Disorganized Attachment

You crave connection. You also run from it. You pull people close, then push them away when they get too close. You want to be loved, but love feels dangerous. Intimacy is both what you need most and what terrifies you most.

If relationships feel like an impossible contradiction—needing something that also threatens you—you may have disorganized attachment. It's the least understood attachment style and often the most painful to live with.

What Disorganized Attachment Looks Like

• Intense relationships that swing between hot and cold
• Craving intimacy but panicking when you get it
• Sabotaging relationships when they start going well
• Difficulty trusting, even when there's no reason not to
• Feeling like you don't know what you want in relationships
• Chaotic relationship patterns—intense beginnings, dramatic endings
• Picking unavailable partners, then being devastated by their unavailability
• Both anxious behaviors (needing reassurance) and avoidant behaviors (withdrawing)

How It Develops

According to research from the National Institutes of Health, disorganized attachment typically develops when a caregiver was both the source of comfort and the source of fear. Maybe a parent was loving sometimes but frightening other times. Maybe there was abuse or neglect alongside moments of care.

This creates an impossible situation for a child's nervous system. When afraid, children instinctively seek their caregiver. But what happens when the caregiver IS the source of fear? There's no solution. No strategy works. The system becomes disorganized.

The tragedy of disorganized attachment is that love became linked to danger early on. Now, even safe love triggers the alarm system. You're not overreacting—your nervous system learned that intimacy is a threat.

The Push-Pull Pattern

People with disorganized attachment often describe relationships as exhausting. They oscillate between:

• Desperately wanting closeness (like anxious attachment)
• Feeling suffocated and needing to escape (like avoidant attachment)

Partners experience this as unpredictable—one day you're all in, the next you're distant and cold. But from the inside, it makes perfect sense: intimacy triggers both the desire for connection AND the fear of being hurt.

Healing Disorganized Attachment

This is the hardest attachment style to shift, but it's possible. According to the American Psychological Association, healing typically involves:

• Trauma-informed therapy: Working with someone who understands the roots
• Learning to recognize triggers: Noticing when the fear response activates
• Developing self-regulation: Calming your nervous system when activated
• Corrective experiences: Slowly building trust with safe people
• Understanding your patterns: Seeing the logic in your "illogical" behavior

Healing doesn't mean becoming perfectly secure. It means having more choice—being able to recognize when old patterns are running and choosing a different response.