Beyond the Anxious-Avoidant Dance: Internal Objects, Projective Identification, and the Path to Integration

Last updated: 23-11-2024

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Picture two dancers locked in an eternal waltz - one perpetually advancing, the other forever retreating. Each step forward triggers a step back, each withdrawal invites pursuit, creating a pattern as mesmerising as it is exhausting. This is the anxious-avoidant dance, a relational choreography that plays out in countless relationships, yet its true complexity lies far deeper than simple push and pull dynamics.

What drives an anxiously attached person to repeatedly seek out partners who maintain emotional distance? Why do avoidantly attached individuals find themselves drawn to those whose need for closeness feels overwhelming? The conventional wisdom about 'choosing wrong' or 'bad luck in relationships' fails to capture the profound psychological mechanism at work - a phenomenon known as projective identification, where we unconsciously press others to embody the very parts of ourselves we've learned to reject.

This dance, far from being a mere compatibility issue, reveals something fundamental about how we manage our internal world - specifically, how we handle the universal human needs for both connection and independence. Through the lens of object relations and attachment theory, we can begin to understand why these patterns feel less like choices and more like gravitational forces - invisible yet powerful, recognised only through their effects as they pull us into orbits we seem powerless to escape.

The Formation of Internal Objects

To understand how these patterns develop, we need to look at how our early relationships shape our internal world. What we inherit from our early relationships isn't just a simple template of how to relate - it's a complex internal landscape populated by different "objects" or models of "how to be". Children internalise both how their caretakers feel and behave, and how it feels to be on the receiving end of these interactions.

A child with a secure parent may internalise a unified, integrated object: someone who can be both independent and connected, who maintains their sense of self while remaining emotionally available. This provides a stable foundation for the child's way of relating to others, and to their own needs.

However, children of insecurely attached parents often internalise a split picture - two distinct objects representing different ways of causing relational harm. One object represents someone who creates pain by disowning their need for independence, becoming overwhelming or intrusive. The other represents someone who creates pain by disowning their need for connection, becoming distant or rejecting.

The child, faced with this split internal world, typically identifies with one of these objects and projects the other. Projection is a psychological defense where we unconsciously attribute parts of ourselves that we can't accept to other people - like seeing our own anger in others when we can't acknowledge it in ourselves. Through this process, the child takes on one way of being while pushing the other outward, seeing it primarily in others rather than themselves.

This explains why insecure attachment patterns tend to perpetuate: an anxiously attached parent might create either an anxiously attached child (through modelling) or an avoidantly attached child (through projective identification), and vice versa.

Beyond Simple Projection

This is where projective identification enters the dance, moving beyond simple projection into something more complex and compelling. It's not just that we project unwanted parts of ourselves onto others - we unconsciously behave in ways that pressure them to embody these disowned aspects of ourselves. And remarkably, they often do.

Consider how this plays out in the anxious-avoidant dance. The anxiously attached partner has learned to disown their capacity for independence - they've pushed away this part of themselves because it feels dangerous or threatening. Instead of recognising their own potential for independence, they project it onto others, seeing them as overly self-sufficient or distant. But it goes beyond just seeing others this way - they actually interact in ways that push their partners to become more distant. They might consistently defer to their partner's judgement rather than trusting their own, create situations where their partner must take the lead, or check in constantly for validation and reassurance. These behaviours often deprive the relationship of independence, which makes their partners feel overwhelmed or suffocated, pushing them into a more distant position.

The avoidant partner, conversely, has learned to disown their need for connection and intimacy. Rather than acknowledging their own desires for closeness, they project these needs onto others, seeing them as needy or dependent. Their behaviour - pulling away when things get emotionally intimate, maintaining emotional distance through vague or inconsistent communication, avoiding vulnerability by changing the subject when deeper feelings come up - deprive the relationship of connection, often triggering their partner's fears of abandonment. When their partner reaches out for connection, they might respond with subtle withdrawal or criticism, inadvertently encouraging the very clingy behaviour they find so overwhelming. Their inconsistent availability confirms their partner's worst fears, intensifying the very dynamic they're trying to escape.

The Magnetic Pull of the Familiar

What makes this dance so compelling is how it allows both partners to maintain their familiar ways of relating while also staying connected to their disowned parts through the other person. It's crucial to understand that disowning a need doesn't make it disappear - if anything, the unacknowledged need often becomes more intense, driving our attractions and relationships in ways we don't consciously recognise.

This helps explain why insecurely attached people often find themselves less drawn to secure partners, even though such relationships might be healthier. The anxiously attached partner, who has disowned their independence, may be bored by a secure partner's balanced approach to autonomy and connection - but this boredom reveals something crucial about their attachment pattern. They are seekers, perpetually chasing connection in an attempt to lose their independence. With a secure partner (or even another anxious partner), the chase is too easy, too quickly resolved. When they catch what they're pursuing, they may feel they have finally lost their independence. Despite being what they consciously sought, the unconscious need for independence is still there, and so the relationship feels unsatisfying. The avoidant partner, in contrast, remains perpetually just out of reach, matching their desperate attempt to lose independence with an equal determination to maintain it. This creates an exquisitely balanced dance where neither partner has to fully face their disowned needs - the anxious partner can perpetually strive to lose independence without ever quite succeeding, while the avoidant partner can maintain distance while still engaging with their disowned need for connection through their partner's pursuit.

Similarly, the avoidant partner, who has disowned their need for intimacy, might find a secure partner's acceptance of independence does not give them the intense connection they unconsciously crave. They are distancers, perpetually creating space to avoid vulnerability, yet paradoxically drawn to partners who make this distance nearly impossible to maintain. With a secure partner (or another avoidant partner), the distance comes too easily - there may be a loneliness, a lack of the intense intimacy of a push-pull that makes connection feel both threatening and irresistible. The anxious partner, in contrast, creates such an overwhelming pull toward intimacy that the avoidant partner can fully embody their familiar role of resistance while still engaging with their disowned need for connection through their partner's persistent pursuit. The relationship becomes an endless game of emotional hide-and-seek, where being 'found' feels both terrifying and secretly desirable.

This is why these relationships can feel simultaneously frustrating and oddly fulfilling. The anxiously attached partner gets to maintain their focus on connection while still having access to independence through their partner, even if only through conflict and opposition. The avoidant partner keeps their emotional distance while staying linked to intimacy through their partner's intense need for closeness. Each partner's disowned needs get expressed and partially met, but in a dramatic, often painful way that reinforces their original attachment wounds.

In contrast, relationships with secure partners might feel less exciting or intense precisely because they don't engage with these disowned needs in such a heightened way. A secure partner's balanced approach to both independence and connection doesn't create the same opportunities for dramatic expression of disowned needs. This can feel underwhelming to someone who's used to relationships revolving around these dynamics, even though it potentially offers a healthier path forward.

The Path Toward Integration

Understanding projective identification opens up new possibilities for healing, but the path forward requires more than simple awareness. Reshaping these internalised objects is a profound and lengthy process that often requires experiencing someone else inhabiting the projected object role - but then acting differently than expected.

This transformation can occur in therapy, where the therapeutic relationship becomes a container for working through these projections as a form of transference. Transference is the unconscious redirection of feelings from past relationships onto the present - for instance, experiencing your therapist as critical because they remind you of a judgemental parent. The therapeutic relationship provides a safe space to recognise these old patterns and experience them playing out differently.

It can also happen in intimate relationships, though this presents both special challenges and opportunities. The key is the other person's capacity to maintain connection to their whole self while under the pressure of these projections, perhaps even naming and working with the dynamic as it unfolds in real time. For our internal objects to change, they must first be activated in relationship - our perception of the other person temporarily becomes infused with the qualities we expect based on our past experiences. Yet when they respond in ways that differ from these rigid expectations while maintaining their own centre, new possibilities for relating can emerge. These experiences gradually allow our internal objects to become more flexible and integrated.

This process becomes particularly complex - and potentially transformative - in anxious-avoidant pairings, where both partners must simultaneously work on reshaping their own internal objects while helping their partner do the same. Each must learn to tolerate both connection and independence, both in themselves and in their partner. While this dual task makes anxious-avoidant relationships particularly challenging, it also offers unique potential for growth and healing. When both partners commit to this work, they can help each other integrate the split-off parts of themselves, creating a relationship that transcends their original attachment patterns.

Toward Wholeness in Relationship

The ultimate goal isn't to eliminate our attachment patterns - they're part of our story and have helped us survive. Rather, the goal is to expand our capacity to hold all parts of ourselves: our need for connection and our need for independence, our vulnerability and our strength, our dependence and our autonomy.

As we move toward this integration, our relationships transform. They become less about recreating familiar wounds and more about growing together. The anxious-avoidant dance slowly gives way to a new kind of partnership – one where both partners can move freely between connection and independence, intimacy and autonomy.

This is the deeper invitation of our challenging relationship patterns: not just to break free from old wounds, but to reclaim the fullness of who we are. In doing so, we create the possibility for relationships that don't just repeat our past, but help us grow into our future.