The Healing Journey
By Paulien Timmer:
How I Fully Healed the Fearful Avoidant Attachment Style and Now Guide Others to Freedom
I met my now-husband when I was 20. He was very loving, patient, and kind. That felt good — but looking back, it also felt unfamiliar. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but my nervous system was simply not used to safety in relationships. What followed became both my personal healing journey and the foundation for my life’s work: guiding fearful avoidants toward complete healing.
About six months after we met, I started having very intense doubts. They became obsessive. Looking back, it was relationship OCD. But I didn’t know that at the time — because there was almost nothing known about relationship OCD, or even the fearful avoidant attachment style.
Whenever I googled what I was experiencing, I kept reading:
“If you have doubts, you should probably break up.”
“Doubts mean it’s not the right relationship.”
And yet… there was a small voice inside me whispering:
Maybe this isn’t about the relationship. Maybe this is me.
What I realized — even early on — was that I had a very hard time accepting love and receiving love.
So I made a decision: I would work on myself really hard for one year. I didn’t want to throw away a beautiful relationship simply because I couldn’t allow myself to receive love. I was terrified that, by loving myself more, I would realize I had to leave him.
But something else happened entirely: I felt more love for him.
I became more confident, more calm, and finally allowed love in.
The Internal Experience: Living Inside Fearful Avoidant Patterns
The fearful avoidant patterns felt incredibly confusing — but also deeply hopeless. I constantly felt overwhelmed, broken, like something was missing inside me. I felt powerless. Behind in life. Stuck.
As the relationship OCD progressed, I entered what I now call the Crash State — the deepest form of fearful avoidant activation. It feels like a complete internal collapse where your Fearbrain takes over entirely. I felt like I was working so hard to solve a problem and reach a finish line — but every time I approached it, the finish line was pushed further away. That’s when I started to lose control. I was genuinely afraid I was going crazy.
At that time, seeing a psychologist was still somewhat taboo. I truly thought I might need to be institutionalized. I was terrified of my own thoughts and feelings.
It felt like being in a war within my own body — and you take your body everywhere you go.
It was a 24/7 hell. And I don’t say that lightly.
I never knew whether what I was doing was actually helping. I didn’t even know what I was working toward. There were no examples of people who had been through this and made it out the other side. I felt completely alone. There were so many times I thought:
I cannot go on like this. What I’m doing is crazy. I should just stop, break up, and find a relationship where I don’t have all these problems.
But I kept going. Partly because my husband is amazing. And partly because I was obsessively dedicated to figuring out what in heaven’s name this was. I recognized that the extreme fear I was living with constantly wasn’t normal.
The hardest part was that there was simply no roadmap for what I was experiencing. There were books on relationships, but those were about communication or relational conflict — we didn’t have problems. Our relationship was good. The problem was me, but it was about the relationship. The obsession was about the relationship.
I saw five different psychologists. Early on, it became painfully clear that they had no idea what I was dealing with. Their questions, their exercises — none of it came close to the magnitude of what I was facing. I felt more unseen, more misunderstood, and lost even more hope.
The Search for Answers
I began reading. Everything. I devoured around 300 books over the course of five years. Very few truly resonated. And none of them were about attachment — because I had no idea that I was dealing with the fearful avoidant attachment style.
Even when I finally did learn about attachment, there was still almost nothing known about fearful avoidants.
But I kept going. I kept working on myself. And one major turning point came when I discovered Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).
Finally, I had a tool that could go deep — a tool to address the roots of my fears, beliefs, and negative associations.
I became obsessive about using EFT. Sometimes I tapped for up to eight hours a day. I was determined to find the absolute roots — because otherwise, it felt like there was no point.
Through this work, I uncovered that my doubts were actually a protection mechanism. My Fearbrain was using doubt to protect me from pain:
From rejection.
From abandonment.
From failure.
From vulnerability.
I discovered deeper beliefs that were driving everything underneath. And slowly, the healing began.
The Healing Arc from fearful avoidant to secure
Over six years, I healed to the point where I was ready to marry my husband. On my wedding day, my last trace of anxiety surfaced — a single thought. But by then, I had done so much healing work that I had full confidence and peace.
Leading up to that moment, I had interviewed 100 couples who had been happily married for over 40 years. That gave me a very realistic image of what marriage truly looks like. I had dismantled so many internal beliefs, dissolved so much anxiety, and built an entirely different internal world.
I was finally ready to leave that intense, brutal chapter behind me.
But life had other plans.
My first book (about the interviews with happily married couples) had been published, and got a lot of media attention. I was finally enjoying life.
Then I realised something.
I had written one blog post on my website about doubts and the deeper causes behind them. That single post was being read over 2,000 times a month, and people were emailing me:
“I have these doubts too. How did you get out of it?”
I realised I wasn’t the only one that had these intense doubts and maddening thoughts.
The Call to Help Others
For a while, I answered these emails, but saw it as a closed chapter I didn’t want to revisit.
Two years later, in October 2018, everything shifted.
Lying in bed one night, I was suddenly transported back to how hopeless I once felt. And I thought:
If there is even one other person struggling like I struggled, I have to help them.
My fears around starting a business — around talking publicly about this chapter of my life — didn’t matter anymore. What I wanted didn’t matter anymore.
I couldn’t let others struggle, feel hopeless and feel so alone when I had the roadmap out.
That night in bed lit a fire that blazed through every fear I had and pulled me forward. I still don’t enjoy talking about that time in my life, but it feels neutral now. It feels like another lifetime almost.
What does it feel like to be fully healed from the fearful avoidant attachment style?
Today, I operate from full secure attachment.
It is an absolute world of difference.
Where once my world was filled with fear and exhaustion, now I experience peace.
I no longer feel behind.
I don’t carry the heavy, constant pressure of trying to live up to impossible expectations.
I am not overwhelmed or exhausted anymore.
My self-worth is stable.
Life no longer feels like trudging through mud on fire, stepping on landmines, where any conversation or situation could trigger obsessive spirals.
My internal war is over.
At one point, I genuinely didn’t know if I could have gone on much longer. That is a very serious thing to say, but it is true.
Now I am free.
The difference is more than night and day. I feel like another person, like I stepped into another life.
I believe in myself. I wake up excited about my life, my day, my work, my family. I have a strong internal compass. I’m no longer derailed or influenced by others’ reactions or emotions. I know I’m safe. I expect secure attachment from others. If people behave otherwise, I don’t internalize it as my fault.
There isn’t a thought, feeling, or emotion that can scare me now. I feel completely safe in my mind and body. And that is ultimate freedom.
The Gifts That Remain After Healing
When you heal the fearful avoidant attachment style, something beautiful happens.
You don’t just “catch up” to being normal — you realize you were being forged in fire, which makes you infinitely stronger than others. Not better, but with a depth and a wisdom that most people don’t touch in a lifetime
Today, I feel the gifts fearful avoidants uniquely train through trauma:
- Complex problem-solving.
- Deep relational attunement.
- The ability to read others with great precision.
- The capacity to connect on levels most people never reach.
When you strip away the trauma, the fear, and the survival mechanisms, you’re left with something powerful. You become far ahead of where you thought you were. You move from being deeply confused to understanding life and people better than 99% of people – because you have lived every emotion, every corner of the complex human mind. You are fully regulated, fully alive.
You discover that your sensitivity, your depth, and your survival adaptations have become strengths.
This is why I feel so passionately about helping others walk this path. I know what’s waiting for them on the other side. I live it every single day.