The "Wise" Behind the "Why's?!" - Appreciating My Triggers as a Fearful Avoidant
The internal, and sometimes, external emotional turbulence of the Fearful Avoidant seemed to never fail in resurfacing triggers that I thought had long been buried at sea.
There is a specific kind of quiet pride that comes when you think you’ve finally mapped the coastline of your own life experiences. I started mapping my initial journey in 2019, following the death of my mother, after finding myself in the eye of an emotional hurricane. For a long time, I believed I had cleared the deck. I had 'battened down the hatches' by constructing that internal "Safe Harbor" where I no longer felt constantly tossed by the threat of abandonment or betrayal. I felt like a Captain who had finally tamed the North Atlantic, with the crystal-clear skies and a bright North Star guiding me. A false sense of calm, unaware of the storms I'd face on my way to the other side.
But then, the horizon shifts.
A trigger bobs to the surface, not with the violence of a tsunami, but with the persistent, rhythmic thud of a buoy against a hull. Each thud reverberating through my brain as the inner critic, a malicious stowaway, sneered, "See? I knew you would screw this up. AGAIN." The initial disappointment is sharp. It feels like a regression, a sign that my coping skills or strategies didn't work. Then came the "WHY'S" - "Why do I even bother? Why do you even bother with me? Why is this happening again?" Then a mutiny of shame ambushed my ship.
But through the lens of a Fearful Avoidant in recovery, I’ve reclaimed my ship and learned to see this differently. The WHY'S evolved into my WISE. Healing isn’t a singular passage - a movement from one destination to another - but a voyage of priority and complexity. The microbursts of unexpected weather were necessary in honing my Captain's intuition.
Whether I am in an activated (anxious) state, scanning the horizon for connection, or deactivated (avoidant) state, docking my ship to preserve my autonomy, I am learning to appreciate these surfacing buoys. They are my "WISE" indicators. They aren't there to sink me; they are there to show me exactly where the next layer of my mastery lies. As I evolve, my triggers evolve with me, shifting from blunt instruments of survival into refined tools for intimacy.
In the beginning, I had to survive the tsunami - an unscalable wall of intense emotions that usually evoked the most primal of stress responses. For me it was fawning - appease and please. "What did I do wrong? How can I make it better? Please don't be mad at me. Please don't hurt me. Please don't leave me." These safety triggers demanded total focus just to stay afloat' and were directly correlated to the deepest core wounds.
The healing of the FA requires addressing these wounds first in order to create a clearing for the lesser, but still relevant, nuanced relational patterns are finally allowed to surface.
It wasn't that I was lost at sea; it’s that I was EVOLVING. I was now skilled enough to navigate the complexity of the "lower-priority" currents that were previously drowned out by the storm.
I am no longer just surviving the sea. I am learning to interpret it.
