There is a man in Saigon whom I have known casually for about three years. Successful. Sharp. Great dinner conversation. The kind of person you would really picture together. We would see each other at meetings, always have something to talk about, and I assumed she had a full social life behind the scenes.
One night after everyone had left, he said something that caught me off guard. He said he couldn’t remember the last time someone called to talk to him. Not to organize anything. Not to ask for favors. Just to talk. He said it casually, as if describing the weather, but I could feel the weight underneath.
He was not an introvert. He was not anti-social. He was one of the most socially adept people I have ever met. And he was deeply alone. Not because he lacked the ability to connect, but because deep within his operating system there was a rule: intimacy is dangerous. Keep people at a distance where they can enjoy you but never really know you.
This rule did not come from nowhere. It never happens.
Where the rule is written
Attachment theory, begun with John Bowlby and expanded by researchers such as Mary Ainsworth and later Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, provides the clearest framework for understanding how this happens. The basic idea is that the patterns of closeness and security you experience with your primary caregivers as a child set a template for how you approach relationships as an adult.
A A study examining childhood maltreatment and adult attachment found that childhood neglect and physical abuse had lasting effects on attachment styles and that the effects could be measured 30 years later in adulthood. Both anxious and avoidant attachment styles predicted higher levels of depression and anxiety and lower self-esteem. The study found that anxious attachment partially explained the pathway from childhood neglect to adult mental health outcomes, while avoidant attachment was associated with emotional inhibition and avoidance of attachment relationships.
Simply put: if you grew up in a home where need was met with rejection, ridicule or silence, your nervous system made a logical calculation. Here he concluded that the vulnerability is not safe. And then he built a castle around you so impressive that when you were an adult you didn’t even know it existed. You just thought you’d rather be independent.
Avoidance is similar to strength
This is what makes avoidant attachment difficult to identify from the outside and painful from the inside. Doesn’t seem like a problem. It seems self-sufficient.
research on attachment style, childhood trauma, and adult well-being From Psychology Today notes that avoidant attachment is associated with physical abuse in childhood, and that avoidant adults inhibit and control their emotions by avoiding intimacy. But here’s what makes it difficult: avoidant people often display what appear to be a lack of problems. They work well at work. They manage their lives skillfully. They do not visibly disintegrate. Researcher R. Chris Fraley found that adults who avoid distractions can effectively suppress their physiological stress response when instructed to do so.
In other words, they do not suffer less. They are better at hiding it. The skill that keeps them safe during a difficult childhood, the ability to shut down emotional signals and look good, becomes the skill that isolates them in adulthood. Because the thing that breaks down isolation, that lets someone see that you’re not okay, is something that your entire system is built to prevent.
This is what it looked like in my life
I grew up in a loving family. I want to say this clearly. My parents did not abuse. My childhood was not as traumatic as the word suggests. But like many Australian families of that generation, emotional expression was not a central currency. You were expected to handle things. You were expected to take it easy. The message was never “I don’t have feelings.” It was more subtle: “Don’t be a burden to them.”
That’s enough. That’s all it takes. You don’t need a dramatic origin story to create a running pattern. You just need a consistent, quiet signal that says: low maintenance is how you win love.
So I became low maintenance. I became a friend who did not need anything. A partner who is easy. A colleague who solves his own problems. And for years it felt like an identity. I felt who I was. After moving to Saigon with my husband and trying to build a life from scratch, I saw a pattern: I could easily form relationships and almost never deepen them.
Every friendship would reach a certain depth and then a plateau. Not because the other side was drawn. Because I did. Unconsciously, reliably, at the point where true intimacy would require me to show something unpolished. Needing something loud. Risking something that my nervous system has protected me from since childhood: extreme exposure.
A perfectly structured life
People with avoidant patterns don’t just avoid intimacy. They build their whole lives without needing it. And the architecture is often impressive. They have full schedules, productive careers, interesting hobbies, and a large circle of acquaintances that would describe them as friendly and well-adjusted. Everything in their lives is designed to provide stimulation without requiring sensitivity.
The Harvard Study of Adult DevelopmentFollowing people for more than 85 years, it found that the single strongest predictor of health and happiness later in life was the quality of close relationships. Not the number of relationships. Not professional success. Not financial security. The depth of connection with the few people who really know you.
For someone with an avoidant pattern, this finding is both revealing and devastating. Obviously, somewhere under the castle, you always know that what you are protecting yourself from is what you need most. Destructive because the castle works. It keeps you functional, productive and comfortable. Dismantling it means choosing inconvenience over safety, and your entire system is designed to make that choice feel impossible.
What started to change for me
Meditation was part of it. Instead of sitting with myself on the pillow in our apartment every morning and controlling it, we’re learning to feel what’s actually there. In my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How to Live with Maximum Impact and Minimum EgoI wrote about the Buddhist idea that our habits are not character traits. They are strategies that once served a purpose and are now on autopilot. I am not an example of avoidance. It’s what I built to live in a version of a world that no longer exists.
But the bigger change came from my wife. He’s Vietnamese, from a culture where emotional directness is complicated, but he has a quality that quietly breaks down my defenses: He notices when I pull back and doesn’t let me pretend it’s not going to happen. Not aggressive. Not with drama. He would simply say, “You do whatever you go for.” And I would understand that he was right. I went behind the wall without realizing it.
This is what secure people do. They don’t ask you to dismantle the rest. They stand close enough to him that you begin to realize that the wall is not protecting you from them. It just keeps you alone.
What would I say to a person who knows himself here?
You are broken. You are not cold. You’re not “just an introvert who prefers her own company,” although you’ve probably been telling yourself that for years because it’s a more comfortable story than the truth.
The truth is that at some point, probably very early on, you got the message that needing people is risky. This weakness will be met with nothing but warmth. And you made a completely rational decision to protect yourself by being someone who doesn’t need anyone. This decision protected you when you were little. Now that you are not there, it keeps you alone.
You don’t need to fundamentally change your personality. You don’t have to be someone who shares everything with everyone. You just need to find a person, a conversation, a moment, where you have to let go of the chosen version and say something honest about what’s going on inside you.
It will feel dangerous. Your entire system will protest. Every instinct you’ve carried for decades will scream at you to retreat, to control the impression, to stay safe.
Do it anyway. Because the life you built to protect yourself from vulnerability works perfectly. And the value of this perfect protection is the one thing he can never give you: someone who really knows you.
I’m still learning it. Every day here in this city, with my wife, daughter and a few people, I walk slowly, flawlessly past the wall. The castle does not fall suddenly. One honest sentence comes every time. And every time what you fear, rejection, punishment, withdrawal does not happen. And you understand that with a sadness that is equal parts sadness and relief, it will never happen.
