Closeness feels like too much, yet you want to be seen, heard, and held in true connection. Deep down you still long for love that meets you in your most hidden places.

What is Avoidant Attachment?

When emotions come up, your immediate reaction is to step back, to create distance, to cope on your own. You trust yourself more than anyone else, guard your inner world carefully, and keep your deepest feelings hidden – even from yourself.

As a child, when you needed comfort, you were left on your own. When you felt joy or fear, perhaps it went unseen, unheard, criticized, or dismissed. Maybe it didn’t feel safe to say: I’m scared. I’m nervous. I don’t want to… No one was there to notice and mirror back your joy, your excitement, your fear, or your struggles. 

Without an attuned adult, you learned to close your heart, and tuck your feelings away, so you couldn’t be seen or hurt. You survived by becoming overly self-reliant and retreating into your own world – at the cost of not knowing how to resonate deeply with your own and others’ feelings.

This extreme self-reliance and retreat into yourself are avoidant defenses that once protected you. Now, these defenses keep you stuck in conflicts – such as:

• You long for connection but you’re also scared of it
• You need to feel alive, yet you numb your own emotions
• You want to be seen and known, but also hiding so you’re not seen

Avoidant defenses are not who you are, at your core. They are the echoes of a time when closeness and vulnerability felt unsafe. Beneath them is a self that still craves to feel, to resonate, to belong.

Deep down, you feel cut off – not only from others, but also from your own inner world. You may find yourself tense, disconnected from your emotions, or unable to fully experience the richness of closeness, love, and creativity.

As an adult, that protective distance leaves you longing for something more – connection, intimacy, aliveness – but unsure how to let it in. The lack of emotional resonance can feel like an invisible wall between you, others, your creativity, and the life you want.

Healing avoidant attachment is not about forcing yourself to open. It is about healing what was broken in those early years – so you can start to feel that intimacy can be safe and that emotions are not threats, but what can make you feel more alive and connected.

How Do You Know You Have Avoidant Attachment?

If you find yourself engaging in avoidant defensive strategies, that is a sign. These protective patterns often run on autopilot, outside your awareness. Some of these presentations are good indicators of avoidant attachment style:

• Needing space when emotions feel too much.
• Struggling to trust others fully, even in close relationships.
• Feeling safer relying on yourself than depending on someone else.
• Being uncomfortable with vulnerability, intimacy, or emotional closeness.
• Not understanding your feelings
• Feeling disconnected from your embodied emotional states
• Not feeling comfortable with your ownΩ or others emotions 
• Not expressing or sharing your emotions  

The tricky part is that the more you engage in old defensive strategies, the more you reinforce these old patterns, keeping you stuck in repeating old and rigid stories. 

Healing Avoidant Attachment 

In my approach at Creative Minds Psychotherapy, I integrate contemporary psychoanalytic therapy, relational neuroscience, EMDR therapy, and my own framework of Creative Emotional Space. Together, these approaches help you transform avoidant defenses into expanding your ability to connect, create, and thrive.

1. Psychoanalytic Therapy: Understanding the Roots

In-depth, psychoanalytic therapy helps uncover the unconscious stories and early experiences that shaped your avoidant style. Together, we explore:

• How early relational wounds shaped your mistrust of closeness.
• The protective strategies you developed to feel safe.
• Unconscious fears that make intimacy feel threatening.

Through this process, what was once hidden becomes more conscious – so you can begin to integrate old experiences and let go of the defenses that are keeping you stuck. With time you can start to choose connection instead of reflexive retreating and unhealthy self-reliance.

2. Relational Neuroscience: Healing Through Attunement

Healing avoidant attachment isn’t intellectual; it’s a deeply embodied process. Using insights from affective and relational neuroscience, therapy becomes a safe emotional space where:

• Your nervous system learns that closeness can be safe.
• Emotional signals that once triggered withdrawal are re-experienced in an attuned, supportive relationship.
• You develop the capacity to tolerate and even enjoy vulnerability.
• You become more open and spontaneous in sharing yourself with others

This attuned therapeutic relationship rewires your nervous system over time, creating lasting shifts.

3. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)Therapy: Reprocessing Core Wounds

Avoidant defenses are often rooted in traumatic or overwhelming relational experiences. A specialized for of EMDR therapy for avoidant attachment, called Attachment-EMDR, for relational trauma, can help you: 

• Safely access painful memories without being flooded.
• Reprocess and release the emotional charge connected to early relational trauma.
• Take in a healthier imprint: “It’s safe to be close.” “I can trust and be trusted.” “I am worthy of love as I am.”

Because EMDR works with the brain’s natural healing mechanisms, it allows avoidant defenses to soften in a profound, embodied way.

4. Creative Emotional Space: Reconnecting With Your Creative Self

My Creative Emotional Space approach makes room for you to reconnect with your authentic emotions, relational longings, and creativity – which are all intimately connected. This space allows you to:

• Explore parts of yourself that were hidden or cut off to maintain self-protection.
• Experience emotional freedom in intimacy and creativity – which no longer feels threatening.
• Build a new sense of self rooted in connection, presence, and expression.

For creatives, this process often unlocks blocked inspiration, restores emotional flow, and allows your creative work to feel alive again.

The Healing Journey For Avoidant Attachment 

Healing avoidant attachment is not about “fixing” yourself – it’s about gently dismantling defenses that once kept you safe, so you can reconnect with your essence and experience the full depth of love, connection, and creativity available to you now.

With psychoanalytic therapy to understand your story, relational neuroscience to rewire your nervous system, EMDR to reprocess trauma, and Creative Emotional Space to awaken your authentic self – avoidant patterns can shift into new ways of being and living your life. 

You can move from distance to closeness, from fear to trust, and from isolation to connection, from stagnation to creativity. 

Taking the Next Step

If you’re ready to heal avoidant attachment and experience deeper love, connection, and creativity, I invite you to begin this journey with me. You can start your avoidant attachment therapy in-person in my Los Angeles office or online throughout California. 

Together, we’ll create a safe, attuned space where you can finally feel at home – with yourself, others, and with your creativity.

Contact me here. I am Dr. Mihaela Ivan Holtz, a therapist specializing in psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapy and EMDR therapy from a modern affective and relational neuroscience. I practice i in Los Angeles., helping adults heal from childhood-rooted relational trauma, anxiety, depression, creative blocks/issues, performance anxiety – creating paths to emotional freedom and authentic living.