The Closer You Get, the More I Pull Away

A book on avoidant attachment, emotional distance and anxious–avoidant relationships.

Your partner — or you yourself — seems unable to tolerate closeness, minimizes their emotions, or systematically sabotages intimacy the moment it becomes real? Avoidant attachment affects roughly 25% of the general population according to the most-cited epidemiological studies, a figure confirmed since Hazan and Shaver's founding study (1987). This clinical guide decodes the three avoidant profiles — the dismissive, who minimizes their needs; the fearful, torn between the desire for closeness and the terror of intimacy; the deactivating, who actively sabotages attachment the moment it activates — and the destructive "dance" that forms between an anxious and an avoidant partner. An eight-week CBT protocol guides you through restructuring avoidant schemas, with tools that are also directly usable by helping professionals. The book closes with the concept of "earned secure" attachment, introduced by Mary Main: clinical proof that your childhood history condemns you to nothing, provided you know how to understand it and integrate it differently.