Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Attachment Styles: A 4-Part Series Part 1- Anxious Attachment

Attachment Style’s Series: Part 1- Anxious Attachment

Attachment Styles- Introduction & Definitions

Attachment Styles is a concept that helps us understand how our childhood brain wires to relate to our primary caregiver, and eventually others. Attachment Styles

This is a script developed in our childhood based on the interactions we have with our primary caregiver. Our brain develops so we can efficiently and effectively deal with how to be close to that caregiver, we are wired to survive in this way.

Humans survive by bonding with a caregiver as we are born helpless and need a lot of care.

There are 4 main Attachment Styles: Anxious/Preoccupied, Avoidant/Dismissive, Disorganized/Ambivalent and Secure. We will review each one over this 4-part series.

Anxious Attachment - How It Develops

This development of a relational script begins with every interaction we have with our primary caregiver. This is to ensure that our caregiver will be motivated to care for us.

If we have a healthy, loving and consistent caregiver, this is a lovely process. Our Secure Attachment Style will be activated in intimate relationships throughout our lives when we get close to others.

When this is secure and consistent, intimacy will likely feel safe for you. You will be able to give and receive love with flexibility, developing a Secure Attachment Style.  

However, many people develop Anxious, Avoidant or Disorganized Attachment Styles. These types also guide our lives and relationships.

An Anxious Attachment Style can develop if an infant, and later child, experience their caregiver as unavailable at times, in regards to their care. As a child, they may feel their parent is emotionally unavailable to them.

This can be a clinically depressed or traumatized parent that has really challenging days with their mental health. They may dissociate, or struggle to simply get out of bed.

They may have lost a loved one while they were pregnant and are grieving their own childhood primary caregiver, while creating a bond with their new baby. This can be triggering and even traumatic for a new parent.

A parent may get sick and need to be in hospital care for a year in the child’s formative years, the child may experience a traumatic abandonment here. A caregiver may have their own attachment trauma and emotionally shut down when they are most needed. A caregiver may be strong with meeting a child’s physical needs but emotionally unavailable.

These types of experiences teach a child that their needs will not always be met. So, whatever the reason for these unmet needs, the Anxious Attachment Style develops in which a child learns love and care can be unavailable when needed or inconsistent and unreliable.

To be clear, this happens even when caregivers are doing their best to love and adore a new baby. Parenting can be both magical and really hard.

Anxious Attachment - What It Looks Like In An Adult, Intimate Relationship

Your Attachment Style activates as you get to know another person and feel close to them, fall in love. 

This activation can take awhile for some people, which is the reason there can be a beautiful honeymoon phase and then things seem to change after dating awhile, possibly making decisions to further intimacy, Ex. Move in together.

This attachment experience will also be impacted by the Attachment Style of the other person you are getting close to.

People with an Anxious Attachment Style worry in close relationships. They worry the other will leave as they begin to feel more vulnerable.

They may worry about a partner’s death often. They may not trust a partner to be emotionally available when they need them to be.

How Anxious Attachment presents will also be impacted by personality. They may hide their fears. They may need a lot reassurance that they are loved. They may be overtly jealous about the partner’s other relationships.

If a person with Anxious Attachment dates a Securely or other Anxiously Attached person, their Anxious Attachment worries/ fears may be largely mitigated.

A Securely Attached person may be more able to be flexible and meet the Anxiously Attached person’s needs, mitigating fears.

Another Anxiously Attached person may be able to access a lot of empathy for their partner (identify with similar worries), take care of each other, forming a Secure Attachment in their relationship.

All people, regardless of their Attachment Style, can create a healthy, Securely Attached relationship under the right conditions.

Here is the commonly seen issue however: people with Anxious Attachment Styles tend to be attracted to and date Avoidantly Attached people.

Why? The attachment scripts simply match.

An Anxiously Attached person expects another will be emotionally unavailable, or inconsistency show up to meet their needs, a natural way of being for an Avoidantly Attached partner. An Anxiously Attached person may experience their Avoidant partner as an emotionally cold, withholding, distant person, triggering to them. Note. An Avoidant person likely does not believe this of themselves, but may find the intimacy needs high and triggering, they withdraw.  

I also believe strongly we have an innate healing centre that sets us up for healing opportunities to heal our Insecure Attachment Styles and make new choices. This will also impact our choice of partner.

The Anxiously Attached person has learned to expect others to not meet their emotional needs. They may feel some needs are met, but they have to work hard for this to happen Ex. Please others.  This informs the way we perceive our partner’s behavior and how they show up for us.

Anxious Attachment - Flexibility

This piece is important as we all have choice and flexibility in who we are.

If you choose a partner that seems to show up in a similar way to your childhood caregiver, your Anxious Attachment Style will be fully activated, can lead to extreme fear of loss. It can lead to feeling very insecure and anxious or preoccupied about losing them. You may scan for threat, nervous about a new colleague your partner has mentioned several times.

This may cause intolerable relationship anxiety.

However, if an Anxiously Attached person chooses a person with a Secure Attachment Style the anxiety can be mitigated and manageable. A Securely Attached person will be more emotionally available.

Anxious Attachment - Healing and Treatment Considerations

Humans are extremely adaptable. We have a lot of capacity for neuroplasticity; our brains can rewire when we are introduced to a different experience than our childhood exposure.

However, our brain will try to use the old script as much as possible, it is biologically easier and more efficient to do so.

This can cause a lot of pain and lost relationships with partners that do not have the capacity to support triggered insecurities as you change.

There are healing opportunities to help keep the impact off of your personal life.

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Attachment Styles can be healed and changed when presented with new experience. Your

Attachment Style will activate with your therapist and this can be used in sessions, relational therapy. You can also build new insight and tools to have healthy intimacy.

What usually brings those with Anxious Attachment to our clinic is fear of and actual relationship losses, as partners find the anxiety hard and/or you do and, inevitably, withdraw.

Stay tuned for Avoidant Attachment in the next Blog in this 4-Part Series.

This may help you better understand your dating partner.  

Lisa S.