How therapists can recognise avoidant defences, understand the countertransference, and build relational safety without pushing for closeness too quickly.

Avoidant attachment in therapy describes a relational pattern where clients may protect themselves from vulnerability, dependency, rejection or emotional overwhelm by relying on distance, self-sufficiency and intellectualisation. In this episode of The Attachment in Practice Podcast, Georgina Sturmer explores how avoidant attachment can appear in the therapy room, how therapists might experience it in the countertransference, and how attachment-informed practice can support clients to feel safe enough to move gently towards connection.

Drawing on attachment theory, attachment styles, relationships and therapeutic practice, this episode looks beyond the idea of avoidance as disengagement. Instead, avoidant attachment is understood as a protective strategy: one that may have developed in response to early relational environments where emotional needs were minimised, closeness felt unsafe, or independence was praised.

Georgina reflects on how avoidant clients may present as articulate, thoughtful and highly capable, while remaining disconnected from feelings, bodily experience or relational vulnerability. The episode explores common defensive mechanisms such as intellectualisation, humour, minimising and rationalising, and considers the risk of therapists either colluding with these defences or pushing too hard against them.

Listeners will also be invited to think about their own attachment responses in the therapy room. When working with avoidant attachment, therapists may notice feelings of flatness, distance, boredom, inadequacy or a pressure to “make something happen”. These responses can offer valuable clinical information when held with curiosity and supervision.

This episode is especially relevant for counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, supervisors, trainees and attachment-informed practitioners who want to deepen their understanding of avoidant attachment in clinical practice.

In this episode, we explore:

• What avoidant attachment really means
• How avoidant attachment presents before and during therapy
• Why intellectualisation and humour can function as defences
• How avoidance lives within the therapeutic relationship
• What therapists may notice in the countertransference
• How to work gently with boundaries, pacing, metaphor and the body
• Why the goal is not to dismantle defences, but to build relational safety