It happens at the dinner table, most often. She reaches across and puts her hand on his — nothing dramatic, no expectation attached, just quiet, the way she’s done it a thousand times before. And something inside locks. Not the face. Not the voice. The face stays exactly the same. But underneath the sternum a gear disengages, a temperature drops, and he becomes, in a way he couldn’t articulate and wouldn’t if he could, suddenly somewhere else. Sitting in the chair. Watching the table. Not here.
If that scene is recognizable, avoidant attachment is probably in the room — and more specifically, this may describe the emotionally unavailable partner in a dynamic that is slowly starving the relationship from the inside while both people look reasonably fine from the outside. This is not an article about why he’s broken. It’s about how the wiring works, where it came from, and what it actually costs to change it — because the cost is real, and that’s worth knowing before deciding whether to do the work.
THE MOMENT: The Man Who Isn’t There
Marcus was 41 when his wife of eleven years handed him the word. Not “divorce” — not yet. The word was “roommates.” She said they’d been roommates for at least three years and she didn’t know when it had happened. She said it quietly, almost clinically, like a diagnosis she’d been sitting with for a while and had finally decided to read aloud.
He didn’t argue with her, because he couldn’t. The word was precise. They ate together and moved around each other and handled logistics and raised their kids and talked about everything except whatever was actually happening between them. He’d been vaguely aware of this for years, in the way anyone’s vaguely aware of a slow leak — not enough to stop what he’s doing, just enough to know something’s wrong somewhere.
What he couldn’t explain was why. He wasn’t unhappy. He loved his wife — or believed he did, or believed he would, in whatever version of himself existed somewhere underneath the distance. He wasn’t angry at her. He wasn’t withholding as a tactic. He wasn’t strategically maintaining power through unavailability, the way some men do. He was simply absent. Present in the physical sense, absent in every sense that counted. And the absence had no explanation he could locate, which was almost the worst part. At least a reason would give him something to address.
The word for what Marcus had is avoidant attachment. And it may be the most misdiagnosed relational pattern going, because it doesn’t look like a wound. It looks like a strength. The avoidant man is the one who handles crises without flinching, who doesn’t need reassurance, who appears perfectly content alone in the workshop while his wife wonders what she married. He looks like he has himself together. What he actually has is a nervous system that learned, before he was old enough to form memories, that needing someone was more dangerous than needing no one.
This is for him. Not for the wife trying to decode him. For the man who recognizes that table scene, who’s watched his partner reach for him in a hundred small ways and found himself, again, somewhere else. The man who doesn’t know why he does this. The man who is, if he’s honest, getting tired of being alone in a room full of people who love him.
THE MECHANISM: How Avoidant Attachment Forms and Fires
Attachment theory began with a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby, who spent the 1950s and ’60s watching children separated from their caregivers and asking a question nobody else had thought to ask systematically: what is this doing to their nervous systems? His answer, developed over three volumes across thirty years, was that human infants arrive with a biological imperative to attach — and that attachment isn’t primarily about food or warmth or safety in any practical sense. It’s about emotional attunement. About being seen by another person whose seeing matters.
Bowlby’s student, Mary Ainsworth, developed the Strange Situation experiments in the early 1970s — a series of brief separations and reunions between mothers and toddlers, coded by observers watching through one-way glass. What she saw produced the first taxonomy of attachment styles. Some children — the securely attached ones — used their caregiver as a base, explored freely, protested separation, were comforted by reunion. But roughly 20% showed a different pattern: they didn’t protest separation. They didn’t show obvious distress. They seemed absorbed in play, self-contained, independent in a way that looked healthy until you looked more carefully. These children, when researchers measured their cortisol levels, were flooded with stress hormones.
The calm was performance. The independence was survival.
Ainsworth called it avoidant attachment. Later researchers would add the word “dismissive” when describing the adult version. And it reveals the central mechanism: the infant brain, consistently met with emotional unavailability when it reaches for connection, eventually stops reaching — not because it stops needing, but because reaching has been encoded as futile and dangerous. The attachment system doesn’t shut down. It goes underground.
Stan Tatkin, a clinical psychologist and developer of PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy), calls the avoidant adult an “island” — someone who has organized their life around self-sufficiency because co-regulation with others was never reliably safe. The island doesn’t dislike people. The island has a working model that says: when I need someone, what I get back is distance, disappointment, or the demand that I regulate myself. So he regulates himself. And he gets very, very good at it. This self-regulation — what the avoidant man experiences as emotional stability — is technically a suppression system. The feelings are present. Access is blocked.
This is not a metaphor. A 2010 study by Mikulincer and Shaver at Bar-Ilan University used fMRI imaging to watch what happens in avoidantly attached brains when primed with attachment-related words. The expected emotional circuitry — amygdala activation, limbic response — was suppressed. But the regions associated with inhibitory control lit up. The avoidant brain isn’t not feeling. It’s actively suppressing. Every second of every intimate conversation, the avoidant nervous system is running a suppression process in the background, consuming resources, maintaining distance, producing the appearance of calm.
In practical terms: the man who “doesn’t feel that much” in relationships almost certainly does feel that much. He just can’t access it. His nervous system intercepts the signal before it reaches consciousness and routes it into numbness, irritability, or the sudden urgent need to be somewhere else. The nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do — protecting him from an old threat that stopped being real decades ago. It just doesn’t know that yet.
The other half of the mechanism is the partner dynamic. Research by Hazan and Shaver at Cornell, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987, found that anxious and avoidant attachment styles pair with each other at rates well above chance. Not accident. The anxious partner’s pursuit temporarily activates the avoidant partner’s interest without threatening real vulnerability — desire without the demand for full presence. The avoidant partner’s coolness activates the anxious partner’s need to earn closeness — pursuit of someone who seems genuinely hard to reach. Each style feeds the other’s deepest wound. This is the pursuer-distancer cycle that Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy, describes as the most common and most corrosive pattern in long-term relationships. She reaches. He retreats. He retreats. She reaches harder. The loop accelerates. Stonewalling builds. Nobody wins.
Worth saying plainly, because this is where most attachment articles stop being honest: the avoidant partner is not the villain of this story. He is a person whose earliest environment made emotional openness genuinely dangerous, and he adapted accordingly. His adaptation is causing real damage to his relationship. Both of these things are true at the same time, and both need holding to do anything useful about either.
THE LIE: What the Culture Tells Avoidant Men That Makes Everything Worse
The most expensive lie avoidant men receive from the culture is that their avoidance is actually their character. That the self-sufficiency, the need for space, the discomfort with emotional intensity — these aren’t patterns built by an infant’s survival response. They’re just how some men are wired. Strong men. Men who have themselves together. Men who haven’t made the mistake of becoming dependent.
The culture doesn’t say “avoidant attachment.” It says “he’s just not that emotional” and “some people need more space in relationships” and “not everyone expresses love the same way.” All of which is true in a technical sense and catastrophically misleading in every practical one, because it locates the pattern in identity rather than in history. If this is who he is, there’s nothing to examine. If this is what happened to him, and what his nervous system learned to do in response, there’s actually something to work with.
The second lie is that the solution is communication. Every couples book, every therapist who hasn’t specifically trained in attachment, every well-meaning friend will say: open up, share your feelings, have the conversation. The advice is technically correct and practically useless in the moment it’s most needed, because the avoidant man’s problem is not that he doesn’t know how to talk about feelings. The problem is that his nervous system treats emotional conversations as threat environments. Telling someone whose amygdala is in a low-grade fight-or-flight state to “just open up” is like telling someone with a broken leg to run upstairs. The intention is sound. The execution is impossible. Emotional intelligence for the avoidant man isn’t a communication skill. It’s a nervous system skill first.
The third lie is the most insidious: that if nothing missing has been noticed, nothing is missing. Avoidant men are genuinely good at not noticing. The suppression system that manages emotional access also manages the awareness of what’s being suppressed. He doesn’t notice he’s lonely because the part of the brain that would register loneliness is running on reduced power. He doesn’t notice the relationship is slowly closing down because he experiences the distance as comfortable. He doesn’t notice his wife has been reaching for him for three years because he’s built an internal environment where those bids register faintly, like radio signals from too far away.
Marcus didn’t notice any of it until the word “roommates” arrived. And by then, his wife had been noticing for years. The avoidant man tends to be the last person in the room to understand what is happening — not because he doesn’t care, but because his monitoring system has been optimized for a different kind of threat than the one that’s actually present.
The lie with the highest cost, though, is the one about self-sufficiency. The belief that needing no one is strength. That the man who stands alone has something the man who stands in community lacks. Research by Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University — a meta-analysis covering 308,849 participants — found social isolation equivalent in mortality risk to smoking 15 cigarettes daily. The man who needs no one isn’t iron. He’s dying on an extended timeline, alone in a fortress he built to stay safe from something that no longer threatens him.
THE PROTOCOL: The Deactivation Interruption System
- Phase One: Map the Deactivation Sequence. The avoidant moves are not random. They have a specific sequence: trigger, physical signal, deactivating behavior. The trigger is almost always a bid for closeness — a touch, a question about feelings, a request for conversation about something that matters. The physical signal comes before conscious awareness: shoulders rise, jaw tightens, breathing goes high in the chest, something cold moves through the sternum. The deactivating behavior follows: the phone comes out, a small argument starts, silence sets in, urgent work materializes, the room empties. The job in Phase One is only to map this sequence. Not to interrupt it yet. Not to change anything. Just to know, with specificity, what the pattern looks like. Write it down. Three columns: what triggered it, where it was felt first in the body, what behavior followed. Do this for two weeks before attempting anything else.
- Phase Two: Create the Gap. Viktor Frankl wrote that between stimulus and response there is a space — and that in the space is freedom. For the avoidant man, that space is about 40 milliseconds wide when the process starts, which means it doesn’t functionally exist yet. Phase Two is gap creation: inserting a beat of awareness between the physical signal and the deactivating behavior. Not stopping the behavior — yet. Just naming what’s happening, aloud if possible, internally if not. I’m feeling the urge to pull back right now. That’s it. The naming is the interruption. It moves the process from fully automatic to partially conscious, which is the only condition under which anything else can happen. Nothing gets fixed in Phase Two. This is the equipment-building stage for Phase Three.
- Phase Three: Extend the Tolerance Window by Ten Seconds at a Time. This is exposure work, and the unit of measurement is deliberately small because the avoidant nervous system is exquisitely sensitive to overload. She reaches. The deactivation signal fires. It’s been named (Phase Two). Now: stay ten seconds past the edge of the comfort window. Let her hand remain ten seconds longer than every cell in the body is screaming to allow. Breathe into the feet. Feel the floor. Notice that the predicted catastrophe — engulfment, loss of self, annihilation — does not arrive. This is the corrective experience the avoidant nervous system never received: the experience of closeness that does not end in the predicted danger. Ten seconds becomes thirty. Thirty becomes a minute. A minute, over months, becomes an evening. This is neuroplasticity in action — not as a metaphor, but literally: repeated experience changes the strength of synaptic connections in the circuits that evaluate whether closeness is safe.
- The communication variant: There is a specific phrase worth memorizing, because it may be the single most powerful thing an avoidant man can say to a partner who has been living with his distance. Not a rehearsed therapeutic disclosure. This: Something in me wants to pull away right now, and I’m trying not to. I want you to know I notice it. The body will revolt at this sentence. Say it anyway. It does three things simultaneously: it names the internal state in real time (the thing the suppression system prevents), it demonstrates willingness to be seen in the middle of the struggle (the thing avoidant men never do), and it gives the partner evidence that something is actually happening beneath the surface (which she has been trying to believe for years). This is how masculine emotional presence actually works — not through performed warmth, but through honest acknowledgment of what’s happening in real time.
- Two things the protocol is not: It is not a cure, and it is not fast. The Deactivation Interruption System does not rewire a nervous system pattern in eight weeks. It begins the process of rewiring — and the process, once genuinely started, does not stop on its own. It requires consistent application, significant discomfort, and ideally a therapeutic context where someone who understands attachment neurobiology can track state in real time and name what they observe. The protocol gives something to do today. What it promises is movement, not arrival.
The Deactivation Interruption System works backward from the reflex rather than trying to override it from above. Nobody thinks their way out of a subcortical threat response. What’s possible, through repeated corrective experience, is teaching the nervous system that the threat response is misfiring — and over time, reducing its intensity and widening the window of tolerance for intimacy. This is slow. Measured in months and years, not weeks. Anyone selling a faster timeline is selling something else.
THE PROOF: What Earned Security Research Actually Shows
The concept that changes the whole picture for avoidant men is “earned security” — worth understanding precisely, because it is commonly misrepresented in both directions.
Earned security was first documented systematically by Mary Main at UC Berkeley, building on her development of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) in the 1980s. The AAI is not a self-report questionnaire. It’s a coherence analysis — trained coders listen to how the childhood story gets told, assessing not what happened but how well it’s been integrated and made sense of. Main was tracking parents who had difficult, traumatic, or neglectful childhoods but raised securely attached children. What she found was that the critical variable wasn’t the childhood itself. It was whether the parent had processed their own early experience thoroughly enough to develop what she called “coherent narrative” — a story of their childhood that was organized, emotionally alive, and honest about both what happened and how it affected them.
These parents weren’t “healed” in any soft-focus sense. Many had genuinely terrible histories. But they had done the reckoning — the full, unflinching, neither-minimizing-nor-drowning accounting of what their early relationships had actually been. And this processing had, measurably, changed their attachment organization from insecure to earned secure. Their children tested as securely attached at rates similar to children whose parents had been secure from birth.
A 2016 meta-analysis by Roisman and colleagues, published in Psychological Bulletin, examined 45 studies of earned security and confirmed its stability as a construct — earned-secure adults show attachment behavior patterns essentially indistinguishable from continuously secure adults, and the neuroimaging data support this: the brains of earned-secure adults show activation patterns in attachment-relevant tasks that closely resemble secure adults, not insecure ones.
What this means practically: the wiring is not permanent. The avoidant man who does the reckoning — who looks directly at the early relational experience that installed the pattern, without minimizing it (“she did her best, it was fine”) and without drowning in it (“I’m permanently broken by what happened to me”) — can develop attachment organization that functions at security. Not in spite of his history. Sometimes, curiously, because of it: the earned-secure adult has done work the continuously secure adult never had to do, and that work produces a depth of relational self-awareness that pure security doesn’t automatically generate.
Not a feel-good conclusion. A neurobiological finding. The research on Emotionally Focused Therapy, which Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg developed at the University of Ottawa in the 1980s, shows 70-75% of couples moving from relational distress to recovery through EFT — with effect sizes that are among the strongest in the couples therapy literature. The mechanism is attachment reorganization: EFT creates conditions where both partners’ attachment systems can be activated and then responded to differently than historical experience predicted, producing corrective emotional experiences that update the working model. The research on what actually builds strong relationships consistently points here: not communication skills, not conflict resolution techniques, but attachment security — earned or otherwise.
The data on John Gottman’s work is also relevant. Gottman’s longitudinal research at the University of Washington, tracking couples over decades, found that the single strongest predictor of relational stability was what he called “turning toward” bids for connection — responding to small, daily bids with engagement rather than avoidance. Couples who “turned toward” each other’s bids 86% of the time (versus the 33% rate of couples who later divorced) showed stable, satisfying relationships years later. The avoidant man’s deactivating strategies — the phone, the project, the strategic absence — are systematic bid-refusals. And they compound: each refusal makes the next bid less likely, which makes the relationship hungrier, which makes the next attempt more intense, which triggers more deactivation. Gottman called this pattern “turning away,” and his data gave it a 67% divorce prediction rate when it was the dominant mode.
THE HARD TRUTH: What This Will Actually Cost You
Most articles about avoidant attachment end with encouragement. This one won’t, because encouragement without accurate information about the cost is how someone gets set up to quit halfway through and confirm the worst fear — that they’re too broken to change.
Changing avoidant attachment is not a self-improvement project. It is a dismantling. The suppression system built over decades isn’t a bad habit or a cognitive distortion swapped out for a better one. It is nervous system architecture — load-bearing for the entire sense of self, maintained by every interaction with every person who mattered. When it begins to come apart, what gets experienced is not growth. It is grief. The grief of understanding what the early relational environment actually cost. The grief of seeing, clearly, what was refused in the relationships that wanted to offer something real. The grief of recognizing that the self-sufficiency everyone admired was actually a very lonely way to live — and it’s been going on for thirty years without a framework to name what was missing.
The body has also been carrying things it was told it wasn’t. The first time genuine intimacy is stayed with, without the deactivation sequence completing — the first time something is actually felt rather than observed from behind the glass — it may not feel like relief. It may feel like a loss of control that is indistinguishable, at the neurological level, from danger. The body doesn’t know the difference between vulnerability and threat. It only knows it’s exposed. The work requires staying exposed when every instinct says armor up, and discovering, repeatedly, that the catastrophe doesn’t arrive — enough times that the nervous system updates its prediction. That process is uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to prepare for.
The second cost is time. Earned security is not an eight-week program. The research suggests significant, durable change in attachment organization happens over years — and not continuously. Attachment change happens in cycles: expansion, regression, consolidation. The regression feels like failure while it’s happening. It isn’t. It is the system integrating what the expansion exposed, a necessary step, not a setback. The avoidant man who quits at the first significant regression — which usually comes six to eight weeks into real work, when the initial openness starts to feel like too much — never finds out what the consolidation phase feels like. He confirms his belief that change isn’t possible for him, when what actually happened is that he encountered the hardest part and stopped just before the integration began.
Third: there are situations where doing this work will not save the relationship it’s being done for. Some partners, after years of living with avoidant attachment, have reorganized themselves around the pursuit-distance dynamic in ways that make genuine closeness destabilizing in a different direction. When the avoidant man starts to pursue, the anxiously attached partner sometimes doesn’t experience relief — she experiences disorientation. The relationship she knows how to work through requires his distance. His presence is a variable she hasn’t built for. This does not mean the work was wrong. It means both people may need support simultaneously, and couples therapy — specifically attachment-focused, EFT-trained — is often the only container that can hold both patterns at the same time without one of them driving the process off the road.
The hardest truth is this: the window is not always open. If a wife has already moved through the grief and out the other side, if the reaching has stopped not as a pause but as a conclusion — the work can still help. It can still produce the man he’d rather be for whoever comes next, and for his children, and for himself. But it may not save the marriage he’s in. Starting today matters even if the outcome of this particular relationship is already written, because the pattern that created the problem will create the same problem in every relationship until it changes. The fortress doesn’t get less lonely by changing the view from the walls.
If early relational imprints running the present are visible now, that’s already ahead of most men who carry this pattern into middle age without ever giving it a name. The name gives something to work with. The work gives something to build toward. The building is what the partner has been waiting for — and what the nervous system, underneath all that armor, has been waiting for too, since before there was language to know what waiting was.
THE FAQ: Avoidant Attachment in Men — Direct Answers
What is the fastest way to recognize avoidant attachment in yourself?
The single most reliable diagnostic is the reaction to a partner’s emotional bids — not the response, the reaction. Notice what happens in the body when she tries to initiate closeness: a check-in, a touch, a request to talk about something that matters. Regularly experiencing a physical aversion response (tightening, cooling, the urge to be elsewhere) before any conscious thought about the bid — that subcortical alarm is the signature of avoidant attachment. It’s not a feeling about her. It’s a nervous system pattern that precedes thought. The secondary diagnostic: whether a relationship has been experienced as fully satisfying while it was ongoing, or whether its value tends to register most clearly when it’s threatened or ending.
Can avoidant attachment style be changed in adulthood?
Yes — the research term is “earned security,” documented originally by Mary Main at UC Berkeley and confirmed in a 2016 meta-analysis of 45 studies published in Psychological Bulletin. The mechanism is not insight but corrective emotional experience: repeated moments where intimacy is tolerated past the edge of the comfort window without the predicted catastrophe arriving. This updates the nervous system’s threat prediction for closeness. The process requires years, not months, and typically needs professional support — EFT couples therapy and somatic approaches (Somatic Experiencing, EMDR) have the strongest evidence base for this specific pattern. The key variable in Main’s research wasn’t the severity of the original wound — it was whether a coherent, organized understanding of how the early experience shaped things had been developed.
Why does the avoidant man suddenly want closeness when his partner pulls away?
This is sometimes called the “avoidant protest” pattern, and it has a neurobiological explanation. The avoidant attachment system maintains distance by suppressing attachment activation — but the suppression requires a target. When the partner pursues, the suppression system has something to push against. When she stops pursuing and begins genuinely withdrawing, the suppression system has nothing to engage, the attachment circuitry is no longer suppressed, and the avoidant man suddenly has access to feelings about the relationship he couldn’t access when it felt secure. He starts initiating, feeling urgency, recognizing what he had. This is not manipulation. It is a predictable consequence of the suppression architecture encountering its failure condition. The risk is that this sudden availability produces hope in the partner just as she was completing her exit — which is why the pattern can cycle for years without resolving.
What is the difference between avoidant attachment and introversion?
Introversion is a stable personality trait describing how energy gets restored — introverts restore through solitude, extroverts through social contact. It has no predictive relationship with relational dysfunction or relationship satisfaction. Avoidant attachment is a specifically relational pattern — it describes how the nervous system responds to intimacy with a primary attachment figure, not to social contact generally. An avoidant man can be extroverted (socially energized, comfortable with surface-level interactions, uncomfortable only when closeness becomes genuinely deep and vulnerable). An introvert can be securely attached (needing solitude to recharge while remaining fully emotionally present in close relationships). The distinction matters because avoidant men frequently misidentify their avoidance as introversion, which allows the pattern to continue indefinitely under a respectable label.
Does avoidant attachment affect how men parent their children?
Significantly — and this is one of the strongest motivating factors for doing the work. The intergenerational transmission of insecure attachment is one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology. An avoidant father will tend to respond to his child’s emotional bids in ways that communicate, unintentionally, that strong emotions are unwelcome: minimizing distress, pivoting to problem-solving when the child needs witness, going quiet or flat when emotional intensity is high. The child’s developing nervous system encodes this as “my emotions are too much” — and the cycle begins again. Main’s research showed that a parent’s own attachment organization was the single strongest predictor of a child’s attachment classification, stronger than any parenting behavior measured separately. Changing the pattern is the most effective thing a father can do for his children’s relational futures. Not sentiment. What the data shows.
What kind of therapy actually works for avoidant attachment in men?
Traditional talk therapy has a mediocre record with avoidant men — not because therapy doesn’t work, but because the standard format (sit across from a stranger and be emotionally transparent) asks the avoidant nervous system to do precisely the thing it’s spent decades preventing. The approaches with the strongest evidence base are: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which targets the pursuer-distancer cycle directly and has 70-75% recovery rates in clinical studies; Somatic Experiencing and EMDR, which work at the body level below the cognitive story; and Internal Family Systems (IFS), which provides a language for internal states without requiring immediate openness to another person. The non-negotiable when selecting a therapist: find someone who understands attachment at the neurobiological level and who can track nervous system state in session — noticing when dissociation has set in or the window of tolerance has been left, and naming it without judgment. That specific experience of being seen in shutdown without being judged for it is itself a corrective relational event.
How does avoidant attachment affect a man’s friendships, not just his marriage?
The same suppression architecture that runs in intimate partnerships runs in all close relationships — just at lower intensity because friendships typically don’t reach the depth of activation that a primary attachment relationship does. Avoidant men tend to have many acquaintances and few genuine friends, to keep friendships at a level where surface-level exchange is the norm, to avoid situations that require sustained emotional disclosure, and to find they have no one to call at 2 AM when something genuinely falls apart. The male loneliness epidemic runs disproportionately on avoidant rails: the cultural permission to avoid emotional closeness in male friendships provides cover for a pattern that would be more visible in a relationship with a woman. The result is that avoidant men often reach middle age with full professional networks, functional family relationships, and a fundamental absence of being known by anyone — one of the most specific forms of loneliness that exists.
Is avoidant attachment the same as being emotionally unavailable?
Avoidant attachment produces emotional unavailability as a symptom, but emotional unavailability has multiple causes. A man can be emotionally unavailable because of clinical depression, unprocessed trauma, addiction, sustained burnout, or narcissistic personality features — none of which is avoidant attachment, though all produce some similar surface presentations. The distinction that matters most practically: avoidant attachment is a relational nervous system pattern that responds to attachment-focused work — the Deactivation Interruption System, EFT, somatic approaches. Other sources of emotional unavailability require different interventions. A man who is unavailable because he is severely depressed needs depression treatment first. A man who is unavailable because of active addiction needs addiction treatment first. Misidentifying the source leads to mismatched treatment, which produces the outcome that confirms the avoidant man’s belief that change isn’t possible for him — when what happened is that the wrong tool was applied to the right problem.
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