Disorganized Attachment Style: Wanting Closeness and Fearing It at the Same Time
Maybe it goes something like this: you meet someone and you’re super drawn to them. Early on there's excitement, a lot of presence and joy, maybe even a picture of a whole future together. Then things start to get serious, and the doubts arrive. Is this the right person for me? Am I making a mistake? Things that didn't bother you a month ago start to grate, or you find yourself pulling back from a closeness you wanted badly not so long ago, and you can't quite explain why.
If that sounds familiar, you may have come across the term “disorganized attachment style.” It's one of the more confusing attachment patterns to live with, partly because it doesn't follow one rule. Below I'll go through what it is, what it feels like from the inside, where it comes from, and what helps (which has more to do with the body and with relationships than with understanding it, though understanding helps too).
What is disorganized attachment style?
Attachment research started with children. In the 1970s, Mary Ainsworth watched babies being briefly separated from a parent and then reunited, and noticed that most of them had a consistent way of handling it. Some went straight to the parent for comfort. Some acted as if they didn't need the parent at all. Some clung and couldn't be soothed.
A smaller group didn't fit any of those. Mary Main and Judith Solomon described these children as “disorganized.” When the parent came back, a child might start toward them and then freeze, or approach while looking away, or stop mid-step and sit down on the floor. These children had no strategy they could rely on, because the situation had no solution. Main and Erik Hesse later called it “fright without solution.” When the person you're built to run to for safety is also a source of fear, neither running toward them nor running away works.
In adults, disorganized attachment usually looks like wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time, with the two swinging back and forth, sometimes even within the same evening.
What does disorganized attachment feel like?
From the inside it rarely feels like a “style.” It tends to feel more like confusion, self-doubt, and lack of agency around how you relate in close relationships.
In my experience it often shows up as a relationship gets more serious. Some drop-off after the honeymoon phase is normal, once the fantasy isn't doing as much of the work of keeping you interested. This goes deeper than that. What I tend to hear underneath the doubts is a fear of being trapped: of ending up in a relationship that's unsafe or unhappy, and not being able to get out.
Intimacy can follow a similar arc. In the beginning there can be something close to ecstasy, a lot of excitement and presence. Then it drops off, and some people find themselves shying away from closeness, or even feeling repulsed by it at times, because being that close has started to feel exposing. Sex can be especially complicated. When disorganized attachment does grow out of complex trauma, that history often involved boundaries being pushed or violated (sometimes including sexual abuse). So intimacy, both emotional and physical, can be where boundaries feel thinnest.
How this plays out depends a lot on how well you can observe your own thoughts and feelings without acting on them right away (what clinicians call “mentalizing”). Without much of that, the fear can come out as a big emotional reaction, like a fight over something small, or as a shutdown that leaves your partner feeling iced out. Many people can do this well at work and with friends and lose that ability mainly with a partner, which is why they can seem fine everywhere except in their closest relationship. It can be really confusing for a partner to feel very close to you one week and lonely next to you the next. Some people also dissociate when a relationship gets stressful, which I’ve written about in How to Stop Dissociating.
None of this means you don't love the people you're close to. Usually the attachment is strong, and what your body has learned to treat as dangerous is the closeness itself. Afterward there's often shame, a sense that you're too much, or that something is wrong with you at the core.
Is disorganized attachment the same as fearful avoidant?
They're close, and online the terms get used interchangeably, but they come from different research. “Disorganized” comes from studies of infants and, in adults, from the Adult Attachment Interview, where it's tied to loss or trauma that hasn't been resolved. “Fearful avoidant” (sometimes just “fearful”) comes from Kim Bartholomew's model of adult relationships, and describes people who want closeness but expect to be hurt by it. In an actual relationship the two look a lot alike. If you recognized yourself in one description, the other will probably fit as well. The label doesn’t matter much. What matters is the conflict underneath it, between wanting to depend on someone and needing to stay independent.
What causes disorganized attachment
The short version is that a child's caregiver was frightening, or frightened, in ways the child couldn't make sense of. Sometimes that means abuse or violence in the home, but you can have disorganized attachment without abuse in your history. Main and Hesse found that disorganized attachment in infants was linked to the parents' own unresolved trauma or loss. A parent who suddenly goes vacant, who looks terrified, or who swings between warmth and rage without warning can frighten a small child even if that parent never lays a hand on them and loves them very much. This is part of why people with this pattern often say nothing that bad happened to them, and mean it.
Other routes include a parent's addiction or untreated mental illness, or a home where one parent was dangerous and the other couldn't protect the child. In each case the child can't leave and can't fix the adult, so the nervous system does the only thing available, which from the outside looks chaotic: it tries to approach and escape at once, or it shuts down. That made sense at the time, but the trouble is that the same response tends to fire later with partners, friends and colleagues who aren't dangerous at all.
There's a lot of overlap here with what's called complex trauma, which I've written about in What Is Complex Trauma?
How to heal disorganized attachment
Attachment patterns can change, and researchers use the term “earned security” for adults whose early caregiving was difficult and who nonetheless come to look secure. This often happens through a relationship that stays steady enough over time: a partner, a mentor, a therapist.
Because this pattern lives in the body and in relationships, insight on its own usually doesn't shift it much. (I wrote more about that in Why Talking About It Isn't Always Enough.) What tends to help is having the push-pull happen in a relationship where it can be noticed and talked about.
In therapy, that relationship is usually the one with me. The way I work, I welcome talking about how all of this shows up between us. As the relationship deepens, clients may start longing for more closeness and saying so, and then feel strongly conflicting things toward me at the same time. Often we'll have a session that goes deep and feels close, and the next week there's a flip. Clients shut down, find a reason to be angry with me, arrive very late, or cancel the following session. The way I usually understand it, the previous week was a lot. Being that open felt exposing, maybe like something that could be used against them, so the guard went back up. There's a wish to rest into depending on someone, and as soon as some of that happens, there’s a pull back toward independence.
Being able to watch that happen and talk about it in a relationship that's contained, rather than one that can spiral out of control, changes things over time. Repair after a rupture starts to feel safe. The ruptures themselves get less intense, because each one no longer feels existential, as if the old wound were taking over. We can see it as part of the past, and recognize that you aren't in that situation anymore.
Somatic work helps here too. We pay attention to what happens in your body as closeness grows, and to regulating it. My somatic work is also expressive, so if your body wants to communicate something, there's room for it, whether that's deep pain, anger, sorrow or despair over attachment needs that went unmet. That can help the body register that it's no longer living in that time, and it often opens into grieving what was lost. EMDR can also help with the traumatic memories underneath the pattern.
Parts work (IFS) is useful because the same person can feel like the safest person in the world one week and like a threat the next. That makes sense given where the pattern comes from. As a child, the person you depended on was also the one who frightened you, and those two pictures never got put together. So you might feel sure this is the best person you've ever met, and later feel just as sure it's a terrible fit and you need to get away. In parts terms, both of those can be parts of you. We can get to know why each one works so hard and what it might be trying to protect you from, without having to pick one and act on it.
Over time, what I've seen change is that the swing gets shorter. The stretch of feeling distant, or angry and wanting to pull away, doesn't last as long. Some of the unbounded closeness and ecstasy can level out a little too, so the range isn't as extreme. And when you do lean into closeness, you can stay grounded in it and still feel like you're in control.
In the meantime
It can help simply to notice the swing when it happens, without trying to stop it. When you feel the urge to run, or the flood, or the blankness, it's worth recognizing that an old alarm is going off, and that it may be reacting to the past as much as to the person in front of you. If you have a partner, telling them what happens to you, at a calm moment rather than in the middle of it, can make the next swing less frightening for both of you.
Loving someone with disorganized attachment
If you're the partner, the hot and cold can be disorienting, and it's easy to take it as a verdict on you. Usually it isn't. Steadiness tends to matter more than grand gestures: being predictable, coming back after a rupture, not punishing the person for needing space. At the same time, your own limits matter. You can't love someone out of an old pattern, and you shouldn't have to absorb everything. Couples therapy can help both people see the cycle the two of you get caught in, rather than each seeing the other as the problem. I work with couples using Emotionally Focused Therapy, which is built around exactly this kind of cycle.
When it may be something else
Disorganized attachment is a research category, not a diagnosis, and the push-pull can come from several places. It overlaps with complex PTSD and with dissociation (the psychiatrist Giovanni Liotti was among the first to connect disorganized attachment in childhood with dissociation later on). And if what you're mostly struggling with is a loop of doubt about whether your partner is the right one (checking your feelings, comparing, looking for reassurance, unable to let the question rest), that can be a form of OCD sometimes called relationship OCD, which is treated differently. A clinician can help sort out what fits.
And sometimes the fear is accurate. If a partner is controlling, unpredictable or abusive now, your body may be responding to what's happening in the present, not to the past. That's worth taking seriously before assuming the problem is your attachment style.
Working with me
If you recognize yourself here, you don't have to sort it out alone. I'm a psychodynamic, somatic and trauma-informed therapist who works with individuals and couples, in person in Manhattan and online across New York and Florida. You can read more about how I work with relationships and attachment, or reach out for a free consultation.
Sources
Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 226-244.
Liotti, G. (1992). Disorganized/disoriented attachment in the etiology of the dissociative disorders. Dissociation, 5(4), 196-204.
Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents' unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status: Is frightened and/or frightening parental behavior the linking mechanism? In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years (pp. 161-182). University of Chicago Press.
Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years (pp. 121-160). University of Chicago Press.
Roisman, G. I., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204-1219.
