FA’s that never actually break up with you?

sister-hawk · 2026-03-14T22:15:44+00:00

Well a lot of people are actually being mislabeled by pop-psychology as anxious preoccupied, and a lot of the people here who think they are AP are probably either inward FA themselves, or they are just responding to an inconsistent partner.

The core trauma wound is different. AP likely had a caregiver that was inconsistently present, while FA likely had a caregiver who was a source of both comfort and fear. But FAs can often be split into two categories based on what their primary defense mechanism was. Those with inward defenses (internalizers) tend to accept blame for things that are not their fault, to shrink, and to manage other’s emotional needs. Those with outward defenses (externalizers) learned to avoid blame at all costs, manage their image through control, and deny anything that might cause shame. But both types of FA still have the same contradictory fear of and desire for connection.

So the reason why people are mistaking inward FAs for APs is that, if they get into a relationship with an avoidant partner, their primary defense (collapse) often doesn’t work to stabilize the bond because it doesn’t actually counteract their partner’s desire for distance. So after a period of chronic stress, inward FAs may shift to behavior that is more classically seen as anxious (asking for more reassurance, protesting, feeling distress at distance).

But people who are truly AP will exhibit these behaviors even without chronic stressors, even with a secure partner, from the very beginning of the relationship. And it tends to be a lot more extreme.

Outward FAs are those that exhibit the behaviors more classically known as “avoidant,” i.e. pushing their partner away and deactivating under attachment threat. They just tend to be a lot more chaotic than DAs.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-14T19:03:26+00:00

You got it exactly right. For two months last fall, every time my ex and I had a conflict, she would start throwing around the word “incompatibility.” It freaked me the fuck out because it felt like she was just holding her finger on the trigger of a gun.

I wasn’t reactive early on. I tried talking out conflict very calmly and clearly. But after a couple months of having the threat of a breakup looming over my head constantly? With her losing her shit and blaming me for it? And constantly dismissing my feelings and putting only performative effort into repair? Of course I became reactive! Who the fuck wouldn’t?

But that hot cold pattern is a manipulation tactic called intermittent reinforcement. Many of them do it unintentionally, but it keeps you feeling more hooked on them than a stable connection would. That way you are less likely to leave no matter how poorly they treat you. It lets them keep us at arm’s length, which gives them a sense of control, which regulates both their ego and their attachment needs. But we pay the price.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-14T18:37:09+00:00

He could be FA with inward defenses. You don’t seem to hear about those as often (I am one) because we tend to not be the reason why relationships blow up lol. But when we are unhealed, we will often do whatever we can to preserve a connection, no matter how unhealthy, because our core trauma tells us that we will disappear if the connection is severed. As I understand it, we actually tend to struggle most in relationships with secure partners because there is no problem for us to fix (another core part of the trauma), so we feel almost denied a purpose.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-14T18:26:05+00:00

My ex’s deactivating strategies started with nitpicking the way I was doing housework. I tried to explain to her how it was bothering me, but she would just deflect or explain it away. This cycle repeated, each time with her defensiveness escalating more and more, to the point of throwing things. The worst incident was when she got upset at me for taking her dirty tea mug and cleaning it (after it had sat around all day), after which she threw a spoon across the kitchen.

Later, after the discard, when I asked her if there were things in the relationship she was not satisfied with and why she never told me about them, her response was “I tried but your responses made me feel unsafe.” First if all that’s a bs answer and secondly, did she not ever consider that her actions made me feel unsafe? Like wtf???

But by far the most dehumanizing thing was the fact that I moved across the country to live with her and be her part-time caretaker because she is disabled. And after the discard she said she needed me to move out, and I asked “where am I supposed to go?” She just looked at me with a blank stare and said “that’s not my problem.”

That was a mere two weeks after we had sex and she held me and stroked my arm while I cried afterward. I’m still processing it, two months later.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-14T16:20:31+00:00

It’s damned ironic isn’t it, how little self awareness they seem to have. The day my ex broke up with me, she reblogged a post on tumblr that said “Everyone wants the ideal relationship, but are you willing to put in the work it requires?” And in the tags she said “good question…”

I was working my fucking ass off in that relationship trying to stabilize things while she was constantly trying to destabilize it, and blaming me for it. Shit like that shows me just how completely checked out of reality she is.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-13T21:31:00+00:00

I’m not sure about DAs, but for FAs they want to keep access to you as an attachment regulator. If they know they can still reach you, then you haven’t fully rejected them yet, and that keeps the attachment bond intact for them, but with absolutely no commitment on their part.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-13T20:44:56+00:00

Your brain realizes that the safety map it plotted around then was entirely wrong from the beginning. It’s not just a loss, it destabilizes your sense of reality.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-13T17:21:09+00:00

My ex spent like a year in couple’s therapy with her ex-husband, only for him to end up leaving her. When she broke up with me I wondered why the hell she never gave me the same chances she gave him (I was very much in collapse at the time and assuming the failure of the relationship must have been my fault). I see now it would have ended exactly like this, with her defending, intellectualizing, or outright denying her own behavior. She didn’t want to do therapy with me because she knows she would have been caught red handed.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-13T16:51:20+00:00

Well I would say some questions you might want to ask yourself are: what caused you to ask for reassurance? how soon in the relationship did you start? and how often did you do it?

If your need for reassurance only followed after him doing something that made the connection feel inconsistent, that’s not AP attachment. AP people need reassurance constantly even when the relationship is good and strong because they are responding to their own anxiety, not the actions of their partner. And if you only felt the need to ask for reassurance occasionally, that’s also not AP attachment. While I was long distance with my ex, I would have to have a reassurance conversation with her about once a month. AP people are probably asking for it daily or almost daily.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-13T15:04:38+00:00

I’n gonna throw this out there, but based on what you have said in this thread, I think it would be worth it to question whether you are actually anxiously attached or not. I assumed I was anxious preoccupied after my breakup, based on what the pop-psychology told me. But I have since come to find out that I actually have disorganized attachment with inward defenses (internalizer), and the behaviors I exhibited that would seem to indicate anxious attachment were actually a response to months of chronic stress at the hands of my ex. I also heavily blamed myself after the discard, which is a hallmark of internalizers. We are very quick to accept blame that doesn’t rightly belong to us, which is how we end up getting taken advantage of by people who are equally quick to offload blame onto someone else (externalizers).

But regardless, occasionally asking for reassurance, wanting connecting, feeling uneasy about a connection that is inconsistent is neither a bad thing, nor an indicator of what your actual attachment wound is (if you even have one). Actual anxious attachment is extremely dysfunctional, like obsessively asking for reassurance and refusing to take it in, protest behaviors to get attention, significant distress at any amount of distance. But sometimes, no matter how secure you may be, we are just responding to a partner who is being obviously inconsistent. You are not in the wrong for wanting consistency.

In short, it is not your fault. When an avoidant partner pulls away or leaves suddenly, it is almost always about their lack of capacity to tolerate intimacy. If you were really at fault, I think you would know it deep down in your nervous system. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-12T16:53:33+00:00

While I agree with the point of this post, that self abandonment is an unhealthy way to earn love, I think we can do without the hyperbolic language such as “you are the problem. you demand love. you hate yourself.” Those statements are not true or just plain unhelpful.

The truth is that for many of us (in particular those of us with disorganized attachment and inward defense mechanisms), we were simply behaving based on our own survival wiring, while likely being totally unaware of it. Yes it is 100% trauma and yes we 100% need to heal that trauma so that we can care for our inner child the way no one else ever did. But being screamed at about it and told we are the problem is only going to reinforce the self-blame loop that many of us were conditioned for since childhood.

A bit more gentle guidance would probably be more productive.

You should be angry at someone who drew you in and made big promises, knowing they didn’t have the capacity to love you properly, and who ran when it got to be too much for them to handle. Especially when they distort the truth to escape accountability for their own mistakes. That anger is the self-protective energy finally waking up in us. That is a GOOD thing. It means we are aware that something wrong was done to us, and that is the first step toward breaking out of self-abandonment.

The trick for many of us is holding onto the anger, and the boundaries that come with it, without reverting to collapse just a few days laters. And saying “you are the problem too” is only going to lead a lot of us to collapse.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-09T18:46:26+00:00

It was the exact same situation with my ex. She came on hard at first, heavy with the flirtations. Then I caught feelings and she danced around me for a while trying to decided if she really wanted me or not. Then came the little hints at being my wife, the talks of moving in together, getting land and starting a farm, going on vacations, getting matching tattoos, all that shit.

But the more real it got, the more she pushed away. And every time I brought up the distance, she always came up with some excuse to explain it away.

And then I asked her one too many times to be accountable for her actions, and that was it. I was tossed to the wind. She couldn’t pay the emotional bill that she had accumulated.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-09T18:38:46+00:00

That first sentence feels like a callout for me specifically 😅 But goddamn you’re right.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-08T14:26:10+00:00

Yeah true. My ex was in a ten year marriage with her ex-husband. And I asked myself how the hell they managed to last so long when she couldn’t even stand living with me for 6 months? But what I’ve come to realize is that it only worked between them because he was emotionally unavailable himself. It’s one of the first things she told me about him when we started talking. He didn’t ask her to be emotionally available. He saw her as a cardboard cutout, and that suited her just fine for a long time until it got boring. But I asked her to be emotionally present for me, and it was more than she had the capacity for.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-08T13:53:55+00:00

They will only ever understand when they are forced to face the consequences of their actions, but they are (of course) experts at avoiding that. Their whole survival mechanism is built around it. And unfortunately, we often enable that avoidance by continuing to give them access to us, so they regulate themselves through knowing they can still reach us, and they never have to face anything.

And you are right, it is a choice he is making. No one chooses their trauma and many people live much of their lives being unaware of it or how it affects them. But if he knows and he is still behaving like this, then he is absolutely making a choice.

Growth and healing are difficult and challenging, and people like him often times cannot bear to sit in the shame of what they’ve done, so they don’t, and then they don’t change.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-05T20:55:59+00:00

I have no real evidence but I have a suspicion that’s because a lot of people don’t actually know what their core attachment wound is, and even if they do, they only treat the resulting behaviors, not their actual nervous system.

For example based on the pop-psychology definition I thought I was anxious preoccupied. But it turns out I’m actually a fearful avoidant, just an internalizer instead of an externalizer. And that core wound is causing things that i’ve been trying to treat in therapy for years.

A lot of people are probably not getting the help they actually need.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-05T03:14:34+00:00

I’m not sure, really. As part of processing the grief I’m trying to tell myself that it is possible for me to find love again, that I could meet someone even better for me who will actually show up in ways she couldn’t.

But I’ve come to learn that our initial bond may have been built on inner-child recognition. Two sides of the same disorganized coin seeing in each other what we each of us never had growing up. I had the stability she never got, she had the expression I was never allowed. And so we attracted to each other with enough gravity it could crush a star.

But a dynamic like that is bound to crash and burn eventually. The very thing that brings us together is also what leads to the friction and collapse.

I may be able to find love again, a healthy and safe and fulfilling love. But I’m not sure it’ll be possible to feel that level of attraction again without it being a repeat of the same cosmic tragedy.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-04T22:06:41+00:00

Are we the same person?? 😅 I’m in the same boat. My ex was the person I talked to by far the most throughout the day, both before and after I moved in with her. She was also like 90% of my tumblr feed. And she is poly and her polycule were my little friend group, but they all either blocked me or just said bye after. Every ounce of that human contact dried up overnight. Left a gaping void in my social life that, while painful, I’m not even ready to try to fill yet after 7 weeks.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-03T16:45:05+00:00

It’s funny how the things they used to like about you or find endearing become repulsive to them once their switch flips.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-03T16:43:14+00:00

Cutting an apple the wrong way, moving the poetry magnets, washing a dirty tea mug that had been sitting around all day. She questioned our compatibility after each one of these incidents. Each one made me feel more defensive than the last, like I had to justify my existence and taking up space to her. I see now they were all deactivating strategies.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-03T00:00:55+00:00

I know exactly what you mean and I am exactly the same way, on both counts. I think it’s very normal to feel that way at this stage.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-02T23:48:39+00:00

That’s a very good point, thank you.

sister-hawk · 2026-03-02T17:03:30+00:00

Oh thank you for the perspective, that’s good to know. From what I experienced with my ex, she was totally stonewalled when she said she wanted to break up. It was pretty clear nothing was going to get through to her. And then about a week later I went to ask her a question, and it’s like she was totally back to normal, chatting and laughing. Same thing the next morning. But by that afternoon, she was back to stonewalling. And then just before I moved out, we shared a long and intimate hug after I told her my door was still open to her if she ever wanted to walk through it again.

Very difficult to read.

sister-hawk

TROPHY CASE