Disorganized Attachment Therapy (the fearful-avoidant pattern)

At a glance

Disorganized attachment therapy works on the push-pull pattern — wanting closeness intensely and fleeing it when it arrives — and on the earlier experiences that pattern is usually anchored to. At TEO Counselling it is provided online by Mohamad Shabib (MACP, CCC, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the CRPO in Ontario), who sees clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland & Labrador in English or Arabic, and by Alison Shaji (MA Clinical Psychology, RCC), who sees clients in British Columbia. Individual sessions are $150 per 60-minute session, couples sessions are $175, and the first step is a free 15 minute consultation with no referral needed.

What is disorganized attachment?

Disorganized attachment — called fearful-avoidant in the adult literature, and spelt disorganised in British English — is a pattern in which closeness is intensely wanted and registers as unsafe at the same time. The other patterns each run one strategy: the anxious pattern moves toward under stress, the avoidant pattern moves away. This one runs both, in alternation, which is why it feels less like a strategy and more like being pulled in two directions by something that never announces itself.

The two names come from two research traditions. Disorganized is the infant category identified by Mary Main and Judith Solomon in the 1980s, watching Strange Situation recordings of babies whose behaviour fit none of the existing categories — approaching a parent while turning away, freezing mid-movement, reaching and retreating at once. Fearful-avoidant is the adult analogue, named in Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz’s 1991 four-category model of adult attachment. Online the terms are used interchangeably, and one honest distinction is worth keeping: an adult who recognises themselves in this description has not been classified as anything. The infant category is assigned by trained coders watching structured recordings. What an adult has is a pattern they can observe in their own relationships — which is the thing therapy can actually work with.

As with every pattern on this site: it is a learned response, not a personality type and not a diagnosis, and most people run different patterns with different people. The other three patterns, and how the whole framework fits together, are on our attachment-based therapy page, which is the hub for this topic.

How is it different from anxious and avoidant attachment?

The shortest honest answer: the disorganized pattern contains both of the others and settles into neither. It borrows the anxious alarm and the avoidant escape, and runs them against each other.

The difference is that anxious and avoidant people have a direction. Under stress, one reliably moves toward and the other reliably moves away, and each strategy — whatever it costs — is at least coherent. The disorganized pattern has no settled direction: the person you want to run to is the person you want to run from. If the pursuing half of this is the dominant one for you, the anxious attachment page covers that pattern in depth; if your version is one steady policy of distance rather than an alternation, the avoidant attachment page covers the dismissive pattern and carries a side-by-side comparison of dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant. This page is for the people caught between the two.

What does the push-pull pattern look like in a relationship?

From the outside it reads as hot and cold. From the inside it is two alarms taking turns: distance sets off the first, and the closeness that resolves it sets off the second.

What causes disorganized attachment?

The research answer is unusually specific for this pattern. After Main and Solomon identified the disorganized category, Mary Main and Erik Hesse proposed in 1990 what tends to underlie it: frightening or frightened caregiving — a caregiver who was at times the source of fear, or who was themselves visibly frightened and overwhelmed in ways a child could sense. Main and Hesse described the child’s dilemma as “fright without solution”: the person a frightened child is wired to run to is the same person the fear is coming from, so the nervous system holds two incompatible instructions — approach and escape — and can complete neither.

An adult running the push-pull is often running exactly that unresolved instruction pair, decades later, with partners who never did anything to earn it. This is also why the disorganized pattern is the one most closely associated with early trauma — frightening caregiving includes abuse and household violence — and why trauma-focused work, rather than communication advice, is usually the sensible starting point.

Two corrections to the internet’s version. First, this is a description of a developmental route, not a verdict on anyone’s family: a caregiver can be frightening to a small child without cruelty — through their own untreated trauma, addiction, rage they never directed at the child, or terror of their own that leaked. Plenty of people with this pattern were never hit and doubt their own history as a result; the pattern does not require a story that would convince a courtroom. Second, later experience matters too: a frightening adult relationship can lay the same wiring down, or deepen it. What the origins share is one lesson, learned somewhere it was true — the people closest to you are the least safe — still being applied somewhere it no longer is.

What does therapy for disorganized attachment actually involve?

Because this pattern usually sits on top of unprocessed experience, the work is sequenced differently from the other two: steady the alternation first, then work on what it is anchored to, then practise the new moves where they matter. There is no single protocol for it, and no Canadian credential called “attachment therapist” — so here is the actual training this work is built from.

Can disorganized attachment change? What earned security means

The clinical literature treats adult attachment as learned and changeable rather than fixed, and for this pattern the research tradition has a specific name for the direction of travel: earned security. The term comes out of the Adult Attachment Interview research of Mary Main and colleagues, describing adults whose early relationships were genuinely hard — and who nonetheless came to relate, and to tell the story of their own history, in the coherent, steady way secure people do. People do arrive there. Nobody can promise you will, or say in advance how long your version takes, and a page that claimed otherwise would be lying to you.

It is worth being precise about what change looks like here, because the popular version sets people up to feel like failures. It rarely looks like the alarms never firing again. It looks like the switches slowing down — enough space between the surge and the action to notice which alarm is talking. It looks like the calm stretch of a relationship becoming survivable, then tolerable, then eventually what it always should have been. It looks like being able to say something in me wants to run right now out loud, instead of running — which changes the whole exchange, because the other person is finally responding to what is actually happening.

And it compounds: every rupture that gets repaired instead of ended is new evidence against the old lesson. That is why the relationships you choose — including the therapy relationship — end up doing more of the work than any technique.

How do I start therapy for disorganized attachment?

You start with a free 15 minute consultation, booked online without a referral. It is a conversation about what has been happening and whether this work fits — not an assessment, and there is no obligation to book anything afterward. For this pattern in particular it is worth saying: wanting to cancel it the day before is not a sign it was the wrong idea. It is often the pattern doing the thing this page describes.

It helps to bring one concrete example rather than a summary — the last time the switch flipped, what was happening just before, and what you did. That single example usually says more than any label, including the one in this page’s title.

If you would rather read for a while first, that is a reasonable order to do things in. There is a free attachment workbook on this site with nothing to sign up for, and the attachment-based therapy hub covers all four patterns if you are still working out which one is yours.

Common questions about disorganized attachment

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