The term first
Two vocabularies got mixed together. Mary Main and Judith Solomon described a pattern in infants in the 1980s and called it disorganized, because no coherent strategy appeared when the parent returned. Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz described the adult four-category model in 1991, where the equivalent corner is called fearful-avoidant.
The word that spread on social media is disorganized, applied to adults. Both point at the same region of the plane, but the infant term carries clinical implications that an adult attachment questionnaire cannot support.
What two simultaneous alarms produce
High anxiety pushes toward closeness to stop the worry. High avoidance pushes toward distance to stop the discomfort of closeness. Both fire in the same situation, and each coping strategy cancels the other.
What shows on the outside is alternation inside one relationship: weeks of intense investment, then a retreat that seems to come from nowhere. The trigger is often a moment of closeness that went well rather than a fight, which makes the sequence unreadable for the partner.
On top of that sits a difficulty reading intentions: a neutral signal gets treated as a threat by the anxious axis and as an intrusion by the avoidant one, sometimes on the same day.
Why this corner is the least common
In adult samples, most scores fall into the other three corners. Fearful-avoidant stays a minority, and the literature associates it more often than the others with early relational experiences marked by fear, where the source of comfort was also the source of alarm.
That statistical association says nothing about any individual. High scores on both axes are not proof of a difficult past, and a difficult past does not necessarily lead there.
What helps
This is the profile where professional support changes the most, precisely because the two spontaneous strategies neutralise each other: there is no obvious move that settles both alarms at once.
Two supports come up repeatedly in the couples therapy literature. Making the sequences predictable, by naming in advance what happens when the retreat arrives. And working on each axis separately rather than on the corner, since the two do not move at the same rate.
What Noetly measures
Your profile gives two distinct scores with their margin of error rather than a single label. The distinction matters particularly here: a profile with very high anxiety and avoidance barely above average often gets the same name as one extreme on both, while the two situations call for different supports.