5 Common Thoughts When You’re Anxiously Attached
#1 “That’s it, I know s/he’s leaving me”.
Having an anxious attachment style is incredibly common, and it’s a huge obstacle when it comes to building healthy, stable relationships.
If you’re anxiously attached, you’re constantly looking for signs of danger. You feel like you need to be ready for everything: abandonment, betrayal, rejection, conflict. You’re in a never-ending state of fear.
However, it’s possible to heal. It’s possible to find different ways of being and become more secure.
Becoming more secure requires becoming aware of your thoughts, beliefs, and patterns, so that you can identify them when they come up to the surface, and then let them go.
1. “That’s it, I know s/he’s leaving me”
Anxiously attached people struggle with feeling safe and at ease, which means every obstacle is seen as a potential threat to the relationship — and we feel the need to anticipate every potential threat.
This thought stems from two main beliefs:
- Abandonment is inevitable;
- There’s something fundamentally wrong with us, and our partner will eventually find it out.
When we feel this way, it’s usually because our parents did not show love in a consistent way. Maybe they’d get distant when we made mistakes, or they’d be affectionate one moment and cold the next.
These experiences create the belief that love is always taken away from us when we show our true colors (when we show our authentic, vulnerable, not-so-perfect side).
2. “S/he’s so amazing, why would s/he want to be with me anyway?”
This idea that there’s something wrong with you is the reason behind your low self-esteem — and it’s also one of the reasons behind your chronic fear of rejection and abandonment.
These fears may not necessarily operate at a conscious level. Sometimes they’re so deep in our subconscious mind that we’re not aware of them (unless we make a conscious effort to dive deep into our emotional patterns).
You may have normalized these thoughts, but the truth is, secure people don’t think:
I knew this was too good to last.
I knew something would go wrong.
I’ll never find anyone else.
In secure relationships, almost everything has a solution as long as there’s love and respect involved.
3. “S/he can’t treat me this way! I’ll show him/her”
Since you need constant reassurance, you get extremely insecure and suspicious of your partner when you’re not given the reassurance you crave.
While it’s normal to expect reassurance and emotional closeness from your partner, it’s not normal to get immediately bitter and resentful at the slightest disappointment or “sign of rejection” — especially when the rejection is not even real.
However, anxiously attached people also have the tendency to have avoidant partners. This type of partner can indeed trigger your sensitivity to rejection since you re-enact each other’s wounds, fears, and insecurities.
In secure relationships, there’s no space for bitterness or retaliation. You’re able to effectively communicate your needs and express your feelings in a calm, respectful way — and you give your partner the space to do the same.
4. “S/he’d better come crawling back to beg my forgiveness, otherwise s/he can forget about me forever”
This is what we call protest behavior, and it can be very harmful to the relationship. In this article, I mentioned other examples of this behavior:
- Excessive attempts to reestablish contact, like calling many times or loitering by your partner’s workplace in hopes of running into him/her;
- Withdrawing, turning you back on your partner;
- Paying attention to how long it took them to return your calls and waiting just as long to return theirs;
- Waiting for them to make the first “make-up” move and acting distant until they do;
- Acting hostile, like rolling your eyes when they speak, looking away or leaving the room why they’re talking;
- Threatening to leave, acting busy or unapproachable;
- Making your partner feel jealous;
5. “I’ve ruined everything”
When you have an anxious attachment style, you probably experience all-or-nothing thinking.
Your partner is either amazing or untrustworthy. Your relationship is either a fairy tale or a failure. You’re either a great partner or a terrible one. There’s no middle ground.
Thinking of people in such extreme terms is not only damaging — it’s inaccurate. We’re all complex individuals with complex traits, and we all have a range of behaviors:
“There is no “in-between” when partners see each other in an all-or-nothing way. And you may very well feel that your partner never listens to you or is always inconsiderate. However, this is likely not the reality. Most people have a range of behavior that includes sometimes being considerate and sometimes being inconsiderate. This range of behaviors is shaped from a combination of our genes and our upbringings. As individuals, we vary in both pleasant behaviors (like giving compliments) and unpleasant ones (like interrupting).”
Jeffrey Bernstein PhD, in The Toxic Impact of All or Nothing Thinking
We all want to be loved. We all want to feel secure, valued and appreciated.
If you’d like to know more about attachment theory, I highly recommend reading Attached by Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller M.A. It’s an incredible tool to dive into your attachment style — and the 5 common thoughts I mentioned are originally from this book.
Luckily, attachment styles can change. It’s always possible to change your patterns once you become aware of them.
Are you ready to heal your wounds?
