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Attachment avoidance may appear as self-sufficiency, emotional distance, minimisation of need, or disengagement under relational stress.
Avoidance reduces distress in the short term but commonly maintains anxiety, trauma responses, functional impairment, and interpersonal narrowing.
Shame often links trauma, attachment threat, avoidance, concealment, anger, self-criticism, and disengagement from care.
Emotional dysregulation is a transdiagnostic formulation mechanism that can amplify impulsivity, interpersonal rupture, avoidance, and risk.
Perfectionism can drive achievement but may maintain anxiety, depression, shame, procrastination, avoidance, and burnout.
Negative core beliefs bias attention and meaning-making, often linking early experience to current automatic thoughts, affect, and behaviour.
Reassurance seeking can soothe briefly but may maintain uncertainty intolerance, anxiety, dependency cycles, and interpersonal strain.
Splitting can simplify unbearable ambivalence but may destabilise relationships, teams, and self-experience.
Biological, social and cultural material that belongs in the formulation but is not a psychological mechanism. A factor needs case evidence before it explains anything.