The Secrets and Vulnerabilities of a Semi-Healed Avoidant (Me!)

I promised my newsletter readers I’d share more about my own experience of having a predominantly avoidant attachment style, and how I’ve moved it towards something more secure. Gulp, I’m going to share what I’ve written to them as a post here too. No mean feat for that avoidant style, where vulnerability is excruciating.

It’s only with hindsight that I can see how much my avoidant style shaped things. At the time I had no idea there was anything going on. I can celebrate how much I’ve shifted it over time, though it can still peep out when someone presses my buttons. Hello, old friend!

Dodged them for a long time, then a pattern of emotionally unavailable men. Underneath it ran the rule: don’t get too attached to any one person, you can’t rely on them. My first serious relationship had a lot of long-distance and, tellingly, the relationship fell apart once we tried to live together.

For years, “keep moving” was my whole strategy: I moved houses, cities, even countries regularly. I used the buffer of “I’ll be gone again soon” to cope with any difficulties and a part of me was always halfway out of the door.

In my mid-thirties I made a deliberate choice to change things: I moved back to my native north east, tried therapy, and built a more balanced, purposeful life. I found a little house, set up my acupuncture business (which you can’t just lift up and move) and put myself out there, meeting Mr B with a pretty secure attachment style. He showed me what steady, unwavering support felt like.

Old habits crept in early: “if we’re still together then, why don’t we go to Y” became such a fixture of my vocabulary that Mr B banned the phrase outright. Even a few years in, I’d occasionally catch myself quietly working out back-up plans in case everything fell apart. Over time I learned to trust and commit, even when it felt scary. I did a marriage and a mortgage – both very big deals for me! Now we have a stable, committed relationship where I can be me (warts and all!), get things wrong, and we can rupture and repair without it turning into a crisis.

Commitment more broadly always felt like a weight too. We never wanted children, and I do wonder if the responsibility felt too much. I’ve no regrets. I sometimes fancy a dog but the commitment puts me off! That said, we’ve become a very important part of my niece’s support system, and we make life decisions around her needs as well as ours. That feels different, but good.

Where it still shows up: I still use my island: space, quiet, and time to recharge, properly, on my own. Mr B has learned to check whether I’m on my island before joining me, and doesn’t take it personally if I send him away. And still no dog 😆.

My style could best be summarised as “arm’s length”. I’d float between friend groups rather than fully belonging to one, and got very good at not sharing what was really going on for me. Humour was (is?) my thing, not necessarily a bad thing, but one which needed balance. I’m much better at that now, and can bring caring, sincere, supportive and vulnerable as well as the funny.

These days I’m much more able to let people see the real me, including my shortcomings, even in public forums like this one (yikes!). I’ve also swapped one or two very intense friendships for a wider circle of connections at different levels of closeness, which I love.

This was always easier kept at arm’s length too. I was fiercely self-sufficient, emotionally and practically. My family was spread across different continents for years; we’re now within five miles of each other (though I still need a three-mile buffer zone, whereas they’re over the road from each other). I can now ask for help if I need it, and be there when they need me, whilst holding boundaries that feel good.

With hindsight, a long and difficult stretch of degenerative illness with my in-laws, pretty early on in my relationship with Mr B, contributed to a period of burnout: an intense job, a need to be perfect at everything, and the removal of my main coping strategy – running away! I was closer to secure by then, but it was still wobbly, and under that stress it didn’t quite feel up to the job.

Where it still shows up: When things get overwhelming, I can still retreat into my own bubble and go a bit unreachable. It’s rarely my first instinct, but co-regulation – being around others – is what gives me the ability to re-emerge.

I was pretty much a professional temp for years. Even the permanent jobs never felt permanent – I was always looking for the next thing. After many years, I found acupuncture, genuinely freeing to find something I could imagine doing for the long haul. I’m not an acupuncturist any more, but I don’t see that as jumping ship. Health issues meant I needed to change the intensity of my work, and I felt my heart, and gifts, lay in the “talking” side of treatment, which led me to holistic and somatic life coaching. 7 years on, and 24 years since I started in holistic health, I still love it.

Where it still shows up: Those with an avoidant style can often be workaholics – that’s never been me, though I can get pretty consumed by thinking about my work and business. I’m much better now at carving out “on” and “off” times, though it’s still a work in progress.

I’ve never liked being told what to do. Rules, restrictions, and too many expectations have always chafed too. This is also my rebel streak, which I work with rather than trying to shift. I used to avoid feedback in case I didn’t like what I heard, and anything less than effusive could make me panic and hide. It felt too vulnerable and vulnerability can feel genuinely excruciating for those with an avoidant attachment style. I now love feedback and actively pursue it to help me improve. That vulnerability can still flare if I’ve messed up, but I can stop it turning into a disappearance. Part pretty-recovered perfectionist, part pretty-recovered avoidant.

2 of my happiest years were spent travelling the world alone: always on the move, making connections but never for too long, setting my own agenda. Perhaps an avoidant’s dream, but also nourishing my values around novelty and adventure. I’m still very much a suck-it-and-see person, prone to throwing myself into something and then moving on, though a few things have stayed steady throughout: walking, nature and birds, jigsaws, yoga. And money, if I’m honest, I lean slightly more towards spending than saving (an avoidant pattern), though always with a sensible head on.

Where it still shows up: I’m still fairly averse to too much constraint or expectation, and there’s a lone-wolf streak that isn’t going anywhere. But I show up, I make myself available, I make warm, genuine connections, and I let people see the behind-the-scenes.

Not sure which style is yours? Then my Attachment Style Quiz is just for you. Send me an email and I’ll whizz it over to you.

Meeting Mr B helped enormously; being around that steadiness consistently helped me find more of it myself (remember it doesn’t only have to come from a partner, your coach or therapist can provide this too!). My own somatic work mattered just as much: first through yoga, then training as an acupuncturist, then my nervous system regulation studies. Connection with the natural world played its part too. And, perhaps as a side effect as much as a strategy, I’ve put down roots I simply can’t up and leave: a marriage, a mortgage, a business, and now a niece whose care we help build our lives around. With hindsight, I’d get the order better: work towards secure attachment first, then put the roots down, rather than try to force yourself into security with ties!

Having coaching myself, and my own ongoing development as a coach, has shaped this too. I don’t think we ever fully heal this stuff. The echoes stay. They just show up less often, less loudly, and we get better at navigating the choppy waters when they do.

One last point. People with a more anxious style often think avoidant attachment must be great. Not wanting or needing others isn’t security. It’s still a place of fear – fearing connection, fearing standing still, fearing letting people in, fearing sharing the real you. Security doesn’t come from having walls around you that make you unreachable. It comes from being able to be genuinely okay on your own, and just as open to connection, riding the ebbs and flows between the two without needing either one to feel safe.

If you’d like to move towards a more secure attachment style, and to release those “autopilot” behaviours and thought patterns that are making life tough, I can help.

Having someone alongside you who offers secure, non-judgemental, consistent support, someone who won’t flinch, judge, or disappear when things get uncomfortable, can make a real difference to how that shift happens. But it’s not just about having that steady presence: it’s also having someone who can spot the patterns you can’t see from inside them, and help you open up options you’d never have let yourself consider before, so you end up shaping the life you want rather than just managing old habits.

If that sounds good, book a free exploratory call and we can talk about what that might look like for you.