Chapter 8
The Clingy, Anxious Perceiver and the Aloof, Avoidant Perceiver
I have two dear friends who are sisters. They are both highly educated, brilliant businesswomen who have enjoyed quite a bit of career success. But knowing them as well as I do, I believe that they would have enjoyed a great deal more success by now if they were both just a little bit better at dealing with people.
They have very different problems when it comes to their (lack of) social skills. One sister, whom I’ll call “Sarah,” is needy, overly accommodating, and highly sensitive to rejection, while “Emily” is aloof and has difficulty making connections with others. But both of these problems stem in large part from their childhood and are manifestations of a single (and all too common) influence: neglectful parents.
It’s not that Sarah and Emily didn’t have enough food to eat or clothes to wear. And they weren’t beaten or yelled at, or even punished particularly often. Their parents—like many others—were just very preoccupied with their own lives. The parents married and had children very young—in fact, you could argue they were still practically children themselves, who still quite naturally wanted to do all the selfish things that young people generally want to do. They wanted to go to parties and socialize with their friends. They wanted to go on trips and have adventures. And they wanted to build successful careers—following their own dreams. Their two little girls seemed to mostly get in the way. Or at least, looking back, that’s how it seems to Sarah and Emily.
Roughly half of the adults in the United States have difficulty relating to other people in adaptive, healthy ways, because their mental models of what relationships are like are still based on the maladaptive relationships of their childhood. It is in childhood that we learn that people can—or can’t—be trusted to be there for us, and we carry those lessons with us into our homes and workplaces as adults.
. . .
Psychologist John Bowlby, one of the most influential figures in the study of child development, identified three ways in which infants become attached to their caregivers.1 Securely attached children have caregivers who are responsive to their needs—the adults can be counted on to provide comfort and to be helpful and understanding. These children seek out their caregivers for support when sad or frightened, but otherwise feel safe to venture out and explore the world. They are the kids who will happily play with other children on the playground until they fall and scrape their knees. Then they run crying to Mommy or Daddy (or Nanny), get kissed and hugged and bandaged up, and run happily back to their friends for more play.
Being responsive isn’t the same thing as indulging the child’s every whim or giving the child everything he or she asks for. Being responsive means showing concern and affection and making the child feel safe and well-cared-for. Above all, it means consistently doing these things.
When a child feels that his or her caregiver’s responses are loving but not reliable—the caregiver is sometimes there for the child, but often isn’t—or when love feels contingent on the child’s doing everything exactly right, then he or she will most likely develop anxious attachment. Anxiously attached children (which make up about 30 percent of all children in the United States) are needy and clingy. They are deeply worried that their caregiver might not be there for them when he or she is needed, so they act out to get the caregiver’s attention. And they are easily upset when that attention isn’t given. These are the children who cry and scream all morning about going to the playground, only to get there and throw a tantrum and refuse to play with the other children or leave their caregiver’s side.
My friend Sarah was one of those children. According to her sister, she would cling to her parents whenever they were around, until they would inevitably get annoyed and force her to let go. She would make big scenes and ruin family gatherings, just so her parents would fully focus on her. She never ventured far from home—in fact, she lives only a few blocks from her parents’ house and stops by nearly every day. Often, Sarah will use those visits to complain to her parents about how they “ruined” her life, how she would have turned out differently if they had just given a damn about her. Then she’ll turn around and buy them an expensive gift or send them on a vacation—anything and everything to get the validation from them she desperately craves.
When caregivers are perceived as reliably unresponsive, on the other hand—when they generally just can’t be bothered to provide loving support to the child—then he or she will probably develop avoidant attachment. Avoidant children (about 20 percent of children in the United States) want very little to do with their caretakers. They don’t worry about not getting the affection and attention they desire, because they expect not to. These children neither cry over going to the park nor even ask about it very often, because they assume the caregiver won’t take them, so they’d better just amuse themselves. Sarah’s sister Emily was this sort of child. According to Sarah, it was as if Emily just checked out of the family around the time she was five and never checked back in. She kept to herself, kept her own counsel, and never complained about the attention she never received. When it was time to go to college, Emily didn’t apply to a single school within a thousand miles of home, and she hasn’t lived within a thousand miles of home since.
Both anxious and avoidant attachment are the product of neglect—though, as I said earlier, not necessarily the kind of neglect that gets your children taken from you by Social Services. These kids may have a totally normal-looking life—food to eat, clothes to wear, toys to play with, and a nice roof over their heads. It’s the attention and emotional support they aren’t getting enough of. Perhaps their caregivers are preoccupied with other things, or perhaps the caregivers themselves were the products of this same sort of neglect and don’t know how to give support that they never received themselves.
Whatever the reason, these early experiences of responsiveness and neglect shape the child’s view of what relationships are, what can be expected of him or her, and whether other people can be trusted. Decades of research on attachment has found that these views are fairly stable once they are established and that we see even our adult relationships—with romantic partners, friends, and colleagues—through the lenses that these models create.2 Psychologists sometimes identify attachment style in adults by asking them to read descriptions of each style (secure, anxious, avoidant) and seeing which description fits them best.
The Secure Lens
A securely attached adult would describe himself or herself like this: “I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don’t often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me.”3
Roughly 50 percent of adults say that this description fits them best.4 I’m not going to describe this lens in depth, because if your perceiver is looking through it, frankly it’s just not going to cause problems for you. People looking through the secure lens are relatively easy to get along with and don’t have trust issues. It’s the other two lenses you need to worry about.
The Anxious Lens
Here is how adults with anxious attachment might describe themselves: “I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.”5
Does that sound like anyone you know (or possibly someone you dated)? I’ll bet it does.
The anxiously attached have felt the pain of abandonment before, and they know all too well that it might happen again. So they are constantly seeking closeness, while simultaneously constantly worrying that the people they want to be close to don’t return the feeling. They doubt their own self-worth, question whether they are even lovable, and look to others for validation. It’s not exactly that they have low self-esteem—it’s more accurate to say that their self-esteem fluctuates wildly, depending on how much validation they are getting.
When they become tense or fearful, they get clingy, jealous, highly emotional, and really, really needy. (Ironically, these are the very behaviors that tend to drive people away.) The anxiously attached can also be caring and giving, but there’s something off about the way they care—it’s impulsive, controlling, and sometimes overwhelming. It feels almost as if it’s more about them than it is about you. And it is about them, which is why it feels that way. They are too wrapped up in their own concerns and fears to engage in the kind of perspective taking necessary to give high-quality support.
One of the most troublesome aspects of the anxiously attached is their tendency to see injuries and slights where there are none and to make a big deal out of interpersonal problems that really shouldn’t be such a big deal. Columbia psychologist Geraldine Downey coined the term rejection sensitivity to describe this three-part phenomenon: the perceiver (1) expects to be rejected, (2) is quick to perceive rejection in ambiguous circumstances, and then (3) overreacts to rejection (real or imagined).6 The perceiver’s lens is skewed in such a way that the smallest things—an e-mail not returned, an appointment you are late for, a compliment not given—feel like a deliberate slap in the face or a sign of your true feelings for the person.
People with strong rejection sensitivity, like my friend Sarah, tend to be over-accommodating and ingratiating to win favor. When people meet Sarah for the first time, they find her warm, funny, and generally charming. It’s what happens later—the neediness, the emotionality, the hurt and hostility—that ultimately ruins everything. Sarah has changed jobs every year or two, and always because of interpersonal conflicts with her supervisor or colleagues. (“He was out to get me.” “She deliberately undermined me at every step.” “They all kept me out of the loop.”) She’s also been engaged three times, but had each engagement broken off by a fiancé who wondered if he could handle life with a woman so prone to bouts of jealousy and suffocating levels of affection.
The great irony of all this is that, in principle, rejection sensitivity develops in the service of trying to prevent rejection. The anxious lens causes these people to see rejection everywhere because they are scared to death of it, and they are trying to keep it from happening again. But the consequences of rejection sensitivity are so interpersonally unpleasant that the strategy generally backfires, producing the very rejection they sought to avoid.7
The Avoidant Lens
Here’s a typical self-description of avoidant attachment in adults: “I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being.”8
As a result of their early experiences, like those of my friend Emily, people with this attachment style have learned that other people fundamentally cannot be trusted to be responsive to their needs. So they’ve decided to go it alone—they have become an island unto themselves. In fact, they often take pride in their self-sufficiency and independence and are likely to think relatively highly of themselves and relatively less of everyone else for being so pathetically needy.
People who look through the avoidant lens prefer to maintain emotional distance, even in their closer relationships. And they don’t disclose things about themselves readily, because too much intimacy makes them feel vulnerable. I have an avoidant male friend who told me that despite having been in back-to-back lengthy monogamous relationships for about fifteen years, he hadn’t told a woman that he loved her in that entire time. He just felt that this was a line he dared not cross—that some sort of nightmare of intimacy and mutual interdependence would unfold if he did. I do not envy the women he dated.
Incidentally, think twice before you offer emotional support to avoidant people, because they generally don’t want your support, and they would really prefer that you not count on theirs. In part, this reluctance is because they often don’t know how to give support, having not received much of it themselves. It’s also because they have very little use for reciprocity—they don’t feel they can count on it. If they do show support of some kind, it tends to be motivated by a sense of obligation rather than genuine desire, which ultimately undermines the relationship further.
. . .
Table 8-1 illustrates the key differences between perceivers who use an anxious lens and those who use an avoidant one. Consult it whenever you’ve got an interpersonally difficult colleague on your hands, to help you figure out exactly what you are dealing with.
TABLE 8-1
Are your perceivers looking through the anxious or avoidant lens?
| Anxious lens | Avoidant lens | |
| Emotional tone |
Worrying Needy Quick to anger | Chilly Disinterested Difficult to anger |
| What they want |
Constant validation Evidence of affection and loyalty |
To keep you at a distance To not depend on you, and to not be depended on |
| How their relationships end | From self-sabotaging oversensitivity to rejection | From self-sabotaging unwillingness to open up |
| What they hate most |
Broken promises Ambiguity Loneliness |
Obligation Forced intimacy Vulnerability |
Speaking Your Perceiver’s Attachment Language
Psychologists don’t know as much about anxious and avoidant attachment in adults as they do about promotion focus and prevention focus. That’s because most of the research done on attachment focuses on infants and little kids. However, there are still a few research-based strategies you can use to communicate more clearly with someone perceiving you through one of these lenses.
If you suspect that your perceiver is looking through the anxious lens, you should start by taking a deep breath, because this is going to require some effort and patience. You are dealing, fundamentally, with a frightened person—someone who is not above hurting you first just to keep you from hurting him or her. It’s not going to be easy. Here are some key approaches to rely on:
- Practice empathy. When a person with an anxious lens gets defensive or lashes out, ask yourself, Why does he or she feel threatened right now? Try to look at things through the anxious lens—what could be the perceived rejection? Doing this will not only help you to understand the problem, but will create feelings of empathy that will guide you in the direction of a solution.
- Don’t take it personally. Again, this is really not about you—it’s about what happened to the perceiver a long time ago. If you can keep calm and remain engaged, it will help him or her to do so.
- Avoid ambiguity. The truth is, a lot of ambiguity would be cleared up completely if we took a little extra trouble to make ourselves clear. Your perceiver is less likely to read your words and actions as rejecting if you take pains to project your true intentions.
- Be reliable. It’s never a good idea to blow people off or not keep your word, but it is a particularly bad idea when you are dealing with someone looking through the anxious lens.
Consider a hypothetical. You have added a new member, Julia, to your team, and you are eager to involve her in the team’s current projects. So you ask her to take the lead on an upcoming conference—a role that would usually be played by your anxiously attached employee, David. Now that you know about the anxious lens, what should you do?
By taking a moment to see it all from David’s perspective, you realize immediately that this situation that will create ambiguity for David. Why did you assign Julia to this role? he will wonder. Could you be unhappy with David’s past performance—is he no longer in your good graces? Even a securely attached employee might have some of these concerns—an anxiously attached employee certainly will.
So you should begin by trying to remove all the ambiguity you can. Meet with David before you announce Julia’s new role, and explain your reasoning. Assure David that you are very pleased with his performance and that Julia’s assignment should in no way be taken as evidence to the contrary. If possible, offer him an assignment that will reassure him by giving him greater responsibility or a chance to really shine.
With an avoidant perceiver, again, the word of the day is patience, because these people are super slow to warm up to others. It can take years. Here are a few other things to keep in mind:
- Stress activates the avoidant lens. Avoidant adults are particularly likely to distance themselves from other people during times of stress, so be aware that the avoidant perceiver might clam up during a particularly tough time.
- Set expectations for yourself. You aren’t going to get a lot of warmth or support from an avoidant person, so it’s important not to take that as necessarily a sign of hostility or dislike. (Remember, you’ve got a trust lens, too—and it is easy to get a distorted view of avoidant people when you’re looking through it.)
- Keep your own warmth in moderation. Avoidant people are suspicious of too much ingratiation, and they don’t respect it. You want to maintain a consistent room temperature in your dealings with them. Over time, your relationship will become warmer—just let it go at its own pace, and don’t try to force intimacy or closeness.
Consider how you might treat a new avoidant-attached colleague, Margaret. She’ll be working with you and the other members of your team on several projects. Your boss has just assigned her to take the lead on the next conference, and you think she might be feeling a little overwhelmed. Unfortunately, she’s been distant and seems reluctant to ask for help. Now that you know about the avoidant lens, what should you do?
Margaret is almost certainly feeling stressed, which will just amplify her natural tendency to isolate herself. It will also increase her reluctance to ask for help, since she will then feel obligated to you—a relative stranger who she has no reason to assume she can trust.
It’s fairly safe to assume that she needs your help—and to assume that she won’t look either happy or grateful when you offer it. (Remember, it’s not about you. Don’t take it personally.) Try to refrain from being overly solicitous about it when you do offer help, because you don’t want to come on too strong. You aren’t trying to be her new best friend—just a colleague who can be counted on to lend a hand. Treat the whole thing like it’s not a big deal, but be firm. Use a phrase like “Let me give you a hand with this,” rather than “Would you like a hand with this?” If you make it a question, she’ll almost certainly say “no thanks,” no matter how much she needs it.
. . .
One thing to keep in mind about all four of these personality lenses—prevention, promotion, anxious, and avoidant—is that while the lenses are relatively stable, people can and do switch lenses throughout their lives. Experiences of loss can make a promotion-minded person more likely to wear the prevention lens, and experiences of rejection can make a securely attached person anxious or even avoidant. And it works in reverse—positive, responsive relationships can both help an anxious or avoidant person see that people can be trusted and help the person put down the lenses that are warping his or her social and emotional life. Perhaps you can even be a part of that process for others, now that you understand why they wear the lens that they do.