Should you be single to heal the fearful avoidant attachment style?

I am Paulien and I am so happy you are here! In this blog I am going to talk about whether you should stay single or be single to heal the fearful avoidant attachment style! I get this question a lot. There isn’t one straight answer to it. But.. the main answer is: NO.

You absolutely do not have to be single to heal the fearful avoidant attachment style. If we would have to be fully healed and be completely perfect and love ourselves completely before we get into a relationship, no one ever on the planet Earth, in whatever time would ever be in a relationship.

We learn and we grow in our relationships. And besides that, relationships are actually a really good place to do that because they are mirrors. Maybe more than anything, your partner and your relationship is a mirror for what fears and what kind of beliefs you have about yourself, about your partner, about love in general and about how much love you think you are worth.

So you absolutely do NOT have to be single to heal the fearful avoidant attachment style.

And taking that even one step further: it is actually quite hard to heal an attachment style while not being in a relationship. There is one caveat to that and I will touch on that later.

The insecure attachment style you have, if you are a faerful avoidant, was formed through relationships. It has everything to do with connection. So that is when you will get triggered, you will get triggered in a relationship. And when you get triggered it is clear what you need to heal. So your relationship will bring stuff up to the surface. That is not just for the fearful avoidants, that is for all the attachment styles, even the secure ones.

Relationships will always bring shit up, it will always trigger something and you will always work through something. And before you think: oh my gosh, do I have to do this for the rest of my life, this is so hard! It just gets easier and easier and there will come a time when working through something or healing a trigger is just not a big thing anymore. It is just something you do and you know that you will feel so much lighter and better after that. It’s almost like noticing you’re thirsty then grabbing a glass of water and then afterwards you’re like: Oh it feels so much better, it’s not a big thing anymore!

So you can get to that place where it just gets easier and easier for most triggers.

The one caveat I really do want to point out, is that for the fearful avoidants it can be a little bit too much to be in a relationship when you’re just starting your healing journey.

And because relationships do trigger a lot, it can be too much and sometimes it’s just purely too overwhelming to be in a relation because of the sheer amount of triggers that you encounter every day.

So what can happen sometimes, is that fearful avoidants feel the kind of stable peace and sanity they have to feel to start working on their triggers.

And this does not mean that if you are struggling right now in your relationship, that you have to break up and you have to be single to work on this. Absolutely not! It is hard to be in a relationship as a fearful avoidant and work on your triggers, but when it’s possible with the right help, it is very valuable and you do not have to break up with somebody you don’t want to break up with just because you have to heal this fearful avoidant attachment style.

But it can be a little bit too much and then taking a break from dating, if you’re just dating and not in like a serious committed relationship, can actually help to really be with yourself and really turn inwards.

And there is some healing absolutely to a certain extent you can do while being single because you have a lot of experiences in your past that you can think back to. And all the feelings and associations that come up that you can work through. So you can heal for sure to some extent, but then when you get into a relationship you will get triggered.

I mean nothing is 100% sure but the chances are that you will get triggered. And like I said, that’s okay, everybody has that! For everybody a relationship is a mirror and for the securely attached it’s just much easier to work through those triggers than for a fearful avoidant.

So no: you do not have to be single to heal a fearful avoidant attachment style but sometimes it makes it easier to kind of get through the first layer of healing before you can handle being in a relationship while healing the fearful avoidant attachment style.

What I do want to mention too: as fearful avoidant, we carry a lot of pain. And through that pain we sometimes hurt our partner. We can be quite mean, I could be very mean. We say hurtful things, we expect a lot. We demand a lot. And when you are in a committed relationship and you are healing and you’re going through the healing process, what I want you to consider is to make a promise to yourself that you will always treat your partner with respect. The fact that you are hurting and that you have all this pain, carrying all this pain inside you, is not a reason to demand things from your partner, to demand they change so that you can feel better, to be mean, to express everything you don’t like about them and is wrong with them.

It is not something that makes you a bad person because it comes from pain. And when you are healing, you are taking responsibility for that. And that is amazing. That is amazing. That is courageous.

That is what a lot of people don’t do.

And it will help you tremendously to also take responsibility for always looking at your partner as a human being and giving him/her the respect he/she deserves. Even when your fear brain is going off and saying that they’re the reason that you feel this way and that they should just change so that you feel better.

This is a very hard decision to make. Know that I am your cheerleader on this. I will be cheering you on from the sidelines because it’s not easy.

It’s really taking responsibility and looking at our own shit and say: even though I’m hurting so much, I can’t hurt another person. I’m not going to project this on my partner. I’m not going to be angry. You won’t be perfect. You won’t be perfect, and you don’t have to be.

It will help you to heal tremendously and it will just give your partner the respect he/she deserves.

What I did in a time when I was healing is I would sometimes flip the perspective and think: what if Arjen, my now husband and then boyfriend, would say those things to me? If I had things in my head that I felt like I needed to get out, otherwise I was not being truthful or whatever. I was like: what if he would say them to me? And a lot of times that was so confronting and I would be pretty much shocked that I could not imagine him saying anything of the sort.

My husband is just super loving and super kind. I would be so hurt if he would say even 1 out of 10 things I would say on a daily basis to him. And I had to take responsibility for that. Even though I was healing, even though I was hurting, even though I had all this trauma, even though that was sad. And that was really hard and I deserved my own compassion and I deserve everybody’s compassion. It still wasn’t an excuse to treat my boyfriend/husband as shit and just projecting all my pain on him.

So, absolutely you can heal in a relationship, but that means taking a whole shit ton of responsibility for yourself, for your actions, for what you say, for what you do, and for healing your own triggers.

If you are up for that: you are absolutely freaking amazing. And what you’re doing is almost an Olympian deed. So I don’t want you to feel like you’re not enough or you’re not good. If this doesn’t work or you slip up, that happens.

But as long as you have this perspective and you know that you don’t want to do this, and you make that promise to yourself again and again and really work, genuinely, honestly work on getting better: a relationship is a really beautiful place to heal. If you have a partner that gives you all that space, that gives you love, unconditional love maybe even, and understands you, or tries to understand you, you can absolutely heal in a relationship.

And I wish that for you. I wish that you heal. I wish that you feel better. I wish that love just comes so much easier for you. If you really want to dive deep into this, get to the roots of the fearful avoidant attachment style and release this shit: my program Healed & Happy is there for you!

When there is no pain to project, you won’t project your pain. So releasing trauma, releasing all these negative core beliefs that you have will help so much. In Healed & Happy we will dive deep into the core beliefs and release everything that is holding you back or that is causing that lashing out and getting angry and just feeling so much pain and so much trauma.

I can completely understand if the information in this blog is kind of confronting to read.

But you being here and reading this blog and thinking things through: I genuinely just want to applaud you because that is a very courageous start of realising things and healing!

So much love, you deserve so much love,

Paulien

This is not to diagnose. I’m not a psychologist and it’s not black and white. You can definitely recognise so much of the fearful avoidant attachment style and maybe you’re even dominantly securely attached. So don’t see this as this is a strong diagnosis. I am just here to tell you all about it and really help you understand yourself a little bit better.