Avoidant Attachment in Marriage

When we look at some of the areas that people
with an avoidant attachment style struggle in, it’s easy to focus on extremes
or exaggerate the way they interact with you. But your spouse can be avoidantly
attached to you and still be a faithful, committed, reliable person in the
marriage. 

In this article, we’re going to look at the
challenges that having an avoidant attachment presents in marriage. The section
towards the end is especially important because it examines how an avoidant
attachment style develops in childhood. Someone with this attachment style may
behave in ways that seem like they are intentionally doing things to hurt you,
and it is easy to take personally. But in most cases, there is no intent to
harm or be difficult in the marriage. We really encourage you to listen to them
with compassion and understanding. 

Avoidant Attachment and Needing Others

The default posture of an avoidantly attached person is to not depend on others. There are a number of reasons they may have this fear. It may be because they are distrustful of close relationships or are afraid of relying on anyone else. It may also be because they don’t want to experience the pain of rejection. They may feel pressured to give the other person the level of support they receive. They may avoid being close enough to receive support from another because they don’t want to offer support in return and have their efforts rejected. This may be because there have been times when they have depended on someone else and it has led to disappointment.

A person with an avoidant attachment style
places a lot of value on independence and being self-sufficient.^[1] They
may consider that to need someone else is to show weakness, so they sometimes
develop alone wolf mentality. They
may also seem to be very much in their head and working through problems
rationally.

Attachment
In the Brain

To fully understand the avoidant attachment
style, we need to look at how attachment in general develops in childhood. When
a child is with their parent and they experience a moment of threat or
uncertainty or distress, their attachment system is activated. What this means
is the part of the brain that is responsible for tracking and monitoring the
safety and availability of their primary caregiver is turned on. The moment of
fear prompts the child to re-establish if their parent is safe and available
and can meet their needs. When the parent affirms this, the child’s brain turns
the activation off.

A child whose caregiver is not available learns
to prevent their attachment system from activating. They don’t let themselves
get upset or distressed or needy towards a loving significant other. Therefore,
they develop an avoidant attachment style: first towards their caregiver, and
later on towards their spouse.

An avoidant attachment can have a significant impact on a marriage. An avoidant spouse may do the following things:

1. Averting their gaze from what they consider to be an unpleasant emotion in an attempt to prevent intimacy or connection.
2. Tuning out a conversation related to commitment topics^[2]
3. Accusing their spouse of wanting too much from them when the spouse is asking for deeper emotional connection (Catlett, 2015)
4. Turning towards busy work in the home or at work when conflict with their spouse threatens their sense of safety in the relationship, or using sulking or hinting or complaining to seek support from their spouse during a conflict or when in crisis.

All of these responses are geared towards keeping that attachment system deactivated. They’ll deny or minimize their vulnerability and repress their emotions as a way to manage emotions that have been aroused.

They Operate Independently

Because of the “not needing” others attitude and
fiercely independent coping style that comes with keeping their attachment
system deactivated, people with an avoidant attachment style are often very
self-reliant. This desire for
independence can cause the following things to happen:

1. They may put up unnecessary boundaries in a marriage, like sleeping in different beds, or not sharing information that would be better shared.[3] Again, this is not about an intent to deceive but the avoidance of intimate connection. For some, disengaged sex may be easier than intimate sex. It can be difficult for them to think about being concerned with their spouse’s feelings during or after sex.
2. They can develop habits like making dinner independently after their spouse goes to bed, or exaggerating their work schedule rather than simply asking for alone time from their spouse. 
3. They may say “I love you” and mean it but actually be dissociated from the emotion of love. Some avoidants are dissociated from most of their emotions as a way of maintaining emotional distance and not feeling needy. Again, you can see that this supports their need to feel independent.

Avoidant
Attachment Affects Career

It’s interesting to note that you will often
find avoidantly attached people in litigation, scientific fields or those kinds of occupations where avoiding the feelings of
others can be beneficial, or where performance is not based on group effort.^[4]
These occupations allow them to work in an environment where they can do their
job without being involved with the emotions of others, which a career that
involved a lot of people work would require them to do.

Avoidant Attachment Affects
Spirituality

Looking at people with an avoidant
attachment from a spiritual perspective, they often seem to have difficulty
experiencing warmth, intimacy or closeness with God.^[5] They may see God as distant
or impersonal or generally uncaring.^[6] This kind of information is
helpful just to note that their avoidant attachment isn’t something that
singles out their spouse for special treatment but is a pattern of avoiding
deep connection across significant relationships.

How Does Avoidant Attachment Develop
in Childhood

As children, avoidant adults often
experienced a certain level of unresponsive behaviour towards their distress or
need for comfort from their parents. This can happen on a scale from mild and
continuous unresponsive behaviours through to more severe forms of neglect.^[7] For
example, their parents may have been unresponsive when the children were
distressed or in need of comfort. Going back to the idea of activating the
attachment system in the brain: these are
the moments when the child feels the need to reach
out to be affirmed that the parent is available and safe and responsive.

If the child experiences rejection
in those moments when they need reaffirmation due to being emotionally upset,
the child will learn to suppress their emotional neediness. That natural desire
has to be put aside when frightened, in distress or in pain, because if they
are not upset then at least they can be close to their parent physically, even
though they are not available to meet their emotional needs. In other words,
I’ll put my distress away so I can be near you.

Sometimes you see children who’ve
developed this attachment style actually backing up towards their parents. It’s
the pursuit of some feeling of closeness without being seen. By not outwardly expressing feelings, they can
at least partially gratify one of their attachment needs, which is to remain
physically close to the parent. In these situations, the child learns from
repeated, painful interactions with attachment figures (parents) that their
distress leads to rejection or punishment.

Some children learn to rely heavily
on self-soothing and self-nurturing behaviours. They attempt to meet their attachment needs on their own since they
cannot rely on an attachment figure to meet them.

Children with an avoidant attachment style learn to appear very independent and to not need support
from others. Later in life, this translates to not seeking authentic,
vulnerable intimacy in marriage^[8]

How to Shift to Secure
Attachment When You Are Avoidantly Attached

If you are listening in today and recognizing that you are avoidantly attached, your spouse may be feeling anything from content but wishing for more of a connection with you all the way to highly distressed and feeling very rejected. But the good news is that you can change your attachment style to your spouse: there are ways to help yourself as an individual and things you can work on as a couple. 

Things To Work On Together

We have more content on what to work
on together in our bonus material for this article. But one of the first things
you’ll want to do is to own how this attachment style shows up in your
marriage. Knowing that this is what happens, owning that and being willing to
face it and work on it together is a huge gift to your spouse.

One of the things you can work on
together is really thinking about “we” instead of me and you. If you are
avoidant you can just start prompting yourself to think about things in your
marriage interdependently rather than independently. Think less about doing
things efficiently and more about doing things together. You can invite your
spouse to gently call you out on this as well: they may be a very useful
barometer on when the independence is trumping connection.

As you experience more connection, notice what that’s like. It feels better. There’s warmth there and a deeper joy. 

Another thing to work on together is
cultivating emotional intimacy. You can invite your spouse to ask what you are
thinking. You can urge yourself to share more vulnerability with your spouse
as well, knowing that they are a safe person. This is how you make yourself
more comfortable with vulnerability and start to disconfirm the idea that when
you are distressed your attachment figure (spouse) will reject or punish you
for showing that distress.

Things
to Work On Yourself

For yourself, it becomes important to learn to accept your spouse for who they are. Sometimes when you are avoidant, you can build a case against your spouse to justify the distance between you. It may feel more comfortable to create distance, but it supports avoidance. When you challenge yourself to accept and appreciate your spouse more deeply, it puts you back into a better position for developing closeness and fostering connection. 

Sometimes in this attachment style
it’s hard to know how to be close to your spouse because you’ve been
conditioned towards independence. This might sound odd but try activating your
attachment system by thinking about losing your spouse and the devastation you
would feel. That punch in the gut feeling is often followed by a desire to be
close to your spouse — to make sure they are safe and available and they feel
cared for. Now: how can you demonstrate more of that reaching for connection in
other moments?

Attachment is a spectrum where you have anxiously attached on one end and avoidantly attached on the other with secure attachment in the middle. If you are avoidantly connected, you may want to try thinking about how you could foster anxious attachment in yourself. And try a little of that so that you land somewhere in the middle.

So as you reach for the uncertainty of connection it really compels you to step away from the “I don’t need anyone — I am an island unto myself” position and towards some interdependence and just that idea of, “I need you and you need me and that’s good!”

References

^[1] Jeb Kinnison, “Type: Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment Style,” Jeb Kinnison, March 10, 2014, https://jebkinnison.com/bad-boyfriends-the-book/type-dismissive-avoidant/.

^[2] R. Chris Fraley and Claudia Chloe Brumbaugh, “Adult Attachment and Preemptive Defenses: Converging Evidence on the Role of Defensive Exclusion at the Level of Encoding,” Journal of Personality 75, no. 5 (October 2007): 1033–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2007.00465.x.

^[3] Jeremy McAllister, “Ending the Anxious-Avoidant Dance, Part 1: Opposing Attachment Styles,” GoodTherapy.org Therapy Blog, May 18, 2017, https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/ending-anxious-avoidant-dance-part-1-opposing-attachment-styles-0518174.

^[4] Kinnison, “Type.”

^[5] Mockingbird, “Attachment Theory and Your Relationship With God,” Mockingbird, October 26, 2016, https://mbird.com/2016/10/attachment-theory-and-your-relationship-with-god/.

^[6] Lee A. Kirkpatrick and Philip R. Shaver, “An Attachment-Theoretical Approach to Romantic Love and Religious Belief,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18, no. 3 (June 1992): 266–75, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167292183002.

^[7] Jason D. Jones and Jude Cassidy, “Parental Attachment Style: Examination of Links with Parent Secure Base Provision and Adolescent Secure Base Use,” Attachment & Human Development 16, no. 5 (September 3, 2014): 437–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.921718.

^[8] Jones and Cassidy.