Rethinking the Secure and Avoidant Attachment Dynamic: A Deeper Look Beyond the Old Map
Thursday, March 27, 2025.
Let us begin by stating something sacrilegious in traditional attachment circles: the conventional Secure-Avoidant framework, while helpful in its day, may be running on legacy software.
Attachment theory has evolved since Bowlby and Ainsworth first introduced their elegant model, and what was once a tidy categorization has become a limiting vocabulary for increasingly complex relational realities.
In this re-examination of the Secure-Avoidant dynamic, we’ll integrate fresh research, critique conventional narratives, and explore emerging models that treat attachment not as a fixed set of traits but as a dynamic, plastic, intersubjective process shaped by culture, neurodivergence, trauma, and adult developmental trajectories.
Traditional Framing: Secure Meets Avoidant
The classic model paints the Secure partner as the emotionally available, nurturing soul and the Avoidant-Dismissive partner as the lone wolf who bolts at the first whiff of vulnerability.
It implies that with enough patience and therapeutic elbow grease, the Secure can rehabilitate the Avoidant, as if this were an emotional version of a home improvement project.
But what if this framing is less a map and more a Rorschach test, projecting cultural biases about masculinity, autonomy, and "correct" relational functioning?
Attachment as State, Not Trait
Recent scholarship (Fraley & Roisman, 2019) suggests that attachment isn’t fixed; it varies by relationship context, life stage, and emotional salience.
In other words, you might be Secure with your partner but Avoidant with your mother. Or Secure until you’re sleep-deprived and mid-renovation.
This calls into question the entire concept of labeling folks as "Avoidant."
Maybe we should be talking about moments of avoidance, strategies of emotional regulation, or adaptive behaviors that arose under conditions of threat or neglect.
Polyvagal Theory: A Competing Operating System
Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011) offers a neurobiological lens that reframes Avoidant behavior not as dismissive disregard, but as a dorsal vagal shutdown response—a protective dissociation when intimacy feels threatening. This reframing creates space for compassion, not just interpretation.
In this view, the Secure partner’s attempts to engage emotionally may inadvertently trigger the Avoidant partner’s sense of danger, leading to physiological withdrawal. We’re not dealing with a bad attitude; we’re dealing with a nervous system in defense mode.
Neurodivergence and the Avoidant Mislabel
The Avoidant label is also often disproportionately assigned to men and to neurodiverse folks.
Research on autistic and ADHD adults in romantic relationships (Rogers et al., 2020) reveals that what looks like avoidance is sometimes sensory overload or difficulty with interoception—the ability to feel and interpret internal bodily states.
In such cases, labeling a partner as Avoidant may obscure deeper truths about neurobiology, communication mismatches, and the need for alternative intimacy scripts.
The Secure Partner Isn't Always the Hero
Here’s another heresy: Secure partners aren’t always benign. When Secure turns into "fixer," or subtly moralizes emotional availability, it can replicate parent-child dynamics or emotional superiority. Emotional superiority is the halitosis of a Secure Attachment style.
Moreover, some partners labeled Secure may actually exhibit earned security with a history of trauma. They may become reactivated by the Avoidant’s distancing and begin to display anxious or even controlling behaviors, which are then overlooked under the halo of "security."
Cultural Scripts and Masculine Avoidance
The lion’s share of Avoidant labels still fall on men, raising the question of whether this is about attachment at all, or about a culture that grooms boys to devalue vulnerability and intimacy. The Avoidant might not be a dysfunctional partner, but rather a thoroughly and successfully socialized one.
Studies like those by Mahalik et al. (2003) on masculine norms show how stoicism, emotional control, and autonomy are core to many men's self-concept—and how those traits map neatly onto what we call Avoidant Attachment. But they’re not always signs of injury; they’re also signals of identity.
The Reality of the Secure-Avoidant Dance
In real life, these couples can create adaptive, creative, and even deeply loving relationships.
But it requires retooling the language: not fixing the Avoidant, but understanding the protective function of their distance; not idolizing the Secure, but recognizing their own blind spots.
Therapy in this context becomes less about pushing the Avoidant toward some imagined center, and more about co-creating a new system of cues, rituals, and repair strategies that honor both partners' nervous systems.
Toward a New Paradigm: Attachment as Mutual Regulation
Instead of mapping partners onto static types, emerging models like Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) developed by Patricia Crittenden (2008) view attachment strategies as adaptive responses to specific developmental threats.
Here, Avoidance isn’t an attachment flaw—it’s a survival skill.
And Secure isn’t a prize—it’s a state that must be co-created, regulated, and revisited throughout the lifespan.
From Pathology to Partnership
The Secure-Avoidant pairing isn’t doomed, but it can’t be reduced to a script in which one is the rescuer and the other the resistant.
It demands a new relational literacy—one where we treat each other not as walking attachment types, but as nervous systems in constant dialogue.
Couples therapy, especially trauma-informed and neurodivergence-literate work, can help reframe these patterns. But more importantly, partners themselves can choose to shift the frame. Not "how do I fix you?" but "how do we build a rhythm that honors both our wiring?"
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Crittenden, P. M. (2008). Raising parents: Attachment, parenting and child safety. Willan Publishing.
Fraley, R. C., & Roisman, G. I. (2019). The development of adult attachment styles: Four lessons. Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 26–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.008
Mahalik, J. R., Burns, S. M., & Syzdek, M. (2003). Masculinity and perceived normative health behaviors as predictors of men's health behaviors. Social Science & Medicine, 64(11), 2201-2209.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.
Rogers, C., Cage, E., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2020). Autistic traits and relationship satisfaction in neurodiverse couples. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(6), 2173-2185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-03955-7