Three Attachment Styles: Anxious, Dismissive-Avoidant, and

Fearful-Avoidant

Attachment language can get confusing. There are three common attachment patterns people talk about.

One is anxious attachment. This is when connection really matters to you. You're very aware of other people's feelings, you work hard to keep relationships steady, and you worry about being left or not being enough.

Then there's the fearful-avoidant, sometimes called anxious-avoidant. This is when someone wants closeness but also fears it. They pull people close to them and then push them away when it feels overwhelming.

And the third one is dismissive-avoidant attachment. This is when emotions and closeness feel uncomfortable or unnecessary. The person avoids emotional conversations, downplays connection, and relies heavily on themselves while expecting others to adjust.



Today, I'm focusing specifically on dismissive-avoidant behaviour as a pattern, and how it shows up in the relationships scapegoats often find themselves in, with parents, partners, or siblings who use emotional distance as control.

What Dismissive-Avoidant Behavior Looks Like in Your Relationships

If you're a scapegoat, you likely grew up around people who seemed calm, steady, and self-contained on the surface. They said things like, "I'm fine," "I don't need much," or "I've got this." Their independence felt reassuring.

But over time, something felt missing. Emotions weren't talked about much. Conversations stayed on the surface, and when feelings came up, they were passed over, the subject changed, or the conversation ended early. The emotional weight in the relationship became unbalanced, leaving you carrying all the feelings, all the repair work, all the responsibility for connection.

This wasn't random. This is dismissive-avoidant behaviour — and when you're the scapegoat, you've been on the receiving end of it for years. Here is how to notice the pattern.

People with dismissive-avoidant behaviours often turn to work or staying busy as a way to avoid emotional connection. They handle things on their own, keep their struggles private, and stay focused on tasks, routines, or projects — even in close relationships.

The work itself isn't the issue. It becomes dismissive when it's used to stay emotionally unavailable, leaving you to carry the emotional conversations, the repair, and the responsibility for keeping the relationship connected. Emotional check-ins stopped happening. Date nights get pushed aside. Conversations stay practical and task-focused. And the relationship begins to feel like closeness is no longer a shared priority. 

Another difficult part of dismissive avoidance is the inconsistency. Early on, the relationship probably felt warm and fuzzy. Connection came naturally, and closeness didn't feel complicated. But as you tried to deepen the relationship — as you asked for more honesty, more presence, more emotional availability — the dismissive avoidant person started to pull back. Becoming quieter, less available, and spending more time elsewhere.

Conflict is often where this pattern becomes most visible and most damaging. When emotions rise or problems need to be talked through, dismissive-avoidant behaviour shows up as shutting down. Conversations get cut short. Topics change. They leave the room or act like everything is fine when it clearly isn't. 

What makes this especially hard for you, as the scapegoat, is that the repair doesn't happen. The issue isn't talked through later. There's no checking back in. No reassurance. No acknowledgment of what happened. And over time, that creates deep uncertainty in the relationship.

You start walking on eggshells. You don't know what's okay to bring up or how to fix things once distance shows up. You begin to doubt your own perceptions, your own needs, your own right to feel hurt. And slowly, you end up stuck — they're protecting themselves with distance, and you're left longing for connection that never comes.

This Isn't About You - It's About the Pattern

Here's what's important to understand: This pattern isn't about you being too much, too sensitive, or too needy.

People with dismissive-avoidant patterns learned early on that emotional closeness doesn't feel safe. Many of them tried to speak up, share needs, and open up — sometimes carefully, sometimes awkwardly. But when those moments were met with escalation, shutdown, or being walked away from, their system learned something simple: trying didn't feel safe.

So the distance that follows isn't necessarily about not caring. It's about their self-protection. But here's where it matters for you: Their self-protection became your burden. You became the one responsible for all the emotional labour. All the bridge-building. All the reaching out. All the wondering if this time would be different.

And when you're the scapegoat, this dynamic gets weaponized. The emotional withdrawal isn't just protection — it becomes punishment. It becomes a way to keep you off-balance, questioning yourself, and working harder to earn the connection that should have been freely given.

No one is saying the people in your life are trying to hurt you on purpose. But when protection replaces communication, and repair doesn't happen, connection becomes impossible to sustain. Recognizing dismissive-avoidant behaviour for what it is — a pattern, not a personal failure on your part — gives you permission to stop carrying the entire relationship on your shoulders. It gives you permission to step back. To protect yourself. To stop wondering if you're too much, and start asking if they're offering enough.

When I Finally Stopped Believing "I'm Just Better at This"

Last night's boundary moment wasn't an isolated incident. It was one more example of a pattern I've been living with for years.

The thing about dismissive-avoidant behaviour is that it rarely shows up as one big, obvious moment. It shows up in a thousand small ways that slowly make you question whether you're seeing what you're actually seeing. This is what it looks like for me.

I buy all the birthday cards and Christmas presents because I'm told I "pick the best ones." I manage all the finances because if the other person handled it, they say they'd "spend all the money." I plan every single meal. I change the sheets on the bed while they act like they don't know how. They'll take care of one task, but somehow the next one is a mystery. They don't clean the house because I "do a better job." Even getting the mail somehow became my job.

Each one of these things sounds small on its own. Reasonable, even. Who doesn't want the person with better taste to pick the cards? Who wouldn't let the more organized person handle the finances?  But the exhausting part of this behaviour? I started believing it. That I actually WAS better at these things. That may be I WAS too particular.  That I should just be grateful he does the one thing he does: work. That's what this pattern does - it makes you doubt your own reality.

But here's what I finally understood. This isn't about capability. It's about avoidance. Every single one of these tasks requires something the other person doesn't want to give: attention, planning, emotional presence, and follow-through. These aren't just chores. They're acts of care. They're how relationships actually work.

When someone consistently positions themselves as incapable of the basic work of maintaining a household and a relationship, they're not being honest about their limits. They're avoiding shared responsibility.

And what makes it dismissive-avoidant specifically is what happens when I try to talk about the imbalance. I don't get acknowledgment. I don't get change. Instead, I get deflection. Sarcasm. "You're so good at it though." "I thought you liked doing that." "Why are you making this such a big deal?" The message underneath is always the same: Your need for a relationship is unreasonable. My distance is your problem to manage.

And here's what makes this so insidious for scapegoats - this is the same dynamic we grew up with. Being told our needs were unreasonable. Being positioned as "too much" while carrying everything. The pattern just followed us into adulthood.

That's what I saw clearly last night when I set a boundary around my work time. The same pattern that shows up in laundry, meals, and birthday cards showed up there too — avoid, deflect, and make it my issue.

I can't change how someone else shows up. But I can change how much of myself I give to a dynamic that keeps asking me to be smaller.

As I've been working through this, I've held onto five grounding truths that keep me steady. I'm sharing them with you because if you're recognizing this pattern in your own life, these might help you, too.

Five Grounding Truths That Changed How I Protect Myself Around Dismissive-Avoidant Behaviour

Grounding Truth 1: Understanding a pattern doesn’t mean you have to tolerate it.

You can understand why someone avoids emotional accountability and still decide that the way they show up doesn’t work for you. 

Grounding Truth 2: Boundaries don’t create problems — they reveal them.

When you stop over-explaining, fixing, or carrying all the emotional weight, people show you what they’re capable of. Boundaries don’t push people away. They simply make it clearer who can meet you where you are and who can’t.

Grounding Truth 3: Emotional distance is information, not a verdict on your worth.

When someone stays on the surface, avoids real connection, or dismisses your feelings, that tells you something about their capacity. It does not mean you’re too much, too needy, or not enough. “They can’t go there” is very different from “I’m not worth going there for.”

Grounding Truth 4: Self-soothing is not the same thing as self-silencing.

Yes, learning to calm yourself, pause, and respond instead of react is healthy. But that doesn’t mean talking yourself out of your needs just to keep the peace. You can regulate your nervous system and still say, “This doesn’t work for me.”

Grounding Truth 5: You don’t need the other person to understand or agree to make a healthy choice.

You don’t have to wait for insight, validation, or the perfect conversation to decide what’s right for you. Sometimes the most meaningful change isn’t finding better words — it’s stepping away from a dynamic that keeps asking you to prove your worth.

How To Model This Healthy Behaviour for Your Kids

Our kids are always watching how we handle our relationships — especially the hard parts. They don’t just learn from what we say. They learn from what we tolerate. They learn from what we explain away. And they learn from what we quietly carry on our own.

When a child sees you notice that something doesn't feel right in a relationship - even if you can't name it yet - they learn that feelings matter. When they see you set a boundary without yelling, blaming, or shutting down, they learn that self-respect doesn't have to be dramatic. You're showing them that it's okay to say, "This doesn't work for me," without needing to convince, argue, or prove anything.

You don't need to have all the language figured out. You don't need to explain attachment theory to your kids. You just need to model what it looks like to trust your own instincts when something feels off. When you say, "I need quiet time to work and it's not okay to interrupt me unless it's urgent" - that's modelling boundaries. When you stop doing everything and let some things go undone - that's modelling that you're not responsible for carrying it all. Your kids don't need you to be an expert on dismissive-avoidant patterns.

They need to see you stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace.

Conclusion

If you've recognized dismissive-avoidant behaviour in a parent, partner, sibling, or someone else close to you, I want you to know something important. You're not imagining it. You're not being too sensitive. You're not asking for too much. You're finally seeing a pattern that's been shaping your relationships for years, maybe your whole life. And seeing it is the first step toward protecting yourself.

This isn't about fixing the other person. It's not about making them understand or getting them to change. It's about giving yourself permission to stop carrying the entire relationship on your shoulders. It's about recognizing that when someone consistently avoids emotional connection, minimizes your needs, and deflects accountability, that tells you something about their capacity, not your worth.

Those five grounding truths we talked about earlier? They're not just ideas - they're tools you can come back to every single time you start doubting yourself. Every time you wonder if you're being unreasonable. Every time that old voice tells you, maybe you should just try harder.

Because understanding a pattern doesn't mean you have to tolerate it.

"Remember, change begins with ourselves.

Put your knowledge into action and reach your full potential ."

Wishing you heartfelt warmth 

Kate/Gramma Kate