How Anxious Attachments Affect Your Relationships
Last week we talked about adjusting from being couple to become parents and this week we talk about how anxious attachments affect your relationships.
People with anxious attachment are often nervous and stressed about their relationships. They need constant reassurance and affection from their partner. They have trouble being alone or single. They'll often succumb to unhealthy or abusive relationships.
What Is Attachment
Attachment is the ability to make emotional bonds with other people. It starts at birth and continues into early and later life. It is a way of relating to another person.
The type of attachment you had with you mother or main caregiver can affect your relationships as an adult. From this first attachment relationship, you have a blueprint that affects later relationships.
When emotional needs aren’t met or responded to, this can have a long-lasting effect. This is called an insecure attachment.
What causes an anxious attachment style?
Anxious attachment style develops in childhood. The relationship and interactions you have with your parents or other primary caregivers ultimately lays the foundation. If those interactions are often anxiety-inducing, chances are you'll develop an anxious attachment style. Some examples of what types of interactions can lead to anxious attachment style include:
Lack of consistency. When a parent's actions vary, such as moving between loving and neglectful, it leaves the child unsure if their needs will be met and anxious.
Extreme parenting styles. On one end it may be a parent who is overly controlling and does not allow for age-appropriate independence. On the other, it could be a parent who isn't focused on the child and absent from their lives. Both forms of parenting can foster an anxious attachment style.
Trauma or distress. Experiencing abuse or stressful situations — such as a messy divorce, violence, or extreme poverty, can cause this attachment style.
These events and interactions can be stressful, which is why those with anxious attachment styles typically experience more stress and have a harder time in future relationships.
Signs of anxious attachment in adults
As an adult, anxious attachment style can show up as:
difficulty trusting others
low self-worth
worries that your partners will abandon you
craving closeness and intimacy
being overly dependent in relationships
requiring frequent reassurance that people care about you
being overly sensitive to a partner’s actions and moods
being highly emotional, impulsive, unpredictable, and moody
Adults and young adults who develop anxious attachment may be at increased risk for anxiety disorders.
What does anxious attachment look like in relationships?
If you have anxious preoccupied attachment, you may have trouble feeling secure in relationships and have a strong fear of rejection and abandonment. Due to this insecurity, you might behave in ways that appear clingy, controlling, possessive, jealous, or demanding toward your partner.
Anxious-ambivalent attachment. People with anxious attachment are usually needy. They are anxious and have low self-esteem. They want to be close with others but are afraid that people don’t want to be with them.
As a child, your parents probably were inconsistent. They might have responded sometimes. Other times, they might have been distracted or just not there. You might have felt anxious and unsure and felt like your parents were all over the place.
Anxious-avoidant attachment. People with anxious-avoidant attachments are the opposite of needy. Instead of wanting to be emotionally close, they avoid connecting with others. They might rely on themselves, crave freedom, and find emotions to be difficult.
Your parents were probably unavailable as a child. They might have rejected your needs or emotions, and you learned to withdraw and soothe yourself. You learned to avoid closeness or maybe never knew what it felt like and now avoid it all together.
It’s important to remember that an anxious attachment doesn’t always mean you weren’t loved as a child. It means that you didn’t receive all the emotional responses that you needed. Your personality and other life experiences might have also played a role.
How to fix anxious attachment styles
While you can't fully change your attachment style, you can work to understand your attachment style, how it affects your behaviour and thinking in your relationships and build skills to counteract the negative effects of insecure attachment.
A therapist can help you identify your attachment style, potential root causes from your childhood, and ways to move forward in a healthier manner.
You also don't have to work on this alone. For example, if you are in a relationship and feel that your anxious attachment style is causing problems like distrust, paranoia, and insecurity, consider going to couple's therapy with your partner.