Fear of Commitment and Dismissive Avoidant Attachment Style

The dismissive avoidant attachment style is the attachment style associated with being kind of slower-moving in relationships. They are generally more guarded and slower to warm up. They CAN be kind of cut off from their feelings and, because they are slower to warm up and they don’t have positive associations to vulnerability, you will often see a dismissive avoidant connect INTELLECTUALLY with people over emotionally.

So why can the dismissive avoidant fear commitment? The first underlying reason is that the DA has deeply-programmed negative beliefs around relying on other people. Why is this? At a very young age, usually the dismissive avoidant learned that attempts at this HURT. This is the attachment style that is generally formed from NEGLECT. The dismissive avoidant learned that attempting to get their emotional needs met from a caregiver results in REJECTION of those needs. Now, a child’s mind cannot understand that they have an emotionally absent caregiver and that the inability their caregiver has to meet the DA’s needs is ABOUT THEIR CAREGIVER. Children are egocentric, so the mind assigns meaning largely based on this and the mind makes it mean something about THEM. The mind concludes that if they have these emotional needs that are not being met, there must be something wrong with them. This forms a deep-rooted shame wound, the ‘Something is Wrong With Me’ or ‘I Am Defective’ core wound. The dismissive avoidant becomes conditioned to rely on themselves as their ‘safe space’. Attempts at closeness, relying on others, and emotional vulnerability feels UNSAFE. This gets deeply programmed into their nervous system. All of this is why, if you are the dismissive avoidant, you can have this automatic anxiety around closeness and vulnerability. Your truth can be that you really care about a relationship and then this is happening. All of this early truth can actually be hard for the dismissive avoidant to spot in some cases. Until it is examined, a DA can think they had even an idyllic childhood and it is important to note that trauma is not JUST what happened that shouldn’t have. Trauma is also what did NOT happen that needed to.

Surrounding all of this, many different deeply-rooted negative beliefs can form around emotions and vulnerability such as “If I show my emotions, that will make me WEAK” or “I cannot rely on others, there’s no point, my needs won’t get met anyway”. It can sometimes be inconceivable that there is even the option of getting needs met from others. This is why the idea of commitment can make the dismissive avoidant feel TRAPPED. Because, if it is your automatic belief that you cannot rely on others, and that others will never and can never meet your needs, you are stuck with the idea that relationships will be one-sided. Dismissive avoidants, since they did not have a lot of modeling for what a healthy exchange and interdependence looks like, along with no healthy experience of asking for needs to be met or conflict resolution, they can have an underlying belief that they are INCAPABLE of doing relationships because they can feel like they don’t know where to start. Dismissive avoidants also do not like PRESSURE because this can touch on what can be one of the DA’s biggest core wounds, the ‘I Am Trapped’ core wound, and since they generally move slower in relationships than the other attachment styles, they can often feel this way in the process.

These are some basics on the deep-rooted why’s behind the dismissive avoidant’s fear of commitment. If you are a dismissive avoidant or the loved one of a dismissive avoidant, all of this is something that CAN BE healed.