Avoidant Attachment is Wrong – it’s an unfortunate psychological theory mistake.
What if this unfortunate category of “Avoidant Attachment” has ruined countless lives, numerous relationships, sanity checks, prime youth days, and good old days.
What if – simply put but also stupidly revolutionary – “Avoidant”… actually just means NOT attached at all.
There are actually only 3 Attachment styles. Entertain me for a thought exercise. As a disclaimer, I haven’t conducted social experiments using the scientific method, or gotten a PhD in social psychology, etc.
This isn’t a clinical argument – it’s a theoretical one. Psychology deals in patterns and tendencies, not deterministic laws. Human behavior is contextual, relational, and often subjective by nature. You can’t fully predict what a person will feel, say, or do, or why they are the way they are.
What if I told you there’s only 3 Attachment Styles, not 4. And Avoidant is just a devastatingly incorrect concept, which has given millions of people agony, despair, anxiety, and wasted years over a couple of generations since the 1960s when psychologist Mary Ainsworth tried to elucidate the insecure attachment style that John Bowlby had come up with.
These are the 3 Attachment Styles
- Secure – pretty self-explanatory. Their calibration is on point. The definition of Stoic. Not “stoic” as in unemotional. But Stoic as in they navigate the flow of life and relationships pretty easily and adeptly. They care, as the Stoics should. But they let you be.
- Anxious – they need to be super close to whomever they’re attached to – namely physically, but also digitally. They need a lot of texts, a lot of 1:1 time, and a lot of reassurance, in order to feel ok.
- Disorganized – aka “anxious-avoidant” is definitely a thing, and counts, even if avoidant isn’t. Basically disorganized is when someone is anxious to get close, but then freaked out by their own anxiety and desperation, then – I want to avoid using the term avoid so as not to complicate things lol – evade their own anxiety in order to overcompensate. “I need you where are you????” “Just kidding haha I’m fine”, “wait what hiiiiii!!!!”
They say your attachment style stems from when you were a baby – ie “your relationship with your parents or primary caregivers” as boring and cliché as that sounds. What is also true and should be taught more is that attachment styles 1) change over time, and 2) depend on with whom.
- Some people – especially earlier in my life – probably thought I was secure and fine.
- Others – have definitely thought I was anxious.
- A few – have thought I was for sure disorganized.
- Yet others – thought I was the oh-so-impossible “avoidant”.
The truth is, for those who thought I was “avoidant” – I honestly wasn’t attached at all. Like some of them were nice and tolerable enough, but some of them I didn’t like at all –even as a person.
I say scrap the whole obsession with “avoidant” people.
You may protest – no, but I know they truly do care, but they’re just “avoiding” their feelings due to childhood traumas, relational traumas, their ex was a psycho, blah blah blah. Trust me, no judgment, I’ve been there. And yes that may all be true. And they may care about you a little bit – but in the same way that one cares about steak or chocolate, or their nice old neighbor or that cute baby. Like they may not actively hate or loathe you. They may like you as a friend or acquaintance. They’re just not actually attached to you in any capacity. Sorry. Attachment theory is a thing. But that doesn’t mean your crush or lover is attached to YOU.
But congratulations. If you internalize this little concept, just one thing – avoidant means not attached at all – you’ll have saved yourself months to years to decades of speculative mind loops and wishful thinking.
