The Anxious-Avoidant Dance: How to Heal This Unhealthy Relationship Cycle

One steps forward, the other steps back. One explodes outward, leaving everything on the table, the other shuts down and pulls everything inward. These are the makings of what I call the anxious-avoidant dance.

As adults, we all have what’s called an attachment style. While different people may bring out different sides of us, we tend to be either anxious, avoidant, or secure. And within the context of a relationship, we have two people, each with their own attachment style, coming together in an energetic dance. (Take my free attachment style quiz.)

These styles are formed as children, based on many factors. One of the big ones is our ability to co-regulate with our primary caregivers. Those who are anxious tend to be hyper aware adults. They learned to become this way in order to adapt to their parents’ inconsistency in giving love, attention, and support. Those who are avoidant tend to become emotionally aloof or more detached as adults. They learned this emotional withdrawal as their parents likely disregarded or ignored their needs, were often unavailable, and even discouraged crying or emotions.

As you can see, the anxious and avoidant are very different in how they react to stress or trauma as adults in relationships. The anxious clings and becomes more desperate while the avoidant shuts down or even runs away.

While this sounds like utter doom and gloom for the anxious and the avoidant, it’s not. There is actually a lot of room for healing within the anxious-avoidant dance… It just takes two willing-to-work partners and a little awareness from both sides.

Let’s take a deeper look at this dance to see just how healing can unfold…

Co-regulation: Forming a Secure Attachment

With the help of a supportive partner, great support group, or even a licensed therapist, we can all move towards more security within ourselves and relationships. We aren’t bound to our attachment style for life. But what does a secure attachment style look like?

Secure attachments are formed from our ability to co-regulate with our primary caregivers, most often our mother. Co-regulation is also like a dance, but between mother and child. This dance includes joyful facial expressions, responses to cries, and the tone of voice that tells the child she is attuned to them. From co-regulation, a baby is able to learn how to healthily self-soothe.

During this process of co-regulation, the baby’s very young brain is being wired for the dance of connection: A dance that will continue to play out in their adult relationships.

Do you want to learn how to move from anxiety to security by healing your anxious patterns, understanding your nervous system, and learning how to build healthy relationships? Click here to learn more about my book, Anxiously Attached.

The Anxious-Avoidant Dance

When two people come together who did not learn how to coregulate well enough in childhood - either an anxious or avoidant attachment style - it can be a more turbulent relationship pairing. When these two meet, each tends to look to the other for what they missed in childhood and of course, neither is able to provide it for the other.

This pairing can seem like a moth to the flame. The avoidant pulls away at the first sign of intimacy, becoming quiet and disinterested, because they’ve learned to believe emotions of any kind make them weak. This proves the anxious person’s belief that they will always be abandoned, so they do what they’ve learned to do since childhood… they cling harder and become more and more desperate for validation that everything is okay. Of course, this only pushes the avoidant one further away and the dance continues.

This dance continues because we are ultimately attracted to what feels familiar versus what feels right. Through our experiences in childhood, we form beliefs around what is “normal.” Unless we check ourselves as adults, we will naturally continue to seek what feels normal versus what feels healthy and play the same relationship patterns out over and over again.

Both the anxious and the avoidant are only doing the best they can with what they’ve learned to adapt with and often, they are both operating out of pain and fear. But, this does not have to be the case if both partners are willing to shine some light on the root cause of these potentially toxic behaviors…

Healing Within the Dance

The dance between the anxious and avoidant is more than just a simple case of crossed relationship wires. Neither is actually attuned to the other’s needs. And this becomes very physiological. Each is activating the other’s sympathetic nervous system (SNS), kicking each other into fight, flight, or freeze at any sign of stress within the relationship.

And physiologically speaking, a stable, secure, and intuitive connection is next to impossible to establish when both partners are constantly activating each other’s deepest core wounds.

But, if both partners are willing to communicate through this dance that’s playing out, the relationship could take a 180-degree turn for the better. You see, it's hard to do the work with your partner theoretically… but once one person or both people feel activated, boundaries can be set and healthy communication can begin to heal and change the behaviors that no longer have a place in our adult relationships.

Both partners must reach a relaxed enough state of safety before true, authentic connection can begin. This means setting a safe space for open and honest communication and having two partners who are willing and ready to show up and do the work. Otherwise, the anxious-avoidant dance will likely continue.

While we cannot simply learn to co-regulate on our own if we didn't learn as children, we can learn it through connection with others. Through a strong support system, a helpful partner, or even a licensed therapist, we can learn how to self-soothe in a healthy way, even within a relationship.

Do you want to learn more about the different Attachment Styles and get a holistic understanding of how attachment is formed through a neurobiological lens? Click here to get my course, Attachment Styles Unpacked.