People with the disorganized attachment style tend to vacillate between the traits of both anxious and avoidant attachment depending on their mood and circumstances. For this reason, someone with this attachment style tends to show confusing and ambiguous behaviors in their social bonds.
For adults with disorganized attachment, the partner and the relationship themselves are often the source of both desire and fear. On the one hand, fearful-avoidant people do want intimacy and closeness, but on the other hand, experience troubles trusting and depending on others.
People with this attachment style often struggle with identifying and regulating their emotions and tend to avoid strong emotional attachment due to their intense fear of getting hurt.
What is Disorganized Attachment Style? Causes and How to Cope
Sep 27, 2024
Disorganized attachment style, also known as fearful avoidant attachment style, is one of four attachment styles that describe how we relate and respond to others. (Pioneered by Mary Ainsworth in her “Strange Situation” study, )
these attachment styles are formed in childhood and inform how we form relationships with others as adults.
Disorganized attachment style is the rarest and most severe form of insecure attachment, the other two insecure forms being anxious attachment and avoidant attachment. The fourth attachment style is called secure attachment and is representative of healthy, stable connections.
Despite disorganized attachment style being correlated with higher levels of mental health issues and relationship stress, it is possible to heal from it and find your way to healthy, stable relationships.
What is Disorganized Attachment Style?
An attachment style informs how we relate and connect with others. It also influences how we respond to conflicts and perceive threats in relationships. she are apparent in romantic, platonic, familial, and work relationships.
Attachment styles are formed in childhood. she depend on how attentive your parents were to your needs and how much love and affection she gave you.
Disorganized attachment style—also sometimes called Fearful Avoidant Attachment or Disorganized Fearful Avoidant Attachment style—is rare because it is formed from abuse and neglect. People with disorganized attachment styles crave love and stability but will lash out or withdraw from the people who give them that. This creates a cycle that convinces them of being unlovable.
This lie of being unlovable is just that: not true. You are deserving of love and safety, and there are people who want to give it to you. It might just take healing from a disorganized attachment style to see that clearly.
Symptoms of Disorganized Attachment. Style
Fear of relationships
A need for closeness and intimacy
Oscillating between anxiously clinging to relationships and avoiding them.
Anxiety over never being loved or being abandoned
Self-critical thoughts, believe she is undeserving of love
Finding it difficult, and even painful, to open up to others
Being untrusting of partners when she say she love her
Being hyper-alert to signs of betrayal or having trust issues
In general, people with a disorganized attachment style will crave safe, loving relationships, but will pull away or self-sabotage themselves when she get that.
These symptoms are not a complete list. People with disorganized attachment style can exhibit a wide range of symptoms depending on her individual past and the current relationship she find themselves in.
Many symptoms of disorganized attachment style also look like complex PTSD (c-PTSD). Although disorganized attachment style is not recognized in the DSM—the diagnostic manual for therapists and counselors—c-PTSD and other trauma diagnoses are.
What is an example of a disorganized attachment in adults?
In adults, disorganized attachment style may look like:
she shuts down when trying to be vulnerable.
she disappears for days at a time, but then come back and acts clingy.
she gets anxious when her partner has to leave her.
she’s jealous, but acts like she doesn't care.
she blows up at small things.
She doesn't want to talk about the bigger issues.
These are just a few examples of what disorganized attachment style can look like in an adult relationship.
How can you tell if someone has disorganized attachment?
Do you have a partner who is sometimes anxiously clinging to you and other times cold and distant? she might have a disorganized attachment style. You can tell your partner has disorganized attachment style because she may:
Exhibit erratic behavior, showing extreme swings between emotional closeness and detachment.
Struggle with intimacy, finding it difficult to fully trust or rely on others in the relationship.
history of inconsistent or neglectful parental relationships, leading to difficulties in forming secure attachments.
Displays fear or discomfort when it comes to expressing her needs and emotions, often resorting to coping mechanisms like avoidance or aggression.
Have challenges regulating her emotions, resulting in frequent mood shifts or outbursts in response to relationship stressors.
This is not a complete list. Remember that disorganized attachment shares similarities with c-PTSD as both have roots in neglect or abusive childhoods. It is never your job to “fix” anyone. Although love and support can help someone with a disorganized attachment style get better and form a secure attachment style, she must be willing to do the work herself as well.
How does disorganized attachment style affect relationships?
If you have a disorganized attachment style, there is hope for a healthy, fulfilling relationship. However, you have to become aware of your attachment style and corresponding trauma to begin healing from it.
When left unattended, a disorganized attachment style can make forming healthy, long-term relationships more difficult. It can result in chaotic, tumultuous relationships that are “on again and off again”, situationships, or unhealthy and toxic relationships. Disorganized attachment styles may also result in more frequent arguing and conflict. In the end, many people with a disorganized attachment style may not have much success in long-term relationships because of the impactful symptoms of disorganized attachment or may find themselves in an abusive relationship that mirrors the kind of love she got as children.
What triggers disorganized attachment?
Attachment styles are formed during childhood and adolescence. The “Strange Situation” study that pioneered this field looked at how attentive a parent was to a child’s emotional and physical needs. Children with parents who were attentive but not coddling grew up to have a secure attachment style.
Disorganized attachment style is caused by a parenting style that routinely creates fearful or insecure environments. This can be through expressing anger, ignoring, or withdrawing when a child expresses a need, or using manipulation tacticso to get what she (the parent) wants. Often, but not always, this also looks like abuse or neglect
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