TL; DR
Disorganized attachment creates an exhausting push and pull dynamic in relationships, where you deeply crave connection but may feel threatened, trapped, or compelled to withdraw once intimacy becomes available. Often rooted in early experiences where caregivers were both a source of comfort and fear, this attachment pattern can cause your nervous system to mistake healthy closeness and consistency for danger. Rather than being a character flaw or intentional self-sabotage, these conflicting reactions are learned survival responses that can change. Online relational trauma therapy can help you recognize these patterns, process the experiences behind them, and teach your nervous system that safe, consistent relationships don’t require you to stay on guard.
The Push and Pull of Wanting Connection and Wanting to Run
You spent the whole week craving connection with your partner. They finally show up, fully present, emotionally available, giving you exactly what you’ve been asking for. Instead of relief, something in you tightens. You make a joke to deflect, pick a fight over nothing, and suddenly need space from the very person you were missing an hour ago. In my work as an online relational trauma therapist based in Palm Beach, FL, this pattern has a name, and it makes far more sense than you’ve been giving yourself credit for.
You’re not indecisive. “Too complicated” isn’t the right label either. Sabotaging good things on purpose isn’t what’s happening here, even though it feels that way at 11 p.m when you’re replaying the whole thing, wondering what is fundamentally wrong with you. Disorganized attachment is what happens when your nervous system learned that love and danger can exist in the same place. The closer someone gets, the more you want to let them in and the more your nervous system screams at you to run. If you’ve been exhausted by a push-pull pattern you can’t seem to stop, this blog names what’s actually happening underneath it.
Where Did the Wiring Get Crossed?
Every child is biologically wired to seek comfort from their caregiver when they’re distressed. That’s not a choice. It’s hardwired survival. Now imagine being a child where the person you instinctively run to for safety is also the person creating the danger. That’s the impossible problem at the core of disorganized attachment: the person I need is also the person I’m afraid of. This shows up in homes with abuse, emotional volatility, severe inconsistency, addiction, and chronic unpredictability.
Sometimes it’s a caregiver who could be loving and terrifying at different times, even in the same afternoon. The child can’t simply stop attaching. Their nervous system has to figure out how to move toward safety while simultaneously bracing for danger from the same source. That impossible balancing act doesn’t just disappear when the child grows up. It follows them into every adult relationship, running the same contradictory program with new people. Most of whom have no idea what they’re actually dealing with.
Anxious Moves Closer. Avoidant Moves Away. You Do Both Before Lunch.
Here’s where disorganized attachment gets confusing, both for you and for the people who love you. Anxiously attached people generally move toward connection. Avoidantly attached people generally move away from it. Disorganized attachment does both- often within the same day, the same argument, and the same breath. You desperately want reassurance one morning, then feel suffocated by the exact closeness you asked for by evening. Your partner feels like they’re trying to hit a target that keeps moving. You feel equally lost because you genuinely don’t understand why your needs seem to contradict themselves so relentlessly.
When Calm Feels More Unfamiliar Than Chaos
Here’s the part that surprises most people. For someone with disorganized attachment, things going well can feel just as activating as things going badly. When the relationship is stable, when there’s no conflict to scan for, and when your partner is consistently showing up, your brain doesn’t always register that as safety. It registers it as unfamiliar. The search for danger starts automatically. You start wondering if you’re missing red flags and becoming suspicious of consistency. That’s because consistency was never something you could count on growing up.
Sometimes you create conflict just to return to the emotional terrain your nervous system actually recognizes, even when the rational part of your brain knows things are fine. Healthy relationships don’t bore you. Your system calibrated to chaos a long time ago, and peace feels like the moment right before something goes wrong. Online relational trauma therapy teaches your nervous system the difference between genuine danger and the discomfort of something finally being okay.
What Does the Push & Pull Actually Look Like When You’re Living Inside It?
You tell your partner you miss them, and they respond warmly. Instead of landing in that moment, you feel exposed enough to deflect with humor or change the subject entirely. Reassurance arrives. The second it does, your brain starts wondering if they’re just telling you what you want to hear. All week you’ve been craving emotional intimacy. Then your partner actually wants to spend the weekend together. Suddenly, you feel trapped, needing space you couldn’t explain if your life depended on it. The fear of abandonment and the fear of being fully known are running at full volume simultaneously.
That’s why “I don’t trust myself in relationships” is something clients say to me regularly. It makes perfect sense when your nervous system keeps sending two completely opposite signals at the same time. The exhaustion from this pattern isn’t just emotional. It’s physiological. Your system is working overtime trying to simultaneously seek connection and protect you from it. That kind of internal conflict burns through energy most people don’t realize they’re spending.
Communication Skills Were Never Going to Fix This.
This pattern didn’t develop on its own either. When the people who were supposed to provide protection also created fear, confusion, or emotional unpredictability, the nervous system organized itself around those early experiences. That’s complex trauma, and it explains why communication skills and relationship advice have never touched the problem.
Your nervous system learned that closeness was dangerous. It has to experience something genuinely different before it can believe something different. At my online therapy practice in Palm Beach, FL, I use approaches like EMDR alongside attachment-focused work for exactly this reason. Not to change your thoughts about relationships, but to help your nervous system update survival strategies that stopped fitting your life a long time ago.
The Push and Pull Pattern Can Change. Your Nervous System Just Needs Proof.
If you recognize yourself in this push-pull cycle, here’s what’s worth knowing: your conflicting feelings don’t automatically mean you’re making the wrong relationship choice. Sometimes your nervous system is reacting to old danger rather than anything happening in the present. Feeling both drawn to and scared of someone doesn’t automatically mean they’re unhealthy for you. It might mean your wiring is doing what it always does when closeness starts feeling real.
The next time you feel the urge to cling or pull away, see if you can slow the cycle down enough to catch what happened right before the impulse arrived. There’s usually a moment of vulnerability, fear, or exposure that triggered the shift. You won’t always catch it, and the times you do won’t always change the outcome. What it does is start building awareness of a pattern that’s been running on autopilot for decades. That awareness is where intervention becomes possible.
Love Doesn’t Have to Feel Like a Contradiction
People with disorganized attachment often carry tremendous shame. Years of believing they’re “too complicated,” “too damaged,” or fundamentally impossible to love. None of that is accurate. What you’re experiencing makes complete sense in light of what you’ve lived through. Even if it doesn’t feel like it late at night when you just pushed away the person you were desperate for this morning. Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never feel afraid in relationships again.
The goal isn’t to erase your attachment system or pretend the past didn’t shape you. It’s to help your nervous system stop treating safe relationships like dangerous ones. When that starts to happen, something remarkable shifts. You stop spending all your energy trying to decide whether to stay or leave. Instead, you finally have enough emotional space to simply be in the relationship. For many people with disorganized attachment, that’s the first time love has ever felt like somewhere they could actually rest.
THE PUSH & PULL ISN’T A CHARACTER FLAW. IT’S A NERVOUS SYSTEM THAT NEVER LEARNED LOVE COULD BE SAFE. DR. JENNA BUDREAU-ROMAN OFFERS ONLINE RELATIONAL TRAUMA THERAPY IN PALM BEACH, THROUGHOUT SOUTHERN FLORIDA, AND BEYOND.
If you read this blog and felt something shift from “what’s wrong with me” toward “this actually makes sense,” that shift matters more than you realize. The push-pull, the contradictions, the exhaustion of wanting closeness while your nervous system treats it like a threat. All of it has an origin, and all of it can change. At Love and Theory, I work with high-achieving professionals in all PSYPACT states who are done being confused by their own relationship patterns and ready to understand what’s been driving them all along. Online relational trauma therapy in Palm Beach, FL helps your nervous system learn what it never got the chance to learn the first time around: that love doesn’t have to be something you survive.
- Schedule a free consultation to talk about the pattern that’s been exhausting your relationships. No judgment about the push and pull. Just an honest conversation about what’s underneath it.
- Work with an online relational trauma therapist based in Palm Beach, FL who understands that disorganized attachment isn’t about being “too complicated” for love. It’s about a nervous system that learned love and danger in the same place, and it deserves clinical care that respects that complexity.
- Find out what relationships feel like when you’re no longer spending all your energy deciding whether to stay or go. When love finally has enough room to feel like rest instead of a contradiction you can’t solve.
OTHER ONLINE THERAPY SERVICES LOVE AND THEORY OFFERS IN PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, NEW YORK, & ALL PSYPACT STATES
When disorganized attachment starts revealing the depth of what’s underneath the push-pull, there’s usually more than one area asking for attention. The relationship absorbing the contradictions, the self-worth that’s been eroded by years of believing you’re too complicated, the nervous system that hasn’t felt safe in closeness since long before your current partner. At Love and Theory, I offer boutique, high-touch therapeutic experiences designed for the whole of who you are, not just the attachment pattern that brought you here.
Alongside relational trauma recovery, I provide deeply curated individual therapy for over-functioning perfectionists, invisible caregivers, and high-achievers who are done trying to think their way out of patterns that live in the nervous system. I also specialize in couples therapy for ambitious partners navigating the specific kind of confusion that happens when one person’s attachment system sends contradictory signals and the other person can’t figure out which version of the relationship is real.
For clients who need maximum flexibility and discretion, my concierge therapy experience offers luxury-level emotional support with personalized scheduling, longer sessions, and between-session access. Every service is tailored to your unique emotional landscape, intelligence, and goals. Reach out today, explore more on the blog, or follow Love and Theory on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Jenna is a licensed clinical psychologist and relational trauma therapist based in Palm Beach and New York, NY. She is also the founder of Love and Theory, a boutique therapy practice designed for high-achieving professionals who have mastered everything except understanding why love keeps feeling like a problem to solve instead of a place to land. With over a decade of experience and advanced training in EMDR, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and somatic approaches, she specializes in relational trauma, complex PTSD in relationships, and the attachment patterns that keep brilliant people caught between craving connection and bracing for it to hurt them.
Licensed in 40+ states via PSYPACT, Dr. Jenna combines deep clinical expertise with a warm, direct approach that helps guarded humans discover that the push-pull they’ve been living inside isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a pattern that can finally, genuinely change. She created Love and Theory from a simple realization. The people most confused by their own relationships are often the ones whose nervous systems are working the hardest. They deserve someone who understands that.