A data-driven look at what 112 people taught us about how we love, protect ourselves, and survive.
We ran an attachment style quiz, and 112 people took it. The results were honest in the way data usually is — not dramatic, not clean, but quietly telling. Another analysis will be done as soon as we reach 1,000+ responses as this is a more scholarly dataset. If you want to participate you can take the quiz at http://agoodlittleghost.com/attachment-quiz/.
Here is what we found. And more importantly… what it means.
The Numbers
The distribution broke down like this:
- Anxious: 41 responses (≈37%) — the largest group
- Fearful-Avoidant (Disorganized): 36 responses (≈32%)
- Secure: 25 responses (≈22%)
- Avoidant: 10 responses (≈9%)
Average percentage scores per style:
- Secure: ~22.5%
- Anxious: ~30%
- Fearful-Avoidant: ~28.5%
- Avoidant: ~19%
The first thing worth saying clearly: most people are not securely attached. That’s not a judgment. It’s just the reality of who took this quiz and, probably, who most people are — people trying to love while feeling fundamentally unsafe.
Who Is Further From Secure?
One of the most useful questions to come out of this data is also one of the most counterintuitive: Is the anxious style or the avoidant style further from secure? We see a lot of comments on social media about how Avoidants are the worst, or creates a victimization model for the Anxious. Surprisingly, if we measure the raw distance from the secure average (22.5%):
- Anxious sits at +7.5 points above secure
- Avoidant sits at -3.5 points below secure
- Fearful-Avoidant sits at +6 points above secure
Mathematically, anxious deviates further from secure than avoidant does. But that answer, by itself, is incomplete. And incomplete answers are dangerous when the topic is how people form and lose connection.
The Direction of the Deviation
The reality is that distance matters less than direction.
Anxious attachment is overly activated. The anxious person moves toward others as a way of managing fear. They overthink. They cling. They seek reassurance because closeness, for them, is the regulation strategy. They are far from secure not because they don’t want connection — they want it desperately — but because they lose themselves in the pursuit of it.
Avoidant attachment is under-activated. The avoidant person moves away from others as a way of managing the same fear. They withdraw. They suppress. They mistake independence for safety. They appear regulated from the outside, but what they’re actually doing is controlled detachment — and there is a meaningful difference between those two things.
Avoidants score numerically closer to secure in this dataset. But that proximity is partly an illusion. The avoidant appears calm because they’ve gotten very good at not feeling the problem. That’s not healing. That’s containment.
The Counterintuitive Truth About Who’s Harder to Move
This is where the data gets genuinely interesting.
Even though anxious responses deviate further from secure on paper, avoidant patterns can be harder to actually shift in practice. The reason is straightforward: anxious people feel the problem constantly. They know something is wrong. The discomfort is loud. That loudness, as painful as it is, creates pressure toward change.
Avoidant people avoid feeling the problem at all. The defense mechanism works too well. There’s no loudness, no urgency, no obvious moment where the wheels come off. The stagnation is quiet, and quiet stagnation is very hard to interrupt.
So:
- Anxious = visible struggle
- Avoidant = hidden stagnation
Both are real. Neither is worse. But they call for different kinds of work.
What the Fearful-Avoidant Data Reveals
The fearful-avoidant (disorganized) group represents 32% of respondents — the second largest group — and it deserves its own honest look.
This style combines both patterns: the drive toward connection and the fear of it. The result is oscillation — moving toward someone, then pulling back, then moving toward again — without a stable strategy. Fearful-avoidant responses in the data showed the highest levels of internal conflict: wanting emotional support while simultaneously distrusting it, needing closeness while reading it as a threat.
In the language of Be A Good Little Ghost, this is what happens when early attachment trauma creates a “horror without resolution” — the child needs closeness from the very person who is the source of the fear. That paradox doesn’t disappear in adulthood. It just finds new people to replay itself with.
Fearful-avoidant is furthest from secure not because it deviates the most in one direction, but because it fails to find stability in either direction. It is distance from secure measured not in points, but in coherence.
What the Data Actually Shows About All of Us
Looking across all 112 responses, a few patterns emerge that go beyond style labels.
Communication triggers insecurity across the board. A large portion of respondents described overthinking when communication changed, withdrawing when they felt distance, or fearing that a shift in tone meant something was wrong. The common thread: perceived distance is read as emotional threat — not a reflection of reality, but an interpretation of it.
People don’t trust their needs to be received. Responses consistently showed people wanting support but struggling to ask for it, needing reassurance while fearing they were “too much.” This isn’t a communication problem. It’s an identity problem. When you don’t believe your needs are acceptable, you either hide them (avoidant) or over-communicate them out of panic (anxious).
Conflict is being survived, not processed. Very few responses pointed toward repair-oriented behavior during conflict. Most described fear, withdrawal, or emotional swings. This aligns with something the Ghost Framework returns to repeatedly: behavior under pressure is almost always a coping mechanism, not a choice. And coping mechanisms don’t heal anything. They manage.
The core fear is abandonment — across every style. Anxious, avoidant, fearful-avoidant — they are all orbiting the same wound. The fear of being left. The avoidant just has a better disguise for it.
A Better Question Than “Who Is Further?”
The more useful question isn’t who deviates more from secure. It’s this: Who is further from balance?
Anxious is imbalanced toward others. They extend themselves to maintain connection at the cost of losing themselves.
Avoidant is imbalanced toward self. They protect themselves from connection at the cost of having it.
Fearful-avoidant oscillates between the two.
Secure doesn’t sit in the middle as some perfect compromise. Secure is the place where both needs — closeness and autonomy — can exist without one threatening the other. It’s the ability to say I need you without collapsing into it, and I need space without disappearing into it.
What Each Style Actually Needs
For the Anxious Person
The work is not about loving less or needing less. It’s about building the capacity to stay grounded regardless of what the other person does. The anxious person chases safety externally because they haven’t found it internally. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a survival response that stopped serving them.
The shift: from “Do they still want me?” to “Can I stay grounded regardless of their behavior?”
In practice: pause before reacting to perceived distance. Ask honestly whether something is actually happening, or whether you’re interpreting. Learn to self-soothe before you reach for reassurance.
For the Avoidant Person
The work is not about becoming more open or more vulnerable in some general sense. It’s about learning to tolerate closeness without it feeling like a loss of control. The avoidant person has equated independence with safety, and the problem is that this equation costs them the very thing they need.
The shift: from “This is too much” to “I can stay present without losing myself.”
In practice: stay in difficult conversations a little longer than feels comfortable. Express one honest thing instead of nothing. Recognize that withdrawal creates the very disconnection the avoidant most fears.
For the Fearful-Avoidant Person
The work is slower and, in many ways, harder — not because the person is more broken, but because there is no stable strategy to build on yet. The goal isn’t to eliminate the oscillation immediately. It’s to slow it down enough to see it.
The shift: from “I don’t know what I feel” to “I can stay with one response long enough to understand it.”
In practice: slow down reactions before they become patterns. Track what happens over time, not just in individual moments. Start building internal safety before demanding it from others.
The Deeper Truth Beneath the Data
People are not broken. They are protective.
Every style in this dataset is an attempt to answer the same question: How do I stay safe and still be loved? Anxious people answer by pulling close. Avoidant people answer by keeping distance. Fearful-avoidant people answer by doing both, sometimes in the same conversation.
None of these answers are wrong, exactly. They were all right once — usually in childhood, when the options were limited and the stakes were real. The tragedy is not that people developed these strategies. The tragedy is that most people carry them into adulthood without ever realizing that the original threat is gone, and the protection is now the problem.
The safety being chased externally must be built internally. That’s the through-line of the Ghost Framework, and this data confirms it. You do not become securely attached by finding the right partner or improving your communication skills. You become securely attached by building something inside yourself that doesn’t collapse when someone pulls away or overwhelms when someone gets close.
That work is not fast. It’s not linear. It doesn’t look like a breakthrough moment. It looks like many small choices, over time, to stay instead of run — to feel instead of manage — to be honest instead of performing safety.
That’s what becoming real looks like.