How To Spot A Fearful Avoidant Attachment Style: 7 Traits (Part 1)

Your attachment style determines so many subconscious beliefs and needs that you have regarding behavior and expectations in relationships. Different attachment styles can have completely different subconscious 'rules' for relationships so it is easy to see how this can lead to disappointment, misunderstanding, hurt, and conflict when we don't understand how a loved one naturally operates. This is especially true for romantic relationships. Understanding the attachment style of a loved one, along with your own attachment style and how it operates, is pivotal in becoming masterful at navigating your relationships for success and happiness! If you think a loved one or perhaps you are a fearful avoidant, I discuss seven common traits found in fearful avoidant attachment style to help you figure it out. This is part one. Stay tuned for more traits of a fearful avoidant in part two coming soon! At the end of this blog post, you will find my YouTube video How To Spot A Fearful Avoidant Attachment Style: 7 Traits (Part 1)

So how can you recognize a fearful avoidant attachment style? Here are 7 traits to look out for.

Trait #1:  The core wound ‘I cannot trust’ or ‘I Will Be Betrayed’ is one of their biggest, if not biggest, core wounds. Unhealed fearful avoidants will almost always struggle with trust in relationships, especially once they are deeply attached to someone. They often handle the dating phase BEFORE a committed relationship fairly well without this getting activated. The only caveat to this is if the fearful avoidant has formed an attachment to the person they are dating and wants to be in a relationship with the person, but for whatever reason they aren’t yet such as the person they are dating being emotionally unavailable or perhaps dismissive avoidant and they move slower than the fearful avoidant does. The fearful avoidant will not always be open about their trust wound, but it can show up as questioning, testing, or hypervigilance. Sometimes, if you break a fearful avoidant’s trust, it is game over for the relationship and they will exit the relationship pretty swiftly because this is an injury to the relationship along with an existing wound for the fearful avoidant. Fearful avoidants generally experienced some type of trauma in childhood that formed a trust wound. Examples of this could be mental or emotional abuse, physical abuse, or sexual abuse. It could be that they had a parent with a personality disorder where they grew up in an environment where they didn’t know what to expect or could not trust that parent. For instance, with a narcissistic parent, the fearful avoidant may have experienced a plethora of different traumas on an ongoing basis, such as jealousy and sabotage from that parent, narcissistic rage, scapegoating, triangulation, or narcissistic ‘poking’ where the narcissist tries to invoke a reaction to gain supply. All of this will be especially true if they are the ‘scapegoat’. All of this fosters a sense of deep betrayal and mistrust towards the parent and leaves the child questioning how they can trust anyone if they cannot trust their own parent. Another scenario is that the fearful avoidant may have had a parent who struggled with addiction to substances. This created an environment where they never knew what to expect and simultaneously may have felt responsible in some way, shape, or form. For instance, maybe Dad is passed out on the couch after drinking and they make sure he gets to bed. It is often that fearful avoidants experience enmeshment trauma. The common theme is that there was often a caretaker and/or environment that they could not trust in childhood. 

Trait #2: Hypervigilance. As briefly mentioned in trait number one, the fearful avoidant’s ‘I Cannot Trust’ or ‘I Will Be Betrayed; core wound often shows up as hypervigilance. It is often the case that when a fearful avoidant grows up, they don’t form an attachment STRATEGY. What does this mean? The fearful avoidant usually doesn’t have the luxury of experiencing an environment in childhood that allows them to do this. This is the attachment style that generally experiences higher levels of trauma and a shaky or unpredictable environment or responses from a caregiver. This means that the ONLY thing a fearful avoidant can do is recognize a change quickly and act accordingly. This is a skill formed generally pretty early in the fearful avoidant’s life and almost becomes a super power. What is the BEST attachment strategy when you feel unsafe? Hypervigilance. The FA’s attachment strategy IS hypervigilance. What does this end up meaning? A fearful avoidant will almost always notice any changes in patterns of behavior or routine. They will notice microexpressions and body language. You won’t be able to put much past a fearful avoidant. Hypervigilance is something that the fearful avoidant actually keeps after they heal and become securely attached. The only difference is that they won’t have instances in which they AUTOMATICALLY assign meaning based on their wounds to what they notice. 

Trait #3: Presence. This is one distinction between a dismissive avoidant and a fearful avoidant, though it will be somewhat nuanced since dismissive avoidant attachment style is on a spectrum and there are fearful avoidants who lean more dismissive. But generally-speaking, you will get a great depth of presence from a fearful avoidant. One of a fearful avoidant’s needs in relationships is depth of connection. Even a more dismissive-leaning fearful avoidant will have a need for depth of connection. They will just fill their smaller cup for that faster, but it is a cup that definitely still exists and it is an important need for every fearful avoidant. Some fearful avoidants can grow frustrated, bored, or have wounds activated if the connection only scratches the surface but we often do not grow up learning about boundaries and needs so this is a great example of what can happen when we 1) Do not know what our needs even are and 2) Then do not communicate them. For example, a fearful avoidant can feel rejected or disrespected if they feel like they are investing and only getting surface-level communication from someone instead of recognizing that depth of connection is a relationship need they have and then actioning it by communicating about it. Fearful avoidants often want to have conversations about someone’s hopes, dreams, life experiences. They will often in some form lean towards conversations that are people-oriented whereas a dismissive avoidant will often have the conversation preference of things, politics, news, events, and activities. 

Trait #4: Fearful avoidants usually fall into one of 2 categories. They are usually either overachievers or they are really doing poorly. Now this is not all, but this is a big number of FAs. When they fall into the category of overachievers, they are generally very, VERY focused on whatever aspect of their life that represents success to them. If that is health or fitness, they will really throw themselves into their wellness routine and have no problem maintaining regular workouts, for example. They will really make health a regular theme in their life regarding different daily aspects such as their diet and sleep and this will really be a priority for them and they can really get upset if something gets in the way of this because health would really be a personality need for them. Another example is they might have a career dream and they will really throw themselves into doing whatever it takes to make things happen. This type of FA can really be a workaholic. Another example is that they could really be into home projects and become really focused and really just throw themselves into the project and devote hours of their time to getting it done and sometimes be kind of a perfectionist about it. The overachiever fearful avoidant is accustomed to the idea that if they want to make something happen in life, they will and they have learned this through experience. So these are some examples of the overachiever category. If the fearful avoidant falls into the second category and they are doing poorly, then they are generally really struggling. This will reflect often in chaotic relationships and they might have substance abuse issues and various types of addictions. Fearful avoidants can commonly be kind of intense people. It is interesting to note that these categories are 2 extremes and different extremes is a common theme with fearful avoidant attachment style. Which brings me to the next trait.

Trait #5: They often can have extreme trauma responses. When the fearful avoidant deactivates, they often deactivate extremely strongly. They generally deactivate all at once over a trigger and then recover faster than a dismissive avoidant. The way in which they deactivate is one difference between the fearful avoidant and the dismissive avoidant. Dismissive avoidants will not deactivate to such a strong degree. It will be to a lesser, but more pervasive degree. Dismissive avoidants are usually in a perpetual slight deactivation on a regular basis whereas fearful avoidants most often swing from deactivation to activation and back again really depending greatly on what wounds are activated at the time. This represents their ‘hot and cold’ pattern in relationships. When the fearful avoidant shuts down, they REALLY shut down. Another way the extreme trauma responses can show up is in the ‘fight’ response. Which brings me to the next trait. 

Trait #6: Volatility. If the fearful avoidant has one of their wounds triggered by a partner, for instance, they can get really loud, angry, and very harsh with their words. It is not unusual for a fearful avoidant to say a lot of things that they don’t mean during conflict and feel very guilty about it later on or sometimes expect a partner to understand that they were angry in the moment and their words shouldn’t have a lot of weight to them. This is obviously not the healthiest way of dealing with things but this is a pretty big pattern that you could see in fearful avoidant attachment. One reason behind the volatility is that fearful avoidants have generally many more triggers than other attachment styles. You can think about it as mines in a minefield. There’s going to be the potential for a lot more volatility if you have a lot of mines that people in your life can step on in your minefield. 

Trait #7: Some common emotions that an unhealed fearful avoidant experiences on a regular basis are anger, hurt (these 2 are what can lead to the volatility often seen in conflict), often frustration when they feel trapped, overwhelmed, pressured, anxious or panicked, guilty, ashamed, and offended. When a fearful avoidant starts to heal, they will notice that these negative emotions in their patterning show up less and less often and are less and less intense as the healing process progresses.