When Love Feels too Risky: Understanding the Push-Pull Pattern, How It Impacts Adult Relationships, and How Therapy in Los Angeles Can Help
Disorganized attachment is one of the most complex and deeply misunderstood attachment styles, and not because something is wrong with you, but because something chaotic happened to you. When someone grows up in an environment where love is intertwined with fear, unpredictability or emotional instability, the nervous system does what it must to survive. It learns to stay on guard. It learns that closeness can feel dangerous. And it learns to move toward connection and away from connection at the exact same time.
If you’re someone who desperately wants intimacy but feels overwhelmed once it arrives or you notice yourself craving closeness one minute and shutting down the next, you’re not confusing or dramatic. You’re not “too much.” You may simply be living with the long-term effects of disorganized attachment. And the beautiful news? These patterns can be healed through trauma-informed individual therapy in Los Angeles, couples therapy or online therapy in California.
Let’s take a deeper walk into where disorganized attachment comes from, why the nervous system reacts this way, how it plays out in adult relationships, and how therapy helps you create steadier, safer, more grounded connection.
Understanding Attachment Styles
Attachment styles are essentially the emotional blueprint formed between you and your earliest caregivers. The way they responded (or didn’t respond) to your needs shapes how your nervous system learns to relate to closeness, love, conflict, and safety.
- Anxious attachment forms when a caregiver is inconsistent, sometimes loving, sometimes unavailable – leading to fear of abandonment.
- Avoidant attachment forms when a caregiver is emotionally distant or dismissive, leading the child to minimize needs to stay safe.
- Disorganized attachment forms when a caregiver is both a source of comfort and a source of fear. This is the most chaotic blueprint of all because the nervous system doesn’t know which direction to go. On one hand, there’s a strong need for connection, support, and love. On the other, there’s a deep-rooted fear of getting too close because closeness might have once meant pain, punishment, rejection, or neglect.
Think of attachment as the original “relationship software” coded into your brain and body. Disorganized attachment means the software was written inside a storm.
What Causes Disorganized Attachment?
Disorganized attachment is almost always rooted in early experiences where safety was inconsistent, unpredictable or completely absent. And here’s the important thing: the caregiver didn’t have to be a “bad parent.” They may have been overwhelmed, traumatized themselves, struggling with mental health issues or simply emotionally unavailable in ways you couldn’t understand as a child.
Common early experiences include:
- Caregivers who were unpredictable as loving one moment and furious the next
- Caregivers who were frightening or easily triggered
- Homes where there was yelling, chaos, substance misuse or untreated mental illness
- Emotional neglect or chronic misattunement
- Caregivers who mocked or dismissed the child’s distress
- Parents who shut down, dissociated or oscillated between extremes
To the child’s brain, the lesson becomes:
“I need you… but I’m not safe with you.”
This emotional contradiction is too overwhelming for a young brain to make sense of, so the nervous system develops disorganized strategies that made perfect sense back then but often feel painful now.
The Neuroscience Behind Disorganized Attachment
Let’s bring in the brain, because this is where the story gets clearer and more compassionate.
When a child experiences a caregiver as frightening or unpredictable, the brain’s alarm system (the amygdala) becomes highly sensitive. It learns to scan for danger constantly. Cortisol, the stress hormone, tends to run high. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, reflection, and interpreting cues accurately, becomes harder to activate under stress.
Over time, the nervous system wires itself into survival mode:
- Hyperactivation (panic, anxiety, overthinking, emotional intensity)
- Deactivation (shutdown, dissociation, numbness)
- Or rapid oscillation between the two
This means that in adult relationships, a moment of conflict or vulnerability can trigger a full-body threat response. Your system doesn’t think, “We’re having a disagreement.” It thinks, “I’m unsafe,” even if the threat is not actually present.
Understanding this is so freeing:
Your reactions aren’t character flaws, they are nervous system patterns learned in chaos.
How Disorganized Attachment Affects Adult Relationships
When the nervous system holds both the desire for connection and the fear of connection, relationships can feel emotionally exhausting. You might notice yourself swinging between extremes as many clients describe as emotional whiplash.
Here’s what it can look like:
- Craving closeness but panicking when intimacy deepens– You might long for love, reassurance, closeness, but the moment someone really sees you or depends on you, you feel triggered, overwhelmed or suffocated. Your body might react even faster than your mind can track.
- Difficulty trusting even a stable, loving partner– Your brain may watch for the “shift,” the moment things go wrong. You might test, pull away, shut down, or analyze everything your partner does, not because you want to sabotage things, but because your brain is trying to protect you.
- Feeling both “too much” and “not enough”– People with disorganized attachment often feel unlovable and overly intense at the same time, a painful contradiction that makes relationships feel high-stakes.
- Becoming reactive in conflict– Conflict can feel like danger even when it isn’t. That’s why arguments can escalate quickly or leave you wanting to disappear.
- Dissociation or emotional numbness– When things get too overwhelming, your nervous system might shut down completely just to survive the emotional intensity.
- Choosing emotionally unavailable partners– This happens because instability feels familiar, and the nervous system confuses the familiar with the safe. These patterns aren’t about willpower. They’re about wiring. And wiring can be gently, consistently rewired.
It’s a painful cycle: you want to feel safe with someone, but your nervous system tells you not to trust it. Therapy can help you interrupt this pattern and move toward something more secure.
How Therapy in Los Angeles Helps You Heal Disorganized Attachment
Healing disorganized attachment is absolutely possible, and it often begins with one steady, emotionally safe relationship: the therapeutic one.
Whether in individual therapy in Hermosa Beach, couples therapy in Redondo Beach, or online therapy across California, therapy helps you:
- 1. Understand your attachment story– We trace where the patterns began and how they show up today, without shame or self-blame.
- 2. Build regulation skills that calm the nervous system– You learn what safety actually feels like in your body and not just in your mind.
- 3. Develop emotional tolerance– You practice staying present with hard feelings instead of shutting down or spiraling.
- 4. Rewire old relational patterns through corrective emotional experiences– The steady, reliable presence of a therapist begins to teach your brain a new template for safety.
- 5. Grow a more secure internal world– Over time, you learn that connection doesn’t have to feel dangerous, unpredictable or overwhelming. This process is gentle, relational, and deeply transformative.
Why Couples Therapy in South Bay Can Be Especially Helpful
If you’re in a relationship, couples therapy in Hermosa Beach and across the South Bay can be life-changing. Disorganized attachment often makes relationships feel like emotional minefields not because of lack of love, but because the nervous system is reacting to old wounds.
In couples therapy, you and your partner learn how to:
1. Create emotional safety together
You practice communication that doesn’t trigger fear, shame, or shutdown.
2. Understand each other’s attachment patterns
Partners often stop taking things so personally once they understand the “why.”
3. Co-regulate during conflict
This is huge for healing attachment wounds. You learn how to calm each other instead of accidentally activating old trauma responses.
4. Repair after ruptures
People with disorganized attachment often fear that conflict means abandonment. Learning repair builds resilience.
5. Build consistent connection
Through therapy, couples learn predictable routines of care, comfort, and responsiveness that help the avoidant side feel safe and the anxious side feel secure.
Couples therapy doesn’t just help the relationship; it helps the nervous system rewrite its old story about love.
You Can Heal. Your Attachment Style Is Not Your Destiny.
Whether you’re working through disorganized attachment, navigating old relational wounds or trying to build a healthier partnership, you don’t have to keep doing it alone. With support, safety, and consistent therapeutic work, you can move toward earned secure attachment: the grounded, steady version of love your nervous system never got to learn.
If you’re ready to heal, whether through therapy in Hermosa Beach, across the South Bay or online therapy across California, I’m here to help you build relationships that feel safe, warm, and truly nourishing.
Healing is absolutely within reach, and you deserve relationships that don’t feel like survival mode.
