Avoidant Attachment Explained: Intimacy, Trust and Change

Most of the conversation about attachment is aimed at the person who is worried about being left. Host Mark Groves says so plainly in the opening minutes of his podcast episode with attachment specialist Adam Lane Smith, and his frustration is audible: the avoidant partner, the one who goes quiet, withdraws when things get close and seems to disappear when a relationship needs them most, is largely left out of the picture. In this conversation, Smith tries to fill that gap. He moves from a plain-language definition of attachment through the difference between secure and insecure styles, a warning against turning attachment into a clinical label, and a four-stage model of trust he sketches as a route out of the cycle. What follows is an expanded look at those ideas, drawn from the episode and its published description, for anyone who has ever wondered why closeness feels like a threat to the person they love, or why it feels like abandonment to themselves.

Why is avoidant attachment the style nobody talks about?

Groves opens the episode by naming a gap in the relationship conversation. He argues that when people talk about healing attachment wounds, the talk tends to center on anxious attachment, the chasing, reassurance-seeking side of a pairing, and that avoidant attachment gets discussed mostly as the thing that anxious people have to put up with. He describes the avoidant partner as someone often left without tools or language for their own experience. "We can't talk about one without talking about the other," he says, and his interest is in how an avoidant person builds self-awareness when most of the available material was written for the other side of the dynamic.

That framing matters because it changes the question. Instead of asking how to get a distant partner to open up, the conversation becomes how a distant person can understand what their own pattern is protecting, and how change is supposed to happen from inside that pattern. Groves's stated premise, from his own introduction, is that the foundational pattern can be changed. "Understanding why we attach the way we do," he says, is the first step, and the rest of the episode is an effort to make that understanding concrete.

What does attachment actually mean?

Smith begins with a definition he deliberately keeps simple. "Attachment is just the way we as kids learn to connect to people in our life to get our needs met," he says on the episode. The idea is not a personality type floating free of experience. It is a set of expectations built in childhood about whether other people will respond when we reach for them, and whether we ourselves are worth responding to.

Smith describes the secure version as a child learning that people will speak kindly, that conflicts get resolved reasonably peacefully, that others can be trusted, and that the child is worthy of love and attention. He acknowledges how that sounds to many listeners. "If that sounds like unicorns farting rainbow dust, then that's fine," he says, adding a blunt statistic that gives the stakes some weight: "that is secure attachment and only about half of people in America have that anymore."

The insecure styles are what he calls the other half of that picture, and he sorts them into two broad experiences. One is learning that other people will be arbitrary, that they will stop caring under stress because they are focused on themselves. The other is learning that you yourself are deficient, that you have to keep playing from a deficit to earn approval. A person who fears being abandoned tends toward anxious patterns. A person who fears being engulfed or hurt tends to pull away. In Smith's telling, the avoidant response is less a coldness than a protective strategy built on the conviction that getting too close will end badly.

Can someone be both anxious and avoidant?

Groves asks the obvious follow-up, and Smith's answer is one of the more useful parts of the early conversation. Yes, he says, a person can hold both. "About 5% of people are both," Smith says on the episode. He describes the pattern: someone starts out anxious and assumes the problem is them, then comes to believe that other people are unreliable too, and ends up trusting no one. He calls this the disorganized style, and notes that some people call it fearful avoidance.

He gives the dynamic a vivid shape. The fearful-avoidant partner can be the most romantic person in the room. "They romance you, they walk you into The Cabin in the Woods, it's so gorgeous and lovely, and they say we're going to live here forever," Smith says. The listener responds with enthusiasm, saying they can't wait to be together forever, and then, in Smith's account, the other person panics: "oh god, what have I done, I'm alone with..." The intensity of the invitation and the sudden retreat are not contradictory. They are two halves of the same fear. Closeness is wanted, and closeness is dangerous, so the person swings between them.

For someone reading this who recognizes that swing in their own relationship, the useful takeaway is that the pattern is not a verdict on their worth or a sign they are incapable of love. It is a predictable response to an old lesson, which means it can be observed, named and worked with rather than simply endured.

Is attachment style a diagnosis?

Smith is careful about labels. Partway through the episode he pushes back on the impulse to treat attachment as a fixed clinical condition. Attachment, he suggests, is not a full diagnosis in the way a formal psychiatric category would be, and treating it as one can become its own trap, a story that tells a person something is wrong with them and stops there. The point of naming a style is to see a pattern clearly enough to move it, not to file a person away.

This connects to the optimism Groves expresses in his introduction. The episode is built on the premise that transformation is possible, and that a learned response can be unlearned. "Transformation is possible for everybody," Groves says at the start of the conversation, and the trust framework Smith describes later is meant as a practical map for how that happens between two people, not only within one.

What is the four-level model of trust?

The published description of the episode includes a four-level framework that frames trust as something built in stages rather than declared in a single moment. It is worth reading as a sequence, since each level depends on the one before it:

• Level 1: Consistent and self-policing with a specific code of honor. Trust starts with reliability. Each partner keeps their word and holds themselves to standards they can name, without needing to be monitored.
• Level 2: Long-term life goal. The relationship is oriented toward a shared future that both people are actually working toward, not a vague hope.
• Level 3: Mutual acceptance. Each person is accepted as they are, including the parts that trigger the other, rather than being held to a version they must keep performing.
• Level 4: Mutual fulfillment. Both people get their needs met inside the relationship, so that connection is sustained by mutual benefit rather than one person's accommodation.

Read against the avoidant pattern, the sequence has a logic. A person who fears intimacy often cannot leap to acceptance or fulfillment, because those require letting another person see them fully. The first level asks for something smaller and more concrete: being consistent, keeping small promises, and holding oneself accountable. That is where a fearful or avoidant person can start building evidence, for themselves, that closeness does not automatically lead to harm. The later levels become possible only once that evidence accumulates.

Where to go from here

This conversation is most useful as a starting point rather than a finished prescription. If the avoidant pattern in this article sounds familiar, the most direct next step is to listen to the full episode, where Smith goes deeper into how a person in this pattern can start building self-awareness, and where the closing segments carry the practical lessons Groves flags as the most valuable. Smith also hosts the podcast I Wish You Knew and maintains a YouTube channel and website where he continues to talk about secure attachment, boundaries and direct communication.

For readers who want to keep exploring, the episode's description points to a searchable archive of Groves's episodes, which can be found through his Dexa page at dexa.ai/markgroves. The larger lesson of the conversation is the one both men return to: attachment patterns are learned, they can be seen, and they can be changed, one consistent act at a time.