Johnny Cohen
Dismissive & Anxious-Avoidant Attachment
Imagine that you’re four years old and running toward the playground. But before you even make it onto the bark mulch, your feet trip, and your body is caught by the concrete. Your knees feel the impact, and you notice a little blood leaking out of a scrape. You feel tears well up within you, but you hold them back long enough to determine if someone will respond if you let them out.
Looking back at your mom, she’s already turned her face downward, immersed in a book. Based on your life up till now, you already know how she will react if you interrupt her. She’ll say she’s sorry, while her eyes narrow, and she purses her lips together in annoyance, betraying her true feelings. While she says the right words, everything else tells you that she’d rather you not have the feelings you have. So in a quick, subconscious moment, you make a decision. You decide it’s better to sit with throbbing knees than to feel like a bother. Especially when you’re already feeling physical burn, the subtle rejection would just be too much.
The pain continues, but there’s nothing to be done. You try your best to push it out of your mind, trying to focus on the playground, finding something new to play with or explore. A new activity is nothing like a hug, but it’s better than sitting and feeling sorry for yourself. It’s better than actually feeling how much you need a hug. Distraction is a second-best strategy for dealing with your pain, but it’s all you’ve got.
After a while, this process is not even a decision anymore. You know that if you’re in pain, or sad or scared, your best bet is to try to handle it on your own. Ignore or distract. By the time you’re an adult, the emotions barely register. You don’t feel much, and so you don’t need others to help you when you’re feeling bad. You’ve stopped hoping that you’ll get the response you truly long for. If mom doesn’t like you when you’re crying, it’s best stop crying — and decide that you’re okay on your own.
When Emotions Drive Disconnection
In a family like this, shutting down emotions keeps mom close. If our parents don’t like our emotions, or can’t handle them, we will learn quickly that the best strategy to maintain closeness is to keep our feelings under wraps. So we come up with ways to shut down our emotions.
Parents have different ways of discouraging their children from sharing emotions. “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” is an obvious message that sadness isn’t welcome. But there are other subtle ways that caregivers, even with the best of intentions, can send this message. Consider the mother who can’t handle her son’s tears when he can’t have more candy after dinner, so she swoops in saying, “Oh honey, don’t cry!” and allows it, rather than setting a healthy boundary. While the son gets what he wants, he begins to notice that mom isn’t all that comfortable with his big emotions. So, the child is thrown into a terrible dilemma between showing emotion and maintaining connection. He learns that his emotions have a way of increasing mom’s anxiety, rather bringing her close. He has to choose between feelings and closeness. To avoid a moment of disconnection, he does his best to stuff down his emotions.
Then, we grow into adults who feel we must keep our ugly emotions away from others to keep them close. The best strategy is to continually shut down your emotions. So, we fill our days with activities, just like the toddler exploring the playground, trying to ignore his need for a hug. On weekends, you’ll see us working around the house, plugging away at a personal project, or immersed in a solitary hobby, like video games or reading novels. We’ve learned to manage emotions by a simple strategy: ignoring them.
Without emotionally supportive caregivers, we have learned to rely only on ourselves, and in the process, have learned to work hard to survive. Our independence earns us countless rewards in our US culture that praises a rugged individualism that pulls itself up by the bootstraps. Like a Clint Eastwood character, we face the day ready to single-handedly take on the world. We just focus on what needs to be done. We talk about our natural distaste for emotion, claiming, “it’s just who I am,” or we appeal to the pragmatic, “what’s the point of emotions anyway?” Life is just better when everyone stays calm. We consider ourselves logical and solution-focused. Without being clouded by emotions, we can clearly see problems and solutions. We’re the person you call during an emergency.
In the middle of solving a problem, we can get frustrated with others’ emotions that only seem to complicate the process. Which is where the rub happens. Shutting down emotions doesn’t always work when it comes to those we love. Reflecting on our own self-sufficiency, we find ourselves puzzled by why others seem so emotional and so needy. Dragged down as they cling to us for closeness, we feel suffocated by the intimacy they try to push on us. Without realizing it, we often find ways to wedge a little breathing room in our relationships. While we just want to keep emotions at arm’s length, others feel differently. They want to know that there’s a human heart beating inside, and they want to know our thoughts and feelings. Part of a connected relationship includes feelings, something that is hard to get from a robot. So, a paradox happens, where we try to stay even keel to weather the storms of life, and to keep others close. But so very often, others in our lives feel shut out by our stoicism.
Locked in the Basement
It’s not exactly that we’re hiding what’s going on inside from others, it’s that we don’t know ourselves what we are feeling. Friends and family feel like we’re a house with all the shades pulled, closing ourselves off from the world. In reality, it’s more like a glass house with a basement that’s locked tight. We don’t know what’s down there, and we don’t know how to get to it. Besides, why would we want to? It’s only bad feelings down there. And then, even if we did open the basement, we wouldn’t even know what to do with those feelings that are down there! We’ve never had someone to help name or tame those uncomfortable feelings, so we’ve just shut them away. It’s best to just force the basement door shut, leaving the mess of sensations and feelings on the other side.
So we believe, and would have others believe, that we simply aren’t emotional people. But really, it’s not that we don’t have feelings; we’re just ignoring them. And ignoring emotions is not who we are, it’s just the best strategy we’ve come up with so far. We actually have much more going on under the surface than it appears from the outside. This aversion to emotion is actually a way of surviving our internal world. If we never had anyone there to help us calm down our emotions, they feel chaotic and overwhelming. Ignoring them doesn’t mean they go away, it just means that they’re swirling around in a way we don’t know how to process or talk about them. So we have to figure out how to manage them on our own. So we distract ourselves in a variety of ways, or just do our best to ignore them.
Healthy Emotional Connection
For a frame of reference, let me explain the way emotions should work. When my daughter was three, we took her to a Peacock Lane, a neighborhood block in southeast Portland that decorates for Christmas, where most houses go above and beyond, choosing some sort of theme like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Star Wars. It’s festive and noisy and only open to foot traffic for the month leading up to Christmas.
A root had grown under the cement block, causing a ridge in the sidewalk. It was completely imperceptible on the dark and crowded street, yet just tall enough to trip a toddler. My daughter fell, even while holding my hand. As soon as I heard her crying, I whisked her up into my arms. I checked for hurt knees, but she wasn’t hurt, just shaken up. “Oh,” I said in a soft, soothing voice, “that must have really scared you.” As I held her close, she quickly calmed down.
In less than one minute, I taught my daughter some important things about her emotions. After tripping, she had a feeling in her body that expressed itself in tears. I helped her translate that bodily sensation into a word she could talk about: “scared.” And then, I taught her how to manage that feeling, which was to come to dad, knowing I will hold her close and talk in soothing tones until she is able to move on from the emotion. She also learns that emotions are for connection. If I cry, dad comes and dad holds me. She’s beginning to understand what emotions are all about and why they are important in relationships.
But imagine if instead of holding her, I subtly shamed her for her feelings. What if I said, “You’re fine,” with a slight tinge of disgust in my voice. Or if I hadn’t noticed at all, the sounds of the crowd overwhelming her tiny voice. And what if this happened over and over again, teaching her that emotions either have no value, or worse, they cause rejection and disconnection. What if she learned that crying only makes dad angry? Then, emotions do the opposite of drawing others close — we learn that they cause the still-face moments of disconnection.
It only makes sense to lock our emotions in the basement, if early on in life we found that showing emotions like sadness or worry didn’t draw others close. Instead, if we were subtly or explicitly punished for sharing distressing emotions, we learn quickly to not show them at all, and if possible, not feel them in the first place.
So, refusing to share our emotions isn’t a way of icing others out, it’s actually a way of keeping them close. Over the course of a lifetime, locking away emotions becomes an automatic response, occurring outside of consciousness. Many of my clients have learned so well to deftly lock away emotion, that they have trouble interrupting the process when their spouse asks, “but what are you feeling?” It’s already gone to the basement, untouched and inaccessible.
Those who automatically shutdown their emotions create a biological pattern in their brain that dismisses input from the insula, the part of the brain that helps us interpret bodily sensations as emotions, as well as read body language from others. Overtime, accessing our emotions, as well as reading others, becomes increasingly difficult. Our brain has shifted in order to help us avoid emotions.
Emotional Fire Hazards
After spending so much time and energy suppressing our own emotions, it can be frustrating when others don’t do the same. As creatures made for connection, others’ emotions trigger emotions in us. It’s like taking great care to be safe on the Fourth of July, and all your neighbors start firing off airborne fireworks, inevitably landing in the driest part of your lawn. Just to be safe, not only do you hose down your own space, you start trying to extinguish everyone else's yard. And others notice, as they feel you take a cold wet spray to their emotions.
We prefer to be alone, putting up high walls to make sure that stray fireworks don’t set our yard on fire. In fact, it becomes so much easier to be alone because there’s less to manage, so we retreat into patterns that give us solitude and a feeling of safety, protected from the world of emotions that others might bring in.
Inevitably, it becomes hard to connect with others. Someone important in your life tells you about their feelings and expects the same from you. You reach inside and find nothing, because it’s all locked in the basement. Realizing you have nothing to show, you feel like you’re letting the other person down. Over time, we develop performance anxiety when it comes to emotions bee have no idea how to actually emotionally connect.
So we just avoid getting on stage. We avoid deep conversation, intimate moments, and any possibility of meaningful talk. We want to do activities together, because we do want connection, but we just can’t risk getting too close and personal. So we build things together, or play board games, or do outdoor activities.
The Path to Healing
The way we increase our connection with others is by sharing our emotions with them. But that’s tricky if you don’t know what your emotions are. There are some helpful books about emotions, but because this way of relating to emotions was formed at an early age, our bodies have created a pattern that can be difficult to break – unless we work with our bodies.
Mindfulness and body scans can be very helpful, but it’s important to recognize the goal of the body scan is not to calm down or to feel nothing, but rather just the opposite – it’s to slow down enough to notice things like a tense stomach or heaviness in the shoulders. Emotions, in some sense, originate in the body as sensations, and then our brain interprets them. So, knowing our emotions starts with noticing our body.
Working at an ADHD clinic, I’m used to working with clients who have shorter attention spans than the rest of the population. Doing these practices need not take long. Try this three-minute body scan. Frequency is more important than time spent. If you can find a time to do this twice a day, you’ll start on your path to noticing your emotions, and being able to share them with others.
Yoga or other ways of connecting with your body in a mindful way is another way to increase awareness of emotions.
Being curious with others can be helpful: saying, “I think I’m feeling sad, but I’m not even sure why” is a great starting point.
Working with an Emotionally Focused Therapist or experiential therapist can also be helpful.
Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman are great books to read on the topic.
Check out my Attached to the Invisible episodes on Dismissive Attachment Style and Dismissive Attachment with God.
Read more about what this attachment style looks like in relatonship to God.
Sign up for my Secure Spirituality Newsletter to get monthly emails about attachment, spirituality and practices for more secure relating to God.