Disorganized Attachment Style In People of Colour & How To Deal With It 

Disorganized attachment style is characterized by conflicting and unpredictable behaviors in relationships — and for many Black and Brown people, it didn’t begin with a single traumatic event.

It began in the ordinary, relentless experience of growing up in environments where emotional needs were either unsafe to express, unaffordable to meet, or met with unpredictability that left the nervous system permanently on guard.

Between TikTok therapists and your own observations, you may already know the different kinds of attachment styles.  If you don’t know the type of attachment style you have, take this quiz.

You may have even half-diagnosed yourself based on traits you’ve noticed – building walls when you enter a loving relationship, not wanting anyone to come emotionally closer, pulling back right when things start to feel good.

Perhaps you’ve noticed certain patterns or similar patterns within your relationships here, and having the words that go with them might help you work things out better. 

Here are the questions this blog answers:

🤎Do I have a disorganized attachment style, and how does being from a Black and Brown family affect it?

🤎How do I heal disorganized attachment style?

🤎How to deal with disorganized attachment in platonic relationships

Those are the questions on your mind, right? See, I know you☺️.

Roots of Disorganized Attachment Style

Disorganized attachment style forms in childhood when the source of fear is ALSO the source of safety. 

When caregivers rotate between love and neglect — warm one hour, frightening the next — they create an environment so unpredictable that the child’s brain cannot form a coherent strategy for getting their needs met.

With anxious attachment, the child learns to cling to people. 

With avoidant attachment, the child learns to withdraw. 

But disorganized attachment is a mix of anxious and avoidant attachment styles, and as I said earlier, it’s when the source of fear is also the source of safety. 

You can’t move toward the person who hurts you. You can’t move away from the person you need to survive.

So the brain thinks: “I need you, but you might hurt me.”

This creates a fearful-avoidant pattern in adulthood of a push-pull dynamic, like craving closeness but feeling deeply scared when it gets “too real,” being hypervigilant to rejection and criticism. 

If you’re the partner on the receiving end of this, you may find it useful to know that when someone with disorganized attachment is pulling away but still engaging, even minimally, it’s usually not over. 

It’s the attachment system doing what it was trained to do.

The worst thing you can do is mirror the withdrawal and disappear. 

Give space, hold your boundaries, but don’t vanish. 

Your consistency — especially through the moments when it would be easier to withdraw — is some of the most important data their nervous system will ever receive.

And if you’re the one pulling away: this loop is not your fault. It is your nervous system trying to protect you from what once hurt you.

The problem is that it’s using childhood tools to manage adult relationships – and those tools are costing you the kind of connections you value.

Is It Disorganized Attachment Or Something Else?

Several mental health conditions overlap with disorganized attachment style, and getting the distinction right matters because the treatment paths differ significantly.

Bipolar disorder, like disorganized attachment, can be rooted in the fear of abandonment, intense emotions, and push-pull relational dynamics. 

How do you tell the difference? 

Two things: how severely it disrupts your functioning across every domain of life, and the intensity and pattern of the emotional responses themselves. A good clinician can help you distinguish them.

If we’re talking about impulsivity and inconsistency in relationships, ADHD shares surface similarities with disorganized attachment, too.

However,  the origin of ADHD is neurological, and attachment work alone won’t touch executive function. 

Then there’s autism.

Autistic people who’ve spent years masking develop relationship patterns that read as attachment-insecure — the constant monitoring, the post-social exhaustion, the unintentional outbursts from misread cues. 

This is not the same condition and does not respond to the same intervention.

What Disorganized Attachment Feels Like Across Ages & Relationship Types

Adolescence

Some of what made a person fearful-avoidant was, at the time, labeled as dramatic and overly sensitive. In BIPOC households, particularly, emotional expressiveness in children is often disciplined because the adults themselves had no room to feel, and had no model for holding a child’s feelings without getting uncomfortable.

So the teenager, left to figure things out on their own, builds a pattern of pursuing friendships that overextend them. A lot of oversharing is going on. They develop little to no emotional regulation skills. They end up getting burned in relationships. 

In early adulthood

By adulthood, the person who was called too sensitive is now well-read and has a name for the feeling. Then they go through a relationship that mimics how they felt during their childhood, and feel drawn to people who either make them feel anxious or could also make them feel avoidant 

And after that comes the slow, sickening realization: they may be the common denominator.

In midlife

Midlife, unaddressed disorganized attachment may begin to feel permanent. 

There may be a long partnership that’s lacking in intimacy. 

Or a pattern of relationships that never made it past a certain point, each one ending where the last one did.

Disorganized Attachment in Platonic Relationships

Romantic relationships aren’t the only relationships affected by disorganized attachment styles. 

In friendships, disorganized attachment may look like being intense too quickly, oversharing too fast, and withdrawing just as fast.

It can look like being loyal to friends who are chaotic and unreliable, unconsciously recreating the unpredictability of your upbringing. 

In family relationships, going home has its own category of triggers. 

Probably, the original attachment figures are still there. 

The nervous system adaptations built specifically for this environment, for this person’s tone of voice, and moods, are still intact.

Yes,  having a disorganized attachment can make you hypervigilant/aware of changes and moods, which means your caregiver’s tone can undo years of work in thirty seconds flat. 

Let’s look at queer relationships, too, where there’s often an additional layer of hiding, masking, and suppressing yourself.

What looks like fearful-avoidant withdrawal in a queer relationship often is a defense mechanism built long before this partner arrived. 

If you’re in an intercultural or mixed-background partnership, what counts as closeness, appropriate disclosure, repair, or conflict often differs between partners in ways that activate attachment on both sides. 

Your partner, who grew up hearing “you have to work twice as hard to get half of what they have,” learned early that their worth is earned from being perfect.

They have grown to numb their emotions so any conflict to them signals abandonment. 

Disorganized attachment in these contexts means misalignment stings harder and makes any type of therapeutic progress, and working with culturally attuned therapists in Calgary can be incredibly helpful.

Therapy Modalities for Healing From Disorganized Attachment Styles

Disorganized attachment responds particularly well to the therapeutic relationship because the therapeutic relationship is itself the intervention. 

Over time, you have the experience of being known by someone consistently – and not hurt for it.

That experience, when repeated, teaches the nervous system that closeness is survivable.

1. EMDR: EMDR uses bilateral stimulation — typically guided eye movements — to help the brain reprocess these stored responses. What this does, practically, is reduce the charge attached to your childhood memories so that present-day triggers no longer carry the full weight of the original memory.

2. Somatic Therapy:  Unlike traditional talk therapy, somatic therapy engages bodily sensations to uncover and address emotional trauma tied to attachment problems.

3. IFS (Internal Family Systems) addresses the internal split directly: the part that wants closeness and the part that’s terrified of it. Rather than trying to eliminate either, IFS works to understand both as protectors with valid origins, which, for most people with disorganized attachment, significantly reduces the shame load.

4. Attachment-focused therapy: For someone with disorganized attachment, the most therapeutic thing that can happen is a relationship that keeps showing up, e.g., the consistency of seeing the same therapist, week after week.

   At Ashay Therapy, this is the work we do — with BIPOC clients, first-generation Canadians, and adults who’ve been carrying this particular kind of exhaustion for longer than they should have had to. And we can help you get matched up with a therapist who would be the best fit for you with this 1-minute form. 

Low-Cost Therapy Options for Disorganized Attachment Style Work  in Calgary

Every person who got very good at not needing anyone also got very good at not feeling much at all — and called it being strong.

This matters before we round up because if you’re braced against feeling, the practices become another performance of coping rather than regulation. 

For low-cost and sliding-scale therapy options in Calgary, we’ve put together a full guide here. 

There are more options than most people realize, and working with a therapist who understands your culture doesn’t have to be out of reach.

In my clinical work as a Black therapist in Calgary, I can tell you that disorganized attachment doesn’t go away by eliminating the pattern.

The pull to withdraw will still come. But, over time, you learn to act on it less automatically. You repair more quickly when you do act on it. 

If you backslide, please don’t see it as a failure.

Rather, treat it as information, e.g., “my nervous system was dysregulated beyond my current capacity”.

The question after a backslide is not “Why am I still like this?”

It is: “What was I dealing with when this happened, and what do I need to build more capacity here?”

Learning how to self-soothe or recognize what part of you is activated and using it as information, like “do I need self-soothing?  Or is this my attachment in play? 

This matters because one of the most damaging things you can do on this path is measure yourself against a standard of perfection that was never meant for people like us. 

Many Black and Brown people were told to be strong, to work twice as hard, to need nothing — and underneath all of it was a message: earn your worthiness. 

The correction for this is to accept that you are not perfect. And to accept that you are still worthy of love, regardless.

Ashay Therapy works with People of Colour navigating life with different attachment styles. 

Your first consultation is on us.  Get matched up with a therapist