Dismissive Avoidant Worksheet

Before you rate anything

Rate these for the last two years rather than for this week, and across whoever you have been involved with rather than for one person. The distortion this pattern produces is not flattering yourself. It is not registering the question. If an item reads as odd or slightly unanswerable, that reaction is usually worth a 4 rather than a 1.

Every item is scored 1 to 5, where 1 is not me at all and 5 is exactly me. There are five sets of five. Add each set, write the subtotal in the box, then add the five subtotals for a figure out of 125. Do the adding by hand. It slows you down at exactly the point where you are most likely to round yourself down.

One thing the score cannot settle on its own. If, a few days after you take distance, something starts pulling you the other way, you are probably looking at the fearful-avoidant pattern rather than this one. Sets two and three are the ones that separate them, so mark those two subtotals clearly before you read the bands.

Items 1-5, self-reliance as identity

Whether independence is a preference or part of who you are.

Self-reliance in this pattern is not a preference, it is part of the description you would give of yourself, which is why these items ask about identity rather than about behaviour. The tell is small and consistent: being helped with something that matters costs you a little standing, even when the help is competent and freely offered. It does not present as fear. It presents as capability, and it is usually accurate, which is what makes it hard to examine. People score this set low because they do accept help with practical things. Score it for the things that matter, where the answer is different.

Items 6-10, what discomfort makes you do

Where the urge goes when something between you is wrong.

The question here is direction of travel under stress. Everyone wants space sometimes and that is not what these items measure. They ask where the urge goes when something is wrong between you and another person, and whether the relief that follows distance holds or fades. In this pattern it holds. Two days apart after a row settles you, three days settles you further, and nothing arrives to pull the other way. If you notice yourself wanting to go back before you meant to, mark it, because that single observation moves you towards a different pattern and a different set of material.

Items 11-15, the delayed hit

How late the feeling arrives, and what it attaches itself to.

This set is about timing and it is the one people score wrongly. The emotional response is not switched off, it is slow, and the delay can run to months. The characteristic sequence is very little at the time, a genuinely untroubled stretch afterwards, and then something substantial arriving much later, often set off by something small and unrelated. Because the delay breaks the link between cause and feeling, the later hit rarely gets filed under the relationship it belongs to. Score for what actually happened in the months afterwards, not for how well you remember handling it.

Items 16-20, criticism as a distance tool

Faults that appear exactly as closeness increases.

Criticism does a specific job in this pattern: it produces distance without requiring a conversation about distance. The faults are usually real, which is what makes the mechanism so hard to catch from the inside. The test is not whether they are true, it is when they became noticeable. If irritation at small habits arrives at the same point that access increases, the timing is doing the talking. Reading this set as a question about whether you are a decent person will produce inaccurate answers. It is a question about mechanism, and the mechanism is common.

Items 21-25, the account you give

The explanation that makes everything above unremarkable.

Every pattern has an account of itself and this one is unusually tidy: I am just independent. It is often partly true, which is why it holds up. What marks it out is its function, which is to close the subject rather than to describe it. Research using the Adult Attachment Interview finds something similar in how people with a dismissing pattern describe childhood, offering a positive summary that no specific memory is produced to support. If these items are hard to answer because there is not much to report, that difficulty is the item rather than a problem with it.

Scoring the twenty-five items

Add the five subtotals, then read the profile before the total.

Add each set of five, then add the five subtotals for a figure out of 125. Before you go to the bands, look at the profile rather than the total, because two sets do most of the work here. Set two says distance keeps helping. Set three says the response arrives late. A high total with a low set two usually means something else is running, most often the fearful-avoidant pattern, where the same surface behaviour is produced by two systems instead of one. This is a self-observation sheet and not a validated instrument. The score organises what you noticed; it does not measure you.

The three bands, and the fork at the end

What each band suggests, and the question a score cannot settle.

Under 55 suggests this pattern is not the main thing operating in your relationships, whatever else might be. Between 55 and 84 suggests self-reliance is a strategy you lean on heavily and that it costs you in particular places rather than everywhere. Eighty-five and over suggests self-reliance is doing the work that a relationship would otherwise do, which is quiet, comfortable, and tends to end things slowly rather than loudly. None of these is a diagnosis and the boundaries are rough by design. The question underneath all three is the one on the last prompt.

Dismissive and fearful-avoidant are not degrees of the same thing

They look alike from outside because both produce distance. Underneath, one has a single system and the other has two. In the dismissive pattern the distance works and keeps working, so nothing interrupts it. In the fearful-avoidant pattern an anxious system is running underneath the same behaviour and it starts pulling in the opposite direction within days, which is what produces the reversals: the message unsent, the ending regretted, the return that surprises everyone including you.

People often want to know which of the two is easier to shift. There is no honest clean answer, and the obstacles are different rather than larger or smaller. A dismissive pattern comes with very little felt distress, so almost nothing pushes anyone towards doing the work in the first place. A fearful-avoidant pattern comes with plenty of distress and therefore plenty of motivation, but the instability makes any sustained practice harder to hold. Motivation and stability rarely arrive together.