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Have you ever wondered if there are major differences between a male fearful avoidant attachment style and a female? The answer is, for the most part, no, but in some ways, yes. And in today's video, I'm going to break down exactly what those crucial differences are by describing the male fearful avoidant in all of the different traits and characteristics that you are likely to see. And we're going to start by talking about some of the overarching themes. Then we'll go into how they tend to treat their feelings of trust in relationships and seek safety, even some of those reactions they might have when they're feeling emotionally unsafe. We'll talk about where some of the male fearful avoidant wounds come from, different enmeshment points in childhood, the mother wound at times. We'll get into all of that and we'll talk about social and emotional regulation, how they see themselves, and we'll even talk about behavioral patterns. So there's going to be a lot to cover. This is going to be a mini masterclass in all of the traits. We'll talk about the top 30 things across all of those categories that you can expect to see for a male fearful avoidant attachment style, foreign. Let's start with the overarching themes. Number one, as you can imagine, as is very typical with all fearful avoidance, they have these same overarching themes. They crave depth of closeness, but they fear it when it actually comes to fruition. So you'll see this defining fearful avoidant contradiction where they want this closeness. They want to almost, like, merge and have depth of connection with somebody. But then when it really happens, they'll get this gratification from that experience of having, like, a lot of closeness or a really deep, meaningful conversation. But soon after that, they'll start to push away. They'll start to feel overwhelmed. Sometimes smothered. And male fearful avoidance tend to pursue very intensely at the start of relationships. But when intimacy and closeness really land, but when they start tearing into, like, the commitment category, they will retreat. They will panic a little bit. They'll start to feel this fear of enmeshment creeping in, this fear of being smothered again. And so they'll come on very strong quite early, but then go cold almost without warning. And it often leaves people's heads spinning. You will also see this dynamic of like, I really want this closeness. I want this depth. Often male fearful avoidance are very physical by nature, very tactile, often very kinesthetic. But then they are like, all in when you're with them. And then when you're not with them, they tend to retreat and they're not always that responsive. And that juxtaposition for so many people in dating is often very confusing. It feels like this person's all in one day and then, you know, kind of missing over communication and really not consistent the next day. As male fearful avoidance start to get closer to somebody, they start testing their partner. And they will test them in a variety of different ways. They will often test them first from the perspective of, you know, are you really interested in me? Do you think that I'm valuable? And male fearful avoidance tend to put other people on a big pedestal. But when they start to think that they may have earned their worth, they start to test, okay, well do you actually have traits that are going to contribute to a trusting and trustworthy relationship? So they'll start to look a little more deeply into are you consistent and congruent? They start to really poke it, to sort of see your relationship history. They want to know if you're going to hurt them basically, which is that self preservation part of the fearful avoidant, because they've usually been hurt in many ways before. And male fearful avoidance have a long standing theme and history of sabotaging relationships where love is actually good or healthy, especially as the relationship starts to grow. And there are two major points in time that they are most likely to do this point in time. Number one is around that four, five month mark, they start becoming much more hot and cold. I won't actually call that a full sabotage point. It's when they get a year and a half and they get into that power struggle stage of relationships. You know, if you've been following this channel for a while, you know that we talk about the dating stage, then the honeymoon stage, then there's this power struggle stage. And it's statistically where most people break up, but it's where fearful of winds are the most hot and cold and the most push pull. And even if they have a really healthy partner at this point in a relationship or somebody's willing to meet them part way, somebody's, you know, trying to work through conflict. A lot of times, unfortunately, the fearful avoidance, and this goes for men and women, but you'll definitely see it here. Male fearful avoidance often don't feel worthy of healthy relationships. And they don't. It's like their nervous system is not comfortable in a healthy, safe relationship long term. So when they don't have this constant chaos, they may actually sabotage from that particular space. And as you can imagine, male fearful avoidance actually have these same core wounds or triggers that all fearful avoidance do. They have the core wounds of feeling betrayed, biggest one from integrated attachment theory. They have the core wound or fear of being trapped, helpless or powerless if they rely on somebody else. The core wound of fearing abandonment. And then you see these oscillating parts where they fear abandonment, but they also fear being trapped or engulfed. And they have a difficult time trusting. And on top of that, they have this chronic I am unsafe core wound because their nervous system is chronically dysregulated. They won't tell you they feel unsafe. They very much trust themselves to handle unsafe situations. But you know your nervous system is trapped in an I am unsafe core wound. When you have chronic fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses, there tends to be a lot of these themes in here. They fear this like abandonment, but they also fear this rejection. And rejection is another core wound for fearful avoidance. So we see a lot of these big themes. Now what you'll often see in terms of male fearful avoidance, a lot of times in childhood they were parentified, enmeshed. Sometimes they have a big mother wound where they were forced to basically be the surrogate parent to a mother or they had to sort of be like head of household, jump in, protect the mother or younger siblings at a young age from the father figure. There may be themes like this, or they were forced to take on so much responsibility at a young age because of being in the thick of more big t trauma, seeing abuse in the household or a parent who was an alcoholic, or having some sort of deep abandonment or pain point where there's a lot of responsibility that was put on them to base. Basically step into a role. Again, another form of parentification, whether it's instrumental parentification, like having to step into the role of the protector or doing more things for the younger siblings around the house, or emotional parentification where they were put in a position where they now have to emotionally caretake for everybody else. Now, these are not the only themes, but these are a lot of those common themes that you'll tend to see. Now how do they deal with trust and safety? Well, often they tend to constantly scan their environment. They're very hyper vigilant. Of course, even if somebody's showing healthy signs of trust, they're always and male fearful avoidants have a very difficult time letting their guard down and receiving from other people. They may receive like a compliment here or there, but they're not really receiving help and support from other people because they're so identified with the role of being the caretaker, and often even end up being the role of the savior, trying to save or fix other people incessantly. And they often don't really trust that somebody's care for them is going to withstand the test of time. They often think, well, yeah, you're going to care for me now, but once this infatuation is over, how can you possibly show up and care for me? And again, that's usually because they didn't get cared for in the way that they deserve to have as a child growing up. And so it's almost this unknown to them that they could have or even receive that. When it comes to emotional regulation, we'll often see this intense emotional depth and intensity masked by this kind of controlled exterior. You can almost feel the intense emotion bubbling beneath the surface of this. Not always, but the vast majority of the time. They may have moments of emotional flooding depth, emotional availability, followed by going into functional freeze mode, this sort of muted withdrawing at times. And they tend to oscillate back and forth between those different modes of being from a nervous system perspective. And they may go from being very anxious one day to very avoidant the next. They often can struggle a little bit with their own anger irritability. And I'm not saying in any ways that they'll necessarily have these like extreme outbursts, but they may, you know, be harsh with their words at times or critical or very frustrated. And they may very much self isolate under stress and pretend like they've always got it, they're always fine. Now, in certain cases, we'll often see the male fearful avoidant attachment style also provide or try to pursue physical and sexual closeness rather than emotional vulnerability. They'll do that emotional vulnerable piece quite well in the early stages of dating. But as things progress, they often try to create a gap and distance around emotional vulnerability because it doesn't feel safe for them. And as is very typical with fearful avoidance as a whole male fearful avoidance will often be good at being vulnerable about small things, but not actually the big things they truly feel insecure or vulnerable about. They'll keep those things close to their chest and sometimes take those things to the grave. Like, they can be very private deep down, especially around the things that they feel may diminish their sense of worth in your eyes. The things that they think, oh, you would judge me for this, you would think less of me. They are so hyper vigilant about, and they tend to clam up and take those things and keep those things very quiet and personal in a really big way. Now, a Lot of times male fearful avoidance have an internalized sense of shame. We know that they often have this I am bad, I am unworthy set of core wounds that get internalized as shame. Not the same type of shame you would tend to see with a dismissive avoidant, because not so much of the defectiveness core wound, but much more so the sense of I'm just not worthy as I am and I have to earn my worth and I have to keep proving my innocence to to and proving that I'm good. They have this huge fear of being seen as bad. And you'll generally see as well that they are so mean and harsh and critical to themselves in their own internal dialogue, which obviously translates to them projecting that and thinking you will see them through harsh and critical eyes in a relationship. The very last thing I'll say before we go into what you do in this relationship dynamic is of course the behavioral patterns that you would see here are a lot of mixed signals, hot and cold protest behaviors where they will test, withdraw, retreat quite frequently. They may struggle with conflict repair. They'll often go from feeling very frustrated and angry and upset to then feeling extreme guilt and shame for their actions and behaviors. But they have a hard time taking accountability and changing the pattern in relationships unless they're doing subconscious work, because we can't really change dramatically unless we involve the subconscious mind in the process. And male fearful avoidants are very much attracted to intensity. They love intensity. They'll often mistake chaos and intensity for chemistry and think that that's what they should be pursuing in a long term relationship, but then often be let down by the fact that chaos does not provide the trust and stability they actually need to make a long term relationship work. If you're struggling with this, if you are on the receiving end of this relationship dynamic and you want to learn so much more about what's driving these behaviors and how to actually rewire and heal them at the subconscious level. You can use the link down below to check out a free hour and a half long masterclass that I run that's coming up this week and you can actually join me there literally for free. And we will go through at a much deeper level all of the attachment styles and their subconscious core wounds. We'll talk about how to rewire these core wounds because until we do that work at the subconscious level, that's actually what sponsors all of these chaotic patterns and behaviors, is these core fears. The fears and wounds of being unworthy, bad, abandoned, trapped, helpless, powerless, betrayed. These big core wounds we were talking about earlier. And until we understand those things in a really deep way and understand how to not hit those things, those wounds in our partner and how to rewire them in ourselves, if this is you or you want to share this with somebody you love, then we will keep recycling these really difficult themes and patterns. So you can join me there for free. It is live. I will be teaching it live. You can ask me your questions live in there. Share with me what you're experiencing or going through and it will be the next steps to really understand this dynamic a lot more deeply. So I hope you enjoy and if you enjoyed today's video, please like share. Subscribe to this channel. Let me know if you've experienced this firsthand in your relationships or or if you've ever dated somebody like this that you've loved. And I will see you in tomorrow's video. You won't want to miss it.