strong feeling and emotion. These can range from gambling, to excessive sex, to social media addiction, to extreme activities that can have a high risk of death sometimes, anything that can provide an intermittent win with a spike in dopamine.
The chaos in the avoidant’s brain is sometimes too much to bear, but they try to cope in any way possible without needing to seek other people or to connect with them in a genuine way. Avoidants try to live alone, and us as human beings are not wired to be alone and our brains know that very well, otherwise we’d be extinct. So the cognitive dissonance in this drives the avoidant to keep connections superficial, available yet not too meaningful but enough for fun and they often perceive sex as a way to achieve some form of intimacy, but it won’t be authentic. We go back to the instant gratification coping mechanism.
So now we understand why some avoidants, although they may not value having a lot of money, still strive for more work and money not because they’re looking to become filthy rich necessarily, although this definitely plays in favor of the social acceptance criterion which they still desire deep down, but because focusing on these aspects distracts them from dealing with the more painful side of being human and non-avoidant. It becomes eventually a vicious cycle: avoidant > distracts themselves through one of the coping strategies to avoid dealing with being non-avoidant > ends up avoiding more and repeats the cycle.
There is no order in which these coping strategies happen, often they happen altogether at the same time, which can really make it difficult for the avoidant to live peacefully on a daily basis as the thoughts become very chaotic sometimes, the escaping desire increases, and the coping mechanisms are being used but they only provide relief for a while before they themselves create newer problems that the avoidant will need to worry about. Instead of working through what they have been avoiding for so long and their human relationships with others and why they have turned out the way they did, they would start worrying instead on how to achieve the best at work, or which new extreme activity they should get involved in.
Relationships
The brain of an avoidant person protects them by preventing rejection by never getting too close to anyone. They would look for all the reasons why a relationship won’t work, or they will convince themselves upfront that they’re not the relationship material. They may see sex as a safe way to connect with people, however they will never reach true intimacy. With time, they learn that their guards are always up, that they’re cold and distant all the time. They may even engage in a push-pull behavior: they may initiate contact with someone, but once that person gets close or starts desiring intimacy, the avoidant suddenly shuts down and escapes. They will stay distant for as long as it takes for their attachment system to settle again. Then they will be back until they feel emotionally too close, and escape again.
The avoidant dislikes their independence to be taken away, and they have a genuine belief that people will try to do so, they then subconsciously seek people with whom they know they can’t have a long-term connection. They hate being trapped so they would want to end any form of substantial connection. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: their belief that everyone is so needy and time consuming has been confirmed; unknowingly they just fear abandonment and don’t know for sure what will happen if they get too close. That is why all the relationships including friendships will always have a wall that the other person is not allowed to cross for fear of entrapping the avoidant in feelings they wouldn’t want to deal with.
What further entrenches the above is the inner talk that secretly whispers to the avoidant: “you don’t need anyone”, “everyone is so needy and can’t be trusted”, “they’ll take away your freedom and you will become trapped”, “you need to protect yourself or you’ll get hurt in the process because you cannot control the outcome, so you better do something to be on top of the situation”.
When an avoidant has argument with someone, they suddenly remember all the negative bits of their traits and relationship, their brain is constantly seeking to reaffirm existing beliefs and minimize intimacy. However once the relationships ends and their brain is no longer trying to actively protect them, they start positively reminiscing about their ex and remembering all the great details about them and wanting them back. Usually an avoidant will attract people who are natively anxious and vice versa, this is because both types of people confirm each other’s beliefs: first one for the avoidant is that people are not reliable and needy and clingy, second one for the anxious is that people can seem to disappear if they don’t lean on to them long enough or excessively. The anxious person becomes more anxious when dating an avoidant and the opposite is true. The anxious leans in, the avoidant pulls away. The first one needs closeness to feel safe, the second one needs distance; but they attract each other intensely since both want to exhibit their true nature to the fullest extent and both suffer from confirmation bias whereby they seek people and activities that would validate their existing beliefs about life and human beings.
What’s next?
A lot of the avoidant people think the problem always lies elsewhere, that the main issue is not necessarily with how they perceive other people and relationships. Yet we have said it before, and I will say it again, human beings are all about survival and connection, take one away and you’re left with a huge void that you will be trying to fill incessantly and desperately, not knowing anymore what it is that you’re trying to solve and dealing with. Your problems will start revolving around your coping strategies, like alcoholism, extremism, drugs, perfectionism etc. And these will become the new issues you will be worried about until you find other ways to cope with them while constantly building new coping strategies to deal with old ones.
We might perceive avoidant individuals as strong and unbreakable, but this is merely a facade. Their greatest challenge lies within themselves, and this is where the real work must be done to prevent self-sabotage. The goal is to cultivate a more compassionate and understanding relationship with themselves, allowing them to develop healthier connections and a deeper sense of self-acceptance and emotional resilience.
