What is anxious attachment and where does it come from?
When you even dip your toe into the resources available to you around dating and relationships, one of the first things that people will bring up is your attachment style.
Anxious attached, avoidant attachment, disorganized attachment and the all holy, celebrated, elusive secure attachment.
But the more I work with my clients, the majority of whom identify as anxiously attached and who also tend to be high achievers, people pleasers and generally responsible people, the more I have started to notice that while many have taken a quiz or heard a description of anxious attachment, they often stop there.
What good is knowing you’re anxiously attached if you have nothing to do with that information?
There is enormous value (self-awareness, tools and the potential for real healing) in understanding what your attachment style means for you, in your dating life and beyond. So in this post, I wanted to kick off the first post in a little series where we’re going to dive into…
What are attachment styles and where do they come from?
Alright, let’s jump in here.
While I assume many of you are familiar with the concept of attachment styles (which falls under “Attachment Theory,” a theory of how we relate to each other that was made famous by Rachel Heller and Amir Levine, who also authored the most popular book on the matter, Attached), here’s a brief summary of what you need to know:
What is anxious attachment (and the attachment styles)?
Humans biologically need social interaction and connection, also called attachment. We are a social species and have been since the caveman days. We were more likely to survive hunting sable tooth tigers if we worked in groups and there were more likely to be offspring if we formed communities to work together, created units that allowed for specialization (some to hunt, some to raise children, some to gather food, etc.). So it is in our biological wiring to desire connection and deeply fear the loss of it.
It makes sense because if you were rejected from the pack (either being left behind or considered a threat/unwelcome), it almost definitely meant death.
These patterns are especially sensitive in childhood while we actually are dependent on other human beings - as a 1 year old baby, you couldn’t survive without your parents. So in our younger years, these biological instincts are the most active because in that phase of life, our sense of survival is the closest to the reality of those caveman days.
Our attachment style describes the way in which we have learned to survive social connection.
At it’s core, our attachment style is a survival instinct, not a logical set of actions. Attachment style pulls on our most basic biological impulses for safety and security and is often happening in subtle and subconscious ways that our brain and body have developed over time to keep us safe.
In understanding this, we can have more compassion for when our attachment style is potentially getting in the way of healthy connection - it’s not like we’re choosing to act this way, our body is taking over.
Based on your childhood, you picked up a set of behaviors that helped you feel safe as a child and these behaviors are continuing to play out in your adult life, reinforced by decades of repetition.
The famous experiment to describe attachment styles went something like this:
A group of mothers and babies were observed by psychologists in a room with toys and a chair for mom to sit. After a few minutes, the mom leaves the room (sometimes with a stranger entering at some point, others just using mom) and later returns, somtimes twice. They then watch the baby’s behavior - do they experience distress with mom’s absence? And most importantly, what happens when mom returns?
Some babies who experienced distress at mom’s departure and and then were more clingy upon her return and even more distressed when she left again; these babies usually were afraid of strangers presence. Some babies would ignore or avoid their mother upon her return, almost punishing her for her absence, these babies were often indiscriminatory between mom and strangers. Others were relatively undisturbed by mom’s departure and return other than just noticing the changes in the situation and often these babies would be comfortable with a stranger’s presence if mom was there but more wary when alone.
Obviously, I’m summarizing multiple in-depth experiments here but I’m guessing you get the idea.
What psychologists were able to observe here is that these patterns in the babies generally predicted their attachment styles, the belief being that even at this young age, the babies had picked up patterns on how to maintain their feelings of emotional safety based on shifts in their key attachment figure, usually mom.
How amazing is that? When we’re absolutely tiny, we are already figuring out how to manage our feelings in regards to scenarios where we might be scared and lonely. The human brain is really cool.
So what are the attachment styles?
At the simplest level…
Securely attached are okay with closeness and okay with distance
Anxiously attached are okay with closeness but not okay with distance
Avoidantly attached are okay with distance but not with closeness
Disorganized attachment are sometimes okay with closeness or distance but varies seemingly unpredictably
You can probably see how these attachment styles would mirror in the babies in the experiment:
A baby who was distressed when mom left the room and deeply relieved, even clingy on her return would be considered anxiously attached (okay with closeness but not with distance)
A baby who was not distressed when mom left and registered little interest when mom returns would be considered avoidant (okay with distance but not with closeness)
A baby whose patterns were unpredictable would be considered disorganized (although this label developed later and was not included in the original experiments)
A baby who felt some distress when mom left but resolved the distress upon return would be considered securely attached
Just like these babies, by the time you were crawling around your childhood bedroom, you had figured out a system to help your nervous system feel okay based on the amount of attention and care you were or weren’t getting from your caregivers.
Where does anxious attachment come from?
It’s important to note that even those who are anxiously or avoidantly attached can have come from deeply loving families with parents that tried their best. The reality is that these survival patterns are developed at ages before we’re able to communicate and understand our world so we may have perceived danger in a situation (that led to us needing to figure out a way to “survive,” triggering an instance that contributed to our attachment style) in a situation where we were completely safe but we just didn’t understand that.
What matters is our perception, not the reality.
But one of the most crucial parts of healing attachment styles (which I’ll talk about in more depth later in this article) is acknowledging that even if your mother deeply loved and cared for you and was absolutely doing her best that there might have been times where she wasn’t able to meet your needs and as a child, you were affected by the situation. (It could have been as simple as you heard a loud noise from your crib and got scared but mom was on the other side of the house and didn’t hear you crying so you were left scared and alone until she walked by your room and heard you!)
This is important to recognize because your very young, very little brain probably experienced somethings that your adult brain right now wouldn’t register as scary but we need to acknowledge that this pain was very real to little you and that as a result, you started building patterns to avoid experiencing that pain again.
Our attachment style is built on the unmet needs from our childhood.
So how do these patterns develop?
If you experienced pain or fear in situations where you felt alone or left behind (like the example above being left crying in your crib), you would associate distance with pain. This often is creates a fear of abandonment (a.k.a fear of distance).
If you associated pain or fear in situations where you were in close contact (like you were upset or in distress maybe from a dirty diaper or feeling uncomfortable around Uncle Jack but then your parent scolded you or ignored your feelings even though you were in their arms), you would associate closeness with pain. This often creates a fear of trusting people or intimacy (a.k.a fear of closeness).
So to come back to our high level definitions…
Securely attached are okay with closeness and okay with distance - they generally felt emotionally safe both with their attachment figures (i.e. parents) and when they were not nearby
Anxiously attached are okay with closeness but not okay with distance - they generally felt emotionally safe when parents were nearby but learned that they were not safe when they were not
Avoidantly attached are okay with distance but not with closeness - they generally felt emotionally safe when parents were not nearby but learned they were not safe when they were close
Disorganized attachment are sometimes okay with closeness or distance but varies seemingly unpredictably - they were sometimes emotionally safe when parents were close and sometimes not, same with when parents were not close (an example might be with an abusive parent, sometimes they were the source of danger and other times, when they were apologizing or conciliatory, they were a safe source of love. Understandably, these patterns are very confusing for a child’s brain!)
Whichever pattern was more prevalent, began strengthening over time and after years of repetition, they became your roadmap for social connection as a whole, as your world expanded out beyond mom to include other family, friends and ultimately your romantic partners.
So let’s talk a bit more about what the attachment styles look like in adulthood…
Anxiously attached adults tend to worry a lot about the state of their relationships (friendship and romantic), they have a desire for closeness (even perceived closeness, just through a text message or having an update), tend to be very sensitive to the world around them, and when in doubt, will tend to assume that they were the cause of any rift or break.
Avoidantly attached adults tend to focus a lot of their independence and own agency, they tend to want space and time to process, can easily feel smothered and trapped by their relationships (friendship and romantic) and they tend to be quick to find fault or blame in the world around them.
Securely attached adults care about having connection in their lives but are not consumed by it, feel comfortable with intimacy and connection but are also okay with distance and independence, they can comfortable raise issues and forgive them without major issue and have a balanced view of the world around them.
Disorganized adults will tend to exhibit traits of both anxiously attached and avoidantly attached rather unpredictably (this attachment type is exceedingly rare)
What you need to understand about attachment styles
Attachment styles, other than securely attached, are usually spoken about in the negative sense. And in some ways, I understand because they have their roots in childhood experiences where our needs weren’t met. But it’s important to understand that while we may have developed some behavior patterns from these experiences that are negatively affecting our lives in adulthood, we also developed some skills that are positively affecting our lives.
If you are anxiously attached, here’s a perfect example. In Attached, they describe that “the brains of people with an anxious attachment style react more strongly to thoughts of loss and at the same time under-recruit regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions.” So we are more sensitive to abandonment, rejection and loss (yeah, sounds right) and we are less skilled at managing negative emotions than other attachment styles (sure, I could see that being true). Thus far, this all sounds pretty negative.
But they go on to describe a pattern that I have seen in real life over and over again:
“People with an anxious attachment style are indeed more vigilant to changes in others’ emotional expression and can have a higher degree of accuracy and sensitivity to other people’s cues.”
Those spidey senses, that skill of assessing other people’s moods and feelings that made you such a good Mom’s little helper or helped you navigate the workplace with such social skill or even tell that a friends is upset before they say it out loud - that is a skill that developed from your anxious attachment!
It’s important to include this note from the book: “However, this finding comes with a caveat. The study showed that people with an anxious attachment style tend to jump to conclusions very quickly, and when they do, they tend to misinterpret people’s emotional state…This is an important lesson for someone with an anxious attachment style: If you just wait a little longer before reacting and jumping to conclusions, you will have an uncanny ability to decipher the world around you and use it to your advantage.”
Anxiously attached people have the gift of emotional sensitivity - this is a superpower, as long as they are able to slow themselves down to not jump to conclusions.
I find this to be so amazing to know, as a fellow anxiously attached person. My emotional sensitivity IS more accurate than the average person and I just need to know how to work with it to not jump to negative conclusions. I can understand that because I have a heightened fear of loss, I’m going to probably overassume the negative and so in order to be perceiving the world accurately it is actually important for me to see less danger and focus more on the possibility of the outcome being more positive than my knee jerk reaction!
