#237: How Anxious & Avoidant People Differ Around Breakups
Breakups are painful for almost everyone. But if you’ve ever gone through one and felt like you were absolutely shattered… while your ex seemed totally fine, you’ll know how confusing and destabilising that contrast can be.
In this post, I want to unpack how anxious and avoidant attachment patterns tend to process breakups differently — and most importantly, why comparing your grief to your ex’s is one of the fastest ways to deepen your suffering.
Because yes, anxious and avoidant people often cope very differently.
And no, that difference doesn’t mean what you think it means.
The Anxious Breakup Experience: Intense, Urgent, Overwhelming
If you lean anxious in your attachment patterns, breakups can feel earth-shattering.
Relationships are often your primary source of stability, identity, and emotional grounding. When that anchor disappears — especially if the relationship had been feeling strained — your attachment system is already highly activated.
Anxious attachment is characterised by hyperactivation under stress. So in the lead-up to a breakup, you may have been:
Trying harder to fix things
Initiating more conversations
Seeking reassurance
Ruminating about what’s wrong
Increasing efforts to restore connection
When the relationship ends, all of that energy doesn’t just disappear.
Instead, you’re left with a nervous system that is highly activated… and nowhere for that activation to go.
That’s why anxious breakups often involve:
Intense grief
A frantic urge to talk to them again
Endless replaying of conversations
Googling, researching, analysing
Monitoring social media
Trying to “solve” what happened
It’s not that you’re dramatic or incapable of coping.
It’s that your nervous system is screaming:
“Do something. Fix this. Restore safety.”
And in the absence of the relationship, that energy often gets channelled into rumination, obsession, and comparison.
The Avoidant Breakup Experience: Relief, Distance, Distraction
Avoidant attachment works differently.
Where anxious attachment hyperactivates under stress, avoidant attachment deactivates.
In the lead-up to a breakup — particularly if the relationship has felt conflict-heavy or emotionally intense — someone with avoidant patterns may already have been:
Pulling back
Feeling depleted
Feeling overwhelmed by emotional processing
Disengaging internally
For many avoidant people, high relational stress feels exhausting. Their capacity for ongoing emotional intensity is often lower.
So when the relationship ends?
The primary emotion — at least initially — is often relief.
Not relief because they never cared.
Not relief because it was meaningless.
Relief because the stress has stopped.
There can also be relief around regained autonomy:
“I’m back to myself.”
“I don’t have to navigate all that anymore.”
“I have my space back.”
From the outside, this can look like:
Throwing themselves into work
Socialising a lot
Going to the gym obsessively
Picking up new hobbies
Getting back on dating apps quickly
If you’re anxious and watching this from the sidelines, it can feel brutal.
You’re drowning… and they’re at the bar.
The Comparison Trap
Here’s where so much suffering happens.
You see them coping “well” and your brain makes meaning:
“They never loved me.”
“It didn’t mean as much to them.”
“I’m the only one hurting.”
“Was it all a lie?”
But you’re not comparing apples with apples.
You’re comparing:
A hyperactivated nervous system
withA deactivated nervous system
Those are fundamentally different stress responses.
Your system moves toward.
Theirs moves away.
Neither response is superior. They are simply different protective strategies.
What About Delayed Grief?
One of the most common questions I get is:
“Are they really fine? Or is it going to hit them later?”
In many cases, avoidant partners do experience delayed grief.
After the initial relief settles and the reality sinks in — weeks or months later — they may begin to feel:
Loneliness
Nostalgia
Longing
Sadness about what was lost
There can be a timing mismatch:
You feel everything immediately.
They may feel it later.
That said, not every avoidant person processes deeply. Some — particularly more dismissive styles — may keep the breakup very factual and surface-level:
“We weren’t compatible.”
“It wasn’t working.”
“It ran its course.”
And they may never experience a dramatic emotional wave.
But here’s the truth that matters:
It still doesn’t change what you need to focus on.
The Real Work After a Breakup
When you’re anxiously attached, your instinct is to monitor them:
What are they doing?
Are they dating?
What are they telling people?
Are they happier without me?
But that instinct is just your attachment pattern continuing to play out.
It says:
“If I can figure them out, I’ll feel safe.”
But you won’t.
Because your healing has nothing to do with how they’re coping.
The real work after a breakup is:
Learning to sit with your grief without trying to fix it
Interrupting rumination and comparison
Rebuilding your sense of identity outside the relationship
Understanding how your patterns contributed to the dynamic
Choosing how you want to show up differently next time
There is no shortage of meaningful work to do.
Focusing on them might feel urgent — even necessary — but it’s usually a distraction from what actually needs your attention.
Keep Your Eyes on Your Own Paper
It’s completely natural to want answers.
It’s completely human to feel hurt if they seem okay.
It’s completely understandable to want to know if you mattered.
But comparing your grief to theirs will never bring relief.
You are not meant to process loss the same way.
And their timeline, coping strategy, or emotional expression does not define your worth.
Your job now is not to decode them.
Your job is to show up for yourself.
And if you can do that — even imperfectly — a breakup becomes more than just an ending.
It becomes an inflection point.
A moment where you stop abandoning yourself in the pursuit of understanding someone else… and start building the kind of internal safety that no relationship ending can take away.
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[00:00:00]:
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about breakups, and specifically how anxious and avoidant people differ when it comes to the processing of a breakup.
[00:00:38]:
So we all know, and particularly if you are listening as someone with more anxious attachment patterns, as tends to be the bulk of the people in my listeners and my community online, you would know that a breakup tends to be really earth-shattering for you. And I've spoken many times before on the show about all of the layers that go along with the navigating of a breakup. For someone with anxious attachment patterns. But something that I've seen time and time again is that a major source of suffering for folks with anxious attachment patterns is in comparison and in obsessing over what your ex might be doing and thinking and feeling after a breakup, comparing it with how you're coping, and then making a lot of meaning out of that. So if they seem to be relatively okay, it's really easy to take that as meaning that they aren't experiencing any sort of grief, or that they don't care, that they never really loved you? Does that mean that it was all a lie? All of those thought loops that we can get stuck in that can really keep us in our pain and turn that pain into suffering that is often self-inflicted. So today's episode is an opportunity for me to contextualise why anxious and avoidant people process breakups differently, because they absolutely do, and to really give you an insight, not with a view to indulging your tendency to want to obsessively analyse them, but actually, hopefully, to liberate you from that need somewhat by helping you realise that there is nothing to be found in that comparison. It's actually not relevant to anything. And to be mindful of the fact that that instinct to monitor them, to cheque on them, to see how they're going, to compare that to yourself, that is really an extension of your pattern in relationships playing out in the context of a breakup.
[00:02:36]:
Because we know that anxious attachment is very other-focused, and we convince ourselves that if we can just solve the puzzle and figure out how someone's feeling and then reverse engineer all of that to get to the outcome that we want, then we'll be okay, then we'll be safe, then we'll have some sort of certainty and resolution. Because we have such a low tolerance for uncertainty and unanswered questions and all of those things that I've spoken about before. So that's what we're going to be talking about today, and that's really the spirit with which we're going to be talking about it. Not to scratch the itch of like trying to get to the bottom of their psyche so that you can feel more in control, but actually so that you can just make peace with the fact that you're different and maybe keep your eyes on your own paper a little more, which is ultimately what you need, even if it's not what you want. Now, before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to remind you, if you are going through a breakup, my free training on breakups is a really, really great resource. I actually talk about what we're going to talk about today, that tendency to compare, as being one of the key ways we keep ourselves stuck, alongside ruminating and avoiding our feelings and treating the breakup as a competition. All of these really common pitfalls that we can get stuck in, again, particularly if you are more anxious in your attachment patterns, and giving you a clear path in terms of what to focus on instead so that you can really be in the breakup but navigate it from a place of agency rather than feeling like you're spinning out of control and desperately someone to rescue you or need relief from something outside of yourself. Breakups really are a beautiful opportunity to learn how to show up for yourself and to be intentional around what your next chapter looks like and how you're going to carry yourself through it.
[00:04:15]:
So they can be a really powerful learning opportunity, and my free breakup training really helps you to crystallise what to do and what not to do if you want to kind of rise from the ashes, so to speak. So the link to that is in the show notes, or you can head directly to my website, stephanierigg.com. And I should say, while I remember, I recently went live with a brand new upgraded website, which has been a year in the making. It's really, really wonderful. It has lots of free resources. They're all organised by category. There's heaps of blog posts, so there's plenty to dig into there alongside all of my existing programmes that you will have heard me speak about before. So definitely head to stephanierigg.com to cheque some of that out, whether you're going through a breakup or otherwise.
[00:04:57]:
The new website is pretty cool and it's well worth a look. So let's get into this conversation around anxious and avoidant attachment patterns when it comes to a breakup. So I'll start by walking you through how that typically looks for anxious attachment, which I know for many of you will be familiar and part of your lived experience. And as I said, I've spoken about this many times on the show before, but for anxiously attached people, breakups tend to be pretty destabilizing. And that makes a lot of sense when we consider that our starting point is a strong preference for being in relationships. As the comfort zone. We tend to derive a lot of our sense of stability and identity from being in a relationship. And particularly as a relationship is progressing, maybe it's becoming challenging, maybe you're arguing a lot, it's feeling wobbly, the anxious attachment system will dial up.
[00:05:49]:
The attachment system hyperactivates in times of stress. That's really at the heart of what anxious attachment is describing. And because of that, because your attachment system has been hyperactivated in the lead-up to breakup, as you ramp up your efforts at trying to fix things, as stress levels rise, so do your attempts at getting connection or stabilising things. Because you're in that state, when the relationship ends, you're often left with so much energy and so much activation in your nervous system, in your attachment system, that then being plunged into darkness, so to speak, just feels so wrong and so physically uncomfortable, intolerable. You almost don't know where to put of that energy that you've now got coursing through you. And that's why we see so much with anxiously attached people wanting to talk about it a lot, having very big emotions, feeling devastated, feeling this frantic need to re-establish contact, to have another conversation, to talk to them, or even, you know, expressing all of that energy and anxiety through doing a lot of research, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, talking to ChatGPT endlessly about the breakup. There's this sense of, I can't just be in the void, I need to be doing something. And that's really at the heart of so much of anxiety in the nervous system.
[00:07:10]:
It's just this blaring alarm that says, do something, this doesn't feel good, this doesn't feel safe, and we need to do something about it. And so oftentimes our anxiety will steer us towards rumination and obsession and stalking them on Instagram and doing all of these things— information gathering, playing detective, what does this mean— to give us a sense of control and to allow us to actually bypass the huge grief and fear that sits underneath all of that. It allows us to feel somewhat in control at a time when our world is spinning and there's this really fundamental tectonic shift going on in terms of how we create safety for ourselves. Because when a relationship is typically your life raft, even when it feels really hard, having that taken away from you, and particularly if the circumstances were such that it was sudden, that can just feel so disorienting. And so your system's doing whatever it can to try and fill that gap and to try and create safety, and often times that's through all of those things going into overactivated, mobilised states of just trying to do something to make the pain go away. So that's often what it feels like and looks like for anxiously attached people, is immense overwhelming grief coupled with this urgent need to fix things, to have more conversations, to get to the bottom of it, to solve the mystery, to understand what went wrong, to replay everything. It is a very like high-intensity experience for most people with anxious attachment patterns. If we contrast that with people with more avoidant patterns, and perhaps it's useful to frame this through what I was just saying around anxious attachment at its core being a hyperactivated attachment system under stress, an avoidant attachment system under stress deactivates.
[00:08:57]:
That's just the other side of the coin, right? Conflicting strategies, different ways of dealing with stress and overwhelm in relationships. So someone with avoidant patterns, particularly towards the end of a relationship when the stress levels were rising, they were probably becoming less engaged, needing less connection, wanting that less, because that's how they protect themselves is to just disconnect. So it's not only the breakup itself, but actually in the lead up, you will likely having very divergent experiences in terms of how your attachment system was working, you know, how you were each feeling. The, the experience for many avoidant people is one of depletion, exhaustion, because their capacity to endlessly work on a relationship tends to be much, much lower than someone with anxious attachment patterns. And so if things are feeling really strained and really hard and there's high conflict and there are lots of conversations about what's not working, that's likely to wear someone down who has avoidant— I mean, I think you could argue that wears anyone down, but particularly someone with avoidant patterns, that's really going to deplete their capacity. And so the truth is, and this can be really hard to hear for someone on the other side of it who's more anxious, is that in the immediate aftermath of a breakup, an avoidant person might actually feel quite a bit of relief. And that's not like, oh, thank God, I'm finally free of this person who I don't care about or love, but just a relief from the overwhelming stress that comes with being in a relationship that's feeling strained. Because that does tend to weigh on them so heavily, there can just be a sense of a burden being lifted.
[00:10:40]:
There can also be a sense of relief around the restoration of someone's autonomy. This sense of, I was in a relationship that asked a lot of me in terms of accommodating someone else and having to communicate all of these things and coordinate, and now I'm just like myself again. I'm back on my island. And that can be a really positive experience for people with avoidant patterns. I know that if you can't relate to that, that can feel— it's really easy to judge that as being like cold or heartless or uncaring, but But remembering again, it's just a completely different starting point and a different way of dealing with stress and fear. You move towards, they move away from. Neither is better or worse, they're just different ways of dealing with a problem. And so when the heat has been so high for so long, it can feel like a sigh of relief for someone with avoidant patterns.
[00:11:33]:
Now, of course, if you are more anxious and the heat has continued to rise in your system in the wake of the relationship ending, and you're just feeling so activated and out of control seeing them back on their island and seemingly coping fine can really be very painful. And of course, it's easy to misinterpret. Some of the other patterns that you might see in terms of outward expression with someone who has more avoidant patterns is they might really throw themselves into other distractions. So working a lot or going to the gym a lot or taking up a new hobby, getting obsessed with something. They might be socialising a lot. You might be seeing them suddenly online and being out at bars and social events and seeming happy and fine. And of course, that can really sting again if you're interpreting it from this place of they've just bounced back and are totally unaffected by the relationship ending. And I know that for anxious people, there can also be this follow-on of like, what are they telling people? What are they saying about me? Are they telling the truth? That desire to want to control the storey that they tell about what happened and who was responsible for what and all of that.
[00:12:44]:
But yeah, you might see an avoidant person after a breakup kind of throwing themselves back into freedom and independence and autonomy in those expressions. So like really devoting themselves to all of the things that maybe they had less capacity for when in a relationship because they've now got their freedom restored, so to speak. And that can extend to dating again quickly, so they get back on the apps much more quickly than you would feel ready to do that. And again, if we're in that comparison mindset, that can really hurt. I've spoken about this before, and I think it's totally normal to feel a bit uncomfortable, to say the least, about the idea of your ex, and particularly a recent ex who you're still having all of those feelings for. The idea of them seeing someone else or being interested in seeing someone else can really hurt. What if they start dating someone new and they're happy with them? What if they make all of the changes for person. These are all really, really common stories, and as frightening as they can feel, we do have to again just see them as a function of what they are, which is our deeper wounds that we're trying to soothe with thought loops, rumination, and problem solving, which is actually never going to truly satisfy that underlying pain.
[00:14:07]:
We really need to try as much as we possibly can to not attach too much meaning to all of that in terms of how they felt about us or what it means about us as a person. Now, I think the really important piece here, because I'm sure people are wondering, like, does their coping mechanism mask deeper pain and grief? The fact that they are fine on the outside, does that mean that they're actually fine on the inside, or is that a reaction against the pain that they're feeling? And I think I think that in many cases, folks with avoidant patterns will experience a delayed grief or a delayed realization. They tend to, as I've just been talking about, I think the primary emotion immediately following does tend to be one of relief. But when reality hits weeks or months following, I think that can be when the, the more tender emotions can surface and someone can realise what they've lost and can feel sadness or nostalgia or that sense of loneliness or longing that just wasn't really there immediately following. So there can just be this timing mismatch sometimes where you're in the thick of it immediately following, and the, the avoidant partner doesn't get there until a bit later. And of course, like, when we're talking generalities— and I should have said this at the start— it's not going to apply to every person in every situation. And not all avoidant people are the same, not all anxious people are the same. So I think it's also fair to say that some folks with avoidant patterns, and probably people who are more dismissive, so maybe have less self-awareness and less of a tendency towards introspection and deep feeling, as is the case with more fearful avoidant patterns, they may never kind of dig any deeper.
[00:15:55]:
They may just continue to coast along and tell themselves a really kind of factual storey about what happened. We weren't a good fit. It all kind of unraveled. Yeah, we weren't compatible. We fought all the time. It was not a good relationship. They might might keep it pretty two-dimensional in terms of how they think about and process the breakup, and they may not have that kind of whiplash or delayed reaction of being plunged into the grief of it after that initial period of relief has settled. So any of those are possible, but again, I think the key point here is to recognise that you have different protective strategies when it comes to processing big emotions, when it comes to an attachment system under stress.
[00:16:43]:
So comparing how you're coping with how they're coping and then making meaning out of it that you take personally and needing to get to the bottom of that, that can really be part of your stuckness in a way that is not helpful at all. Okay, so I'm gonna leave it there. I really hope that this has given you a bit of clarity as to how anxious and avoidant people, anxious and avoidant nervous systems, process stress and the ending of a relationship. It really is so important to have that context because of course it's natural that we'd think we were comparing apples with apples, and then we craft all sorts of storeys that leave us feeling hurt and rejected and fuel our unworthiness and not good enoughness and all of that that can already be activated after a breakup. So I really hope that this has not only given you a bit of insight into why it's totally normal that your ex might experience that very differently to you, and that, that doesn't mean anything, but also, as I said at the start, to hopefully liberate you from the task of trying to get to the bottom of it and recognising that your impulse to analyse them is pointing you towards what really needs your attention, which is being there for yourself. And taking great care of yourself and realising that actually it doesn't really matter how they're coping or how they're feeling or whether they're ready to date again. None of that has to mean anything about me. And really, my job after a breakup is to show up for myself and to get really clear around how my patterns contributed to the relationship dynamic and what I have control over and how I want to do things differently going forward, how I can really nurture my own sense of self and identity now that the relationship is over, particularly if I feel like a lot of that fell by the wayside.
[00:18:46]:
There is no shortage of stuff for you to be focusing on after a breakup, and distracting yourself by focusing on them, as much as it feels like, you know, this thing that you have to do, it's actually not helpful most of the time. So I hope that you've learned something today. And I have been meaning to say thank you to those of you who leave comments and reviews. I read them all, and I'm always so grateful for your kind words and your ongoing support. Sending you lots of love and I look forward to seeing you.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, breakups, emotional processing, attachment system, comparison after breakup, rumination, grief, coping mechanisms, relationship stress, nervous system, agency, relief after breakup, avoidance behaviours, obsession, self-soothing, thought loops, distraction, online resources, new website, free breakup training, self-care, relationship patterns, autonomy, reconciliation, dating after breakup, emotional regulation, personal growth