Wanting Connection But Pushing Away: What Fleabag Teaches Us About Fearful-Avoidant Attachment and the Paradox of Being Seen

This piece uses Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag to explore how some people learn to disappear in order to stay safe in relationship.

"Where did you just go?"

Mid-conversation with the Priest, Fleabag does what she always does — glances at the camera. The familiar smirk is ready, the exit already planned. But this time, something different happens.

He notices.

For two seasons, Fleabag has been disappearing mid-sentence and no one has caught her. The fourth-wall break is her private escape hatch  – a dissociative safe house she can slip into the moment things feel too exposed, too charged, too real. She turns pain into performance, intimacy into commentary, wanting connection but pushing away, and we laugh along with her so we don’t have to notice she’s gone.

Until someone does.

The Priest’s question lands because it interrupts a system that has worked perfectly well up until now. Fleabag doesn’t know what to do with being seen at the exact moment she leaves. The move that once kept her safe is suddenly illuminated.

She freezes.

Last week, a client said something that stayed with me long after the session ended:

“It’s hard to articulate some things because you’re the first person who’s really seen me. And that feels exposing — not comforting.”

Not comforting.

Exposing.

We spend so much of our lives trying to be seen — really seen — held, understood, recognised in our full, complicated selves. And yet, when it actually happens, many of us feel more terrified than relieved. We perform our way through relationships, work, family. We curate, edit, deflect, and fourth-wall our way through intimacy.

So what happens when someone notices you’ve gone?

When they track you mid-disappearance and don’t let you slip away unwitnessed?

In the therapy room, in love, in leadership — being truly seen often isn’t the relief we expected. It’s unbearable and necessary in equal measure.

We Build Escape Routes

Fleabag’s fourth-wall break isn’t quirky television. It’s a dissociative masterclass.

She fractures mid-feeling. She turns pain into humour, longing into commentary. She keeps control by staying just half a step removed from her own experience. It works brilliantly — until someone like the Priest refuses to collude with the exit.

We all have our versions.

Yours might not involve breaking the fourth wall, but most people have a signature move when intimacy gets too close:

The joke that deflects. The sudden need to check your phone. The intellectual analysis of your feelings instead of actually feeling them. The pivot to someone else’s problems. The sex. The work. The wine. The abrupt realisation that you urgently need to reorganise the pantry.

None of this is pathology.

It’s architecture.

You built these exits for a reason, probably because staying visible once felt dangerous, or because no one was there to catch you when you did. These aren’t personality quirks. They’re evidence that you survived something that required excellent infrastructure.

The dissociative move becomes so automatic we often don’t notice we’re doing it. We’re just suddenly somewhere else, and the conversation continues without us.

The Priest’s genius isn’t that he catches Fleabag in the act.

It’s that he names it without judgement.

Not “Why did you leave?”

But “Where did you go?”

As if her disappearance were geography, not failure.

The Ones Who Notice When We Leave

The Priest’s question is devastating because it isn’t accusatory. He isn’t fixing or rescuing or demanding an explanation. He’s genuinely curious. He noticed her disappear, and he wants to know where she went.

This is attunement. Not fixing or rescuing, just noticing where someone goes and staying present long enough for them to come back.

Not mind-reading.

Not problem-solving.

Just: I see you leaving, and I’m holding space for you even when you can’t see yourself.

Most of us have spent our lives with people who either didn’t notice when we left, or noticed and punished us for it. So when someone finally sees us mid-exit and doesn’t shame us for it — when they simply stay — it’s clarifying and destabilising in equal measure.

That client’s words keep echoing:

“You’re the first person who’s really seen me. And that feels exposing, not comforting.”

She didn’t say it felt good.

She said it felt exposing.

Because here’s what we don’t talk about enough: being truly seen activates everything. The longing we’ve carried since we were small enough to need someone’s gaze to know we existed, and the terror that if someone really sees us, they’ll do what others have done before.

Look away.

Leave.

Confirm what we’ve suspected all along.

Attunement, it turns out, is deeply inconvenient when you’ve built your whole life around not being witnessed.

The paradox is this: we engineered these escape routes because being seen once felt dangerous. But over time, the exits themselves become the danger — the very thing that keeps us from the connection we’re desperate for.

Fleabag can’t be close to the Priest while she’s half-disappeared into the camera. She has to choose: the safety of the exit, or the risk of staying.

Neither choice is comfortable.

Both are real.

What It Means to Stay

There’s a moment in the 2004 film Shall We Dance? where Susan Sarandon’s character explains why people choose long-term partnership. It isn’t framed as romance or passion. It’s framed as witness.

"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.'"

That’s what the Priest offers Fleabag, even if only briefly. Not love as transaction. Not fixing or rescuing. Just this: I see you. Even when you leave, I’m holding the space you stepped out of. You don’t disappear just because you learned how to.

Most of us aren’t looking for someone to solve us. We’re looking for someone who can hold our gaze without flinching. Someone who sees the whole complicated truth — the brilliance and the wreckage — and doesn’t look away.

The difference between being looked at and being seen matters here. Being looked at invites performance. Being seen requires presence. And presence is what many of us have learned to avoid, because staying visible when someone is really watching can feel like standing in a spotlight with nowhere to hide.

But this is the quiet truth the work keeps revealing: staying visible, even when it’s unbearable, is how we learn we’re not as catastrophic as we think we are.

Fleabag begins to learn this with the Priest. My client is learning it slowly in our work together. The evidence accumulates gently, against expectation: you can be fully seen, and the person watching does not flinch. Visibility does not automatically lead to abandonment.

This doesn’t happen in one moment. It happens across many moments, with someone who tracks you carefully enough to notice when you’ve gone — and patient enough to wait while you decide whether to come back.

The Walk Away

In Fleabag’s final scene, she does something she’s never done before. She walks away from the camera. Away from us. Away from the fourth wall she’s been using as a shield for two seasons.

She doesn’t explain it. She doesn’t turn back. She simply keeps walking — toward herself, rather than performing for an invisible audience.

It’s the quietest moment in a series built on breaking the fourth wall, and it’s the loudest thing she does.

That’s what it looks like when someone stops performing and starts existing. Not fixed. Not healed. Just… real.

Being seen — truly seen — isn’t a warm bath or a breakthrough you’ll want to document. It’s exposing. Necessary. Occasionally unbearable. It feels like staying still when every instinct says run.

But here’s what I notice, again and again, in the therapy room: the people who allow themselves to be seen — who stay visible for a moment longer than feels comfortable — don’t become different people. They become more themselves. Less defended. Less performed. More here.

The Priest sees Fleabag mid-disappearance and doesn’t shame her for it. She survives being witnessed. And somewhere in that survival, she finds enough ground to stop leaving herself.

You might recognise this pattern in your own life: the exits you’ve built, the fourth-wall breaks only you can see, the ways you’ve learned to leave before someone can watch you go. Not as pathology. As architecture you built when staying visible felt impossible.

Some people live with this pattern as familiar background noise, something they’ve managed for so long it feels like personality. Others are noticing it’s becoming foreground and something that’s starting to cost them, something that’s interfering with the closeness they want. Both are valid places to be.

Recognition often shifts something, even without immediate action. Sometimes that shift is enough. Sometimes it opens a quieter curiosity — not about fixing anything, but about what it might be like to be witnessed without catastrophe. To practice staying visible with someone who can track you carefully and won’t punish you for leaving.

That’s the work we do with clients, holding space for that exploration, without requiring you to stay before you’re ready.

If you’re curious about exploring these patterns in a supported way, we work with women navigating attachment, visibility, and the cost of strategies that worked too well. We have limited availability for new clients.

Curious but not sure you want to commit? Book a free 15-minute consultation/ vibe check HERE.

Or reach out at: kr@thisiskindred.com.au

For a more structured way to reflect privately, Kindred’s Attachment Reflection resource is available HERE.

This is part of Attachment Tuesdays, where we explore attachment patterns through fictional characters. Partly because they give us emotional distance, and partly because Fleabag articulates what we're all thinking - just with better timing and a British accent.