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Post by anapol on Dec 21, 2018 1:12:11 GMT
I've read in a couple of websites that those with FA attachment can potentially settle for abusive relationships. Isn't the distancing and shutting down supposed to protect somehow, even from people with good intentions? I'm just confused as to how someone would "protect" themselves from a good person and stick with an abusive person. I can't visualize how a situation like that might look. Can you guys give a hypothetical example?
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Post by alexandra on Dec 21, 2018 1:54:58 GMT
I've read in a couple of websites that those with FA attachment can potentially settle for abusive relationships. Isn't the distancing and shutting down supposed to protect somehow, even from people with good intentions? I'm just confused as to how someone would "protect" themselves from a good person and stick with an abusive person. I can't visualize how a situation like that might look. Can you guys give a hypothetical example? FA can get triggered in the same ways as AP. But they shut down with too much intimacy and start to believe they've lost feelings or it isn't "the one". So if they encounter someone abusive who continuously triggers them anxious without ever triggering them to shut down, and have inconsistent reinforcement, maybe feel sparks and chemistry, etc., especially if the abuse escalates incrementally in little bits over time, some may be prone to getting stuck in that. Especially if they are already tolerant of abuse or think it looks/feels familiar because of whatever abuse in childhood caused them to develop an FA style in the first place, and especially if they are unaware of their own attachment issues. |
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Post by alexandra on Dec 21, 2018 1:58:21 GMT
Attachment systems aren't really about protecting oneself as an adult. They're defense mechanisms and conditioning to attach and survive as a child, even if you have... let's call them "problematic" adult caregivers. But it's out of context as an adult, as adults have different needs than children, which is why it can start to cause more harm than good.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 21, 2018 14:30:11 GMT
All the behavior associated with certain attachment style may not be visible in one person. The FA style is often misunderstood. People get stuck to the "avoidant" part in it because that's what they see and they compare them to DAs, but often it is not as much about avoidance as it is about fear. There are different kinds of FAs with different experiences, but the common factor for all FAs is fear, attachment trauma, more than a certain amount of avoidance or anxiety. (In my opinion, the commitmentphobic FA and codependent FA should be treated as separate styles, for example, avoidant-disorganized or anxious-disorganized, but it gets complicated when someone is equally both).
Some FAs tend to get stuck in abusive relationships. They pair with people with personality disorders and addictions. They don't know what love feels like or how it should be like. Their attachment style doesn't protect them, it works against them. They tend to avoid and shut down with "normal" people. They have learned to associate fear with attachment, and they may struggle to know which people are safe to attach to. Some of them are only able to attach to people who frighten them. If the abuse is subtle, it can be especially hard for them to recognize it, because "they've seen worse" and they are accustomed to people around them being unreliable and abusive.
These FAs can easily develop "trauma bond". It is very hard to break out of it. They have experienced it in the past and they keep repeating it. Their ability to see their situation clearly blurs over time. They may start to "split" their partner and the whole relationship in their mind, unable to see the truth, because they can't integrate both the good and the bad sides. The thought pattern goes something like this "he claims to love me but he seems to abuse me => if he really loved me, he could not abuse me => he either does not abuse me or he does not love me", and they don't know which to believe, so they sometimes see their partner as loving (good), sometimes as abusive (evil), but never both at the same time. So they get stuck, unable to leave, because they always second guess themselves and gradually they learn to either ignore the abuse or come up with better explanations for it. Sometimes the trauma bond develops from an unintentional dynamic rather than conscious manipulation, sometimes there isn't even real abuse. It is especially hard to recognize for what it is because FA has both the tendency to see their partner as evil and the tendency to choose bad partners. A very traumatized FA may start to see everyone as unreliable, and they may even push their partners to behave in ways that "prove" they were right that the partner couldn't be trusted. So the cycle gets worse over time as they start to see more and more people as untrustworthy and evil and repeat the pattern even with safer people. They can also keep choosing people who reinforce their beliefs because they don't feel any chemistry with safe people.
This is also a personal experience rather than hypothetical example. I am that kind of FA. It sucks. I have no idea what is healthy or normal, and it's like looking at something very close - when it's right in front of you, it gets blurry and you can't see it for what it really is.
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Post by alexandra on Dec 21, 2018 19:26:18 GMT
The thought pattern goes something like this "he claims to love me but he seems to abuse me => if he really loved me, he could not abuse me => he either does not abuse me or he does not love me", and they don't know which to believe, so they sometimes see their partner as loving (good), sometimes as abusive (evil), but never both at the same time. So they get stuck, unable to leave, because they always second guess themselves and gradually they learn to either ignore the abuse or come up with better explanations for it. Sometimes the trauma bond develops from an unintentional dynamic rather than conscious manipulation, sometimes there isn't even real abuse. It can also be, he's abusing me because he loves me, right? If that's the dynamic the partner had with an attachment figure in childhood? Not even knowing to think, if he really loved me he couldn't abuse me, because the person really never experienced love without abuse. I agree there's a spectrum with FA, some are more anxious and some are more avoidant, and I also think that most people primarily see one or the other because they mostly only trigger one side. Since I've dated FAs mostly when I've been AP, they've only been really anxious around me when the relationship was newer and not stable/established yet. Then it became deactivation mostly, unless I was "leaving" them for a while, then the anxious might swing back. But, they'd told me about phantom exes and experiences where they'd go crazy in an AP way with past (sometimes abusive) partners, and I picked out that they'd have a primary anxious or avoidant trigger pattern based on how anxious or avoidant their partners were. The last one was especially tough because I was the first non-abusive and eventually secure person he'd ever dated for any amount of time. So after 3 years, when we finally talked about attachment, he wanted to believe he was AP (with high avoidance) not FA, that I was the only person he feared intimacy with (extremely false), and we didn't get anywhere. |
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Post by leavethelighton on Dec 22, 2018 1:21:57 GMT
Also, attachment styles aren't the whole of someone's psyche. There could have other reasons they're drawn to an abusive relationship.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2018 1:49:01 GMT
Isn't the distancing and shutting down supposed to protect somehow, even from people with good intentions? Different kinds of protection. In the case of attachment style, the avoidance protects from abandonment pain, but NOT abuse. The kind of avoidance that protects from abuse is instinctual self protection. They may coexist in the same individual (me!), but they don't have to. I assume the FA's that stay in abusive situations do so because they are used to it and think it is normal and due to many of the reasons zercher mentioned. It also depends on how they became fearful avoidant. Some of them do not believe they can survive or face life by themselves so we stick to bad people out of fear. In my case, I have strong intuition and am NOT attracted to abusive individuals. E.g. I always hated my father because he's abusive. Last month I went cold turkey on a guy who tried to start something with me, moving too fast, getting my phone number without my permission, etc. Ew. I feel it in my body that something is completely wrong. |
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Post by annieb on Nov 26, 2019 22:58:26 GMT
I've read in a couple of websites that those with FA attachment can potentially settle for abusive relationships. Isn't the distancing and shutting down supposed to protect somehow, even from people with good intentions? I'm just confused as to how someone would "protect" themselves from a good person and stick with an abusive person. I can't visualize how a situation like that might look. Can you guys give a hypothetical example? The abusive person is more likely to re-inforce our low self esteem. We feel familiarity to our upbringing. While we are avoidant, we are more likely to end up in an abusive relationship because of that. A good person we would simply avoid, a bad person, we get intermittent re-inforcement and stay. |
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