Why Your Nervous System Makes You Push and Pull in Relationships
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If you have ever been completely in love with someone and simultaneously felt an overwhelming urge to blow the whole thing up, this is for you. Not in a vague "this might apply to you" kind of way. In a "I am literally describing what happens in your body" kind of way. Disorganized attachment is one of the most misunderstood attachment patterns out there because from the outside it looks like inconsistency and from the inside it feels like pure chaos. And the reason most of the content you have consumed about it has not actually helped you is because it keeps explaining what it is without ever explaining what is happening in your body when it fires. Because this is not a mindset problem. It is a somatic one and those require a completely different conversation.
What Disorganized Attachment Actually Feels Like From the Inside
From the inside it feels like being two completely different people who want completely opposite things at the exact same time. You can be all in when you are together and then the moment you are alone your brain starts picking everything apart until you have almost convinced yourself the whole thing is wrong. (Girl... sames. I was googling "am I settling" while being completely in love with my person. Both things were happening simultaneously and I was a mess.) Or it goes the other way and when you are apart you miss them deeply and then the moment they get emotionally close your chest tightens, something surges, and suddenly part of you wants out of something you genuinely want. Research tells us that disorganized attachment develops when the person who is supposed to be your safe haven also becomes a source of fear, so your nervous system gets wired to both seek connection and brace for danger at the exact same time. It is not a character flaw. It is a survival response that got stuck.
What Is Actually Happening in Your Nervous System When the Pattern Fires
Your nervous system is designed to detect threat and respond to it before your conscious brain even knows what is happening, and Stephen Porges and his polyvagal theory explain this in a way that honestly made everything click for me when I first learned it. For someone with disorganized attachment, closeness itself can be the trigger, vulnerability can be the trigger, and being truly seen by someone who actually shows up for you can be the trigger. (Which is wildly unfair if you think about it because the good ones scare us just as much as the bad ones.) So when love gets real and close, your nervous system does not just register warmth and connection. It also registers threat and responds to both at the exact same time. That restlessness, that urge to run, that sudden need to create distance or pick a fight... that is not you making a conscious choice. It is a patterned somatic response that has been running in your body for a very long time. Bessel van der Kolk's work reminds us that the body responds to perceived threat before the thinking brain is even involved, which means the reaction always comes first and the story your brain tells you about why always comes second.
Why You Understand This Pattern and Still Cannot Stop It
You have read the books, you have been to therapy, you have journaled about this. You know what disorganized attachment is and you can probably explain it to someone else in a really articulate way. And you still find yourself in the same moment, reacting the same way, feeling that same gut punch of why did I just do that again. (The amount of women who have sat across from me and said "I understand it but I still do it" is honestly staggering.) It is not a sign that you are beyond help. It is a sign that understanding alone was never going to be enough. Because this pattern does not live in your thinking brain. It lives in your body. And you cannot read your way out of a somatic response no matter how self aware you are.
The Cycle Keeps Running Until the Work Goes Into the Body
You want connection, you go toward it, things get close and real, something in your body activates, and before you have had a chance to think you are pulling away or creating conflict or slowly convincing yourself the whole thing is wrong. (And then you calm down and you are sitting there like... what just happened. Every single time.) The reason this cycle keeps repeating is not because you are not self aware enough, because you are incredibly self aware. It is because self awareness alone cannot interrupt a somatic pattern in the moment it is actually firing. Your nervous system is moving faster than your awareness can catch up to, and until the work goes into the body where the pattern actually lives, the cycle will keep running.
This Is Not Your Personality. This Is a Pattern Your Nervous System Learned.
The way you show up in relationships right now is not who you are. It is what your nervous system learned to do in order to keep you safe, and those are two very different things. Gabor Maté's whole framework is built around the idea that our responses to love are shaped by our earliest experiences of whether closeness was safe, and your body has just been applying that lesson on autopilot ever since. You are a high functioning, emotionally intelligent, deeply self aware woman who becomes someone she does not recognise when her nervous system gets triggered in love. And that gap is so much more workable than it feels right now. You deserve to feel safe being in love not just in theory, not just from a distance, but in your body, in real time, with a real person who is actually showing up for you. And that is so much more possible for you than it probably feels right now.
