Hide and Seek

On healing my fearful-avoidant attachment

The Chasseur in the Forest, Caspar David Friedrich

Have you ever played hide and seek with a kid who is just a little bit too young to really grok the game?

Usually, they’ll start out all right; they’ll find a place to hide like they’re supposed to. But when it’s time to be sought, they just can’t handle the anticipation. Sometimes they make noise on purpose to attract you to them; other times, they leave their hiding place early, eager to greet you instead of trying to remain undetected while you hunt for them.

Sure, they’re subverting the goal of the game, but it’s adorable, sweet, innocent fun.

Having a fearful-avoidant attachment style is a lot like being that young child playing hide and seek. In relationships, however, the game is to seek closeness and you subvert the game by hiding.

In the fearful-avoidant game of hide and seek, you desperately want to play and to win. Relationships and intimacy are sacred values to you. You often start out the game all right: meeting people, becoming friends, dating. But you just can’t handle the anticipation of rejection. The dread of it causes every fiber of your being to scream at you, imploring you to hide—and so you impose distance and you lose the game.

Here, of course, you do not feel adorable or sweet, but self-destructive, confused, and tormented.

I’d like to bring you inside the mind of a person with a fearful-avoidant attachment style, and also share the great strides I’ve made in earning a secure attachment. From a certain perspective, I still have a long way to go, but the growth has been stratospheric so far and it gives me confidence that even more is possible.

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Attachment

I want to be clear from the start I don’t know enough as a layman to endorse the attachment framework, or even to really endorse if I’m using it correctly. I’m using the attachment lens here because I found it helpful as a way to reflect on my problems. This is primarily because the idea of fearful-avoidant attachment best captures the feeling of conflict, of being torn in two directions, which is really central to how I’ve experienced relationships.

But there are certainly other angles and terms one could use for my issues: like “self-esteem”, “anxiety”, and “cowardice”. An alternate subtitle for this piece which I think would be really fitting is: “On recovering from being a coward”.

All that said, the idea of attachment styles comes from research in psychology which describes the implicit mental models people have of themselves, other people, and the world. These internal models are formed early in childhood and impact how people experience and operate in relationships.

The basic attachment triad consists of secure, anxious, and avoidant styles.

• People with a secure attachment (estimated at 50-66% of the population) are generally described as being comfortable with trusting others, communicating their needs directly, and with intimacy more broadly.

• Those with an anxious attachment (roughly 20% of the population) crave intimacy but are preoccupied with the fear of being abandoned. They cope by seeking reassurance and closeness, often coming across as “clingy” or “needy”.

• Those with an avoidant attachment (roughly 20-25% of the population) crave independence. Thus, when others seek intimacy with them, it is often interpreted as a threat to their independence, and they push people away.

A smaller category are those with a fearful-avoidant attachment style (roughly 5-10% of the population). This style is typically described as a mixture of both anxious and avoidant styles. People with this style crave intimacy (like someone with an anxious attachment), but the fear of abandonment and rejection leads them to hold others at a distance and push people away (like someone with an avoidant attachment).

To me, the key distinction between a fearful-avoidant attachment style and both anxious and avoidant styles is this: both the anxious and avoidant are faithful to their values—whether intimacy or independence—however badly they may go wrong in pursuing them. Someone with a fearful-avoidant attachment, meanwhile, betrays his values and acts on a policy of self-denial.

“To avoid the pain of losing what you want, you yourself must throw it away,” is the implicit premise a fearful-avoidant operates by. It is better to be alone by choice, than be rejected.

This might sound insane or self-defeating, but from a young age this policy has felt true and moral and aligned with the way the world works to me. And I’ve noticed that there are plenty of cultural messages saying something similar: “To get what you want, you need to not want it or seek it (either so much, or at all) to the point of being willing to throw it all away”.

In order for Harry Potter to acquire the sorcerer’s stone when looking in the Mirror of Erised, he must not want the stone for himself. Quotes found on motivational posters and your weird aunt’s Facebook page declare, “If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they’re yours; if they don’t, they never were.”

On the radio, 38 Special belts out, “Just hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.” Self-help books advise that pursuing happiness is the surest way to never find it. And from the pulpit, the priest reads, “John 12:25: He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Whatever the origins of my fearful-avoidant attachment style in early childhood, and however it was bolstered by various cultural messages and advice, the fact is that I’ve often experienced relationships as a source of deep internal conflict. I desperately wanted them and I desperately wanted to escape them at the same time.

And so, if you were to dig through my past and study my behavior like an anthropologist, what might you learn about living by such a paradoxical policy? What are the strategies and coping mechanisms—largely unconscious and sometimes fortified with post hoc justifications—of someone with a fearful-avoidant attachment style?

A guide to hiding

If you’ve never played the fearful-avoidant game of hide and seek, you might not realize that there are so many different ways to hide. They each have their advantages and their downsides.

If your fear of rejection is acute, the most effective way to hide is simply by being quiet. If you rarely say anything, most people start to assume you have nothing to say and fairly soon they stop inquiring. The major upside here is that you cannot get close to people if you don’t talk to them.

You can soothe any misgivings when doing this by telling yourself things like, “No one is interested in you anyways”, or “You don’t really have anything valuable to add.” Telling yourself this makes the strategy work even better. Not only does it justify staying quiet, sense of hopelessness it creates can also make it true. Less valuable things will occur to you to say if you start off by believing there’s nothing valuable you could possibly say.

There is one major risk to this strategy, however. To extent the other party is insecure themselves or for some other reason you can’t identify, they may interpret your quiet as a form of haughtiness, as if you are sitting there internally criticizing and laughing at them, and you risk catching some hostility. Being a generally warm person, an attentive listener, and open to shallow small-talk usually dispels this, but not always.

If your fear of rejection is more manageable, you can lean into asking lots of questions while never volunteering much beyond the surface level yourself. This one is particularly rewarding because you get to surreptitiously experience one of the great joys of a relationship without risking any rejection yourself: seeing and appreciating another person for who they are.

The major risk of this strategy is that many people will start to feel uncomfortable, perhaps even used, if they are always sharing and baring their soul while learning nothing about you in return. This strategy is thus best deployed in big social gatherings with relative strangers i.e. a context where the expected length of your relationship is typically limited to the length of the party and therefore not long enough for this problem to develop.

Especially with closer friends and lovers, an effective way to hide is by simply having no strongly-held desires of your own. Without your own desires, there is never any risk of visibility and therefore no cause for conflict or rejection. What they want to eat is what you want to eat. What they want to watch is what you want to watch. And so on for their music, their style of jokes, their intellectual inquiries, their life plans. You can get so good at hiding that you even start hiding from yourself.

This strategy will seem especially useful and necessary if the other party is insecure, controlling, or otherwise wants to use you to bolster their own self-esteem. These people are truly liable to try and punish you for any divergence from what they want you to be/do, so your efforts to “keep the peace” will seem especially warranted.

One thing to know about this strategy, though, is that it’s a bit like pulling the pin of a grenade. You are running on limited time. No person can suppress who they are indefinitely. You will start to feel suffocated, but what you need to know is that it’s your own fingers clutching your throat. Inexorably, conflict and rejection will come, and because of the long mounting pressure and building resentments, it is often explosive.

Rather than blatantly suppressing yourself, the far safer bet is just to run away whenever the going gets tough. If you sense that rejection is imminent—if a joke is made at your expense, if a criticism (fair or unfair) is levied, if an honest conversation would expose you to risk, or if a failure in some other aspect of your life makes you feel unworthy—then you can simply let the relationship quietly fade. Reach out less, make fewer plans, and default to being quiet or only asking questions when you do get together. In a romantic setting, you can reflexively suggest breaking up, or just “taking a break” whenever problems arise.

You can tell yourself that if the other person really wanted your friendship or your love, then they would pursue you. Why are you always the one who needs to reach out and make plans? If they don’t reach out either, then obviously you never mattered all that much in the first place, and stepping back was best for everyone. You can also tell yourself that running away is better for everyone. You’re trying to protect them from you—your anxieties, your negative emotions, your sins and flaws and mistakes.

In the absolute worst case, i.e. in the middle of a conflict that you failed to avoid, you can try any and all of the strategies above in rapid fire. During the argument, you might go quiet and resist answering questions to share what’s bothering you. You might try to mollify the person by giving in to whatever they want. You might beg for space to be alone to think or you might plead to come back to the argument later when heads would be cooler. You might suggest ending the relationship altogether and sparing them the continued pain of dealing with you.

Journalistically, using strategies like this has meant that I spent most of my life with few friends. And my romantic relationships, such as they were, were often dramatic, dysfunctional, and turbulent. By the time I was 30, then, I was divorced and had ~zero friends.

To get a sense of how I started to recover from this rock bottom, I think it’s helpful to describe the intense internal conflict I experienced when I was at my best and clearest—when I first started dating the man who is now my husband.

With or without you

For the first ~year of dating my now-husband, I experienced the highest fever pitch of anxiety and internal anguish that I have ever experienced in any relationship. This was because, on the one hand, I recognized that he was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I felt more fulfilled, alive, seen, and loved than I had even thought possible, and I desperately wanted our relationship to thrive.

But therein was also the problem. The greater the desire for intimacy and the greater the reward the relationship offered, the more amplified was the fear of rejection and the more insistent was the impulse to self-destruct and run away.

Perhaps it’s unintuitive, but the fear of rejection and the compulsion to hide most often came from something outside the relationship. Sure, sometimes I would feel insecure about a beautiful actress I knew he appreciated, or jealous of a previous girlfriend whose qualities intimidated me, or I might worry that a moment of silence or distraction meant he was angry with me, but the most persistent and painful cause for my fears was not anything like this.

Usually, it was a bad day at work. Maybe I was struggling to make progress on an ambitious piece of writing, maybe I had received criticism or a project was at a standstill, maybe I just saw how competent and impressive someone else was and I suddenly felt so small and ineffectual that I became overwhelmed with this sense . . . almost like my existence was an affront to all goodness and beauty. Like I was unworthy of living on the same earth and breathing the same air as someone like them.

Whatever it was, it was less like I was afraid of being rejected or had any reason to think that rejection was imminent. It was much more that I believed I deserved to be rejected, and thus it was only a matter of time until the facts presented themselves clearly and my partner would know it too.

Because I deserved to be rejected, running away did not feel like cowardice. It felt like justice. And whatever other problems may be attributed to my cowardice, I did not fear the guillotine—I had rested my head on its inviting block so many times before.

But whether it was because of my recent failures and divorce, or just because I was so keenly aware of the reward this relationship promised, I struggled desperately to resist the impulse to run away and hide. I have never exerted myself to a greater degree before or since, nor felt my powers of self-control and inhibition so taxed.

The most salient example of doing this sounds so silly and small, but my efforts were truly tortuous.

Every day, my partner and I would take a walk around the neighborhood. On the days when I most felt like I deserved rejection and when the impulse to self-destruct was strongest, I couldn’t hold a conversation on these walks. This was less fun for both of us, but he was so patient and understanding with me. He was happy to just walk and hold my hand.

And so every self-destructive impulse within me locked in on that hand. It felt like I was gripping a hot poker. I wanted to scream and fling it away from me. I wanted to be petty and start a fight, anything to not be touched, to not feel the warmth of a relationship I knew I didn’t deserve and was destined to lose anyway. But I didn’t let go. I would spend the entire walk with the sensation of my fingertips as the totality of my awareness, and just refuse to let go.

This example is small. But I think it was small actions like this which helped me eventually wield a massive lever for change.

Toward Self-Fidelity

The past ~4 years have been nothing short of incredible. I am now married to the man I was falling in love with at the start of my recovery journey, who is perfect for me in every way. With him especially, I no longer chronically struggle with my fearful-avoidant anxieties and coping mechanisms. What was a raging fire is now just dimly glowing embers.

I also have friends and colleagues now and a general sense of benevolence about the world and other people. Above all, I largely experience an unconflicted desire to add more people to my life and to deepen the bonds I’ve already formed.

That is not to say there aren’t ways to still improve. Especially in big gatherings, in meetings with relative strangers or acquaintances, or just in circumstances where I’m struggling with a broader worry about being unworthy or incapable, I do still contend with the fear of rejection and a preoccupation with how others are evaluating me. And, of course, old habits die hard. Even when you now know where they come from and want to change, the only way to alter them is with slow, deliberate practice over time. Thus, often I’m still quieter and more reserved socially than I would like.

It is quite difficult to tell the story of how I arrived here and the work I’ve done over the past several years. This is mostly because I didn't set out with much of an idea of what needed to be improved or how. I didn’t sit down and think, for example, “So, my problem is I have a fearful-avoidant attachment style. I need to work on addressing my fears, finding alternatives to my coping mechanisms, unearthing and correcting all the bad premises that bolster these, and discovering where they originated in my childhood etc.”

No, indeed! Much of the perspective on my problems presented here is retrospective and therefore quite new and recent to my thinking.

What I can do, however, is name two things I did and some of the other things I think contributed to my growth.

1. Random acts of self-assertion

At the beginning of my journey, the thing I was most aware of needing to change was my pattern of self-betrayal. I knew that I had been abandoning myself and I was so, so tired of living underground.

From the outset, I cultivated what can only be described as a resolute wedge of stubbornness. And I used that little wedge as a lever. I decided that, whatever else happened, come hell or high water, I was going to be honest—about what I wanted, what I needed, what I liked, what I disliked, and if I wasn’t sure . . . well I would admit that too.

And, from the perspective I have gained now, it makes sense that this had to be an important lever for change. After all, how could I possibly expect other people not to abandon me if I couldn’t even trust myself not to do so?

My husband encouraged me to do “random acts of self-assertion”, to take small daily actions to assert myself when the stakes are low. Tell the Uber driver the A/C is too cold. Tell your partner the movie is upsetting you and you want to turn it off. Pick the date night meal. Get used to what it feels like to speak up, to have opinions, to matter.

It’s interesting to note that the most immediate effect of doing this was not the alleviation of my anxiety in relationships or the quelling of my impulse to cope poorly by hiding. No, that came much later. What happened first can only be viewed as falling in love—with myself and with the world. I would go throughout my days and feel a sudden and fierce surge of pride for loving the things I loved and an overpowering gratitude for a world that contained them.

These were the fashions, the music, the art that I loved. They were mine, a part of my soul. And how good to be me and to live in such a beautiful world!

2. Honesty about others

I’ve discovered that a crucial part of being honest and not abandoning myself involves being honest about my evaluation of other people.

One of my most deeply rooted habits in dealing with other people is a refusal to have “negative thoughts” about them. It feels mean and petty and immoral. It feels like I ought to focus on my own flaws. It feels like a sure recipe for needless conflict. So my habit has always been to shut it down and … to start picking at myself instead.

It’s important to emphasize here that I’m talking about my thoughts! I’m not talking about resisting the urge to go around denouncing people, or stopping myself from making snarky, unhelpful comments, or acting on ungenerous assumptions, or talking behind people’s backs. You need to have the thoughts first before you do any of this!

I’m saying I had the habit of abandoning myself—in my own mind—by shutting down the very possibility of even thinking something negative about another person.

From the perspective I have now I can see how this would contribute to deep anxiety in relationships. How could I not fear that my relationships were fragile and brittle and that everyone would abandon me at my first misstep if I never acknowledged that other people had missteps too?

This is still something I struggle with and have to actively remind myself to do. But what I’ve noticed is that when I’m honest about my evaluations, when I allow myself to think: that person was kind of awkward then, that argument doesn't make sense, I disagree with them, that joke wasn’t funny, I don’t get what they see in that person etc. the relationship doesn’t break and my good opinion hasn’t been lost forever.

I am perfectly capable of respecting someone, thinking they are very intelligent with interesting thoughts and opinions on any number of issues, while simultaneously holding the view that I think they’re mistaken about something, or think that they’re kind of socially awkward sometimes, or see that they could be better at this, that, or the other.

And the more I’m able to see that, the more I can believe that anyone I would want to be friends with or in a relationship with will have the same approach with me. I can be respected, even loved, while having flaws, making mistakes, or being wrong about something.

I think there are many other contributing factors to my growth and healing, such as:

• Having my dream job where I got to work with some incredible and admirable people. Working on a deeply personally-meaningful project and building something I wanted to see in the world is also an act of self-assertion—but a grand one with real stakes. Getting good and being deservedly valued for my contributions in this realm was precious proof of my own capability and the ability of others to recognize it.

• Having a partner who supported me and encouraged me and saw me was priceless. The fact that he didn’t have any self-esteem issues of his own so my struggles were never experienced as threats to the relationship by him and it never felt like my healing had to happen to please him instead of to get what I wanted out of life was crucial.

• Having a heightened sense after my divorce that certain things were self-destructive and not allowing myself to engage in those behaviors. I would always admit when I was upset about something, for example, and even if it took me a few days to figure out how to express what was bothering me, my partner always trusted me to get there.

• Writing on the internet and, through this, making friends, sharing more of myself, and finding colleagues, inspiration, and so many kindred spirits.

• Intentionally seeking out friendships and putting myself out there to meet up and hang out and get to know others.

I freely admit that I still have so much more room to grow. But whereas the need for growth would have felt like a barrier to love and relationships in the past, now it just feels like a promise of more and deeper joy to come.