In the Strange Situation, the calmest-looking infant is sometimes the one whose body is working hardest. Mary Ainsworth had already proposed that the unruffled avoidant baby was masking distress. A later historical review by Robbie Duschinsky records that she treated the calm as a cover, and that heart-rate studies were the evidence that arrived afterward. Sroufe and Waters (1977) are the study those reviewers point to. A 2015 review by Manuela Gander and Anna Buchheim, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, reports the reunion finding this way: avoidant infants’ heart rates rose from the start of separation and stayed high into the reunion, while their behavior minimized the display of distress. Everett Waters’s own teaching notes on the procedure list “elevated heart-rate” among the Strange Situation marks of the insecure-avoidant infant, alongside being less likely to cry and more likely to ignore the parent’s return.
That gap, between a quiet face and a fast heart, is the whole problem of avoidant attachment. From across the room, it reads as indifference. In the studies, it reads as a strategy for keeping an attachment need from being rejected again.
What the strategy was for
Ainsworth’s avoidant group, in Fraley’s summary of the Strange Situation, did not appear very distressed by separation and actively avoided the parent on reunion, sometimes turning to toys on the floor. He puts that group at about 20 percent of the infants in the classic samples. Duschinsky, drawing on Main’s 1979 account, describes avoidance as a conditional strategy: if direct bids for comfort have been rebuffed, downplaying distress may be the least costly way to stay near a caregiver who rejects clinging. Hazan and Shaver, summarizing Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978), put the caregiving side in one sentence. When a mother consistently rebuffs the infant’s attempts at physical contact, the infant may learn to avoid her.
None of that says the child feels nothing. It says the child has learned that showing the feeling makes things worse. Bowlby’s sequence of protest, then despair, then detachment, as Hazan and Shaver retell it, ends with an active disregard for the mother if she returns after a long separation. Avoidant reunion behavior sits near that last move. It is organized. It is not empty.
How the same strategy looks in adult romance
Hazan and Shaver’s avoidant self-description, offered to Rocky Mountain News readers in 1985 and printed in their 1987 paper, is still the cleanest short form:
“I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being.”
About a quarter of their adult respondents chose it (25 percent in the newspaper sample, 23 percent in the student sample). Those respondents described love as marked by fear of closeness. They were the least accepting of a partner’s faults. On beliefs about love, they were the group most likely to say that head-over-heels romance does not exist in real life, that it seldom lasts, and that it is rare to find someone one can really fall in love with. In the student sample, 80 percent of avoidant respondents endorsed the rarity claim.
They also reported less loneliness than anxious respondents, even while describing themselves as distant. Hazan and Shaver could not tell, from the questionnaire, whether that was accurate or another layer of the same defense. The paper leaves the question open. So should you. “I don’t need anyone” can be a true preference for solitude, or a sentence that ends the conversation before a need gets laughed at. The studies do not give you a private test that sorts those two.
Fraley’s overview adds a split that the three-paragraph quiz flattens. Some avoidant adults, often called dismissing, are high on avoidance and low on anxiety. In a 1997 experiment Fraley and Shaver describe, dismissing adults were as physiologically aroused as others when asked to think about losing a partner, measured by skin conductance. When told to suppress, they could bring that arousal down and pull their attention off the loss. Fearful-avoidant adults, high on both avoidance and anxiety, were less able to do that. If you go quiet under stress and also feel a spike of panic about being left, you are not looking at one uniform “avoidant type.” The popular word covers at least two organizations of the same surface.
Younger avoidant respondents in Hazan and Shaver’s work also tended to describe their parents more glowingly than older avoidant respondents did. The authors read that, alongside Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy (1985), as idealization: a polished story that keeps the disappointing parts out of reach. A childhood remembered as “fine, my parents were great, I was never the kind of child who needed much” deserves a second pass if the adult pattern is systematic withdrawal. Memory can be defensive. That is a finding about self-report, not an invitation to decide your parents were cruel.
The loop with an anxious partner
Anxious/ambivalent adults in the same studies wanted merger and scored highest on loneliness. Avoidant adults were uneasy with exactly that demand. Put them in one kitchen and the pursuits and retreats can lock. The more one person raises the volume of protest, the more the other person’s strategy says closeness is the threat. Hazan and Shaver cite Hindy and Schwarz (1984) for a related, humbler fact: anxious attachment correlated only about .40 from one relationship to another in a sample of recent graduates. Partners matter. The loop is a pair of strategies, not a fate with a particular person’s name on it. The other strategy is described in seven signs of anxious attachment.
An illustrative example, not a case history: on a Tuesday in March, a couple in Tucson starts talking about a holiday. One wants a plan and a feeling named out loud. The other answers with logistics, then remembers an email, then leaves the room. Nobody has declared a war. Each is using the tool that once reduced danger. The repair, if it comes, is usually smaller than a breakthrough. It is a sentence that admits the exit and names a time of return: “This is too much for me right now. I will come back at 8.” Avoidant behavior becomes damaging when the exit has no return. The studies do not test that sentence. They do show that avoidance is about regulating contact, not about the absence of care.
What softening is, and what it is not
Fraley is explicit that the field still lacks a strong account of which experiences change an adult attachment pattern. There is no dosage of vulnerability that the papers prescribe, and no promise that forcing yourself to “open up” on a schedule will reorganize a working model. Bowlby’s own claim, quoted by Hazan and Shaver from the 1973 volume, was that expectations built in childhood tend to persist, and also that they are reflections of actual experience. Later experience can fail to match the old expectation. When it does, the model is open to revision. That is a theoretical door, not a treatment protocol.
Two findings are worth keeping in view while you experiment. First, the heart-rate and skin-conductance results say the calm is often regulatory, not a proof that you are fine. Noticing a tight chest, a wish to change the subject, or a sudden focus on your partner’s flaws is data. It is the adult version of turning to the toys. Second, dismissing adults in the suppression study could turn arousal down on purpose. The skill is real. The cost shows up when the skill runs every time someone asks for a feeling. Using it once, on purpose, in a hard meeting, is different from using it as the only way to stay in a marriage.
Earned security is the research term for adults who can talk about a difficult history with coherence and who function securely now. It is not a mood and not a prize for confessing more. If you want the biography of the clinician who treated these strategies as adaptations, that is Searching for Bowlby. The quiz will place you on a self-description. Read the result against the heart-rate lesson: a low score on “neediness” can mean you are comfortable alone, or that you have stopped counting the need.
When distance is a health problem
Preferring solitude is not a disorder. Withdrawal that comes with hopelessness, panic, substance use, or a partner’s fear qualifies for a different kind of help than an essay. If you are in immediate distress in the United States, the 988 Lifeline is available by call or text. SAMHSA refers people to local treatment at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and states that it does not itself provide counseling. A clinician can help you tell a protective habit from a depression or an anxiety disorder. This page cannot.
Studies named in this essay
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Avoidant infants and rejecting contact, via Hazan and Shaver (1987).
- Duschinsky, R. (2015). The emergence of the disorganized/disoriented (D) attachment classification, 1979 to 1982. History of Psychology, 18(1), 32 to 46. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4321742/. Ainsworth’s mask hypothesis and the citation of Sroufe and Waters (1977).
- Fraley, R. C. A brief overview of adult attachment theory and research. https://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm. Infant proportions; dismissing versus fearful adults; Fraley and Shaver (1997) skin-conductance findings; limits on what changes a style.
- Fraley, R. C., & Shaver, P. R. (1997). Adult attachment and the suppression of unwanted thoughts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(5), 1080 to 1091. As summarized by Fraley.
- Gander, M., & Buchheim, A. (2015). Attachment classification, psychophysiology and frontal EEG asymmetry across the lifespan: A review. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 79. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4333768/
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511 to 524. Avoidant wording, percentages, love beliefs, idealization in younger respondents. Reachable PDF copy.
- Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1 to 2), 66 to 104. Cited by Hazan and Shaver on idealization.
- Sroufe, L. A., & Waters, E. (1977). Heart rate as a convergent measure in clinical and developmental research. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 23(1), 3 to 27. The heart-rate study named by Duschinsky and by Gander and Buchheim.
- Waters, E. The Ainsworth Strange Situation (teaching slides, 2012). Stony Brook attachment lab. Lists elevated heart rate among avoidant reunion signs. https://psychology.psy.sunysb.edu/attachment/video_contents/Strange_Situation_Slides_c2012_EWATERS.pdf
When you next want to leave a hard conversation, what time will you come back, and who needs to hear that time from you?