The Push and Puller - Understanding Disorganized Attachment
This is one blog in a series about attachment styles - you can explore the foundation in “Why You Keep Choosing the Wrong People,” and dive deeper into specific patterns with “The Self-Saboteur” (avoidant attachment), and “The People-Pleaser” (anxious attachment).
You want love. You want connection. And yet - just as you get close - you push away. Then, just as suddenly, you panic about being left behind. You might try to reconnect again - only to feel suffocated the moment they reciprocate in. It’s exhausting, confusing, and often lonely.
Disorganized attachment - also called fearful-avoidant attachment - is one of the most complex and misunderstood attachment styles. At its core is a deep internal conflict: you desire to be close to others, but then also have an equally strong fear that closeness will lead to pain. You long for intimacy, but then panic when someone gets close. It combines aspects of both the anxious and avoidant attachment styles.
This push-pull dynamic creates emotional chaos that can leave you feeling confused, ashamed, or even broken. This is a survival strategy rooted in early life experiences and trauma where love was unsafe, unpredictable, or inconsistent. If the people who were supposed to care for you were also the ones who caused harm, your system learned that closeness equals pain, and distance equals safety, yet still you need people around you, you need to be cared for and loved.
So you end up stuck in a loop: move closer → feel unsafe → pull away → feel alone → move closer again.
Signs You May Have a Disorganized Attachment Style
Living with this attachment style often feels like a balancing act - you may second-guess every interaction, overanalyze your feelings, or struggle to trust even the good moments. One minute, you’re yearning to be seen and held. The next, you feel like you're suffocating under the weight of someone’s attention.
Another feeling that is very common in this attachment style is a sense of shame - you might wonder, ‘why can’t i just be normal in relationships?’
Common patterns include:
Feeling torn between wanting closeness and needing space
Pulling away, then panicking when someone withdraws
Distrusting others, even while craving deep connection
Fearing abandonment yet being overwhelmed by intimacy
Having a history of intense or unstable relationships
Feeling unsafe even in kind, supportive environments
Sabotaging relationships - even the ones that matter most
What Causes Disorganized Attachment?
Disorganized attachment is often the result of early relational trauma - that is ruptures and difficulties in the relationships you had with people you relied on to care for you as a child. It doesn’t always mean abuse, but also from confusing environments where the people you relied on were unpredictable, inconsistent, dismissive, unreliable, or scary.
When a child experiences their primary caregiver as both a source of comfort and distress, their developing attachment system becomes fragmented. The one person they are wired to turn to for safety is also the person they fear. It’s confusing, and the result is an adaptation to emotional and physical closeness that is also confusing.
Because of the hurt, your nervous system and body are wired to be nervous and vigilent in relationships, you are tense and fearful. Even in health relationships, you feel this fear. .
How Disorganized Attachment Shows Up in Relationships
If you have a disorganized attachment style, relationships may feel intense, confusing, or short-lived. You might rush into closeness and then feel overwhelmed. You might idealize a partner, then pull away the moment things feel too real. People you have been close with may have said -
“They say they care, but then disappear emotionally or physically.”
“They sabotage things when we get too close.”
“It feels like they’re always testing me or expecting me to leave.”
“I feel like I’m walking on eggshells - afraid I’ll trigger something.”
“Sometimes I feel like the enemy, even when I haven’t done anything.”
“They accuse me of pulling away when they’re the one going silent.”
“I never know which version of them I’m going to get.”
“I get ghosted and then they overwhelm me with messages”
None of these behaviors make you bad at love - they are also not intentionally manipulate. Someone with disorganized attachment may unintentionally hurt others while trying to protect themselves, but they often feel deeply torn and ashamed afterward - and they want to do better. An emotionally abusive person tends to justify, minimize, or repeat harm without remorse.
The Nervous System and Attachment Trauma
Disorganized attachment doesn’t just live in your mind - it lives in your body. Your body phsyically reacts to the fear that closeness brings - as you gfet closer to someone you may feel rising anxiety, numb, or dissociated. Your breathing may shift. Your heart may race. You may feel an overwhelming urge to get away.
This comes from implicit memories - early, pre-verbal experiences stored in the body’s stress response system. It’s a trauma response -
Fight: picking arguments, becoming critical or defensive
Flight: distancing, ghosting, avoiding vulnerability
Freeze: going emotionally numb or checked out
Fawn: over-accommodating others to avoid being rejected
Until your system learns safety, love can feel more like something to manage than something to receive.
How to Begin Healing Disorganized Attachment
Healing comes with helping your body and brain learn that safe connection is possible.
Here’s what the healing path often involves:
Awareness without shame: Recognize your patterns as protective, not pathological. Learn to track when you’re pulling away, why, and what your body is trying to avoid. Learn how to talk about this with the people you are with so that they are not blindsided by your reactions.
Regulation first, relationship second: Before connection can feel safe, your system needs to feel grounded. Practices like breathwork, movement, and gettign connected to your body sensations can help rewire your stress responses.
Small doses of trust: Instead of diving headfirst into vulnerability, practice tolerating closeness in small, manageable ways. Safe relationships - including with therapists, friends, or partners - can help co-regulate and rebuild your internal sense of security.
Reparenting the younger you: Offer yourself the care, attunement, and consistency that were missing early on. Speak to yourself with warmth. Show up for your needs instead of criticizing.
What Healing Looks Like (Even When It's Messy)
Disorganized attachment is painful, but it’s not permanent. As you learn to stay present in your body, notice your reactions with compassion, and cultivate steady relationships, your nervous system begins to shift. Safety slowly become familiar.
You begin to realize that intimacy doesn’t have to mean danger. That you don’t have to choose between independence and love. That you can stay, even when it’s hard. And that someone else can stay with you. Most importantly, you begin learning that love doesn't have to cost you your safety—and that you deserve relationships that feel steady, supportive, and real.
You can read more about attachment wounds here and some of the major ways it can show up - self sabotage and people pleasing.
In the coming weeks I will write about the intellectualizer, how attachment styles interact, what secure attachment looks like, and then how to determine your attachment style.
If this is something you want to explore in therapy, you can schedule a free consultation at the link below.