Healing Through An Anxious Attachment Style

How To Stop Sabotaging Love

This is a continued article in my “Healing Through” series focused on insecure attachment styles. To read accompanying articles on the avoidant and disorganized attachment styles, see them linked below.

Without awareness, anxious attachment styles hold the potential to manifest toxic relationships and doom healthy ones. They’re rooted in a deep fear of rejection and abandonment, that push the sufferer into specific behaviors that only do more harm than good.

Whilst all insecure attachment styles are rooted in fear, anxiously attached individuals primarily experience fear when they believe their connections are under threat. However, due to past trauma, the supposed “threats” can often be irrational or overblown — leading to dramatic outbursts and reactions.

Anxiously attached individuals find it difficult to be independent and can become reliant on their partners for comfort. The attachment of their own self of sense with the relationships causes problems when they experience distance from their partners. “Without the relationship, who am I?”, they may wonder.

But despite their flaws, anxious attachment styles can be healed. As I say at the beginning of all these articles, no attachment style is a sentence to a lifetime of unhealthy relationships. Secure individuals can become insecure just as insecure individuals can become secure.

Trust in that, and read into today’s article with the compassionate awareness that you too can change.

The Origins Of Anxious Attachment Styles

Anxiously attached individuals typically come from backgrounds where their caregivers displayed affection unpredictably and sporadically. For example, an infant’s parent may only comfort them when it is to the parent’s benefit and not when the child is requiring comfort. The parent may also reject the child’s advances for comfort when it’s not convenient for them.

In these cases, the infant learns that to love someone else is to only comfort someone else’s needs and not their own. After all, these parent’s only show affection when it was good for THEM and not the children. This leads to the subduing of the child’s own needs and the development of the “people-pleaser trait”.

Furthermore, in not having their needs met, the child grows up without boundaries — as they’ve never practiced speaking for what they need and getting those needs met. This has debilitating effects on the child’s own independence and self-worth.

As such, the child grows up highly attuned to the needs of others, lacks their own boundaries, and believes — through memory — that in order to have a successful relationship they must abandon their own feelings and appease their partners.

This is a recipe for codependent relational disaster.

Anxious Attachment In Adulthood

If you suffer from an anxious attachment style it’s likely you have some or all of the following traits.

• You find it difficult to express your own needs and lack boundaries.
• You are highly attuned to the needs of others and will easily shape-shift your own behaviors and/or views to match others (people-pleasing).
• You find it difficult to nurture your own independence (as you were never taught this growing up).
• You believe sacrificing your needs is a part of love.
• You find it difficult to trust your partner’s words and/or actions (due to the mixed signals you received from your caregiver growing up).
• You feel empty, inauthentic, and unseen (as your people-pleasing identity shrowds your true thoughts and feelings).
• You feel overly reliant, or dependent, on a relationship to feel good.

As someone who has related to all of the above, I can vouch for the discomfort that living with an anxious attachment style can bring.

It’s also worth expanding on the point regarding trust. Trust issues run rife in anxious attachment styles because of your caregiver’s inability to be secure and stable with their approach to nurturing you. “Sure you might be comforting me now” you might think, “But what about all the other times you’ve done this and then rejected me later?”.

This can further create issues as our beliefs and perceptions may be irrational and skewed due to our traumas growing up. There may not be a problem and yet we’ll FEEL like there is.

This is perfectly modeled when anxious individuals are presented with distance in a relationship. They may presume that their partner’s distance is a sign of discontent and take it as rejection. In reality, however, it’s merely their partner’s desire for time alone and nothing more.

But that’s enough about why being anxiously attached is a PROBLEM.

Let’s talk about how to start healing.

1. Finding, Developing and Expressing your Authenticity

If you are anxiously attached, it’s likely you felt you needed to subdue your authentic desires as a means to keep your caregiver happy. Furthermore, your caregiver may also have suffered from an anxious attachment style — as many caregivers do — and failed to nurture your independence (as they feared you going too far away from them).

As a result, you became reliant on your caregiver for love but only at the expense of your own needs.

Healing your anxious attachment style, therefore, must run through nurturing your own independence outside of your relationship with others.

This can be difficult as it runs against everything you’ve been taught about relationships growing up. How can you begin satisfying your needs when no one ever taught you how?

Through finding yourself, and then setting appropriate boundaries to uphold your own values and needs.

At first, this can be a daunting task. It’s like asking a people-pleaser to say “no” instead of “yes”, except the same principle runs through your very being.

Getting to the core of who you are, what you enjoy, and what your values are, is a personal growth journey in and of itself. I can’t advise you on who you are, that is for you to find out.

My own self-discovery revolved around heaps of podcasts, books, coaching sessions, and awareness-filled life experiences. It took some time to find myself but growing a strong identity will stop you from reaching out to others for comfort. You’ll be your own comfort, and won’t be reliant on others to satisfy your needs.

2. Engaging In New, Healthier Relationships

In order to fully learn and grow we have to accept responsibility for the actions we’ve taken and the situations we’ve helped create.

And what I mean by this, is that our anxious attachment style can drive us into unhealthy relationships that only perpetuate the negative cycle we’ve found ourselves in. In this, we’ll often repeat the relationships we had growing up because they’re familiar and we know what to expect.

This is often why anxiously attached individuals find themselves with partners who, like their caregivers, show mixed signals, are codependent themselves, and can’t nurture their independence.

But amidst our habits of being — we still have a choice.

In order to grow, you have to break the cycle.

You have to think better and you have to choose better.

This in part means relinquishing your desire for chaos. Because if there’s one thing that anxious people are attuned to, it’s the highs and lows that their relationship patterns present.

Relational foundations built upon mixed signals, distrust, and childhood wounds are incredibly unstable — but also intoxicating. Anxiety and excitement are both arousing sensations that can make anxious people THINK that these relationships are what love is.

But it’s not — it’s just a fight/flight response playing on your traumas and wounds. A relationship that is overbearing, lacks boundaries, and fails to nurture both individuals’ authenticity is not love — it’s toxicity.

To heal your anxious attachment style means to be open to, and practice, a NEW way of relating. One that isn’t so stimulating and triggering, but is built on consistency, boundaries, and true love.

3. Learning To Trust Again

Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby’s attachment theory experiment in which mothers of secure/insecure infants leave the room and the child’s behavior is monitored gives us insight into how distrust manifests through the lens of the anxiously attached.

During the experiment, the infants show high levels of distress when the mother leaves but aren’t easily consoled by their affection when they return. The mother’s past inconsistency renders their affection rewardless. The child thinks, “Why should I believe she cares when she only does sometimes?”.

It’s a shame that this early-childhood pattern then carries through adolescence and deep into adulthood before it’s addressed. We can quite literally grow up believing others don’t mean the affection they show us. As if we’re bad, or undeserving of it.

Trust will reform for us when we experience disconfirming evidence. This means when we experience relationships that aren’t like the ones we’ve previously experienced. This loops back into the previous point: Choosing better partners. You won’t trust someone who acts like they shouldn’t be trusted.

Furthermore, we have to have awareness of our own limiting beliefs and irrational ideologies. For example, if you are dating someone and they ask for time away to relax and do their own thing, you have to trust in their word despite the feelings you may have that something is wrong.

Nothing is likely wrong, you’re just assuming it is because of your past. That isn’t for them to deal with, it’s for you to handle.

There is no surefire way to know when you should be trusting or not trusting — it’s based on perception and experience. Having a coach or therapist help you navigate building your capacity for trust will only help you do this.

Final Thoughts

Healing an anxious attachment style comes with living through your own wants, needs, and desires, and being able to self-regulate. There is nothing wrong with depending on others, but when this is our only mode of coping relationships suffer.

Through choosing better partners and creating new, healthier experiences, anxious attachment styles will slowly become secure.

That’s all for today. There is so much more on this subject that I am eager to get into. Of course, the example I gave is but one of a multitude of scenarios that can occur whilst we’re young. Be sure to follow/subscribe by email to my page for similar articles.

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