Healing Loneliness: Moving out of Avoidant Attachment

The hallmark of having been raised by left hemisphere parents is avoidant attachment, which often manifests as a deep, lifelong loneliness, a tendency to push others away and a struggle to find life’s meaning.

What is attachment?

Attachment isn’t simply a code word for how we show up in romantic partnerships.

Attachment is the way our brains and bodies understand and predict relationships, and how we expect that we need to behave in order to be in relationship with our important others.

This means that attachment styles are based on learned behavior and experiences that have led us to create mostly unconscious decisions about how to keep ourselves safe in relationships, including our relationship with self.

This ALSO means that our primary attachment style is not static, but can change over time once we come to understand that we’ve learned strategies to self-regulate that may not be in our best interests.

What is Avoidant Attachment?

Avoidant attachment has become a kind of code-word for partners who are stand-offish, cold or reluctant with their affection. A quick google search leads to check-lists of what to watch out for on first dates, lest you end up with a terrible, unavailable mate…

Not only are these generalizations misleading, they are not hopeful or helpful!

The fact is: we all come into the world with a longing to give and receive love, and yet our culture teaches us that we should be self-reliant, and often learn from our care-givers that we cannot be held fully in our emotional experience.

It is possible to heal from avoidant attachment. This article includes an overview of what avoidant attachment is, with new findings about the connections between loneliness, lack of meaning and purpose, sexuality and more.

What do the hemispheres have to do with avoidant attachment?

• The hallmark of having been raised by left hemisphere parents is a deep, lifelong loneliness, a tendency to push others away and a struggle to find life’s meaning.
• This is a natural aftereffect of the contracts children who are left to “cry it out” make with themselves, among other lived experiences.

What are the symptoms of avoidant attachment?

Despite living in a culture that encourages us toward extreme self-sufficiency, avoidant attachment affects our health in profoundly costly ways:.

• Parents with more avoidant attachment styles experience greater stress after the birth of their child and perceive parenting as less satisfying and personally meaningful.
• In avoidant attachment, we learn that we are the only people we can rely on
• Avoidant moms tend to minimize their baby’s joy, which often leads to the little one growing up with compromised ability to experience pleasure.
• Avoidant attachment is associated with all forms of dysregulation, including impulsive behaviors, low self-esteem, fears of abandonment and more.

What unconscious contracts and false beliefs are underneath avoidant attachment behaviors?

Do any of these self-agreements/unconscious vows sound familiar?

Dive deeper

To dive deeper into understanding avoidant attachment and how to heal from lifelong loneliness, you might like my webinar on Avoidant Attachment. I present a wealth of research to give an overview of attachment, then we explore interesting new findings about the connections between loneliness, lack of meaning and purpose, sexuality and more.

Learn more about how to heal avoidant attachment, including how to best match 1:1 session work with avoidant attachment healing, and how to work on your own, like:

• Taking time to notice when ourselves loving and being loved
• Developing rich affection for our avoidant selves
• Becoming willing to be loved by imperfect humans
• Working with unconscious contracts