Avoidant Attachment and Emotional Abuse

Intimacy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is what avoidant attachment is designed to prevent. and Emotional Abuse puts you face to face with the uncomfortable truth: the wall that protects you from pain is the same wall that keeps love out.

Why This Triggers Avoidant Attachment

At its core, and emotional abuse activates your fear of engulfment and loss of independence. Your attachment system — deactivated by design — reads this situation as a threat to your space and autonomy. The result is emotional numbness, a sudden need to be alone, or irritation at your partner. What makes this particularly challenging is that your response is automatic: before your rational mind can assess the situation, your body has already decided this is an emergency. Understanding this neurological reality is the first step toward choosing a different response.

What You Might Be Feeling

• Emotional numbness or flatness during vulnerable moments
• Finding your partner's affection suffocating rather than comforting
• An urge to change the subject when things get deep
• Feeling exposed and unsafe when your guard drops
• Physical stiffness when held too closely or too long
• Internal criticism of your partner to create emotional distance

What To Do

1. Notice when you're deactivating — feelings going numb, finding flaws, wanting to flee. Name it as a pattern.
2. Challenge the internal narrative that needing others is weakness. Interdependence is the goal, not isolation.
3. Share one feeling per day with someone you trust. Start small: 'I felt stressed today' counts.
4. When you feel the urge to withdraw, try staying 10% longer than comfortable. Growth lives at the edge of discomfort.
5. Pay attention to your body — avoidants often store emotions physically without recognising them consciously.
6. Consider working with a therapist who understands avoidant attachment. The therapeutic relationship itself is healing.

When This Is Part of a Bigger Pattern

Notice whether your response to and emotional abuse is the same one you've had in every relationship. If the faces change but the pattern doesn't, your attachment system is running the show. The defences you built in childhood — emotional self-reliance, suppressing needs, keeping people at arm's length — were brilliant survival strategies then. They're limiting your capacity for love now.