Disorganized Attachment Style in Teens: Causes, Signs, & How to Heal
“Why does my teen seem so distant one moment, then needy for attention the next?” If you’re a parent asking this question, know that you’re not alone.
Parenting a teenager can feel like an emotional rollercoaster at the best of times. Your teen’s moods might swing dramatically from one extreme to the other, or they may briefly let you in only to swiftly push you away again.
However, in some cases, extreme behavioral swings might be more than just acting like a “typical” teenager. It may be a sign of disorganized attachment in teens – an attachment style that can significantly affect how teenagers relate to themselves and others.
Disorganized attachment often develops from early childhood experiences and may appear in teenagers as emotional confusion, relationship chaos, and defiance. If you’re concerned about the signs of disorganized attachment in teens, professional support and guidance are at hand. Healing from insecure attachment is both possible and achievable.
This page can also help, walking you through:
- What disorganized attachment is
- How disorganized attachment in teens develops
- Signs of disorganized attachment in adolescents
- The causes of disorganized attachment
- How disorganized attachment impacts teens life
- Ways of healing disorganized attachment
- Where to find professional support
What Is Disorganized Attachment?
Disorganized attachment forms during early childhood and can act as a blueprint for how people relate to other people. In other words, it can affect how someone feels about themselves, family dynamics, friendships, and romantic relationships. Additionally, disorganized attachment can also impact education and work on a day-to-day basis.
Before we dive deeper into the details of disorganized attachment, it’s helpful to have some background information on attachment theory, which we cover next.
What Is Attachment Theory?
Attachment theory was created by the psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby in the 1950s. The theory explains how attachments made with our caregivers in early childhood form a template for how we emotionally connect with others throughout our lives.1 This template is known as an “internal working model.”
The specific attachment styles, as we know them, came later from a research experiment carried out by Mary Ainsworth – the “Strange Situation.”2 The styles were identified based on certain patterns of behavior and were named secure, insecure-anxious, and insecure-avoidant. A fourth style was added later: insecure-disorganized attachment, also known as fearful-avoidant in adults.
Signs of Disorganized Attachment in Adolescents
Often, the behaviors of those with disorganized attachment can seem confusing. For instance, they may seem to run “hot and cold,” – craving support and closeness one moment and then running in the opposite direction the next. This “chaotic” pattern is a key trait of someone with a disorganized attachment.
Other common disorganized attachment signs youth display can include:3-5
- Rapidly switching between wanting and fearing emotional closeness and intimacy
- Attempting to “parent” caregivers (guiding or advising them, providing support)
- Being defiant toward parents or caregivers
- Problems understanding their own and other people’s feelings
- Freezing when their caregiver approaches
- Fear of being abandoned or rejected
- Feeling anxious, stressed, or fearful
- Being fiercely independent yet also “clingy” in relationships
- Problems trusting others
- Difficulty regulating emotions (having mood swings or problems calming themselves)
- Dissociation or “numbness”
- Boundary issues in relationships (either too rigid or too loose)
- Feeling lonely
- Impulsive behavior
- Having a negative view of themselves and others
You may notice that a lot of these symptoms seem contradictory: fearing abandonment but craving closeness, boundaries that are too loose or too tight, being impulsive yet also anxious. This is because these are traits of both the anxious and avoidant attachment styles.
Teen self-protection behaviors like these can seem conflicting, but the reasons behind them may become clearer in the next section when we consider the causes of disorganized attachment.
What Causes Disorganized Attachment in Teens?
When an infant is distressed, they naturally reach out to their parents or caregivers for reassurance and protection. They signal their needs through cues like crying, clinging to, or following caregivers so that they can feel safe and secure. How the caregiver responds to the baby’s cues provides the basis for the bond and subsequent attachment style, which, in turn, can set the pattern for future emotional connections.
Risk Factors for Disorganized Attachment
When considering insecure-disorganized attachment teens, this style may develop due to factors such as:6
- Childhood trauma
- Abuse or neglect
- Growing up in an environment of fear or unpredictability
- Inconsistent parenting or caregiving
- A caregiver with an overly critical manner
- Being cared for by someone who doesn’t show affection
- Having a caregiver who has unresolved trauma
- Genetics
Trauma and disorganized bonding can go hand-in-hand. When a child grows up in an inconsistent or fearful environment, they may be unsure whether their needs will be met, shaking their sense of safety and security. This inconsistency and unpredictability can lead to youth emotional confusion. In other words, the child may struggle to understand why their parent is sometimes able to fulfil their needs but other times isn’t.
Through the factors mentioned above, a caregiver, instead of providing emotional support, sensitivity, or comfort, may alternatively become a source of fear.3 Plus, if the child doesn’t encounter healing or reparative experiences, disorganized attachment risks spilling into the adolescent years – and beyond.
Transgenerational Attachment
When it comes to understanding inconsistent parenting, it may be helpful to understand a concept called “transgenerational attachment.” This concept suggests that attachment styles can be passed down through families, affecting how we connect with others and manage our emotions. In essence, this phenomenon can be explained by epigenetics: how our genes can change in response to our environments.
Understanding how attachment can be passed down through the family line in behaviors and genes can help us break the cycle – allowing us to form more secure and healthy attachments.
How Disorganized Attachment Impacts Teenage Life
A disorganized attachment style can have significant implications when it comes to a teen’s relationships and personal identity. However, it’s good to understand that attachment is a spectrum, so some teens may show more impacts than others.
Personal Identity
A disorganized attachment can affect how a coherent and stable sense of identity develops. For this reason, teenagers with disorganized attachment may struggle to express what they want or need. They may also experience more severe mood swings than their peers and feel more anxious or stressed.
Additionally, due to how their needs were treated as children, they could have a low sense of self-worth and esteem, affecting how they see themselves and relate to others. Based on their negative self and other beliefs, teens with disorganized attachment are at increased risk of physical and mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression.7,8
School Challenges
Teenagers with disorganized attachment might grapple with their behavior and emotional regulation. This difficulty managing emotions and actions can affect relationships with classmates and teachers. For example, they may become disruptive during lessons and experience problems with motivation and concentration in the classroom.
Family Dynamics
When it comes to parents and caregivers, adolescents with disorganized attachment may, on one hand, strive for independence because they fear vulnerability and rejection. This would be considered classic teen fear-avoidance behavior. Yet, on the other hand, their fear of abandonment may also trigger “clingy,” reassurance-seeking actions. The latter is symptomatic of more anxious traits.
Relationships
In friendships and relationships, teens with a disorganized attachment style may show a “push-pull” pattern of behaviors. In other words, they might swing between wanting closeness and pulling away when they get it.
This pattern stems from struggles with trusting people, yet also yearning for reassurance. Intensity and relationship chaos in adolescents with disorganized attachments isn’t unusual due to the mixed signals they received in childhood. However, their template for relationships can make initiating and maintaining emotional closeness challenging.
Conflict and Support
As mentioned, teens with disorganized attachment subconsciously both love and fear emotional closeness. These clashing needs can fuel an internal conflict, leaving them unsure of what they want, feel, or need. However, it’s not just the teens themselves that are confused – those around them are similarly perplexed, often leading to arguments and conflict.
You may be relieved to learn that, although attachment styles are rigid, they’re not set in stone. Treatment is available for adolescents with disorganized attachment to help them develop healthy boundaries and a more stable sense of self.
Healing Disorganized Attachment
If you suspect your adolescent shows signs of a disorganized attachment style, it may be comforting to know it’s possible to work towards a more stable, secure attachment. Professional advice and support are often the best routes to this security, but self-directed approaches can also work. The best fit for your child comes down to their individual symptoms and circumstances. We discuss these options below.
Therapy
Therapy is often the best route to change when it comes to moving from a disorganized to a secure attachment style. It provides a safe and supportive environment for teens to explore and express emotions, understand themselves better, learn how to regulate emotions and develop relationship skills. Several therapeutic approaches can help with disorganized attachment, including:
- Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): DBT can help teenagers manage intense emotions and allow them to learn skills for building healthier relationships
- Trauma-focused therapy: This therapy can support adolescents with a trauma-based attachment style in processing experiences and moving forward with healthier coping strategies
- Cognitive behavioral therapy for teens (CBT): CBT is a structured therapy that focuses on understanding thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Teens can learn to recognize unhelpful beliefs and patterns, challenge them, and replace them with healthier ones
- Attachment-based family therapy: This structured family counseling approach uses attachment theory to rebuild trustworthy, stable family connections
Self-Help Strategies
Self-help strategies for disorganized attachment are things you can do to support healing outside of therapy sessions. The following are some self-help ideas to support a teen’s healing:
- Learn about the disorganized attachment style: Change can’t happen unless you know where to start. Learning about triggers, beliefs, and why people act in certain ways because of them is the foundation of change
- Encourage self-compassion: Your teen is likely doing the best they can, so remind them to treat themselves with compassion. When they slip into self-criticism, encourage them to replace it with self-kindness
- Grounding techniques: When emotions bubble up and feel overwhelming, grounding techniques can bring a teen back to a place of calm.
- Try journaling: Journaling can help a teen feel better by getting distressing or confusing thoughts and feelings out of their mind and onto a page instead. They may be able to make more sense of beliefs when they see them in black and white, or start recognizing unhelpful patterns. This can pave the way to making positive changes.
Trauma-Informed Care for Attachment Healing
When looking for treatment for a disorganized attachment style, especially if there is complex trauma in teens, it’s important to seek out trauma-informed care (TIC). TIC means that those involved in your teen’s care understand the impact trauma can have and bring this understanding into all aspects of the care they provide.
At Mission Prep, we take a trauma-informed approach to mental health treatment, using evidence-based therapies and trauma-focused approaches to help your adolescent recover.
Our residential programs offer a safe, supportive, and structured environment for teenagers to process their feelings and focus on recovery from their challenges. For example, experiential therapies, such as art and music therapy, are offered to support your teen’s healing. Teens are given the time and space for self-discovery, to learn about their condition, and develop new coping skills with the support of our experts.
We understand how important family involvement is to an adolescent’s recovery. For this reason, we always aim to keep loved ones informed and involved in treatment, which may include attending family sessions to help your teenager process and heal.
Mission Prep: Support for Disorganized Attachment
Healing from disorganized attachment isn’t achieved overnight. It’s a process of discovery, self-awareness, rebuilding beliefs, and learning how to trust people – including yourself. The right professional support acts like a navigation system, guiding you and your teen through any potential bumps in the road.
At Mission Prep, we specialize in treating teenagers with mental health challenges, including insecure attachment and attachment disorders. Our team of experts creates a safe space where your teen can explore their inner world and learn to build healthy relationship patterns at a pace that feels comfortable.
You don’t have to figure this out alone, and neither does your teen. We are here to help. If you’re ready to take the next step, reach out to us today to schedule a consultation and discover how we can help your family heal and grow together.
References
- McGarvie, S., PhD. (2025, March 27). Attachment Theory, Bowlby’s Stages & Attachment Styles. PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-theory/
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., & Bell, S. M. (1970). Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation. Child Development, 41(1), 49–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/1127388
- Moore, M. (2023, August 21). Understanding disorganized attachment. Psych Central. https://psychcentral.com/health/disorganized-attachment
- Sutton, J. (2025, April 8). Can a disorganized attachment style be overcome? PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/disorganized-attachment/
- Drescher, A. (2025, June 24). Disorganized attachment style. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/disorganized-attachment.html
- Rush, T. (2024, December 18). What to know about fearful avoidant attachments. Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/fearful-avoidant-attachments
- Doyle, C., & Cicchetti, D. (2017). From the cradle to the grave: The effect of adverse caregiving environments on attachment and relationships throughout the lifespan. Clinical Psychology Science and Practice, 24(2), 203–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12192
- Hornor, G. (2019). Attachment disorders. Journal of Pediatric Health Care, 33(5), 612–622. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedhc.2019.04.017
