What Causes Avoidant Attachment? Childhood Experiences that Can Create Avoidant Adults.

Imagine arriving into the world. You’re a brand new shiny baby. Someone (or some people) take you home. It is now their job to keep you alive and teach you everything there is to know about being a person.

Before you can even understand the words that are being spoken around you, your brain is running on instincts and learning patterns from how the people respond to you and each other. Your brain is very active and very clever, despite being brand new.

Hungry? Scream and cry. Wet? Scream and cry. Tired? Scream and cry. People give you the wrong thing? Scream and cry louder until they get it right. Success. Do more of that.

These people are familiar, and they give you the things you need. They are safety.

As you get bigger, but still before you can make words of your own, you keep learning. Like all animals, you watch and make mental maps and notes of how it all works. One of the people very reliably responds to you. The other one is less reliable, but they’re OK.

Sometimes their voices are quiet and calm and your little baby nervous system feels safe and good. You’re not sure what they are saying, but you’re mostly going on vibes still at this stage. Other times they are quite noisy, and when they are like that it doesn't feel so good so you get noisy too, and that seems to makes them noisier.

You keep getting bigger, and the people (parents now, you realise) don’t respond the same way when you need something. Crying doesn’t seem to work the way it used to any more. Especially when you cry when you’re tired, or confused, or when they yell at each other. Parent A does a lot of crying, it’s best if you don’t add to it.

One day, one of them goes to live at a different house. It’s confusing but everyone makes a big point of how you get two bedrooms now so you'll have twice the toys.

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You’re 10 now. You live most of the time with Parent A but you still see both parents, though sometimes your weekends at Parent B’s house get cancelled. But Parent B is really fun. Except that time you dropped something and made a mess and got panicky. The panicky bit seemed to be make Parent B more angry than the mess.

Parent A doesn’t get mad so much but they seem sad a lot. They’ve told you all about how Parent B acted and how hurtful it was. You know it’s your job to comfort Parent A it even though you don’t like it very much. But if you don’t it gets kind of scary and that's worse. And it’s better not to tell them about your own sadness in case that makes them even sadder.

Parent B tells you this is a good quality of yours. They’re glad you’re made of tougher stuff than Parent A. It's nice to make them proud.

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There are many paths to avoidant attachment in adults, and this is just one imaginary scenario of how the foundations can be laid in childhood.

In the story above, the child has a range of experiences that teach them repeatedly that emotions lead to bad outcomes.

The parents’ unmanaged conflict creates a stressful environment that even a pre-verbal child can pick up on. As a child, your caregivers are your entire source of safety and survival. When they are aren't overly steady — and crucially, don’t demonstrate healthy repair after conflict — a child’s sense of security is fundamentally shaken. The child internalises that conflict is frightening and destabilising.

As the child grew older, and the parents (particularly Parent B) grew less tolerant of the child’s emotions. They learned their own feelings aren’t welcome, and their unfiltered emotions can get them rejected by someone they love.

Parent A’s emotions began to take up more of the airspace in the home too. After the separation, those feelings had to go somewhere, and Parent A sought comfort from the child. This crossing of a boundary and roles, where the child becomes the supporter of the parent (an experience known as ‘parentification’), can contribute to the child later finding other people’s emotions unsettling in adulthood. Their subconscious makes note that when people get upset, it can get out of hand.

Later, Parent B offered love and approval for the child learning to suppress their emotions. Finding Parent A’s feelings a source of stress also, the child might align themselves with this idea, concluding that keeping emotions under wraps is the best way to operate in the world.

Other pathways to avoidant attachment

Two other common (and polar opposite) childhood experiences can lead to avoidant attachment — neglect, and intrusion.

Neglect occurs when a child’s needs aren’t met by their caregivers. Neglect can range from failure to provide for a child’s basic physical needs — food, shelter, hygiene, etc — through to neglect of emotional needs, such as acknowledgement, validation, and support for the child’s emotional experiences.

Children who experience neglect learn that other people can’t be relied upon. They understand that they do best to take care of themselves, and may become hyper-independent as adults.

At the other end of the spectrum, overly intrusive parenting can also create avoidant attachment in children. Some parents find it difficult to allow the gradual development of increasing independence throughout childhood. They might resist allowing the child to have privacy and their own interior and exterior worlds. The child’s attempts to find autonomy and freedom might create conflict or an increase in parental control.

With this experience, children of intrusive parents learn to equate love with suffocation. Children are clever, and will develop ways to cope with this. They will learn to lie, or omit details, or present one side of themselves to the parent while keeping another side hidden. They will find a way to keep the peace while meeting their own natural need for an individual sense of self. This carries over into an adult who feels slightly out of reach to others, or reacts defensively to being asked to compromise for a partner.

Parents aren’t required to be perfect for their children to become securely attached adults. In fact, the pathway to secure attachment includes plenty of instances of mis-attunement between parent and child, as well as  feeling nurtured and safe. This allows the child to learn an appropriate amount of self-reliance and independence, as well as to depend on others. Over-accommodation by a parent, where the child never has to learn to self-soothe or manage disappointment or other emotions can create anxious insecure attachment. Normal, healthy parents and families have conflict, and how it is expressed and later repaired contribute a lot to the child’s response to relational difficulties as adults.

If you think you are avoidantly attached, or you love someone who is, can you recognise any of the pathways to avoidant attachment above? Being able to understand where confusing or painful behaviour in relationships originated can be the first step in making healthy change. When you are able to identify that you are repeating old patterns and acting from beliefs that reflected your childhood experiences, you give yourself the opportunity to update them for your present adult self, partner, and life.

I write about attachment, relationships, and self-compassion, and I'm currently working on a book about healing attachment patterns in relationships — sign up here for updates.