Attachment Part 2: When Closeness Feels Overwhelming

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“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship."
~ Harville Hendrix

Last time, we talked about anxious attachment, or what we call "love dependency" in Relational Life Therapy. We explored what happens when distance enters a relationship and the nervous system immediately starts sounding the alarm. If you missed that article, you can find it here.

This week, we're looking at the other side of the equation.

If you're reading this and thinking, "Oh, this one is definitely about my partner," I'd encourage you to stay curious. Most of us have the capacity for both love dependency and love avoidance. Depending on the relationship, the circumstances, and our own history, we can find ourselves moving toward people or pulling away from them when we're scared. Still, many of us tend to lean more heavily in one direction.

In the language of attachment styles, what we're talking about today is often called avoidant attachment. In Relational Life Therapy, we simplify things and call it 'love avoidance'.

Unfortunately, love avoidant people tend to get painted with a pretty broad brush online. They're often described as emotionally unavailable, commitment-phobic, selfish, detached, or unwilling to do the work. I understand why people reach for those explanations. Loving someone who withdraws can be incredibly painful.

At the same time, I've found those labels don't tell us very much about what's actually happening.

Most of the love avoidant people I've worked with aren't sitting around tryyying to keep people at arm's length. In fact, many of them want love, connection, partnership, and family every bit as much as anyone else. What they struggle with is what happens inside them when relationships begin to feel emotionally intense, vulnerable, or demanding.

When we look beneath the behavior, we often find someone whose nervous system learned long ago that closeness comes with a cost.

For some people, that lesson came from growing up in families where emotional intimacy simply wasn't modeled. Feelings weren't discussed. Vulnerability wasn't encouraged. People handled their own problems and moved on. There may have been plenty of love in the home, but not necessarily much emotional connection. As adults, these folks can genuinely care about their partners and still feel strangely uncomfortable when conversations become deeply personal. Intimacy feels unfamiliar, and anything unfamiliar can feel threatening.

For others, the experience was almost the opposite – they grew up in families where there wasn't enough room to be a separate person. Parents were overly involved, emotionally/physically intrusive (which includes many types of abuse), controlling, or unable to respect boundaries. Privacy was limited. Independence came with guilt. Personal choices were questioned. In these families, closeness wasn't experienced as nourishing. It was experienced as overwhelming (and therefore, scary and unwelcome) – and they were often powerless to escape it.

If that was your experience, it makes sense that part of you would become fiercely protective of your autonomy.

As an adult, you may find yourself wanting connection while simultaneously feeling alarmed by it. You love your partner and want to be close to them, but somewhere inside there is a fear that too much closeness will cost you something important. Your freedom. Your space. Your ability to think your own thoughts. Your sense of self.

Many people never consciously think those words. They just feel this strong, unexplainable urge to pull away – even if they wish they didn't feel that.

They get busy with work. They focus on projects. They shut down during emotional conversations. They tell themselves they just need space. They feel irritated when a partner wants more connection, more discussion, more reassurance, or more emotional engagement.

From the outside, this can look like not caring.

From the inside, it often feels much more like self-protection.

One of the reasons attachment dynamics can be so painful is that love dependent and love avoidant people often find themselves in relationships together. The love dependent partner feels safest through connection and closeness. The love avoidant partner feels safest through space and autonomy.

When the relationship gets difficult, each person instinctively reaches for the thing that helps them feel secure. One moves closer. The other moves away.

The more one person pursues, the more the other withdraws. The more the other withdraws, the more the first person pursues. Two people pursuing safety in opposite ways and both feeling misunderstood. Both carrying wounds that are much older than the relationship itself.

If any of this sounds familiar, I want to leave you with something hopeful.

Over the course of my life, I've found myself on both sides of this equation. There have absolutely been seasons where I leaned more love dependent – distance felt terrifying, I was desperate for reassurance, closeness, and certainty as quickly as possible. There have also been seasons where I leaned more love avoidant and felt crowded, pressured, overwhelmed, or afraid that intimacy would somehow cost me my freedom.

One of the most helpful things I ever learned is that neither of these patterns meant there was something fundamentally wrong with me. They weren't signs that I was broken – they were adaptations. They were parts of me that learned, long ago, that other people, even people I loved, could hurt me. (And uh, who doesn't have that experience?)

Working with my own therapist and coaches helped me see that these patterns weren't my identity – they were protective strategies. Once I understood that, I stopped trying to shame myself out of them (or let anyone else shame me out of them) and started getting curious about them instead.

I began learning about the younger parts of me that carried those fears. The part that worried people would leave. The part that worried people would overwhelm me. The part that stayed on high alert, constantly scanning for danger and trying to keep me safe. Hello, hypervigilance. And you know what I figured out?

Those parts weren't trying to sabotage my relationships. They were trying to protect me. The challenge was that they were using strategies that made perfect sense when I was younger, but weren't serving me particularly well as an adult.

Over time, I learned how to care for those younger parts of myself so they didn't have to work quite so hard. I learned how to recognize when I was slipping into protection mode. I learned how to stay present with discomfort instead of immediately reacting to it. I learned how to say to that young girl showing up in me: 'Hey... I know this feels scary. I'm here. I've got you. You deserve a safe and beautiful love. Let me help."

And perhaps most importantly, I learned how to tell my partners what was happening inside me! Like, whoa.

And when I say I told them, please know – I don't mean that I made excuses for my behavior. I didn't try to avoid accountability or make them responsible for fixing it. That's no bueno.

I just decided, that instead of withdrawing and leaving someone confused, I could say, "I'm noticing that part of me is feeling overwhelmed right now. And usually that makes me want to pull away. But in this moment, I'm trying to stay." Instead of acting from fear, I could share the fear itself.

Ironically, that kind of honesty created far more intimacy than all of my protective strategies ever did. Real intimacy isn't forged by playing it cool. Real intimacy happens when you're admitting that love feels scary and vulnerable while doing your best to stay connected to yourself and your partner anyway.

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