Avoidants fear intimacy because our early experiences taught us that intimacy comes at a great price.
Our caregivers failed to meet our most basic attachment needs – the need to be emotionally safe, seen, understood, cherished — so consistently that we learned to cut ourselves off from those needs and rely on ourselves instead for comfort and solace.
For small children, the distress of chronic invalidation and invisibility is so overwhelming they must find ways to disassociate from the physical sensations of emotional life.
We thus learned to make our home in our analytical and rational mind, in our own intellectual and imaginative realms.
These private realms became our sacred sanctuary, the only place we could relax, unwind, and be fully ourselves.
And so we learned to retreat there regularly – even when around other people.
Inevitably, these adaptations get carried into adulthood. By then, our brain and nervous systems are hardwired to associate intimacy with a wordless, nameless existential threat.
From lived experience, our bodies “know” that letting people close will be painful and invalidating and unfulfilling, that it will mean adapting to others’ needs while sacrificing the ability to be ourselves and to experience comfort, solace, relaxation and safety.
And so we unconsciously push people away to maintain our safe private inner world.
The avoidants’ fear of intimacy persists in adulthood not in response to people or circumstances – but rather, in response to this instinctive projection of past injury onto people and circumstances.
All children develop internal working models of what to expect in relationships based on early experience. Projection of this internal working model causes us to sense threat and to recoil into self-protection, often with little to no awareness of what is happening or why.
Self-awareness eludes us as avoidants because, to us, it doesn’t look or feel like we are being avoidant. It looks like a natural and common sense response to . It looks like we’re being mature and independent, wise and thoughtful, competent and self-sufficient, even-keeled and rational.
Indeed, we are proud of ourselves for our avoidant traits, which seem to us as far preferable to being needy, overly emotional, or excessively dependent.
Unfortunately, the invisibility of our avoidance makes change unlikely unless and until we reach some crisis that prompts reflectiveness and self-awareness.
Neuroscience tells us that brain rewiring in adulthood only occurs from active awareness and attention. To change our adaptive patterns, to rewire our nervous system for secure attachment, we must consciously choose to do so.
In more practical terms, this means we must consciously want and choose to get closer to people, to enjoy satisfying and happy close intimate relationships.
We must become aware of the micro-behaviors that our nervous system uses to keep people at bay and that make it difficult for us to form and maintain secure bonds.
And we must begin to make different choices, thereby laying down new neural pathways.
Those different choices involve adopting behaviors and ways of being that enable us to love others fully and generously without compromising ourselves or recoiling in self-protection. We must learn that we can be fully ourselves, and be safe and known and seen and cherished, in close relationship.
We can experience all of those things but to do so, we must first know it’s possible for us, we must want it for ourselves, and we must seek out guides and roadmaps to lead us toward new and healthy ways of being in relationship.