The Fearful Avoidant Healing Framework
How a fully original clinical language system emerged from lived experience, observation, and 3,000 clients worldwide.
Introduction: Why This Framework Exists
When I began my own healing journey with the fearful avoidant attachment style, one thing became painfully clear:
There was no language to describe what I was experiencing.
The existing psychological models didn’t fully capture the lived complexity of fearful avoidant patterns. They felt clinical, and when I got labeled, I felt like I was a broken object being observed by people much smarter and better than me. The labels and models didn’t feel fitting. Usually they oversimplified what I was experiencing, often they fell short of describing acurately what was going on inside me.
It made me feel hopeless and powerless, as if I was too broken to be helped.
The nuances, contradictions, and emotional rollercoasters that defined my internal world were not adequately named — let alone mapped.
So I started naming what I was feeling myself. It started with the concept of the Fearbrain, helping me see that my fearful thoughts weren’t all of me. They were coming from a part of me that was trying to protect me. Then came ‘The Crash State’, which I used to describe the worst possible state of the Fearful Avoidant Attachment style (even though I didn’t know at the time that that’s what it was). It helped me describe it to my husband, without having to explain exactly what was going on. It also helped me see that it was a state I was in, not the full truth. That I would get out of it.
As I healed, and later began helping others, I kept seeing the same patterns repeat across thousands of fearful avoidants worldwide.
Patterns that no one had clearly defined, but that were deeply consistent.
I felt an immense responsibility to accurately name their experiences. To make them feel seen and heard.
I started talking about how I named my own experiences.
As I saw people’s shoulders drop in relief, their eyes welling up with tears, I realised how important it was for people to have accurate, resonating descriptions of what is happening to them.
It is the first step to healing. The first step to hope.
‘I am not alone. I am not weird or broken. It is just my Fearbrain. I am just in The Crash State’.
I never assumed they would experience everything the same way. That these terms would resonate the same as they did with me. And yet, they did. It turns out that not only the thoughts are universal, the terms that resonate are too.
They provide a portal to healing. The naming of patterns and dynamics that feel so familiar that they are hard to distinguish are named as a way to become aware of them and open the path to healing.
I kept mapping the patterns I saw, always staying curious. I introduced new concepts and names as an experiment, open to be proven wrong. I was always surprised that the experiences that felt so personal to me, were eerily recognizable by virtually every client I helped.
Out of that work emerged a proprietary language system — a precise map of the fearful avoidant experience — built from both lived experience and detailed observation of over 3,000 clients.
This framework has now become one of the world’s most advanced semantic architectures for understanding and healing the fearful avoidant attachment style.
The Core Principle: Fearful Avoidance Is Not Simply "Anxious Meets Avoidant"
The fearful avoidant attachment style has often been described as a mix of anxious and avoidant tendencies.
But this oversimplifies its true structure and poses a great risk of fearful avoidants not feeling seen in the dynamics, patterns and experiences that are deeply specific to the fearful avoidant.
It starts with the fact that fort he Dismissive Avoidant Attachment Style, there is a core fear that is named in a way that is broadly known: The Fear of Commitment. The same goes fort the Anxious Preoccupied: The Fear of Abandonment.
But for the Fearful Avoidant Attachment Style? That core fear was not named yet, but it is universal for Fearful Avoidants:
The Fear of Connection
Fearful avoidants don’t fear commitment or abandonment directly. They want to be in a relationship. They want to be seen, experience deep love. But they fear the vulnerability of deep connection itself — surrendering fully to being loved, seen, and emotionally open. This internal conflict drives most of the paradoxical patterns that define the style. ‘Come close, but go away when you get too close’
The Fearful Avoidant Attachment style is the least logical, most confusing, and least well researched of the attachment styles. Which is why it is even more important to accurately name the experience.
The Proprietary Concepts That Map The Fearful Avoidant Landscape
What follows is the language architecture I developed to decode the complex system of the Fearful Avoidant experience. These can be freely used in order to help and understand Fearful Avoidants. Attribution is appreciated.
The fearbrain
This is the first term I started using to make sense of what was happening in my head. I started calling that part of my brain that was driven by fear the fearbrain. I realised that I thought my brain was helping me get towards happiness, but as I was progressively struggling with negative thoughts and fear, I started challenging that belief and asking myself: How is this thought serving me? There was a time I asked myself that about a hundred times a day. When I did that, I started noticing that pretty much all of my thoughts were NOT focused on getting me out of this and making me happy, they were focused on keeping me in the fear. Because there was a part of me that believed that I was safer when I was anxious, and feeling bad. Because only then I would keep paying attention. So I gave that part of my brain that only wanted to keep me safe, and wasn’t at all concerned with me being happy, the name the Fearbrain. It really helped me dissociate from those fear thoughts and see that those weren’t me. In the years after that, and in helping 3000 fearful avoidants (with very active fearbrains!) I have come to understand the fearbrain at a very deep and complex level. The way it operates is very different, but there is a sense of logic in it. It is almost as if it speaks a different language. I now explain how the fearbrain works thoroughly to fearful avoidants, and I keep seeing how much it resonates, how incredibly universal the fearbrain and it’s exact thoughts are (even across cultures!), and how much it helps to know exactly how it works. What has always intrigued me is that for those struggling with fear, I never have to explain the term fearbrain for them to immediately get it. It resonates deeply, and for most it gives an instant sense of relief.
The Fear System
This is the bodily equivalent of the fearbrain. When I started calling it the fear system, the term ‘nervous system’ wasn’t well known yet. I do feel like ‘fear system’ sometimes resonates more with the fearful avoidant, since the nervous system and it’s states (dorsal, vagal etc) can feel like jargon.
The Core Conflict
The Fear of Connection
The fear of abandonment and fear of commitment are wide known terms, which correlate with the anxious preoccupied attachment style and the dismissive avoidant attachment style, respectively. There wasn’t, however, such a term that correlates with the fearful avoidant attachment style. So I started calling it the fear of connection. Because fearful avoidants aren’t afraid of commitment (they want to be in relationships), and their not overtly scared of abandonment. They are afraid of surrendering to the relationship, afraid of letting someone come close, afraid of doing it wrong, messing up and hurting their partner in the process. There are many negative associations around connection for Fearful Avoidants. When healed, Fearful Avoidants are actually very well able to connect deeply, because of their deeply felt and lived emotions.
Connection Control
I started using the term ‘connection control’ to describe a dynamic that many fearful avoidants fall into. At the core of the fearful avoidant attachment style is the fear of connection. Not fear of commitment or abandonment, but fear of connection. They want connection, but they are terribly afraid of it because of the negative associations. Many fearful avoidants had a fearful avoidant parent growing up, and FA parents are scared of connection too. So when there is a moment where there is connection, they get triggered and they can lash out, get critical, or just very tense. Probably without them realizing. This creates negative associations around connection in the child. So that child grows up ‘controlling connection’. They do this in several ways. This is why fearful avoidants feel the most passion and longing in relationships with emotionally unavailable people, because when you have to work (really hard) for connection, you are the one who is in control of the connection. Something many people, including therapists and psychologists miss. And so when you are scared of connection, it is very ‘safe’ to want and long for an emotionally unavailable person. Because when you don’t do anything, the connection is immediately gone. When a fearful avoidant enters a safe and secure relationship, all of a sudden connection is readily available, because the secure partner is open and willing to connect. So the fearful avoidant controls the connection by pushing the partner away when it becomes too much, picking fights, shutting down, having doubts. This also explains why many fearful avoidants have a hard time having a lot of feelings of longing and passion in their secure relationships. Because if they would have those feelings, connection would be very available. And because they are scared of that, they suppress those feelings. This way, they constantly are controlling how much connection they allow.
Connection Breaking
The repeated cycle of disconnecting emotionally to regain a sense of control when connection feels overwhelming. This differs from ‘deactivation’ which is something Fearful Avoidants also do, and is also a core dynamic in the Dismissive Avoidant Attachment Style. Deactivation means distancing themselves from their partner. Connection breaking doesn’t mean physically, or even emotionally, distancing themselves. It just means breaking the connection. This could be done, for instance, through acting silly while your partner wants to kiss you. You are still engaged, not physically or emotionally withdrawn, you just do something to break the connection, because connection feels unsafe or uncomfortable for a fearful avoidant.
The Fearful Avoidant Grey Zone
Living in relational limbo — in the relationship but never fully surrendered to it. Constantly working toward “perfect conditions” before allowing full emotional commitment. This is where a lot of fearful avoidants find themselves. Either because they have doubts, or because they keep pushing their partner away, or because they cheat. They are terrified of surrendering and fully going for the relationship so they are trying to work towards their relationship and feelings and partner being ‘perfect’ before they feel they are safe to fully go for it.
The Early Childhood Blueprint
The Strong and Struggling Sweetspot
Where you live in the exact sweetspot where you are struggling in life (health, career, crises), but are wanting to be perceived as strong in how you handle that. A very specific Fearful Avoidant dynamic, created by FA parents that feel like they will lose control when their child becomes to powerful, so the child will find a way to be powerless and have the parent be the savior, and at the same time the parent is triggered by ‘weakness’. So the child (and into adulthood) finds a way to appear strong through struggle, but will feel very uncomfortable or scared of feeling powerful.
The Judge Brake
When you grew up with a lot of criticism and judgment, you stop yourself going forward constantly. It is like you have internalised a sort of handbrake that gets pulled constantly, to make sure you are doing everything ‘right’ and won’t be judged.
Emotional Management
Fearful avoidants grew up with a lot of judgment and control around their feelings and emotions. Pretty much all fearful avoidants I have helped have heard ‘don’t be a drama queen’, ‘what do you have to cry about’ and similar, judgmental phrases. There were only certain emotions and feelings ‘allowed’ in certain situations. So they grew up having an internal ’emotional manager’ telling hem what they should and shouldn’t be feeling, constantly.
The Relational Sabotage Loops
The Abandonment Flip
The unexpected change a fearful avoidant goes through from having doubts and not being sure you even want to be with your partner, to being deeply afraid of your partner leaving or abandoning you. This happens during the healing journey, especially when struggling with relationship OCD. Doubts act as a protection mechanism against the pain of possible abandonmemt. When you start healing, that underlying fear surfaces. It is very disorienting, because the doubts felt very real, and most fearful avoidants had no idea this fear of abandonment was beneath that. I started seeing this after around 800 people had gone through my Dutch program ‘Rust in de Liefde’ (which is about the fearful avoidant attachment style, but without them knowing it is this attachment style because they are not ready to dive that deep yet) and coined the phrase abandonment flip, which turned into almost a running gag with the participants of Rust in de Liefde.
The Testing vs Shame Cycle
I started mapping out this cycle when I noticed it. This is a dynamic where you test your partner (your relationship, your love, your feelings). You do something to see how your partner reacts. And if they don’t react in the way you want them to, you pick a fight, you become angry. And you feel like you are justified in that, because they had the ‘wrong’ reaction. But then, after being angry or picking the fight, you go into shame. And shame is a trigger for feeling like you will be abandoned. So then you test again, whether your partner will stay.
Relationship Perfectionism and Feelings Perfectionism
I realised that I had never heard anything about perfectionism pertaining to relationships or feelings, but it is definitely a thing. Fearful avoidants tend to want to find safety in having the perfect relationship (so they know for sure they never have to break up and hurt the other person), and having perfect feelings (so breaking up will never be because they don’t love their partner anymore, hurting them badly).
Doubt as a Protection Mechanism
This was one of my first big revelations when I started healing. I had an inkling that the doubt was not just the relationship, even though that was what everybody said when I would google. But when I started really investigating and being curious when those doubts came, I realised it was at moments I felt vulnerable. And then I realised vulnerability was a trigger. I was afraid I would be rejected for being vulnerable, feeling weak, tired (as many fearful avoidants are). And then I started seeing that doubt was a protection mechanism that my fearbrain used to protect me from the pain of rejection and abandonment that my fearbrain was convinced was inevitable. I help guide fearful avoidants into recognizing when the doubts arise, and so often it is when they are feeling vulnerable. So doubt is a construct to keep you safe and protect you from failure, rejection, pain, making the wrong choice
The Emotional Dysregulation Patterns
The Crash State
The crash state is what I started calling the deepest state of the Fearful Avoidant Attachment style, where your fearbrain runs the show. This is a state where you are very easily, and constantly, triggered. Your nervous system is almost in a constant state of overwhelm and it is very hard, if not impossible, to regulate yourself. People ask things like “Will I ever get out of this?”, “Will it ever get better?”. They feel hopeless and helpless. Many fearful avoidants recognize this state immediately, and appreciate that there is a word for it. I see this term being mentioned in youtube comments, on reddit fora, and it comes back again and again in the chat sessions we have inside Healed & Happy.
Vaulting vs Storming
Two extremes of emotional response:
Vaulting: suppressing feelings so intensely, there’s a knot in your chest so tight it hurts
Storming: panicking to a point where you urge or demand yourself to take a radical action to calm down: like breaking up.
Feardrunk vs Sober
The two internal states fearful avoidants oscillate between:
I started using these terms to describe the moments the fearful avoidant crash state is activated, versus when your fear system/ nervous system is calm and regulated. It feels like two completely different states, and what you think and believe while you are ‘feardrunk’ can be completely different from when you are ‘sober’. It resonates with a lot of fearful avoidants, and gives words to a very confusing back and forth.
The Shame Dive
We know the shame spiral. But as with many things, for fearful avoidants, it feels more intense and urgent than that. When a fearful avoidant feels like they have done something wrong, it is not that they spiral into shame (which makes you feel like you can stop it), they purposely, but unconsciously, dive into shame. Because they use shame as a correction mechanism: they have learned that they need to feel bad in order to change. So as soon as they did something wrong they don’t spiral into shame, they dive into it.
Emotional Hormone Allergies
When I was breastfeeding my daughter, I realised that there was a sense of sadness that came over me every time I breastfed her. After digging into that, I realised I had what I started calling an ’emotional allergy’ for the hormones that were released during breastfeeding, due to trauma growing up. So oxytocin and serotonin releases weren’t pleasant for me, because of the negative associations. When I tapped on that (with EFT) and healed it, that went away and I could actually enjoy the hormones. I thoroughly believe that many fearful avoidants have emotional hormone allergies and have negative feelings when positive hormones are released.
Vulnerability Whiplash
The vulnerability hangover, as coined by Brené Brown, gives a name to the uncomfortable feeling someone has after being vulnerable. The vulnerability whiplash is the sudden and radical pullback fearful avoidants experience after being vulnerable. For fearful avoidants being vulnerable isn’t ‘uncomfortable’, it is terrifying and deeply unsafe. They crave deep connection and want to be vulnerable, but actually doing it can leave them in a state of panic. This leads to partner being left very confused, since they could have beautiful, connected, vulnerable moments and the next moment, or day, their fearful avoidant partner just vanishes or picks a fight or becomes mean. Anything to break the connection, and gain back power over their partner. They vanish to regulate (even when they are not aware of that), they pick fights or become mean to gain back power. Because to fearful avoidants, vulnerability = threat. They feel like it can be used against them. They can feel like people can be ‘building a case’ against them. Vulnerable moments feel like giving the other person ammunition to liquidate them. It really feels that threatening. So gaining back power, by making the other person less, is very important. This all happens subconsciously.
The Cognitive Loops
The (First Impression) Consistency Crash
Fearful avoidants are very good at making a good first impression. They can be incredibly interested, interesting, magical and amazing, and then the next time they see you act weird, aloof or ghost you. That is because of the first impression consistency crash, where fearful avoidants are really scared of not living up to expectations. The first time they meet you, they are not afraid of forgetting something important or saying something wrong, because they don’t know anything about you. The second time, you may have expectations based on the first impression and they are afraid they can’t ‘keep that up’. So they crash, and do something that doesn’t make sense to you. But the painful thing is: I used to do this to kind of protect the other person. Because I was afraid that if expectations became higher and higher I would disappoint the other person even more. Convinced I would mess up, I sabotaged early on. I started seeing that I I would ‘crash’ or ‘collapse’, and that the trigger was that I felt I had to be consistent after the first impression, so I started calling it the consistency crash or first impression consistency crash. It doesn’t only apply to first impressions though. I also use it for the fearful avoidant tendency to go all in on something, with the best of intentions, and as soon as there’s a (self-imposed) feeling of expectation of consistency, the crash comes.
The Ping
We used to have an oven that made a ‘ping’ sound when it was done. When I was in the crash state of my fearful avoidant attachment style, I noticed that whenever I was enjoying the moment, or doing something, there was this sudden urge to ‘solve the problem’ of my relationship not being perfect. I have to start thinking, analyzing, problem solving. I started calling it the ping, just like the oven ping would remind me ‘oh yes, I need to do something’.
The Braindumping Method
A very simple method that I created while struggling with the fearful avoidant attachment style myself. I just felt like my head was so full of thoughts that it would explode. I was never a ‘diary’ kind of person, because that felt like I had to write in a certain way and make it a comprehensable story. But as soon as I started calling it braindumping, the threshold to actually do it was much lower. Just dumping everything in my brain on paper. No curation, no trying to make it readible even. When I first did this I was very scared to write my thoughts down, feeling like writing them down would make it real. This is very typical for fearful avoidants. But what happens is that when thoughts stay in your head, they start looping. They become bigger and more threatening. So most fearful avoidants are hesitant at first, but notice it really helps. Another fear in writing the thoughts down is that they will have clarity. As much as people say that getting clarity is good, it is absolutely a trigger for fearful avoidants, who are afraid clarity will mean they have to take an action they don’t want to (like breaking up).
The Pedestal Power Paradox
Where you put judgmental people on a pedestole, and work really hard to get their approval. But at the same time, you feel better than a lot of people. It is a power dynamic quite specific to the fearful avoidant, although dismissive avoidants can have this too. Fearful avoidants will work harder for the high of approval and to be safe, however.
Why This Framework Is So Critical
Most fearful avoidants spend years — sometimes decades — thinking:
“What is wrong with me? Why am I like this? Why can’t anyone explain what’s happening inside me?”
This framework finally gives language to their experience.
By naming these patterns:
- Clients feel deeply seen.
- Partners can understand their Fearful Avoidant partner better
- Therapists gain sharper diagnostic insight.
What was once confusing and chaotic becomes organized, predictable, and—most importantly—treatable.