Opposites Attract? Anxious and Avoidant Toxic Bonds
The anxious and avoidant attachment styles could not be further apart in how they approach love, and yet they attract each other like a moth to a flame.
In this case, it’s often the anxious individual who does the chasing, pulled towards the avoidant by an energetic pull as if they were the human version of a black hole. Once across the event horizon (first few dates), there’s no going back. They’re hooked.
Often these attractions end in the anxious individual’s heartbreak and shame at the realization that they spent a significant amount of time chasing after someone who could never truly give them what they want.
Because the avoidant can’t, not in their wounded state, at least.
And let’s not let anxious individuals get off the hook, either. If you identify with anxious-ambivalent attachment, you’ll likely have a predisposition to place a lot of value in your romantic relationships and possibly even derive your sense of self-worth from them. You might naturally be mistrustful of relationships, and seek overt-levels of validation to feel safe. This is not a healthy place to navigate relationships, either.
But I digress, wounded and unaware anxious and avoidant individuals pull each other in — despite their clear differences in relational strategies. This often to detrimental effects on both of their well-being. Despite how emotionless the avoidant may appear, they too are wounded and will bear a new scar of an unsuccessful attempt at healthy love.
So why is it that the two attract one another? And why is the bond formed so toxic?
Let’s look closer.
Setting The Scene: An Anxious Need for More and an Avoidant Need For Less
At the heart of the anxious or otherwise known as ambivalent attachment style is a lack of trust in love. Due to core woundings during childhood, potentially through mixed signals by their caregiver, they find it difficult to believe they are truly worthy of receiving love and therefore struggle to believe their partner's attempts at conveying it. They also find it difficult to champion themselves as they often suffer from low self-esteem.
In this, there is an additional weight placed upon the anxious individual's external relationships. It’s not just about “Does this person want to be with me?” but “Who am I if this person doesn’t want me? All relationships are personal and can impact our sense of self, but an unsteady one to start with will weigh more on the anxious individual's mind.
With self-worth at stake, it means that any threat to a relationship is going to trigger high levels of anxiety, hence their need for reassurance. They are inherently avoidant to self, as mixed signals or otherwise traumatic events have led to a general mistrust in their own worth. Our first relationships are incredibly influential, teaching us not only how to love others but how to love ourselves.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have the avoidant attachment style. Conditioned to believe that their emotions served little place in a relationship, they cut themselves off early from accessing them. In the famous Strange Experiments, infants who later developed avoidant attachment styles don’t cry when their parents leave them in a room on their own, and show little emotions when they return.
Showing up to relationships with emotion just isn’t what they’ve been taught, though they still have emotions buried deep. Rather than be kept in an emotional limbo of “Does my parent love me?”, they learn to disregard emotions entirely and instead build up a defensive wall of high self-worth. “No one can hurt me if I don’t display emotions”, they may think.
In adulthood, the avoidant meets trouble when relationships begin to deepen. Intimacy can not be achieved without emotional connection, but it’s in this space that their walls come up. This makes sense, as they’re not only unpracticed in emotional expression but will fear it due to previous rejection.
You’d think then that they wouldn’t entertain the anxious attachment style.
After all, why give time to someone who wants nothing more than to relate emotionally?
You’d also think that an anxious individual, who requires an additional level of reassurance, wouldn’t go looking for this with someone emotionally avoidant, either.
Both seem incompatible and yet they attract one another.
Why? It doesn’t make sense.
Until we look closer.
Opposites Attract: Why Anxious and Avoidant Individuals Pair Up
Emotional hunger follows the same dynamic as wanting to eat. Both the avoidant and anxious individuals are derived in some sense of their authenticity due to trauma that has impaired their ability to feel whole.
For the anxious individual, a deficit in their self-worth means a desire to obtain the previously unattainable. This means searching outwards for love and care.
But the feeling of desire can be a trickster and certain patterns of behaviour can dictate how desirable something may be for us. For example, it is known that when faced with inconsistent patterns of behavior, humans will desire the reward more than consistent patterns.
Enter in the avoidant.
The avoidant, in their unhealed state, will be inherently inconsistent.
They’ll approach dating with keenness and apparent high self-worth (their defense mechanism) which initially pulls the anxious individual in. “Wow”, the anxious person thinks, “I’ve finally found someone who’s interested in me”.
But soon, as the relationship deepens with time, the avoidant begins to pull away. Whilst the anxious individual finds comfort in closeness, the avoidant finds discomfort but also initially seeks it due to their innate need to relate to others, and potentially their own need to unconsciously rewrite the past and find their own wholeness.
In this circumstance, you’d expect the anxious to pull away from the avoidant but the evidence of their avoidant’s apparent disinterest is conflicting. An unaware avoidant won’t be able to explain their true feelings which are rooted in their fear of intimacy, leaving the anxious individual wondering what went wrong. The avoidant may even come back time after time, further confusing the anxious individual as to where they truly stand.
What forms is an intermittent reward system in which the anxious individual gets the love they crave sometimes, but not all the time. Predisposition to desire love anyway, their desire tenth-fold which makes resisting the temptation to re-engage with the avoidant difficult.
Other bad habits like social media stalking, waiting for text messages, and obsessive thinking also show up. They become fixed on the prize that they can’t obtain, not unlike a behavioral addiction such as gambling (which low self-worth is also a risk factor, amongst other addictions). The anxious individual also knows they shouldn’t be putting themselves out there consistently only to be rejected, but they do it anyway. This leads to shame spirals that only lower their self-esteem further. They become trapped believing the only person who can save them is the person who is causing them pain.
Above all else, this hot/cold, push/pull relationship becomes the normal. As someone who has been stuck in these before and then gone on to experience secure relationships, you don’t know what you’re in until you’ve experienced different. For those of us who have grown up in an insecure environment, we don’t know any better.
This will likely seem unpleasantly familiar to us as if we deserve it.
Mutually Unfulfilling Dynamics
Neither side comes out better from a toxic anxious/avoidant love affair.
For the anxious individual, their belief that no one can love them consistently is confirmed and they’ll likely enter into a new dynamic with an increased longing to obtain what they couldn’t before. This preoccupation with others also means they continue to neglect their most important relationship: the one with themselves.
The avoidant, are likely to return to their defensive state with a facade of high self-worth and a general resistance towards emotions. You can’t help but wonder however that these unhealthy dynamics also take a hit on their self-worth, even if they don’t recognize it.
It’s likely they’ll have been told or reminded of their lack of emotion and inability to express love in a healthy way. It’s possible they may compensate for this by building their walls higher or finally waking up to the fact that this is a problem they need to address.
Both are victims, in their own way, though you can argue the anxious individual feels it the most (they can more readily feel, after all). Their disposition to be more emotional leaves them exposed and it will take them some time to move forward. There have been examples where it’s taken me a year to get over situations that were only a few months in length. It takes time to unweave the ingrained habits like obsessive thinking built around an inconsistent reward pattern. It also takes time to recover from the knowledge that you kept trying when there were clear red flags from the start.
Again, I believe avoidant/anxious individuals can work through their differences but it requires awareness from both parties.
Interestingly, both parties could learn a lot from each other if they were both willing to.
It’s also worth noting that healing requires us not to search for our salvation in others but to find it within ourselves through healing the parts of us we’re ultimately trying to avoid.
Thank you for reading this article today.
Let me know your thoughts below.
Opposite attracts sounds romantic at times but it really needed a lot of effort to make it work