Recent research suggests that defensive mental strategies used by individuals who score high on measures of avoidant attachment involve two processes: automatic vigilance concerning interpersonal threats (e.g., an interaction partner's negative emotional expressions) followed by effortful avoidance of the threatening stimuli. In Study I, I used an emotional cueing task and two different stimulus exposure times to explore the role of attachment-related avoidance in a person's focusing either on or away from pictured facial expressions of contempt. Avoidant individuals were vigilant toward contempt faces when the faces were presented for 100 ms, but were able to disengage from these same faces when they were presented for 750 ms. In Study 2, I used a dot-probe task and three different stimulus exposure times to explore the role of attachment anxiety and avoidance in a person's focusing either on or away from negatively valenced attachment-related and general words. Participants who scored high on attachment anxiety exhibited an attentional bias toward negatively valenced attachment-related words but not toward more generally negative words. Those who scored high on avoidant attachment exhibited an attentional bias away from negatively valenced words, whether attachment-related or not. The attentional bias was strongest when stimulus word pairs were exposed for 500 ms, was still evident when the exposure time was 100 ms, but was not statistically significant when the exposure time was 14 ms. In Study 3, I tested the effectiveness of avoidant defenses by measuring participants' performance to the cueing task while under a cognitive load. Results indicated that avoidant people continued to disengage from contempt faces presented for 750 ms when they were rehearsing a simple 1-digit number, but this ability was attenuated when they were trying to remember a 7-digit number. Taken together, the results suggest that avoidant defenses occur in two stages and that such defenses, at least those involving attention, require at least some degree of controlled, deliberate, effortful processing.