**Fearful-Avoidant TRIGGERS: Managing The Shame Of Having Needs And The Guilt Of Taking Space — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/fearful-avoidant-triggers-managing-shame-needs-guilt-taking-space/

Heidi Priebe explores the fearful-avoidant attachment style, explaining how it involves both anxious activation and avoidant deactivation triggers, plus shame and guilt about needs and space.

## Key Takeaways

- Fearful-avoidant attachment is its own pattern, combining activation and deactivation triggers along with meta-feelings of shame and guilt.
- Shame about having needs and guilt about taking space are central struggles for fearful-avoidant individuals.
- Making attachment needs conscious and addressing them early reduces the intensity of emotional breakthroughs.
- Healing requires separating natural emotions from harmful behaviors and taking responsibility without self-condemnation.

## What the video covers

- Fearful-avoidant attachment is not simply alternating between anxious and avoidant states; it has its own distinct patterns, including meta-feelings about the oscillation itself.
- Fearful-avoidant individuals often experience intense shame after expressing emotions during activated states, especially when those expressions were poorly received.
- Dismissive-avoidant-like guilt arises for fearful-avoidant people who crave independence while simultaneously feeling they must abandon their own needs to be close to others.
- Fearful-avoidant people often have a self-image of being stoic and emotionally competent, which conflicts with the intense emotions that surface when activated.
- Emotions in fearful-avoidant individuals are often repressed, so when they break through they can feel urgent and overwhelming.
- Unlike anxious individuals, fearful-avoidant people are often less consciously aware of their attachment needs on a day-to-day basis.
- Traditional anxious-attachment strategies help fearful-avoidant people, but they must also address the underlying repression of needs.
- Growth involves increasing day-to-day awareness of attachment needs and learning to tolerate and communicate them rather than suppressing them until they erupt.
- Early warning signs such as irritability, distraction, or people-pleasing can signal unacknowledged emotional needs.
- Repairing after activated behavior, including taking responsibility without excessive self-judgment, supports healing and trust in relationships.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction to Attachment Activation and Deactivation
2. 01:26 Fearful Avoidant: Both Anxious and Avoidant Triggers
3. 02:56 Meta-Feelings and the Oscillation Between States
4. 04:24 Shame Over Having Feelings and Expressing Them
5. 05:49 Repression of Needs and Urgent Breakthroughs
6. 08:00 Making Attachment Needs Conscious
7. 10:00 Repairing After Activated Behavior
8. 13:00 Balancing Connection and Independence in Relationships

Answers

## Questions about this video

How does fearful-avoidant attachment differ from simply alternating between anxious and avoidant styles?

Heidi Priebe explains that fearful-avoidant attachment has its own distinct pattern. While it includes both anxious and avoidant triggers, the constant oscillation creates meta-feelings, such as shame about one's previous emotional state or guilt about craving independence.

Why do fearful-avoidant individuals often feel intense shame after emotional outbursts?

They frequently repress emotions while deactivated, so when activated, those emotions come out strongly. Because they have an avoidant history of rejected vulnerability and a self-image of being emotionally capable, expressing intense feelings often leads to deep shame, especially if others responded poorly.

What is the recommended path for growth for fearful-avoidant people?

The main path is to become more consciously aware of attachment needs in daily life rather than suppressing them. Early recognition of signs like irritability or people-pleasing, combined with healthy communication and repair after activated moments, helps reduce overwhelming emotional breakthroughs.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel, or welcome if you're new here. Over the past couple videos that I've put out on this channel, we've been looking at what happens when either we're having an attachment activation

00:14

Speaker A

response. So, for those who air more anxious, when your attachment system gets really triggered, it can feel like you are desperate at any cost to get your attachment figure to pay attention to you and help you soothe your pain and

00:27

Speaker A

return to regulation. Or on the flip side, what happens for those who air more avoidant on the attachment spectrum and how an attachment system trigger can cause you to deactivate and feel as though you are only going to be able to self-regulate

00:42

Speaker A

and feel okay and stressfree again when you have taken space from your attachment relationships and given yourself the opportunity to connect more fully to your own experience.

00:53

Speaker A

And today, what we're going to be talking about is the fearful avoidant attachment style and what it means to have both activation triggers and deactivation triggers. So, the first thing I want to address is that one of the most common questions I get about

01:09

Speaker A

attachment theory is when you have a fearful avoidant attachment style, is it basically just being anxious sometimes and avoidant sometimes or is it kind of its own beast? And my answer to that is yes and yes. Yes as in you are going to

01:26

Speaker A

get triggered similarly to how an anxious person gets triggered sometimes if you air fearful avoidant and you are also going to get triggered the way an avoidant person gets triggered sometimes. But there's also a third thing that happens which is that because

01:41

Speaker A

your system is chronically shifting between different response patterns unconsciously there are kind of meta feelings that you are going to start having about your experience of the oscillation itself. So what I mean by a metap is a feeling that you are having

01:58

Speaker A

about another feeling. So generally those on the anxious side of the attachment spectrum tend to be quite expressive about their feelings. And while they might absolutely sometimes regret things that they've said in the heat of the moment, those who air

02:11

Speaker A

fearful avoidant when in a deactivated state are likely to experience extreme shame over the feelings that they had and expressed well activated. And then on the flip side of things, those who heir more purely dismiss of avoidant in

02:27

Speaker A

the attachment spectrum tend to crave a lot of freedom and independence from their relationships. And while sometimes they will absolutely feel remorse over the ways in which that impacts their partner's desire to be close to them, those who air fearful avoidant tend to

02:42

Speaker A

experience a huge amount of guilt over the independence that they crave in a relationship. Because while they have that avoidant patterning online much of the time that tells them you will only be able to express yourself and be

02:56

Speaker A

authentic and feel like yourself when you are not engaged in a close attachment relationship. They also have that inshed patterning of the anxious style online much of the time that tells them in order to be close to someone you

03:10

Speaker A

have to give up your own wants and needs and values and kind of contort yourself into who this other person wants you to be. And so there is a really big challenge that comes not just from experiencing each of these states, but

03:23

Speaker A

also from oscillating between them and in your differing states, having strong self- judgments about how you behaved or acted in the other state. So what we're going to look at today is some of the ways in which the fearful avoidant

03:37

Speaker A

experiences both activation triggers and deactivation triggers in a way that is unique to the fearful style itself. So, we'll start with the activation side of things. Before we go too deep into that, if you have not watched my video on

03:52

Speaker A

anxious activation responses, which is linked in the description of this one, you might just want to pause the video now and go check it out because it will absolutely likely come in handy to employ some of those tools and

04:05

Speaker A

strategies if you're finding yourself in an activated response. And so, that part can't be ignored. But then what we're going to look at here is essentially how to take care of yourself after you've experienced an anxious activation response and some of the judgments that

04:21

Speaker A

might come up in you as a result of looking back on your past behavior once you've had a little bit of distance from it. So, I mentioned early on, and we're going to go into this now, that the

04:30

Speaker A

fearful avoidant often experiences a lot of shame over the fact that they a have feelings in the first place and b especially when they express those feelings, particularly if those feelings were not received well by the other person. So, like the dismissive

04:46

Speaker A

avoidant, fearful avoidant is an avoidant style type. So what that means is that those who air fearful generally do have that same avoidant history of having their bids for connection which includes showing any form of vulnerable emotion rejected by their caregivers.

05:05

Speaker A

And so there's a sense of shame that tends to develop around our attachment seeking behaviors when we air avoidant in any capacity. And because the fearful avoidant might spend a lot of their time with those emotional responses that

05:18

Speaker A

exist in them inhibited or even fully repressed, so they might not even notice walking around their day-to-day lives just how many emotions are happening for them under the surface until they get triggered. The fearful avoidant, like the dismissive avoidant, can often have

05:34

Speaker A

a self-image that kind of prides themselves on their ability to deal with emotions well, which for those on the avoidant side of the spectrum often translates internally to being kind of stoic and unaffected by the circumstances of their lives. The

05:49

Speaker A

problem is that when you get activated as a fearful avoidant and your system is now screaming at you to do those proximity seeking behaviors to get your partner's attention to get your point and your feelings across, you are going

06:02

Speaker A

to experience very strong instances of emotion. And those emotions might be even stronger for you than they are for those who air anxious because they are so frequently repressed otherwise.

06:17

Speaker A

So again, if you air anxiously attached and not fearful avoidant, it's likely that on a day-to-day basis, you are relatively aware of the subtle emotions that are arising in your system because you are physiologically wired around having that in your awareness. So, even

06:35

Speaker A

though it's highly likely that you are doing a lot of conscious repressing of your feelings because you want to stay in connection with people and might have a story that bringing in too many of your own wants and needs is going to

06:45

Speaker A

threaten your connections. It's often quite different for the fearful avoidant in that they are not as consciously aware of their own wants and needs on a day-to-day basis, particularly their wants and needs that pertain to other people. So, like the avoidant, the

06:59

Speaker A

fearful avoidant is generally pretty aware of what they want to do and accomplish to keep themselves feeling resourced and okay. But often they're a little bit more tuned out to what their attachment needs are. And then when those attachment needs come online, they

07:13

Speaker A

might come paired with this feeling of this absolutely has to be attended to right now. And the reason that is happening is because your system is aware of the fact that you naturally repress these things. And so when they

07:28

Speaker A

do break through into your awareness, it feels very urgent to get them addressed because some part of you knows that if you don't address them now, they're going to go back underground and not get dealt with. So, even though a lot of the

07:42

Speaker A

traditional advice for working with anxious attachment triggers will be helpful for you as a fearful avoidant, there's something additional you're going to have to factor in, which is that if you want to lower the intensity to a manageable level of these

07:56

Speaker A

breakthroughs of emotion, the most important thing you need to focus on is getting yourself sensitized to those emotions more regularly on a daily basis. And this is likely going to be completely counterintuitive to what you think you need to do as a fearful

08:12

Speaker A

avoidant. Each attachment style tends to have its own kind of ideal of what healing looks like that is not quite accurate. And for the fearful avoidant, very often the idea is once I am healed, then I will not be emotional anymore. So

08:27

Speaker A

the emotions that sometimes break through and the needs that sometimes break through are often seen as the problem. And so it feels counterintuitive to accept that the way to work with these activation responses might actually be to more consciously

08:43

Speaker A

integrate the things that come out when we're activated into our day-to-day awareness and our day-to-day life. So to make our attachment needs more conscious for ourselves, not less. But this is absolutely the growth path for the fearful avoidant,

09:00

Speaker A

especially when it comes to those anxious activation triggers. They will not feel as urgent to deal with all at once if you can give your body proof that you are going to attend to these things in a different state. So rather

09:14

Speaker A

than exploding and then suppressing, you can start looking at the feelings and the needs that you have when you are in that state of feeling desperate for your partner's attention and co-regulation or when you are feeling really mad at

09:26

Speaker A

someone and like you are finally going to tell them exactly what you think. What needs to happen in those instances is you need to be able to listen to that trigger and say, "I hear you. I believe you have information that matters and

09:41

Speaker A

right now might not be the best time for me to let it all out because I am feeling really activated.

09:48

Speaker A

But I promise you, you being yourself, that I will deal with this tomorrow or the next day or whenever it is that I feel like I have returned to a state where I can deal with it in a more

10:01

Speaker A

reasonable way. And the kicker here is that you actually have to do it or else you will not believe yourself in those moments. So, I remember this specific trajectory for myself where I started getting sensitized on a day-to-day level

10:16

Speaker A

to more of what I wanted out of other people and my relationships and which boundaries I needed to set in order to feel okay in my relationships. And the more I did this and the more I actually sat down with the people in my life and

10:29

Speaker A

had those hard conversations, the more I trusted myself when my body did have those hyperactive trigger responses come online that if I did not go scream at that person who I'm really pissed at right now, I would have a conversation

10:44

Speaker A

with them the next day and actually express what my problems are in a way that gives it the best chance at those problems getting seen and addressed. So again, the more we start paying attention to and sensitizing ourselves

10:58

Speaker A

to our own needs, particularly our attachment and relationship needs when we are not triggered, the less urgent it starts feeling when we are triggered to get our point across. And one way to start sensitizing yourself to what your

11:13

Speaker A

attachment needs are is to look at your 4F responses. So your fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. When we find ourselves in a state of either being frozen and wanting to kind of withdraw from relationships or when we feel

11:29

Speaker A

really angry at someone or when we're feeling really distracted and not present or when we're feeling super peopleleasy and like we just want to caretake someone, those are all indications that there might be something going on for us emotionally

11:43

Speaker A

that's related to the relationship dynamic that our bodies are frantically trying to hide from us. So that doesn't mean that if you're having a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, that is the moment in which you want to go

11:55

Speaker A

digging for that gold. But looking back on when you've had those responses and what your needs might have been in those moments can give you really good information about what your relational needs are that are generally obscured to

12:09

Speaker A

you by your own avoidant psychology. And again, the more we can start surfacing those needs and bringing them into our relationship dynamics when we are feeling regulated, the less intense our disregulated episodes are going to start feeling. And the other thing we want to

12:26

Speaker A

look at here when it comes to our activation responses, if we do go through an instance where we just explode on someone and we are really not happy after the fact with how we dealt with that and we are having a shame

12:38

Speaker A

spiral about it, what we want to really focus on is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, even if you do not like the way that you addressed a problem, maybe you were really mean to your partner when you brought up a

12:52

Speaker A

certain issue you have, maybe you were really unreasonable or even manipulative about trying to get some need met. This is going to feel so counterintuitive, but it is actually really beneficial for your own healing and the health of your

13:06

Speaker A

partnership for you to be able to separate out the feeling and the need that you had in that scenario from the actions that you took in your attempt to get it fulfilled. So, for example, if I got really angry at someone and I called

13:20

Speaker A

them names, I probably absolutely want to go back to that person when I'm feeling calmer and apologize for how I expressed myself and for the ways in which I was unkind or out of integrity with myself. But what you do not want to

13:34

Speaker A

throw out with the bathwater is the feeling that you had that led to that behavior. So, one of my absolute all-time favorite quotes on anger in particular comes from the book Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Braftoft who is

13:47

Speaker A

someone who runs anger management programs and he says that one of the things he always tells the people coming into his programs is you do not have an anger problem, you have an abuse problem. And this is really important to

14:01

Speaker A

separate out because anger is a natural human emotion that we all have and that we all need to find ways to express without causing undue harm to ourselves or others. Abuse is what happens when we do not have healthy outlets for

14:16

Speaker A

expressing anger. So the point here is that we need to be able to parse apart the feeling that we had which is a natural and normal reaction to being alive. Things like anger or fear or desperation happened to all of us from

14:30

Speaker A

the action that we gave ourselves permission to take when we were experiencing that feeling. And we can take accountability for the actions that we took while keeping in mind that we still need to resolve the feeling that was present in a healthier and more

14:44

Speaker A

direct way. Again, as a fearful avoidant, you are probably prone to thinking that the way to get rid of bad behavior is to better control your feelings and to make sure that you do not feel those things anymore. But in

14:58

Speaker A

most cases, the problem is not that you are feeling. It is in fact that you haven't learned healthy ways of both accepting and expressing your feelings at a lower level. So by the time they've broken through your awareness, you might

15:11

Speaker A

already feel out of control of them. But again, one last time, the emotion is not the problem. The emotion needs to be dealt with, just not necessarily in the way that you feel like dealing with it when you are triggered. So that's one

15:25

Speaker A

side of the spectrum for fearful avoidance. learning to integrate more emotion into your daily life and be aware of more of your attachment needs so that they do not only come out when you are triggered. And on the other side

15:37

Speaker A

of things, you also need to get better acquainted with the parts of yourself that very naturally and healthfully need things like space and boundaries and to stay in connection with yourself when you're in close relationships. So again, fearful avoidance tend to have a lot of

15:56

Speaker A

natural imshment patterning online that might be telling them things like as soon as you are in a relationship, you are a bad person if you are doing anything other than giving your partner everything they need, caretaking your partner. I find that more so than any

16:11

Speaker A

other attachment style, fearful avoidance are so caretaky. And there might be this patterning that comes online that just tells you anytime you want to step back and take time and space for yourself or connect with yourself or find ways in which you are

16:26

Speaker A

different from your partner that matter to you and nurture those parts of yourself. If you are doing any of that, you are being a bad person. And so then what happens? Because we all have a natural need for space and distance and

16:40

Speaker A

to be our own person even inside of close relationships. That part of you that knows you need that space is going to start telling you you have to get out of this relationship so that you can connect with yourself again. And what

16:53

Speaker A

that part needs to learn is that you can absolutely stay connected to yourself when inside of an intimate relationship.

17:00

Speaker A

It's just going to take some practice in how to navigate that. So, when I look back on the years that I spent dating as a fearful avoidant, there were a lot of relationships I had that were on again,

17:12

Speaker A

off again, on again, off again, with the breakups almost always being initiated by me when I felt smothered and like I needed space to connect with myself and then the getting back also usually initiated by me when I missed the person

17:25

Speaker A

and wanted to be with them again. And what is so painful to look at because those dynamics caused so much pain and disorientation for both me and my then partners is that if I were to take any one of those relationships, so let's say

17:39

Speaker A

one that was on again off again for like 3 years and if I were to look at the amount of time over that 3-year period as a whole that I spent with my partner versus the amount of time that I spent

17:52

Speaker A

alone nurturing my relationship to myself and I were to add it all out and take the average so deeply ironically, it would probably average out to approximately the same amount of solo versus partner time that someone in a

18:07

Speaker A

secure relationship would naturally have. It's just that secure people are attuned to when they need space on a day-to-day basis and have no problem carving out that space and taking it for themselves with respect to their partner's needs. And so instead of

18:23

Speaker A

getting totally enshed with their partner and then needing to be totally separate from them in order to self-regulate, they are just able on a day-to-day basis to have a mix of partner time and alone time and to keep

18:36

Speaker A

their connection to themselves alive inside of a partnership while also taking lots of time to spend with their partner in an uninshed way. And so this is another kind of relationship ideal that might need to die for you as a

18:49

Speaker A

fearful avoidant. This idea that once you have gotten rid of all of your pesky feelings, then you will be available for full-time caretaking in your relationship. When in reality, you need both your own feelings and you need to

19:04

Speaker A

take space for yourself to nurture your connection to self within any relationship if you want it to be healthy and sustainable. So, you really have to go through a journey of learning that it's okay to attune to what your

19:18

Speaker A

feelings and needs are and to both negotiate those needs with your partner when that's the appropriate route to take, but also to spend time alone nurturing your connection to yourself when that's the appropriate route to take. And as long as you are feeling

19:33

Speaker A

chronic shame over the fact that you have feelings and needs, as well as chronic guilt over the concept of needing to be your own person, even while in a relationship, you are probably going to be stuck flip-flopping between these extremes that cause so

19:49

Speaker A

much disorientation for you and the people that you get close to. But of course, this all comes from a deeply unconscious place. And just like any of the insecure styles, nobody with fearful patterning is consciously trying to behave this way. It's just a natural

20:04

Speaker A

response pattern that was once adaptive in a certain set of circumstances that as you grow up and start looking at things from a more zoomed out, enlightened perspective, you have the opportunity to start changing. So the moral of all of this is that if you air

20:21

Speaker A

fearful avoidant, yes, you are going to have anxious triggers and you're going to have deactivation triggers and you are going to want to look at how to deal with both of those. But you're also going to want to look at the meta

20:34

Speaker A

feelings that come up for you in response to both of those because until you are able to accept and integrate the fact that there is wisdom to both of your triggers and in both states your body is desperately trying to get you to

20:49

Speaker A

pay attention to something it needs. It's only once you can start seeing the wisdom in that that you can actually get onto the path of healing towards a more secure style where you are no longer trying to deal with relationships

21:03

Speaker A

through chronic self-abandonment and instead can be aware of and good at advocating for your needs the same way you tend to be pretty good at listening to and accommodating for your partners.

21:16

Speaker A

All right, that's all I'm going to say on the topic for today, but as always, let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, feelings popping up as you go through this video. Please leave them in the comment section below. I love you

21:29

Speaker A

guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon.

21:35

Speaker A

[Music]

Topics: fearful avoidant attachment attachment theory attachment activation deactivation triggers shame guilt emotional repression attachment needs relationships Heidi Priebe

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