Disorganised attachment: when I need you close, but I also fear the bond

Do you deeply long for a stable relationship, yet when someone gets too close you feel the need to pull away?

Are there moments when you desperately need your partner and others when you can’t bear them being close?

Do you feel that part of you seeks love while another part does everything it can to escape it?

If you recognise yourself in these situations, there may be a disorganised attachment pattern behind them.

What is disorganised attachment?

Disorganised attachment is the most contradictory attachment style.

The person needs the bond to feel safe, but at the same time that very bond triggers fear, mistrust or an intense sense of threat.

It’s like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake at the same time.

That’s why many people experience their relationships with enormous confusion and find it hard to understand why they react in such opposite ways.

How does it develop?

This style usually appears when, in childhood, the figure who should have provided safety also caused fear or was deeply unpredictable.

It can happen in situations of mistreatment, neglect or abuse, but also in families where the caregiver was emotionally overwhelmed, had serious mental health problems, used substances, or alternated moments of great closeness with others of rejection, threat or emotional absence.

For a child, this is a conflict that cannot be resolved.

The person they need to turn to in order to feel safe is, at the same time, the person who frightens them.

As a result, they never manage to develop a stable strategy for regulating their emotions and protecting themselves.

How does it show up in adult life?

People with disorganised attachment tend to experience relationships very intensely.

At times they seek great closeness, need to feel very connected to the other person and deeply fear losing them.

However, when that closeness arrives, they may feel invaded, become mistrustful or feel a strong urge to pull away.

They often alternate periods of deep involvement with others of distance, creating relationships that are very hard to understand, both for them and for their partners.

An emotional rollercoaster

Many people with disorganised attachment describe the feeling of living on a rollercoaster.

They can go from idealising their partner to deeply mistrusting them in a short time, without really understanding what has changed.

When the relationship seems stable, fear appears.

When the distance grows, the need to restore the bond appears.

This back and forth often causes a great deal of suffering and a strong sense of guilt.

Why does it happen?

From the outside it may look as if the person keeps changing their mind or doesn’t know what they want.

However, the problem isn’t usually a lack of love, but the difficulty of feeling safe within a relationship.

Their attachment system sends contradictory messages: move closer to feel protected, and pull away to avoid being hurt again.

Can it change?

Yes.

Although disorganised attachment is often linked to very painful experiences, it doesn’t determine a person’s future.

With secure relationships and the right therapeutic process, it’s possible to understand these reactions, learn to regulate them and build bonds where closeness no longer feels like a threat.

The aim of therapy isn’t to stop needing others, but to help love stop feeling dangerous.

Because behind disorganised attachment there isn’t a person who is “incapable of love”.

There’s a person who learnt far too early that the one who was meant to care for them could also hurt them.

In the next article we’ll look at how to identify your attachment style and why we don’t always fit entirely into a single category.