Fearful Avoidant VS Anxious Preoccupied Breakup Behaviors

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Sometimes people think their ex is an avoidant, when actually their partner or ex is anxious-preoccupied. Let's talk about these differences during a breakup and why you might get them mixed up. As always, please use a healthy dose of discretion when watching these videos, as these opinions are unique to my experience and the demographic of clients that I work with. First, let's talk about processing time. People with anxious-preoccupied attachment will often stay in communication, even if it's inconsistent, or will loop back around to communication pretty rapidly, even if they take a little bit of time away, which is pretty normal if your relationship is on the rocks or you're going through a breakup and one person is no longer sure that they want to stay. Anxious-preoccupieds don't have that much trouble reinitiating communication, unless they've said their final goodbyes or are particularly hurt and have a deep sense of pride about avoiding future hurt or avoiding reengagement out of a sense of "I want this person to reach out to me." Fearful avoidants, on the other hand, will disappear into their inner world often when going through a breakup. They'll deactivate, they'll disconnect. And if they were hurt, disappointed, or felt uh betrayed, they might be really deeply disconnected from their own hurt um because of shame. And shame is the primary emotion that runs the fearful avoidants world. And it's difficult to investigate underneath shame, because as long as it's there, it acts as a thick cloud that hides everything else, all their other feelings.

[00:01:49]So, what that looks like is longer spans of no communication. And it It looks like not reaching out unless you initiate. While secure and anxious people process much faster, your timeline might not match what the fearful avoidant is experiencing and how long it takes them to process the same emotions that you might feel. Next, let's talk about the reason for a breakup that each type of attachment might give. So, anxious preoccupieds can express themselves and how they're feeling pretty clearly. Their reasons about why they want to break up will make some degree of logical sense.

[00:02:31]Sometimes that logic may not make sense to you if you don't want the breakup and they do. You may look for reasons to avoid actually internalizing and hearing what they have to say. APs have likely thought through their reasons and they've gotten clear on what's going on for them and why they might want the breakup. Now, fearful avoidants on the other hand will often give disjointed reasons or sometimes no reason at all. Or their reason will feel very surface and something that in your eyes can be easily fixed.

[00:03:11]That's because fearful avoidants have a hard time staying in touch with their feelings of overwhelm in the relationship, which is often the deeper reason underneath their concern. But because they're out of touch with it, they might reach for uh like a grasp for straws sort of reason. Something that they can Something that is within reach that they can hold on to to initiate the detachment and the deactivation. Anxious preoccupieds secretly and sometimes not so secretly want to be fought for.

[00:03:46]Again, use discretion about your unique situation. If they push you away, they want to repair. If they're not truly ready to break up, they'll hope that you fight for them.

[00:03:59]If they have a big worthiness wound, which is um pretty common for the AP, they want you to prove your love by demonstrating that you still do care.

[00:04:11]Anxious preoccupieds are often the attachment style that feel like no one cares about them in their relationships.

[00:04:20]So, if they have been feeling that way and have initiated the breakup for that reason, they're going to secretly hope that you will prove them wrong. When fearful avoidants deactivate or break up, they've usually hit a capacity threshold in the relationship. They want to disconnect to protect themselves, to regulate themselves, to process what's happening inside because they often have a backlog of information that kind of starts to bubble up inside them because their processing time just is is much slower. They may interpret you fighting for them through a lens of suspicion, fear, or in a worst-case scenario, in cases of unresolved trauma being triggered in the relationship, that you're somehow coming after them, which is not good. A fearful avoidant might look at you fighting for them as a boundary violation or an infringement on their autonomy. And this is the part where I think people get confused the most, and this is the interplay of trauma into relationships.

[00:05:32]A person with uh any type of attachment style is capable of experiencing trauma throughout their lifespan that ends up affecting their adult relationships.

[00:05:45]But, that doesn't necessarily make them a fearful avoidant. People with fearful avoidant attachment often experience trauma at a really early age when their identity is being formed. This can lead to a lot of contradictory, confusing, and sometimes disjointed ideas about relationships themselves.

[00:06:09]And the thing that I often notice in clients with FA partners is an experience of being confused by their partner in a sort of consistent way long before the breakup ever came about. And this is usually caused by trauma being triggered throughout the relationship and that and then becoming reactive and the their partner sort of going, "What was that?" On the other hand, a person who is anxious preoccupied by the time they're in midlife, which is they've experienced traumas themselves, but underneath those traumas is a certain degree of clarity about who they are in relationships. They often identify as being givers, as being people who sort of love too hard, and even if they get frustrated or upset or even sort of agitated and overwhelmed, the things that they get triggered around are usually pretty consistent in nature and over time you can start to learn their patterns of pretty easily and sort of look out for the the danger zones. And there's a certain degree of capacity that people with anxious preoccupied attachment have to communicate, to stay in connection, to work through conflict even if it's messy. So, even if your partner is displaying some push-pull behavior at the end of our relationship, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're a fearful avoidant. They may be struggling with the detachment themselves, and that is something that is possible for any of the attachment styles. If you're confused about how and why your relationship ended, and you want some clarity about them, about you, and if there's a path forward, I recommend booking a one-on-one coaching session. You can do that right up here somewhere, and you can use this coupon for, I think, $25 for your first session for watching this video till the end.

[00:08:10]If you like this video, um go ahead and like and subscribe to my channel. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.