Caged love: thoughts on avoidant attachment and loving from afar

We've all received that look that pierced us to the core. Or frozen with a single word said, or a single word left unsaid. The presence of another person, someone who really sees us, can unravel something in us without warning. This isn't unusual. It's existential.

Longing to belong is woven into being human. We feel moved by others. To mean something, and to create something meaningful together. When our sense of self feels secure enough to know where we end, and someone else begins, loving and being loved feels magnetic. It pulses through us and pulls at us.

But for some of us, love hasn’t felt like that. It feels more like danger. Somehow even deadening. What’s happening when being loved feels like that?

Beyond the checklist

We often talk about avoidant attachment as though it were a fixed relationship style. Emotional distance. Fear of commitment. Mixed signals. Descriptions like these say very little about what it feels like from the inside. They tell us what someone does, but rarely what those behaviours are trying to protect. So rather than start with theory, let's start with a person. 

The bed socks

This picture came to me while sitting opposite a client in their sixties. They had watched a video listing out avoidant attachment traits and quietly decided that the label fitted them.

“It was alright for my little sister”, they said. “She was allowed to be a bundle of nerves. Cried at the drop of a hat. I didn't. I wasn't allowed.” They turned their head slowly from side to side, hearing their own words. Words they had never said aloud before. They paused, glancing at me, as if seeking permission to continue.

Wincing at what they heard, they wrapped their hands together tightly and stared into their lap before adding, “I used to hide under my duvet when I was upset. At the top of the bunk bed" Another pause. “So, I made sure no one could hear me,” I asked how. How did they make sure? “I put my bed socks in my mouth so no one could hear me crying”, they said.

What we're saying, even when we can't

When we distance ourselves from connection – which is the red thread of avoidant attachment – what we're often saying, even when we can't find the words, is something like this: it never felt safe to simply be me.

Our very being seemed to upset, annoy, or inconvenience the people around us. We might have felt guilty for having needs, let alone expressing them, especially if we thought someone else's mattered more. We didn't show our feelings, because we learned to stuff them away instead. Wehad to. We didn't want to.

We didn't grow up seeing people who could stay close and still be themselves. People who could sit with us when we were frightened, excited, ashamed, or simply having a hard day. Conflict becomes something to dread. It’s less a case of disliking disagreement and more because no one modelled two people who loved each other, disagreed, and stayed connected.

Looking after ourselves? We’re remarkably good at that. Looking after someone we love? Not a problem. Loving someone so much we could be vulnerable with them, emotionally? Too much at stake.

If growing up, love is tangled with duty, pleasing, and obligation, it’s understandable that loving someone can start to feel dangerously close to losing ourselves later in life (Heller & LaPierre, 2012). There’s the tension – balancing love without risk of loss. Of losing ourselves in the process. Yet sometimes our fear isn't really about the other person. It's about disappearing into a kind of void, of merging with them, that closeness risks, symbolically.

The irony is that many of us become highly competent everywhere else. Work. Achievement. Being the person people turn to when a problem needs solving. It’s often in areas of life that ask us to do rather thanfeel where we finally experience recognition, belonging, and sometimes, something close to love.

This is why avoidance attachment is so complex.

Islands, not flaws

The psychologist Stan Tatkin (2012) calls this relational style an island, which describes someone who’s learned that relying on themself feels far safer than relying on anyone else. Islands can look calm and self-contained from a distance. But they're still surrounded by a barrier that makes reaching them a challenge.

The person’s longing for connection doesn't disappear. It simply learns to keep that longing private and adapts accordingly. None of this appears overnight. Much is shaped long before we have words for it, in the earliest, wordless blueprint we carry that tells us two things: what relationships feel like, and what they're likely to cost us.

The relational analyst Jeremy Holmes (1996) described the dilemma this creates with real precision: the person is caught between the loneliness of being left, and the pain of being pushed away if they reach out and connect. Understandably, hiding what we feel seems the safer of the two.

People rarely come to therapy because they've suddenly become avoidant. They come because the way they survive the inherent threat of a relationship is no longer giving them the one they truly want – genuinely attuned connection.

Where does that leave us? 

Avoidant attachment is more than a relationship style. It's a way of being, shaped by real experience, and submerged in paradox. The heart of what matters might be found by asking: what did love once ask of me?

Sitting with that question can loosen something. It can open the possibility that connection with another person doesn't automatically mean losing ourselves. It can also open something harder, a grief for what we needed and didn't get, and never truly stopped wishing for (Bowlby, 1982).

This kind of exploring often happens inside a relationship that finally feels different, one where we don't have to earn our place, hide our feelings, or disappear to stay connected. If we adapted once to survive, we can adapt to thrive, this time with greater authenticity and autonomy. The old grief doesn’t disappear; it’s there but held in care, perhaps in the care of a new relationship. 

Love is still there. It just hasn't always been able to move freely. What becomes caged isn't our love. It's our capacity to reach for it. We don't fear love. We fear what love once asked of us. Honestly? Welove love.

References

Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. 

Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books. 

Holmes, J. (1996). Attachment, intimacy, autonomy: Using attachment theory in adult psychotherapy. Jason Aronson. 

Tatkin, S. (2012). Wired for love: How understanding your partner's brain and attachment style can help you defuse conflict and build a secure relationship. New Harbinger Publications.