Fearful/Disorganized Attachment 101

**Alex Cooper** (0:00)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Sunday session of Call Her Daddy. We are officially back with our series on attachment style. If you haven't been keeping up, I basically posted on my Instagram asking the Daddy Gang what they want me to discuss about attachment styles, and my DMs were so flooded, guys. Everything was ranging from like, sorry, what? Like, what even is an attachment style? Is that different from a love language? And then all the way to like, Alex, please explain in detail what the hell it means to have anxious versus avoidant attachment. So to date, we have done an entire episode on anxious attachment. We then went to avoidant attachment, which has finally led us here today. We gather here today. What is that, Nicole Kidman thing? That's us right now. It is officially time to tackle fearful slash disorganized attachment. And I'm going to be honest, this is probably the hardest attachment style to tackle because it is really, really complicated.
It's like a two-for-one situation, okay? And if you have fearful attachment, most people think you're either needy, aka you could fall into the anxious category, or you're really cold, aka avoidant, and so you fall into that category.
But actually, you're both. If you have fearful attachment, you are high anxiety, and you are also high avoidance. So you kind of got like a dual-package situation going on when it comes to attachment styles. You basically crave intimacy desperately, but you are terrified of it because you believe it will eventually destroy you. So, Daddy Gang, if you are feeling like you are stuck in this like nonstop agonizing loop in your relationships of come here, I love you. Oh my God, get the hell away from me. You're ruining my life. You probably just have fearful attachment. It's also called disorganized attachment. And it can be truly the most exhausting, chaotic relationship dynamic. So, let's start with how did you even get here, right? How does one have fearful attachment? In order to understand this, we have to go back to the childhood guys. So, for comparison, people with secure attachment, their parents were a safe haven to them, right? When they cried, they got comfort. But for fearful attached people, your childhood home was essentially a minefield to you. And in psychology, they say that this attachment comes from fright without solution, aka, what that means is the very people who were supposed to protect you and to keep you safe, your parents or your caregivers or whoever raised you, were also the source of your fear, your chaos and your instability. And so some people's houses may have kind of fit into this like Jekyll and Mr. Hyde parent situation. What that looks like is one minute, let's say your mom or your dad was so warm and loving and even smothering you with affection, right? And then the next minute, they were screaming cold or just completely absent. And you kind of never knew which version of your parent you were getting when you walked through the front door. Some people also may relate more to the overwhelmed or the scary parent. Maybe there was addiction in the house or really intense fighting. Maybe there was physical abuse. And so essentially to survive, you had to become hyper aware of your surroundings at all times. And so you kind of learn to read these like really micro expressions of your parents' faces just to know if you were safe. Another environment to grow up in could have been the role reversal. So this basically means you had to grow up way too fast. You had to essentially parent your parent. Now some of these situations may sound a little familiar to avoidance as well. If you guys watched the avoidant attachment style episode, some of these, you could be like, oh, I feel like that kind of was avoidance too. And I think the easiest way to understand the difference between avoidant and fearful childhoods is to look at basically how the parents reacted to the child's distress, okay? So someone who has primarily avoidant attachment as a child, they learned that their emotions are basically useless. Whereas fearful attachment is when children learn that their emotions and their caregivers are dangerous. So for fearful children, the defining element of a fearfully attached person's childhood is fear without resolution. So when a child is scared, their biological instinct is to run to their caregiver for safety, right? You go to your mom, you go to your dad, you go to your grandmother, whoever raised you, right?
But then what happens when the caregiver is the source of fear?
So imagine how complicated that is, right? The child's brain essentially is short-circuiting because they want to run towards the parent for safety, but then they are like, oh, wait, no, I think I need to run away from the parent to survive. And so that literally leaves you nowhere to run as a child because you're a child. You don't have money, you don't have any other circumstances, you can't choose where you live, you can't choose who your caregivers are, you're stuck. And so you learn from a very young age that closeness equals danger. And so someone with fearful attachment, their caregiver growing up might have been very erratic, may have been frightening, or maybe that parent was also like highly traumatized themselves from their childhood. But this can look like physical and emotional abuse, right?