22: Which Way Do You Lean? Anxious or Avoidant in Disorganized Attachment

  Hello and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, Jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal. What's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve? Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you have found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths, and honest conversations. Now let's dive in.  

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. On today's episode, I'm actually going to be answering a listener's question. But before then, I wanted to let you know, where can you send your questions in to me to get answered?

One of the best places to do that is our free Facebook group. You can get the link in the show notes, or you can go on Facebook and search up Speak Honest, and that would be the easiest way. Come and join us. And it's a great, great community filled with women like you that are just looking to get better, to understand why their relationships keep failing. Why do they keep getting stuck in the same patterns over and over again? And that's what I love working with. So please come and join our Facebook group. You can also reach out to me in my email. That information is also in the show notes, or you can just slide into my DMS on Instagram and ask me there. You can also ask me in any of the comments of any of my Instagram posts. I love interacting with people on there as well.

 So, let's go ahead and get started with this listener question... 

So this listener asks, "Hi Jenn, I've been learning about attachment styles and I'm curious, how can someone figure out if they're more anxious or dismissive in their attachment style, especially if they identify as having a disorganized attachment? It seems like people with disorganized attachment often lean towards one side or the other, either anxious or dismissive, rather than being perfectly balanced. So what signs should someone look for to understand which way they lean?" 

Great question. I really love when this question came in because it really showcases how confusing these attachment styles can sometimes be. So first again, let's go over the four attachment styles. 

We have secure attachment, that's the main attachment that you want to have. The one that gives you happy, healthy, fulfilling relationships. And then we have the three insecure attachment styles. So we have anxious,  we have avoidant  or dismissive as she says in this question. So it's dismissive avoidance. So you can use one or the other, and then you have disorganized attachment.

And often some people call that fearful avoidant.  You can understand why this starts to get all confusing, but let's say here, we're going to talk about them in anxious, avoidant,  and disorganized.  So what she's asking here is, she has a disorganized attachment and she wants to know, how can she know which way she leans?

Does she lean more anxious or does she lean more avoidant? And how can she tell? Well, the fun part about this question is that you will not lean one way or the other. When you have a disorganized attachment style and what I mean by that is a disorganized attachment style bases where they lean, whether it's anxious or avoidant based off of the relationship that they're having in the moment.

And so the way this works is if you are disorganized attachment and you are dating someone who is anxious, you are more likely going to start leaning avoidant.  But let's say then you get in a relationship with an avoidant, you are going to start leaning heavy, anxious. See how this works? And so, for example, myself, I leaned avoidant for a good 12 years of my life.

In fact, I would have just thought I was dismissive avoidant based on the way that I acted for a lot of my life. But as soon as I started dating someone who was avoidant, oh my gosh, did my anxious side come out full force. I became someone I never even recognized. The amount that I clung to him and needed him and checked my text messages every single day just to see if he was there and why is he not texting me back and why can't he give me more?

And this was also confusing to me at the time. This is. Well, before I understood attachment styles, this is what brought me to attachment styles, but before I understood any of that, all I understood was I was becoming this incredibly needy girl towards this person. And yet in my mind, I thought this must mean that I love him.

This must mean that he's the one and everything is perfect because I love him so much, I can't get anything else out of my mind. No, no, no. that's just called toxicity. And that was just a limerence that was building up inside of me because here was this person who was completely different than my past relationship.

So in my past relationship, he was a little bit more anxious. He was the type of person that, you know, couldn't go to bed angry and would constantly force me to have conversations. And in fact, that was a bit of our issues. is that I would need space. And so I would walk away and he would run in front of me and shut the door.

And it became incredibly volatile in these ways, because  in my disorganized mind, if somebody is preventing me from leaving, Oh, then like the big bear is going to come out of me. Right. And so I would scream or yell or throw things or want to push them out of the way. And you can see how this volatility kind of starts to build. 

And so I bring all this up to say, this question is mainly asking, how do you know which way you lean? And the thing is, is you're never really going to know that. It just depends on what relationship you're in the moment. But let's say you are in a relationship and you want to know, are you leaning more anxious or are you leaning more avoidance?

Well, that's going to be completely up to you to figure out. And some people actually We'll swing between them constantly. That's why I call it the pendulum swing dance because they will constantly swing between anxious and avoidant. And it's the push pull dynamic. Come here, come here, come here, go away, go away, go away. 

But let's say you're in a relationship and you find yourself often feeling trapped.  You find yourself. Not replying back to your partner's texts. You read them on your phone and then you kind of like put it down and you don't wanna have to think about it. And you're starting to feel a little bit resentful that they're texting you all the time.

And maybe even you roll your eyes a little bit, you know when it comes through. Or let's say you are starting to find excuses for not hanging out with them.  This is when you are starting to lean. Avoidant. And if this is something that you're working on and you don't like the side of you, then it's really important if you are leaning avoidant to go towards your partner and to start communicating to them what you need.

So if you're starting to feel trapped, you need to communicate that. And I have other podcasts where we talk about this kind of communication style, but remember it's coming towards a solution with your partner. So it's not about coming to them and saying, you're making me feel trapped and I need space.

Humph.  No, it's more like, Oh, I just really love it when I can have some alone time. Cause I'm really introverted and it means a lot to me or, you know, it just makes me feel so much relief when I get to go hang out with the girls and thank you so much for understanding babes. That's just, it means so much to me.

Right? So there's ways we communicate this, but if you're afraid to communicate that to your partner, that's where that avoidance is starting to come in. Okay.  Now, let's say it's the other direction.  Let's say that you're constantly looking at your phone, waiting for him to text you back. You can count the hours  that he has not texted you back.

Worse, you can count the minutes. Okay. I was definitely in that moment. I was like, uh, it has been 47 minutes and 30 seconds and he still hasn't texted me back. That's when you know you're starting to Anxious. Other types of ways you can tell if you're leaning anxious is if you feel like you constantly need to be bringing up a conversation with your partner, it's kind of the opposite of avoid it, right?

I mean, that makes sense. But what I mean by this is thinking like you need to be bringing up problems all the time. This is such a typical way for disorganized attachment folks to actually try to build connection when they're leaning and they're anxious.  And so they will just start fights, they will just pick on their partner.

They will just be like, you didn't do the dishes again because of their partner is fighting with them. What's happening? Exactly. They're connecting. And an anxious person doesn't care how they're connecting. They just need to connect. to connect. And so it's a bit like a toddler, honestly. If you have ever had kids or you've ever worked with kids or been around kids, you'll know that when they want attention, they will find any way to get that attention.

And they'll scream and they'll cry and they'll throw temper tantrums. Well, anxious attached folks are a lot like that. And so when we are kind of in our anxious era, so to speak, we will act out, we'll lash out, we will find a way to get that connection. But that's the unhealthy coping mechanism to get there.

So if you're leaning anxious in a relationship and you are a disorganized attachment, and I would recommend that you actually learn how to self soothe. You pull back a little bit. You learn that you don't have to have every conversation with your partner. This is when I love using the three strikes rule.

The three strikes rule works so well for those. with an anxious tendency. It's where we wait three times to bring something up to our partner. Now, if you're leaning avoidant, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for you because it's so easy for you guys, right? When I'm leaning avoidant, the three strikes rule is nothing.

It's like, Oh, let's do the eight strikes rule because I don't want to deal with this and I'd like to avoid it the whole time. No, no. I want you to go towards it. But if you're leaning anxious right now and you're listening to this, just try this out. Just try letting your partner do something once.  Twice, three times,  and then you bring it up.

So if he doesn't put his dish away, that's okay, we'll figure it out. If he doesn't do it again, you say something, and you're okay with it, and then we'll figure it out. And if he doesn't do it again, we say something again, and then finally we have the big talk.  And I'll get into that again. You can also check out a previous episode that I talked about the three strikes rule.

It goes a bit more into depth about it. That's basically it. So this is just such a great question, especially for people who are really trying to figure out this whole attachment style thing. Remember, it's okay to not know exactly what you are. It's okay to kind of be ebbing and flowing between them.

Everything's a bit of a spectrum, but if you are thinking that you have a disorganized attachment and you're wondering which way you lean, just kind of keep an eye out for honestly how you're feeling with your partner and keep an eye out for your partner. If your partner tends to avoid you, then you're most likely going to be leaning anxious.

And if you have an anxious partner, you're probably going to start leaning avoidance. So all of this self awareness is all there to help you figure out what you need to prevent the relationship patterns that keep getting you stuck in these toxic relationships. That's our goal here, right? All right, everyone thank you so much for listening. Please go and join our free Facebook group. And if you can, please rate and review this podcast, especially on Apple podcasts. It just helps everyone see it. And I hope you all have a great week. Take care. 

As we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination and it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today. Be sure to head over to our show notes where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode right there, and please remember to rate, review, and subscribe if you enjoyed today's podcast, your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast until next time, remember to speak up and Speak Honest.