Escape the anxious-avoidant trap that’s sabotaging your relationships—uncover how childhood wounds fuel the painful pursuit-withdrawal cycle, understand both partners’ experiences, and discover paths to mutual healing, earned security, or the courage to walk away for true freedom.
You text “Are we okay?” for the third time today. Your partner hasn’t responded in six hours, and your mind is spinning with worst-case scenarios. When they finally reply with a casual “Yeah, just busy,” you feel simultaneously relieved and frustrated. Why don’t they understand how much their silence affects you? Meanwhile, your partner is feeling suffocated by your “constant need for reassurance” and fantasizing about having more space. They love you, but they’re exhausted by what feels like an endless demand for connection that they don’t know how to meet.
This is the anxious-avoidant trap—perhaps the most common and certainly one of the most painful relationship dynamics. In SAFE, psychotherapist Jessica Baum reveals why people with anxious attachment and those with avoidant attachment find each other with uncanny consistency, and why these relationships often devolve into cycles of pursuing and distancing that leave both people miserable. More importantly, she offers a path through this trap—though it requires both people to be willing to face the childhood wounds driving their behaviors.
The Perfect Storm of Incompatible Wounds in Anxious-Avoidant Relationships
On the surface, anxious and avoidant people seem like terrible matches. One craves closeness and reassurance; the other needs space and autonomy. One is comfortable with emotional expression; the other finds it overwhelming. Why would these two types consistently attract each other?
The answer lies in their complementary childhood wounds and protective strategies. Both developed their patterns in response to parents who couldn’t provide consistent, attuned care—but they adapted in opposite directions.
The anxiously attached person typically had parents who were sometimes present and sometimes lost in their own world. As a child, this person learned that connection was possible but unpredictable. They developed hypervigilance to others’ emotional states, constantly monitoring and adjusting to try to keep their parent engaged. The implicit message they received was: “If I can just be good enough, attentive enough, helpful enough, I can make them stay.”
The avoidantly attached person typically had parents who were emotionally distant, dismissive, or contemptuous of emotional needs. As a child, this person learned that expressing needs led to rejection or punishment. They adapted by disconnecting from their own emotions and focusing on tasks, performance, and independence. The implicit message they received was: “My feelings are too much. I’m better off alone.”
“I’ve worked with so many clients who have parents with different attachment styles,” Baum writes. “Often, one parent has more anxiety while the other has more of a tendency to hide away behind a newspaper or with busy tasks.”
The Initial Attraction: When Opposites Feel Like Completion
In the early stages of relationship, these opposing patterns can feel complementary rather than incompatible. The anxious person is drawn to the avoidant person’s calm stability—it feels like the secure base they’ve always wanted. The avoidant person is drawn to the anxious person’s emotional warmth and expressiveness—it touches the emotional aliveness they’ve learned to suppress in themselves.
“When James and I got together, we vowed we would never ever do that to our kids,” Baum shares about a couple she worked with, both of whom had witnessed constant parental conflict growing up. “Their bowed heads and drooping shoulders spoke of the deep shame they both felt about repeating a pattern they knew all too well from their childhoods.”
During the honeymoon phase, neurochemicals flood both people’s systems, creating a sense of blissful connection that temporarily overrides their deeper attachment patterns. The anxious person feels finally seen and chosen. The avoidant person feels safe enough to let their guard down a little. Both believe they’ve found someone who will heal their childhood wounds.
When the Trap Closes: The Cycle Begins
As the initial neurochemicals wear off and real life intrudes, each person’s core wounds begin to surface. This is when the painful dance typically begins.
The anxious person starts to feel the first tremors of their fundamental fear: that they will be abandoned. Perhaps the avoidant partner seems slightly distracted one evening, or needs alone time to decompress. To the anxious person’s nervous system, this registers as the beginning of abandonment—the pattern they know so well from childhood.
“All my unhealed wounds were still bubbling underneath, so even with his constant attention, the intensity of my work life and the flow of anxiety in my nervous system continued,” Baum writes about her own relationship. “At the time, these actually added to our attraction.”
The anxious person responds by pursuing: seeking reassurance, asking if everything is okay, wanting to talk things through, trying to restore the feeling of connection. To them, this feels like a reasonable response to something that’s genuinely scary.
To the avoidant partner, however, this pursuit feels like pressure and demand. Their nervous system responds to emotional intensity with a neuroception of danger—not because their partner is threatening them, but because emotional vulnerability awakens their core wound of having emotions be too much, overwhelming, or rejected.
The avoidant person responds by withdrawing: becoming less available, spending more time at work, responding to emotional bids with logic rather than feeling, creating physical or emotional distance. To them, this feels like necessary self-protection.
Which, of course, terrifies the anxious person even more, intensifying their pursuit. Which overwhelms the avoidant person even more, deepening their withdrawal. The cycle accelerates until both people are locked in a pattern neither wants but both feel powerless to stop.
Inside the Anxious Experience
To understand this dynamic, it helps to get inside each person’s experience. For the anxiously attached person, the avoidant partner’s withdrawal triggers a tsunami of bodily sensations and emotions rooted in childhood.
“‘I don’t feel safe!’ I shouted at my partner as I tried desperately to catch my breath,” Baum describes her own experience. “It felt like a cord that once connected us had snapped. ‘What do you mean, you don’t feel safe?’ he asked, staring at me with a detached look on his face.”
Her partner was genuinely confused because nothing objectively dangerous was happening. But Baum’s nervous system was responding to the loss of connection as a life-threatening emergency. For someone whose survival strategy in childhood was maintaining connection with an unpredictable parent, disconnection feels like death.
The anxious person isn’t being dramatic or manipulative—they’re experiencing a genuine nervous system state of danger. Their body is flooded with stress hormones, their belly is tight with anxiety, their heart is racing. Old implicit memories of childhood abandonment are alive and feeling like they’re happening right now.
What the anxious person needs in these moments is reassurance that they haven’t been abandoned, that the connection is still intact, that their partner is choosing to stay. They need the avoidant partner to turn toward them rather than away.
But this is precisely what the avoidant partner is least able to give when they’re activated.
Inside the Avoidant Experience
For the avoidantly attached person, the anxious partner’s pursuit triggers their own tsunami of sensations and emotions—or more accurately, triggers the need to escape from feeling anything at all.
Growing up with parents who were dismissive or contemptuous of emotional needs, the avoidant person learned that feelings are dangerous. Expressing vulnerability led to rejection, humiliation, or being ignored. The safest adaptation was to disconnect from emotions entirely and focus on tasks, achievement, and independence.
Now, when their partner comes to them in emotional distress, their nervous system doesn’t register “my partner needs comfort.” It registers “emotional demand = danger.” They feel an overwhelming urge to escape, shut down, or fix the problem quickly so the emotional intensity will stop.
“My partner was taking stimulants to dull the pain of grief,” Baum shares. “Just a couple of months earlier, his father had passed away, and in addition to absorbing this terrible loss, he was facing the overwhelming demands of taking over the family business.”
The avoidant person often escapes into work, substances, or other activities that provide distance from emotional intensity. They’re not trying to hurt their partner—they’re trying to protect themselves from the intolerable feeling of emotional overwhelm that was dangerous in childhood.
What the avoidant person needs is space to process their experience without pressure, and understanding that their need for autonomy isn’t rejection of their partner. They need their partner to remain calm and connected even while giving them room to breathe.
But this is precisely what the anxious partner is least able to give when they’re activated.
Why Both People Are Right (and Wrong)
Here’s the painful truth: both people’s nervous systems are responding accurately to their own childhood wounds while completely misreading the current situation.
The anxious person’s nervous system is right that withdrawal feels like abandonment—that’s what it meant in childhood when their parent became unavailable. But they’re wrong that their current partner’s need for space equals abandonment or lack of love.
The avoidant person’s nervous system is right that emotional intensity can be overwhelming—that’s what it was in childhood when their emotions were rejected. But they’re wrong that their partner’s emotional needs are dangerous or will consume them.
Both are having genuine experiences of danger in their nervous systems. Both are using protective strategies that worked in childhood. And both protective strategies trigger the other person’s core wound, creating a perfect storm of mutual activation.
“We were two people who I believe still loved each other, but our wounds from the past made it difficult for us to come back to enough safety to reconnect,” Baum writes. “Where before there had been closeness and a deep feeling of being secure in our love, now there was only a lack of eye contact, anger, shutting down, separation, and silence.”
The Two Paths: Heal Together or Walk Away
At this point in the relationship, Baum identifies two possible paths: either both people commit to healing their individual wounds while learning to meet each other’s needs, or the relationship ends because one or both people aren’t willing or able to do that work.
The key question is willingness. If both people can recognize that their reactions are coming from childhood wounds rather than current reality, if both can take responsibility for their protective patterns, and if both can commit to the slow work of healing in relationship, transformation is possible.
But this requires specific conditions:
Both people need their own support system. You can’t heal attachment wounds alone with just your partner. Each person needs therapy, trusted friends, or other anchors who can help them work through their individual wounds.
Both people need to develop interoception. They must learn to recognize when they’re being activated by old wounds versus responding to the present situation. This means feeling sensations in the body and recognizing them as signals from implicit memory.
Both people need to practice rupture and repair. The cycle will continue to happen—neither person can be perfect. But they can learn to recognize when they’ve fallen into it and practice coming back together with curiosity rather than blame.
Both people need to meet each other’s core needs at least sometimes. The anxious person needs reassurance and connection; the avoidant person needs space and autonomy. Both needs are valid, and both people have to stretch beyond their comfort zones.
Baum worked with a couple, Stacy and Paul, who were able to do this work. When Paul’s childhood wound of being hit for going outside as a child was activated by his daughter’s behavior, he could recognize what was happening: “I’m seeing the thousands of times my mother got furious when we dragged mud in the house. She chased us with a big metal spoon and really hurt us sometimes when she caught us.”
With Baum and his wife both holding space for his “Little Me,” Paul could feel the fear and sadness of that child, and receive the comfort he never got at the time. Over months, his reactivity decreased because the wound was healing. His wife was also doing her own work around abandonment wounds, creating a mutual healing process.
When One Person Won’t Do the Work
But what if only one person is willing to heal? This is where Baum’s message becomes both compassionate and firm: sometimes the most loving thing you can do is leave.
In her own relationship, Baum reached a turning point: “When I approached him about doing this work together, he told me that he wanted a fantasy relationship, to stay in the early stage that felt like magic, not in the real one that required intense work. I knew there was no going back to the early times when we were simply lost in each other.”
Her partner’s refusal wasn’t malicious—he genuinely didn’t have the internal resources to face his wounds. But that left Baum trying to heal alone in a relationship that kept reinjuring her. No amount of her healing could fix the dynamic if he wouldn’t engage with his own wounds.
“With great sorrow, I realized the connection was beyond repair, and I made the difficult decision to sever all ties,” Baum writes. The grief of leaving someone you love because they can’t meet you in the healing work is profound. But staying in a relationship where one person continues to activate your wounds without being willing to work on their own ultimately prevents both people from healing.
Breaking Free: What Changes When You Heal
Whether you heal together or separately, the work of addressing your individual attachment wounds changes everything about the anxious-avoidant dynamic.
For the anxious person, healing means:
- Developing a genuine felt sense of safety inside rather than seeking it exclusively through the partner
- Building a community of anchors so you’re not dependent on one person for all your regulation needs
- Recognizing when old abandonment wounds are being activated versus when you’re actually being abandoned
- Learning to self-soothe for at least a few minutes before seeking reassurance
For the avoidant person, healing means:
- Reconnecting with emotions that were cut off in childhood
- Recognizing that vulnerability doesn’t equal danger in the present
- Understanding that your partner’s needs aren’t demands but bids for connection
- Learning to stay present with emotional intensity instead of automatically withdrawing
As both people heal, something remarkable happens: the cycle loses its grip. The anxious person can feel their partner pulling away slightly and recognize “This is my old wound being activated” rather than “They’re abandoning me.” They can take a breath, reach out to another anchor, and then approach their partner with curiosity rather than panic.
The avoidant person can feel their partner’s emotional intensity and recognize “This is activating my old wound” rather than “I’m being consumed.” They can take a breath, remind themselves that feelings won’t destroy them, and then turn toward their partner with presence rather than withdrawal.
“I have learned to slow down, invite Jo to be with the Little Me who endured so much abandonment, and help this young one feel our loving presence with her now,” Baum writes about her healing work. This internal shift—from being overwhelmed by wounds to being able to hold them with care—changes everything.
The Promise and the Challenge
The anxious-avoidant trap is so common because it represents two of the most prevalent attachment wounds playing out in relationship. Nearly everyone in Western culture has some degree of anxiety or avoidance in their attachment patterns because of our culture’s emphasis on independence and achievement over connection.
The trap feels impossible because each person’s protective response triggers the other’s core wound in a perfectly reciprocal way. The more one pursues, the more the other withdraws. The more one withdraws, the more the other pursues. Without intervention, this cycle can continue for years or even decades, leaving both people exhausted and wondering why love isn’t enough.
But the promise is real: these wounds can heal, and this dynamic can change. It requires recognizing that the trap isn’t about your partner being wrong or you being too much or not enough. It’s about two nervous systems responding to childhood wounds that are being reactivated in the present.
With the right support—therapy, anchors, listening partners—and with genuine willingness from both people, the anxious-avoidant trap can transform into something else entirely: two people who understand their wounds, take responsibility for their healing, and create a relationship where both safety and autonomy are possible. Where ruptures happen but repairs come quickly. Where each person can meet their own needs while also meeting their partner’s.
That’s the relationship on the other side of the trap. But getting there requires walking through the pain of the wounds themselves, and doing it together, or recognizing when it’s time to walk away and heal on your own path.