How Disorganized Attachment Manifests In Dating

There are three insecure attachment styles – anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Also known as fearful-avoidant, the disorganized attachment style is the most challenging of the insecure types.

A person forms disorganized attachment when they experience or witness abuse in childhood. Instead of being a source of loving comfort and safety, their parents or caregivers are a source of fear and make the child feel unsafe.

The emotional impact of these experiences doesn’t go away with age.

If you have disorganized attachment, you have a hard time trusting other people and struggle with a lack of self-love.

Although you crave love and affection, you push people away, which has a profound impact on your dating life and adult relationships.

You might mistakenly believe that this is a permanent part of your personality.

It’s not – and this is great news because you can go from a disorganized to a secure attachment style.

And the first step to overcoming your disorganized attachment in dating is to understand how it affects and sabotages your relationships.

7 signs of disorganized attachment in dating

Disorganized attachment often feels like an emotional rollercoaster. Here are the most common ways disorganized attachment manifests in dating.

1. Chronic hypervigilance

As a person with disorganized attachment, you believe the world is a dangerous place. In other words, you’re hypervigilant.

Hypervigilance is a state where your nervous system is constantly scanning for threats.

When you struggle with chronic hypervigilance, you’re anxious most of the time, seemingly for no reason.

When you’re dating someone new, your childhood trauma triggers your hypervigilance and you go into overdrive coming up with all the things that could go wrong.

• What if the person I’m dating turns out to be a manipulator?
• What if they try to hurt me?
• Are they only dating me to pass time and toying with my feelings?
• Are they genuinely complimenting me or is this a love bombing technique?

Before you know it, you’re overanalyzing your texts and conversations to find the smallest clue that could give away their ulterior motives.

Intense feelings of fear make it impossible for you to rationally observe your situation.

What you’re actually doing is looking for a way out of the relationship because you’re terrified of letting people in.

The anxiety caused by disorganized attachment wants you to be on your own because the only time you feel safe is when you’re alone.

This is why disorganized attachment is so difficult – you crave love and affection but you’re terrified of what could happen if you seek it out.

Instead of having fun with dating, you’re biting your fingernails trying to convince yourself to go out on just one date.

2. Fear of emotional intimacy

Intimacy requires trust. But with disorganized attachment, you can count the people you love and trust on the fingers of one hand.

This happens because you conflate love with fear.

As a child, you perceived the people you loved as a threat. Intimacy with a romantic partner triggers this fear, and you instinctively want to run away.

Low self-worth might also make you afraid of intimate relationships. You feel like you don’t deserve love and subconsciously reject it.

After all, the people who were supposed to love you as a child couldn’t do so, so how could anyone else?

3. Emotional unavailability

Disorganized attachment severs your link to your authentic self.

As children, we are wired to preserve our attachment to our caregivers because it’s crucial for our survival.

In exchange, we will sacrifice our authenticity – our needs and true emotions – and become emotionally unavailable to ourselves and others.

As an emotionally unavailable adult, you’re often confused about how you feel.

You might say you want a serious relationship but also be emotionally unavailable to the person you’re dating. When they ask you how you feel about them, for example, you lie or dodge the question.

Talking about your needs makes you uncomfortable, and this pattern of behavior attracts equally emotionally unavailable people, which makes it difficult to enjoy a happy relationship.

4. Self-sabotage

When hypervigilance, intimacy issues, and emotional unavailability come together, this toxic cocktail makes you sabotage new relationships.

For example, you might insult the person you’re dating by making fun of their interests. Or you might be prone to bursting out in anger over innocent disagreements.

This way, you make sure they’ll leave you alone before things get serious.

You could also make your dating life miserable by continuing to see people who treat you poorly, because you have low self-esteem.

And when you do end up in a healthy relationship, you might come up with random reasons why you should break up.

This has nothing to do with relationship standards but everything to do with looking for a way out of the relationship before it even begins.

Everyone has flaws, but you demand perfection, a standard no one will ever meet.

This guarantees you’ll be alone and won’t have to face the uncomfortable feelings that connection with another human being brings.

5. All-or-nothing approach to dating

People with disorganized attachment tend to have an all-or-nothing approach to dating.

For example, the person you date needs to be the love of your life and check off every box or you’re not interested.

Meanwhile, you forget that there’s value in simply getting to know another person.

Every new dating experience can teach you something new about yourself. And dating is supposed to be fun, not deadly serious.

So what if you don’t end up marrying the person you’re dating right now?

Do you truly want to give up all romantic connections until your soulmate comes along?

If the answer is no, then it’s helpful to relax a little in how you approach dating.

6. Going from one extreme to the other

As a person with disorganized attachment, you struggle with regulating your emotions. When you start dating someone new, you swing from one extreme to the other.

One minute you’re happy, only to be consumed by anxiety the next. You start anxiously obsessing over how they feel about you and wonder if you should break the whole thing off just to spare yourself the emotional rollercoaster.

You’re terrified of getting hurt so you want to be the one who does the hurting.

These extreme emotions mirror your childhood environment, where you never knew what to expect.

As a child, you never allowed yourself to be truly happy because you always had to be on the lookout for a potential threat.

So the happiness you feel when you first start dating someone is quickly replaced by fear of what could go wrong.

7. Jealousy

Disorganized attachment is characterized by low self-worth.

When someone expresses an interest in you, you can’t wrap your head around why that would be the case.

You feel inadequate and unloveable, so it’s impossible to fathom that someone else could think you’re special.

This makes you believe that your new boyfriend or girlfriend will leave you as soon as they meet someone better than you. And as far as you know, that’s almost everyone.

You get easily jealous of your partner’s friends and other close relationships.

When they make plans with someone else, you take it as rejection – a sign they’re pulling away from you.

At this point, you might lash out and cause arguments so you could find an outlet for your hurt. If this happens frequently enough, your relationship falls apart.

Then, you’re able to confirm to yourself that relationships aren’t worth the trouble and that other people will only hurt you.

8. You struggle with being yourself

People with disorganized attachment wear different masks in front of different people.

While it’s normal to be somewhat reserved when you meet someone new, your disorganized attachment style takes this to an extreme.

You hesitate to talk about your interests, passions, or accomplishments because doing so makes you feel too vulnerable. What if you express your authentic self and get rejected?

The mere thought of that is too painful to even consider present anything other than a mask.

Your masks prevent others from truly getting to know you. Not to mention that it’s emotionally draining to pretend to be someone else.

How do you heal disorganized attachment?

Healing disorganized attachment means healing from the traumatizing events that caused it in the first place.

The best way to do so is with a therapist who specializes in trauma. They can help you understand your self-protective mechanisms so you’re able to enjoy dating new people, rather than fear it.

If therapy isn’t an option, then you might want to start with a workbook on disorganized attachment that you can do on your own time.

There are also many therapists on YouTube who make helpful content on disorganized attachment and its impact on romantic relationships.

Whichever route you take, at one point you’ll need to break the pattern of self-isolation that your disorganized attachment style has imprisoned you in to protect you.

Learning how to trust people is hard. You might have spent your entire life mistrustful of others.

But it’s worthwhile when you think about all the ways in which other people can make your life more beautiful and vice versa. And remember that by choosing to trust, you’re not giving any of your power away.

At any moment, you can set boundaries and part ways with people who show they don’t value you.

As a child, you might have not had much choice over the people you were surrounded by, but as an adult, you can choose.

So, trust yourself that you’ll make the right decision when choosing partners.