The Anxious Avoidant Trap

Depth-oriented couples therapy in Boulder for couples stuck in pursuer-distancer cycles

(This is part of a series on anxious-avoidant relationship patterns. For a comprehensive overview, see Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Patterns.)

You've had this fight before.

Not a version of it. Not something similar. This exact fight — the same words, the same escalation, the same hollow resolution that leaves you both wondering how you ended up here again.

If you're in an anxious-avoidant dynamic, repetition isn't a sign of failure. It's a sign that something deeper is running the show. Understanding what that something is — and why awareness alone rarely stops it — is where real change begins.

The anxious-avoidant trap follows a predictable sequence, even when the surface content changes.

Something triggers one partner — a canceled plan, a distracted response, a moment of emotional distance. The anxiously attached partner feels the shift and moves toward: asking questions, seeking reassurance, pushing for connection. The avoidantly attached partner feels the pressure and moves away: going quiet, withdrawing, needing space to regulate.

The pursuit intensifies the withdrawal. The withdrawal intensifies the pursuit. Both responses make complete sense from the inside. Both responses make the other person's worst fear worse.

Eventually something breaks the tension — an apology, a moment of reconnection, sheer exhaustion. Things stabilize. Until the next trigger.

To understand each side of this dynamic more deeply, see What Is Anxious Attachment? and What Is Avoidant Attachment?.

Because the fight was never really about what it appeared to be about.

Arguments about dishes, about sex, about how much time one partner spends with friends — these are rarely about dishes, sex, or friends. They're about the deeper question running underneath: Are you there for me? Am I safe here? Do I matter to you?

When that question goes unanswered — or gets answered in the wrong direction — the nervous system responds before the rational mind has a chance to intervene. The cycle doesn't start with a decision. It starts with a feeling that moves faster than thought.

Many couples arrive at therapy having already done the reading. They know about attachment theory. They can identify the pursuer and the distancer. They understand, intellectually, exactly what's happening.

And they're still stuck.

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of the anxious-avoidant trap: awareness doesn't automatically translate into change. You can watch yourself doing the thing, name it in real time, and still be unable to stop.

That's not a personal failure. It's neurobiology.

The attachment system operates below conscious awareness. When threat is detected — and in an anxious-avoidant dynamic, threat gets detected early and often — the nervous system responds faster than cognition. By the time the thought arrives ("I'm doing it again"), you're already three moves into the cycle.

This is something Keri Signoracci, LPCC sees consistently in her Boulder couples therapy practice. Couples come in articulate about their patterns, clear on the dynamic, and still unable to interrupt it in the moment. The problem isn't understanding. It's that understanding lives in the cortex, and the cycle lives somewhere older and faster.

This is also why communication tools so often fall short. Scripts and strategies assume a level of regulation that isn't available in the heat of activation. The anxiously attached partner can't slow down and use "I statements" when their nervous system is signaling abandonment. The avoidantly attached partner can't stay present and engaged when every cell in their body is pushing toward exit.

The tools aren't wrong. The sequence is wrong.

There's another layer to the trap that rarely gets discussed: the role the pattern itself plays in the relationship's architecture.

Over time, couples develop unspoken agreements about who holds which position. One person pursues. One person withdraws. These roles become load-bearing walls — familiar, predictable, and surprisingly difficult to change even when both people genuinely want to.

When the anxiously attached partner tries to stop pursuing — to give space, to pull back, to stop asking — it doesn't feel like growth. It feels like self-abandonment. Like proving they don't matter.

When the avoidantly attached partner tries to move toward — to stay present, to reach out first, to tolerate the discomfort of closeness — it doesn't feel like connection. It feels threatening. Overwhelming. Like losing themselves entirely.

Each person's protective strategy was developed for good reason. The anxiously attached partner learned early that connection requires effort and vigilance — that love has to be pursued or it disappears. The avoidantly attached partner learned that closeness comes with cost — that needing people leads to disappointment or engulfment.

These aren't character flaws. They're adaptations. Intelligent responses to earlier relational experiences that got wired in long before conscious memory formed.

The trap is that strategies built for an earlier relationship are now running a current one. The nervous system doesn't distinguish between then and now. It responds to the present as though it were the past — because in its experience, the pattern is the same.

The anxious-avoidant trap doesn't break through willpower or better communication alone. It breaks when both partners develop the capacity to do something they've never been able to do together: slow down enough to see the pattern before it completes.

In her work with couples in Boulder, Keri draws on attachment theory, somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and psychoanalytic thinking to address the forces driving the cycle — not the surface behaviors, but the protective strategies underneath them. The approach integrates PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy) with a nervous system lens that tracks what's happening in the body before words even form.

This kind of work requires several things to come together:

Nervous system awareness before communication.Learning to recognize the early signs of activation — the tightening, the urgency, the shutdown — before the cycle has fully engaged. This is a somatic skill. It develops through practice, through being witnessed in the moment, through repeated experiences of catching it early.

Understanding your own protective strategy.The pursuit and the withdrawal aren't problems to eliminate. They're protective parts doing their best to keep each person safe. When you understand what your strategy is protecting against, you can begin to work with it rather than push against it.

New relational experiences, not more insight.The nervous system changes through experience. Moments of genuine repair — small instances where the feared outcome doesn't happen, where reaching out is met with presence, where needing space doesn't signal the end — these are what create new patterns over time. Understanding why the cycle happens is a starting point. Having a different experience inside it is what changes it.

Both partners seeing the pattern as the problem.One of the most significant shifts in couples therapy happens when two people stop experiencing each other as the adversary and start experiencing the dynamic as what they're working against together. This reorientation changes the entire texture of how conflict feels.

The anxious-avoidant trap is symmetrical. Neither partner is doing it wrong. Both are responding to what their nervous system perceives as threat.

The pursuer isn't "too needy." They're someone whose attachment system learned that connection requires vigilance to maintain.

The withdrawer isn't "emotionally unavailable." They're someone whose attachment system learned that closeness comes with cost.

Both people are, in their own way, trying to protect the relationship. The tragedy is that the protection strategies work against each other — each response triggering the other's deepest fear.

Seeing this clearly — really seeing it, feeling it, not merely understanding it intellectually — is often the first genuine turning point for couples in this dynamic.

The cycle doesn't have to keep running on its own momentum.

Couples who do deeper work don't typically eliminate the pattern entirely — the attachment wiring doesn't disappear. They develop something more valuable: the ability to see it coming. To recognize the early signals. To interrupt the sequence before it completes. To repair more quickly when it does.

Over time, the fights become shorter. The recovery becomes faster. The pattern loosens its grip — not because it's been suppressed, but because both partners have built enough safety together that the old threat signals stop firing as loudly.

The relationship stops being a place where old wounds get re-enacted and starts becoming a place where they get healed.

Why do I keep having the same argument with my partner over and over?

Repetitive arguments in anxious-avoidant relationships rarely reflect poor communication — they reflect unresolved attachment patterns running beneath the surface. The same fight keeps happening because the underlying question (Am I safe here? Do I matter? Will you leave?) never gets answered directly. The content changes. The nervous system response doesn't.

Why does my partner shut down when I try to talk about our relationship?

Shutdown is a nervous system response, not a choice. For partners with avoidant attachment, emotional intensity or requests for closeness can feel physiologically overwhelming. The withdrawal isn't rejection — it's self-protection against a perceived threat of engulfment or emotional flooding. Understanding this can shift the frame from "they don't care" to "they're activated and don't know how to stay present yet."

Why do I feel more anxious the more my partner pulls away?

This is the core of the anxious-avoidant cycle. The avoidant partner's withdrawal triggers the anxious partner's attachment system, which interprets distance as abandonment threat. The nervous system responds with escalation — more pursuit, more reassurance-seeking — which confirms the avoidant partner's need for space. Each person's protective response activates the other's deepest fear.

Can you love someone and still keep hurting them?

Yes. And this is one of the most painful aspects of anxious-avoidant dynamics. Both partners typically have genuine love and genuine commitment. The hurt doesn't come from malice — it comes from protective strategies that were formed before this relationship existed, now running in a context they weren't built for.

Why do we feel close after a fight but then it happens again?

The temporary relief after conflict — the repair, the reconnection, the sense of "we're okay" — is real. But it doesn't address the underlying pattern that generated the fight. Without working at the level of the attachment strategies and nervous system responses driving the cycle, the conditions for the next fight remain intact. The intimacy after conflict can actually reinforce the cycle if it becomes the primary way the couple accesses closeness.

Is the pursuer always anxiously attached and the distancer always avoidant?

Not necessarily. While this is the most common configuration, roles can shift depending on context, history, and what's being triggered. Some people pursue in romantic relationships but distance in conflict. Some couples find their roles reverse over time or in different domains of the relationship. The labels matter less than understanding the underlying nervous system states and attachment fears driving each person's behavior.

My partner says I'm too sensitive. Are they right?

Sensitivity in anxious attachment isn't a character flaw — it's a finely tuned nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do: detect early signs of disconnection and respond. Whether that sensitivity is "too much" is the wrong question. The more useful question is: what is this sensitivity protecting against, and what would need to be different in the relationship for it to soften?

If you recognize this pattern in your relationship — the repetition, the exhaustion, the sense that you love each other but can't get out of your own way — depth-oriented couples therapy addresses the psychological forces underneath the cycle, not just the surface behaviors.

For a full overview of how this work approaches anxious-avoidant dynamics, see Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Patterns.

Schedule a free 20-minute consultation to explore whether this approach is right for your relationship.

Text: (303) 641-1514 Or book online: calendly.com/ksignoracci

Serving couples in Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, and throughout Boulder County, Colorado.

About the Author

Keri Signoracci, MA, LPCC is a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado. She holds advanced training in PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy), Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic therapy, and psychoanalytic approaches to couples work. Her practice, Coupling From the Core, specializes in depth-oriented therapy for anxious-avoidant dynamics, pursuer-distancer patterns, and attachment injuries in long-term relationships. She sees couples in Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, and throughout Boulder County.