Disorganized Attachment in Couples Therapy: The Old Map vs. The New Terrain

Thursday, March 27, 2025.

Disorganized Attachment has long been the ghost in the machine of couples therapy.

Defined by contradiction, confusion, and chaos, it’s the style that defies clean categorization—a nervous system primed for both approach and avoidance, intimacy and terror.

Traditionally seen as the most severe and intractable of the attachment styles, it has also been among the least understood.

But like many concepts born in the 1970s and codified in the 1990s, our understanding of disorganized attachment is now undergoing a dramatic rethinking.

This post is about that rethinking—a contrast between the old clinical map and the emerging terrain, where trauma science, neurobiology, and complexity theory are reshaping how we support disorganized individuals in relationship.

The Old Map: Disorganized Attachment as Unhealable Wound

Historically, disorganized Attachment was conceptualized as the byproduct of trauma, particularly abuse or frightening caregivers.

In Ainsworth's taxonomy, it represented the child who runs toward the caregiver for comfort and simultaneously flinches in fear. Main and Solomon (1990) formally named it: a contradictory behavioral system arising from an irresolvable paradox.

In adult relationships, the old narrative goes like this: the disorganized partner is chaotic, reactive, mistrustful, and volatile.

They yearn for connection but sabotage intimacy.

They oscillate wildly between clinging and pushing away.

Therapy, in this frame, becomes a long-term holding environment where stability is externally imposed until internal regulation becomes possible.

While accurate in some cases, this view often pathologizes survivors of complex trauma and locates the problem within the client, neglecting the wider system in which they exist.

Enter the New Terrain: Disorganization as Adaptive Intelligence

Newer models, such as the Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) and Polyvagal Theory, offer a radically different lens. In these frameworks, disorganized attachment is not a broken system—it is an adaptive survival strategy in response to environments where safety and danger are unpredictably intertwined.

From a DMM perspective (Crittenden, 2008), what looks like disorganization is often a mixture of incompatible survival strategies.

The person is not confused—they're strategic.

They may shift rapidly between cognitive (avoidant-like) and affective (anxious-like) modes depending on context. Therapy here becomes less about labeling and more about decoding the logic beneath apparent chaos.

Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011) further reframes disorganization as a nervous system that has been trained to toggle rapidly between sympathetic activation (fight/flight) and dorsal vagal collapse (shutdown).

This makes emotional regulation, especially in intimate relationships, extremely challenging—not because the person lacks capacity, but because their nervous system learned to survive threat, not to relax in love.

Case Vignette: Old vs. New

Old Map Interpretation: When Jordan storms out during arguments and later returns crying and remorseful, the therapist might see this as classic disorganization—attachment trauma playing out as push-pull behavior. The intervention might focus on containment, grounding, and psychoeducation.

New Terrain Interpretation: Jordan's pattern is seen as a brilliant (if costly) strategy developed in a volatile childhood home where conflict signaled both danger and abandonment. The therapist might explore what safety looks like in the body, not just in the mind.

Jordan learns to track physiological states, name shifting internal modes, and experiment with co-regulating rather than self-sabotaging.

Critique of the Old Frame: Too Much Pathology, Too Little Curiosity

The older view of Disorganized Attachment often implies that these clients are difficult, exhausting, or hopeless.

And while it's true that relational instability is an unpleasant core challenge, the therapist's lens matters.

If we see disorganization as a flaw, we treat clients as broken. If we see it as intelligence forged in adversity, we collaborate with survivors.

What the New Map Requires of Therapists

Nervous System Literacy: Therapists must understand how trauma is stored in the body and expressed in relationships.

Relational Safety, Not Just Insight: Disorganized clients don’t heal through cognitive understanding alone; they need felt safety and somatic congruence.

Nonlinear Thinking: Progress may not be tidy. Rupture and repair cycles are normal and expected.

Co-Regulation Over Control: Therapists can model stability, not impose it. Regulation becomes a shared practice, not an individual burden.

A Dynamic View of Disorganization

We must move from diagnosing disorganization to dialoguing with it.

What looks like chaos is often choreography shaped by past danger.

What appears inconsistent may actually be patterned in ways that make sense within a trauma-informed, biologically respectful framework.

In couples therapy, this means helping partners learn to name, tolerate, and soothe each other's nervous systems rather than manage each other's behaviors.

It means unlearning the fantasy of perfect regulation and embracing the reality of mutual repair.

Disorganized Attachment isn't a failure of love.

It's a fierce attempt to survive love that was terrifying.

And in the right hands, it can become the groundwork for a deeper kind of intimacy—one that honors complexity, welcomes contradiction, and finds beauty in the untidy rhythm of human connection.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Crittenden, P. M. (2008). Raising parents: Attachment, parenting and child safety. Willan Publishing.

Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. In M. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years: Theory, research, and intervention (pp. 121–160). University of Chicago Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.