Helpful Advice for a Commitment Fearing Avoidant Who Wants to Find Love

An insightful video essay by The School of Life offers comforting advice for the recovering avoidant, specifically on how to find and maintain a healthy relationship despite their ingrained fear of commitment.

‘Avoidant’ is the term usefully coined by attachment theorists to define those of us who, through no fault of our own but with full responsibility for our condition, have grave difficulties around intimate relationships.

This fear, while not completely debilitating, comes from a deeply rooted past lesson in disappointment.

Somewhere long in our pasts, our relationships with our caregivers did not go as they should have done. Someone let us down, someone implicitly taught us  that love was not to be trusted… And so we learnt to  associate distance and solitude with safety.

Despite this, the avoidant can make conscious choices to fight off their unconscious fear.

We can find hope in an important detail: that  there is a substantial difference between acting avoidantly from unconscious motives on the one hand and on the other, feeling drawn to avoidant responses while  being actively and preemptively aware of what is going on.