The Clash of Anxious & Avoidant Attachment Styles

Nick and Sally* met when they were still at school. They had come to see their younger siblings performing in a school play, and as their parents knew each other already it was only natural that they would meet.

They met again a few months later and started dating. It was great to start with, but as time went by the cracks started to show.

Sally was away at boarding school most of the year so they couldn’t see each other for weeks on end. Then the holidays arrived and cramming so much into those few weeks meant that things could get very intense.

Sally’s Mum pointed out that Nick was very ‘needy’ and ‘emotionally dependent.’ But no one noticed Sally’s tendency to be a bit walled off – or if they did they didn’t say anything. This was the 1970s and no one talked about emotional regulation, boundaries or attachment styles.

Nick was funny, charming, loving and desperately anxious. Sally was loving too. She wasn’t brilliant at emotional regulation – after all, like Nick, she didn’t know this was a thing, let alone how to do it. But with hindsight it’s obvious that her attachment style was avoidant. She had a perfect set of boarding school armour – shiny, and efficient at keeping people out. Nick described it as a shell. And he was right. It was a shell – inside it Sally felt safe.

Their relationship lasted four years, but in the end it came to a disastrous finale. The relationship had been a victim of the clash of anxious and avoidant attachment styles and without the insight, skill and courage to transform, it was doomed.

How to cope with a combination of anxious and avoidant styles

If you’re in a relationship like this – where one of you has an avoidant attachment style and the other has an anxious style – it is possible to make it work.

It starts with recognition of what you’re both doing. Which of you struggles with emotional dysregulation? And which of you disappears behind a wall every time things get heated?

Nothing will change until you accept where you are now. Acceptance is easier when we have a sense of how these things got started, so see if you can trace it back to events in your childhood. Once you’ve done that, you can notice with compassion when you fall out of awareness and into an ‘old programme’ that has a long history.

Change requires courage and patience. The courage to do things differently and probably face some big fears, and patience because it requires time and practice.

But you have something really helpful on your side. If you are in a relationship where one of you is anxious and the other is avoidant, you can see where you’re heading – to a place somewhere in the middle.

There are some tools and perspectives you can use which will really help:

• Trust in the process

• Trust in yourself and your partner – your true self will do the heavy lifting

• Self-compassion and compassion for your partner

• Curiosity (about what lies behind those old programmes)

• Mindfulness practice so that you get good at coming into presence

• Somatic practices to support emotional regulation

• Simple touch

After all when you love someone, you don’t want it all to end in tears.

If you’re a woman in a relationship with a man who went to boarding school, it's most likely that he has an avoidant attachment style. Communication may be really challenging and you may feel like there's an ever-widening rift between you. You can get my support with this when you join The Bridge Back to Us, my new group coaching programme for wives & partners of ex-boarders. We start on Monday September 1st.

Find a better way of crossing the chasm between you - join us here.

* I’ve changed the names to protect Nick and Sally’s identity