Name: 5 Signs of Disorganized, Anxious or Avoidant Attachment
Uploaded: 2025-03-12T14:58:42.000Z
Duration: 13 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi there everybody and welcome to this video on five signs of disorganized or what some people call anxious avoidant attachment.

Modal verbs - B1

The person with disorganized attachment often has a lot of characteristics that may be similar to borderline personality or codependency.

So it's important to recognize that dysfunctional attachment may lead to the development of those types of personality traits.

So let's take a look at disorganized attachment.

The person with disorganized attachment can be clingy or controlling and need reassurance, but can turn on a dime to be dismissive and avoidant when abandonment anxiety is triggered.

These are people who've experienced inconsistency and often chaotic, abusive, neglectful environments throughout their life, no matter how old they are.

So their HPA axis or their stress response system is already dysregulated.

So they tend to just go from flat or numb or, you know, I'm kind of okay with things to terrified, furious, frantic, like that.

So when the person senses that they may be getting ready to be rejected, they go from being clingy and needed and trying to make that relationship last to, okay, fine, you're not worth my effort.

They often are hypervigilant to rejection, so they have rejection sensitivity.

Well, in the past, when certain things happened, it indicated that they were going to be rejected.

And when they were rejected, that meant they didn't get their needs met.

And that can be devastating physically as well as emotionally for children.

They may not communicate their thoughts, wants, and needs, but then feel rejected or neglected when their thoughts, wants, and needs are not met.

So there's a part of them that says people should meet my thoughts, wants, and needs.

But then there's another part of them that says it's not safe to communicate my thoughts, wants, and needs.

So they're constantly in this sort of double bind in their own head.

People with disorganized attachment often experience emotional dysregulation.

They go from flat to frantic or flat to furious like that largely because their stress response system has become dysregulated and they never develop the skills and tools to identify and modulate their emotions.

There was nobody there to teach them these skills.

So as a result, when they dysregulate, they are often inconsolable.

They are just feeling out of control and they don't know what's going to help them feel safe and in control again.

During these episodes of emotional dysregulation, they may exhibit impulsive or aggressive behaviors.

A lot of times these behaviors are towards self.

They may become impulsive and just say, okay, we're breaking up.

I think you're getting ready to abandon me.

Or they may become self-damaging in their behaviors, whether they start drinking or using or engaging in non-suicidal self-injury.

So it's kind of the worst of both parenting styles that can develop, that create insecure attachment.

These caregivers are often insensitive, rejecting, and inconsistent in their behaviors.

But they often also tend to be much more aggressive.

They found those with disorganized attachment often grew up in households where there was overt aggression.

It may not have been physical, but there was a lot of chaos and a lot of fear.

The parents lacked awareness of or responsiveness to the child's needs.

They wouldn't help with difficult tasks or when they would try to help with difficult tasks, they would just get frustrated.

If the child didn't pick it up right away, they would get frustrated.

And they may scold the child or tell the child that they're stupid or some other permutation so the child learns that I'm not good enough.

They often blamed the child for their own emotions.

They contributed to an environment in which there was a lack of safety and comfort.

Sometimes they would verbally comfort and physically reject the child saying, oh, it's okay.

I'm not going to touch you, but it's okay.

Or they would physically comfort the child, but yell at them at the same time.

So they would physically comfort them while telling them how useless they were.

Or they'd comfort them briefly and if that didn't work like that, they would start shaming the child for expressing their emotions.

Or other times they would respond appropriately to the child's needs and then the next three times they wouldn't even notice that the child had needs.

So the child never knew what to expect when they had a need.

They didn't know if it would get met, if it would get met for a minute, and then they would be shamed.

And in these situations, the parents often still had unrealistic expectations for independence and performance and communicated to the child that they were never good enough, always too needy, and were, the caregivers rejected them for those things.

Interventions, mindful journaling about the facts in the present context.

This is the same intervention that we use for every single insecure attachment style because it's important for people to start recognizing what's going on now versus what I'm expecting to be happening based on my prior experiences.

So what's going on now in this context with this person?

What do I know versus what am I assuming?

Engage in mindful, nonjudgmental journaling, and if there's somebody safe to talk with, discussion about thoughts and feelings.

The person who's disorganized in their attachment is like the person who's avoidant, often very unaware of their own thoughts, wants, and needs.

So it's going to be important for them to reconnect.

The person with anxious attachment has also been so busy trying to focus on appeasing the other person that even if they knew what their thoughts, wants, and needs were, they ignored them.

So for all of these people, it's important to start connecting and becoming aware of your thoughts, wants, and needs.

It's important for every attachment style to become aware of your triggers, things that happen in the present that make you feel like you're back in the past, or things that happen in the present that you assume are going to play out a certain way because of the way they played out in the past.

Those are the things that trigger your abandonment anxiety, trigger your insecurity, and those are the things that you need to process in terms of the present moment, the facts in this contact with this person, but also in the past to grieve those, to process those, to recognize what was going on back then and come to some sort of resolution so that they don't have as much power over you in the present.

Developing those distress tolerance skills, including distress tolerance thoughts, activities like slow breathing or grounding to help trigger the relaxation response, guided imagery to help yourself feel like you're in a safer place, and sensations to help kind of jolt you from one thing that is feeling overwhelming to something else that is powerful yet controllable.

Take steps to develop friendships with other people, and this is going to be a slow going process because your history has taught you that people are not trustworthy at the very least, and people can be threatening, abusive, and neglectful at the worst, so it's going to take time to develop friendships.

However, it's important to start making these steps if you want to start healing your attachment issues.

If you're not ready to do that, then that is your call.

You're in control of what happens, but when you're ready to start addressing attachment issues, if you ever get there, it's going to be important to actually connect with other people to start learning how to develop these relationships, and it's going to be important to respect boundaries while getting reassurance or giving reassurance that it's not rejection.

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Disorganized attachment is one of three types of insecure attachment that may have developed as a result of insensitive and rejecting parenting.

The person who has disorganized attachment often is unaware or dismissive of their thoughts, wants, and needs until there's a crisis, and then they feel angry and overwhelmed.

They've often never felt safe in the world in their own skin because their emotions always felt like they were overwhelming and out of control or with other people because other people have either ignored them, abused them, or neglected them.

They often have a low frustration tolerance because they've never had support and assistance in accomplishing something that was difficult.

They may have low self-esteem and are prone to emotional dysregulation going from flat to frantic or flat to furious.

Changing disorganized attachment requires that the person feel safe in the present context.

They need to feel like they're in the driver's seat.

They need to feel like they have control over how much they tell other people and how far they go and how fast.

They need to start recognizing how their relationship behaviors developed as a result of trying to survive a rejecting, neglectful, or abusive environment.

They need to learn how to start recognizing and having compassion for their own thoughts, wants, and needs instead of judging themselves or ignoring themselves, recognizing and having compassion going, okay, this is scary for you.

They need to develop emotional awareness and regulation.

A lot of people in disorganized environments, it wasn't safe to have feelings, to express feelings, so they never learned how to identify feelings, put labels on them and go, this is anger, this is anxiety.

They just have this feeling that may feel overwhelming sometimes and sometimes it may even come out as bodily or somatic experiences instead of what people often label as anger or depression.

It may come out as impulsivity or fatigue or aggression.

Helping people develop this emotional awareness can help them start developing the tools they need to regulate those emotions.

And finally, they need to learn how to develop intimacy and a genuine connection with others.