Push-pull, reach-retreat: living with anxious-avoidant attachment

Anxious-avoidant attachment, also known as fearful-avoidant, is often discussed less than other attachment types. Yet it's the pattern I encounter most often in the therapy room.

It's most obvious in people who reach for closeness then pull back when it comes close. This isn't because we've stopped wanting it; it's because wanting to be that close once came with a cost.

An ingenious solution to an impossible demand 

It's tempting to hear "push-pull" and think something is wrong that needs sorting. I gently push back on that. This is a sophisticated solution to an existential childhood dilemma: stay close enough to those you need to survive, but not so close lest their presence feels suffocating.

This forces us into a perpetual movement between incompatible demands. It takes real sensitivity for a child to manage this so skilfully. I see it as both a gift and a burden – as something inherited and carried out of necessity, not choice.

Why confusion makes complete sense

When you look at it this way, the questions people ask start to make sense.

Search any discussion on anxious-avoidant attachment, like Reddit or Instagram, and the same kind of questions circle:

• Why do I want them so much when they pull away, then need space when they get close?
• Is this on-off thing what real love feels like?
• Why am I triggered when my partner is being so nice?

I've heard almost identical questions in therapy. It's hard to understand this push-pull towards connection for the person living with it, and for anyone who's in a relationship with them. Managing two incompatible needs at once is complicated.

What causes anxious avoidance?

It varies, but what matters isn't the specific cause; it's the result. Connection was sometimes given, but not reliably enough that reaching for it always carried the risk of being let down, or being seen as a let-down.

So, we read the room, and reach. Then pause to assess, and retreat. We balance half-reaching and half-retreating until we learn to meet our own needs once everyone else's have been met.

Why living with it is totally exhausting

When the person we depend on for safety as a child is inconsistently available, the body is left holding two incompatible instructions at once: move away from the fear and move toward the same person for comfort.

No one can win here. Certainly not a child. What tends to follow is a state of continuous fight-flight-freeze – which is why this attachment pattern often presents as chronic stress and unforgiving anxiety.

Emotional flashbacks: when the past comes crashing back

When emotions couldn't be expressed, we learned to manage them instead of feeling through them. They’re shut down mid-flow and lead to thoughts, memories, and feelings which don't feel coherent.

Many clients who experience this apologise in therapy for not remembering something they start describing. Or feel an emotion strongly yet can’t find a 'logical' reason for why they do. 

Because unprocessed memories don't feel as though they’re part of a neat and tidy past, they flood back as triggers. Feelings and bodily experiences don’t seem connected to the here and now, but more like an emotional flashback (Walker, 2013).

The invisible cost of unresolved trauma

Relational therapists would argue that when we're constantly negotiating how close someone can get before we pull back, what we need quietly fades into the background. Anxious-avoidant attachment is therefore best understood as a withdrawal from our own needs, and why articulating needs can feel impossibly hard. Dangerous even.

Attachment researchers use the term unresolved to offer context for this. When trauma and/or loss remain insufficiently integrated, our sense of self feels confusing, and the way we speak about it all lacks narrative coherence(George et al., 1985).

Perhaps that's the invisible cost. We're not only managing closeness with someone else; we're trying to make sense of feelings, memories and needs that belong neither to the past nor to the present (Bakkum et al., 2023).

When the balance starts to break down

A crisis often arises in a relationship that can lead to a kind of falling apart, like we’re crumbling inside from the exhaustion of trying to get the balance right. The embodied push-pull, the constant risk assessment, the masking that this asks of us can feel more than stressful over time – it can feel soul-destroying.

This push-pull isn't only in our nervous system; it’s in our thoughts, the meaning we take from our feelings, and the behavioural adaptations so ingrained they have forged our sense of reality and identity.

This is not a simple attachment style we can decide to switch up: it is a whole way of being. A model of relating to ourselves and others shaped over a lifetime that becomes a central part of how we have come to be.

Meeting ourselves before others

Deepening our capacity to relate securely enough in the most important anxhip we have is where the real work lies. And this work takes time to reveal itself after a lifetime in the shadows.

The self-loss that comes from denying our needs, desires, and right to be who we are is gut-wrenching. The relationship we have with ourselves changes how we meet everything – and everyone – else.

Is it easy work? No. Is it worth the effort? Yes – from what I've witnessed in clients who've chosen to do it. Does anxious-avoidance ever truly change? It gets easier to catch ourselves when we’re about to repeat the same pattern, yes – or what the psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg calls “standing in the spaces” (1996).

When we practise both self-allyship and get honest with ourselves, new possibilities reveal themselves to us – doing something about them is still on us. We can learn to stay with the discomfort of not knowing what comes next, rather than racing to repeat what we know simply to stand on familiar ground.

Sometimes, standing in the spaces means choosing what I call self-loyalty over the familiar ground of self-loss. Choosing to stay alongside ourselves, rather than disappearing into others and into what we've always known.

References

Bakkum, L., Schuengel, C., Foster, S. L., Fearon, R. M. P., & Duschinsky, R. (2023). Trauma and loss in the Adult Attachment Interview: Situating the unresolved state of mind classification in disciplinary and social context. History of the Human Sciences, 36(3–4), 133-157

Bromberg, P. M. (1996). Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32(4), 509-535.

George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1985). Adult Attachment Interview. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving: A guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.