He walks in the room, and you know something is wrong. He’s angry. Have you done something? Is he angry with you? What can you do to fix it? You act casual, but you’re watching him like a hawk in your peripheral vision. He says he had a bad day at work and his boss is being an idiot.
He doesn’t look at you while he’s speaking. He’s making some tea. He feels distant. You feel tense. You can’t relax until you feel closer to him. You don’t feel safe. You try to talk to him about his day at work, but he says he doesn’t want to talk about it and just wants to watch the news and zone out. You follow him to the TV room. You watch TV, but you’re waiting for a sign that it’s safe to get closer.
You make some comments about the news to see how he responds. He seems more relaxed. You reach over to squeeze his hand. He squeezes your hand in return. You didn’t realize until that moment just how stressed you’d been. A wave of relief washes over you. The relationship is safe, and so you are safe. Exhale.
When you have the anxious adaptation, scenes like this are typical. You might have noticed in intimate relationships that you tend to be hypervigilant about your partner’s mood and how close you feel to one another. You’re likely to be hyperaware of moments when your partner seems to pull away and find that you have a strong reaction and struggle to calm down until they feel close again. In those moments, you need reassurance that the relationship is safe and that they love and care for you. In the back of your mind, you’re wondering if they’ll stay with you.
You feel that they’re somehow better than you. It’s so difficult to believe that they care for you. No matter how much they tell or show you, there’s always a nagging doubt that they’ll find something unlovable in you and leave. And that would be the most devastating thing. To be left. To have your fears confirmed. You’ll do anything to prevent that.
This is where you betray yourself in big and small ways. It might be saying something is OK when it’s not or always putting their needs before yours. You might also start to feel like you can’t survive without them, that they’re the only good thing in your life, becoming emotionally dependent.
Know that you’re not alone in this experience. This is the impact of your anxious attachment adaptation.
Attachment theory: The dance of love
Attachment theory emerged from the work of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1969, 1988) and has been built on by neuroscientists and social psychologists.
All children have an inbuilt attachment system that drives them to stay close to their caregivers to help them survive in an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous world. The goal of this attachment system is a “sense of felt security” (Mikulincer and Shaver 2016, 12). You can relax when you feel safe and know that your caregiver is close and responsive. If you’re unsure if they’ll be there in the way you need, part of you must remain on high alert, anxious.
We develop this sense of felt security from the experience of being attuned to. Attunement happens when someone is aware of your physical and emotional needs and is lovingly responsive to them. You’ll have developed a secure attachment style if you’ve received good enough attunement from your attachment figure as a child.
Picture a 10-month-old in their bouncer who starts to get bored or hungry. They moan and move their arms and legs, looking towards their mother. The mother sees this gentle call for attention, approaches and lifts them out of their bouncer while asking what they might need with a loving voice. This is attunement. The infant doesn’t need to escalate, to start to cry or scream, because they’ve been attended to.
What helps us create secure attachment? Researchers have found protection, attunement, soothing, expressed delight in the child and encouragement to be core factors in creating a secure attachment (Brown and Elliott 2016). When these five conditions are met enough of the time, a secure attachment is formed, and as a result, we grow healthy and supportive ideas about ourselves and others. If there was insufficient attunement, you would have formed one of the three insecure attachment styles: anxious, avoidant or disorganized.
Your anxious attachment adaptation is a logical and natural response to inconsistent, unpredictable or overly anxious parenting, especially by your primary caregiver. You might have grown up with a traumatized mother who was terrified of you being hurt in the way she was, so she was overprotective and smothering, limiting your natural desire to explore the world.
Or perhaps you had an inconsistent caregiver—sometimes validating and emotionally available, but sometimes overwhelmed by working three jobs, caring for a sibling who needs a lot of attention or managing an abusive partner. This causes you to become hypersensitive to their behaviour, tone of voice and change in mood, as you try to get your needs met.
While you make space to acknowledge how it was for you in your childhood, it’s important to note that the intention here isn’t to blame your parents or make them wrong for everything they did or didn’t do. It’s to recognize where the patterns have come from, for the patterns to make sense, given some of the things you did and didn’t experience in your childhood. These experiences of connection and disconnection created embedded patterns of relating and attaching, which built the foundation for your future intimate relationships.
Forming a relationship template
Attachment patterns are created through repeated relational interactions. Imagine that as a child, something happens and you feel scared. You go to your caregiver for safety and support. The caregiver isn’t available. Maybe they’re working or caring for other children and shoo you away. Perhaps they have depression or a physical illness and struggle to care for themselves. You learn not to go there for safety and support.
Then what? Generally, you would have used one of two strategies. The first is hyperactivating (anxious)—thoughts and feelings that make you want to get closer to your caregiver—which might look like watching your carer’s every move to try to work out when and how to get your needs met or becoming more distressed and demanding.
Alternatively, you might have used deactivating (avoidant) strategies—thoughts and feelings that compel you to move away from the caregiver—which might look like ignoring the caregiver and denying that they have any impact on you. You start to ask for less and suppress your needs (Mikulincer and Shaver 2016).
For both the anxious and the avoidant styles, you learn that you can’t rely on a relationship with another person to provide you with the soothing or protection you need.
These interactions form a template for what Bowlby referred to as your “internal working model,” a mental representation, or template, of what you expect to happen in relationships based on what you have experienced (Bowlby 1969). You then use this model to assess how relationships are as an automatic knowing. These models include how you see yourself and how you expect others to respond to you.
Children are wired to survive. You might like to take a moment and thank your nervous system and yourself as a child for being adaptable enough to survive.
Attachment in adulthood
Just as children have a survival instinct to stay connected to their caregiver, research shows that this continues into adulthood with a drive to have an intimate attachment figure (Hazan and Shaver 1987). A growing body of research demonstrates the similarity of the child-caregiver relationship to the adult-couple relationship (Zeifman and Hazan 2016). Researchers have explored the patterns of infant-caregiver separation and found that intimate partner relationships follow a similar pattern during periods of separation.
By the time we’re fully grown adults, we already have an imprint of how intimate relationships work based on our childhood experiences. These form a template for our adult relationships, whereby we’ll tend to expect what we received as a child and will have an automatic pull to respond in the same way we did as a child.
Thinking in terms of relational distance
The easiest way to think about attachment patterns in adulthood is in terms of relational space and connection. Securely attached people like some overlap and some independence, creating interdependence. Avoidantly attached people like more relational space and less connection and struggle to find a place to overlap; it feels unsafe to them. Anxiously attached people like a lot of overlap and connection; too much distance feels unsafe.
Do you have an anxious attachment?
As you answer the following questions, consider a recent or current significant relationship. Using your journal, work through the statements below (Fraley, Waller, and Brennan 2000; Levine and Heller 2010; Heller 2019) and rate them according to the following scale:
True: 3 points
Sometimes true: 2 points
Not at all true: 1 point
- Do you tend to get attached to a new partner quickly and find it difficult to keep perspective?
- When you get upset, do you find it difficult to calm yourself down and feel that you need others to calm you?
- In a relationship, do you tend to put your partner’s needs before your own?
- Do you feel that your partner doesn’t care about you as much as you care about them?
- Do you find that you’re highly attuned to your partner’s mood?
- Do you find yourself yearning for emotional validation (to have your emotions understood and accepted by your partner)?
- Once you sense something is wrong in the relationship, do you feel compelled to fix it, even to your detriment?
- Do you have a pattern of over-giving in relationships and then feeling resentful?
- Is it difficult to feel your partner’s love when they express it in different ways?
- Do you tend to become highly reactive and distressed during conflict?
- Do you frequently worry about your relationship ending?
- Is it difficult for you to know where your boundaries are?
- Do you worry about being abandoned?
- Is it challenging to be alone? Do you find being alone triggers strong emotions?
- Do you worry that when your partner gets to know you, they won’t like who you are?
Notice if you have a lot of 1, 2s or 3s. If you have a lot of 1s, you’re likely to be more on the avoidant end of the attachment spectrum. If you have a lot of 2s, you’re more secure in your attachment style. If you have a lot of 3s, you’re more anxious in your attachment style.
The challenges of the anxious adaptation
Research has shown that there are three core challenges of the anxious adaptation.
First, the current template of how you see yourself in relation to others often leaves you feeling less worthy than your partner and wondering when they’re going to find out and leave you. The second challenge is that of regulation, of calming yourself down once you’ve become upset. Third are the anxious patterns that you see when you enter an intimate relationship: the anxiety that they’re going to leave, noticing signs of rejection, wanting a lot of reassurance, feeling hypervigilant around them, putting their needs before your own, pushing them for a response and validation, and when you don’t get it, pushing harder, which pushes them further away.
What’s it like to be securely attached?
When an infant is securely attached, they have experienced a caregiver who is attuned and present—often enough. They’ve learned that they’re worthy of attention and love so have formed positive internal templates of themselves and others. This translates into securely attached adults who:
- are comfortable being alone
- can acknowledge internal distress and manage their feelings in a healthy way (self-regulate)
- can identify emotions and share them with others
- communicate openly and honestly
- have a positive image of themselves and others and know that they’re loveable
- assume that others mean well most of the time
- tend to show respect and gratitude toward their partner
- tend to be open and honest and to trust the other person when they start dating
- are less likely to have one-night stands and report mutual initiation and pleasure from sex (Feeney 2016)
- are comfortable with connection, intimacy and vulnerability, and their partner’s vulnerability
- have a supportive, caring inner voice
- are able to compassionately self-reflect
- know how to be interdependent—are able to find a balance between being connected with another person and being alone.
A secure relationship feels warm and safe, with room for exploration, adventure and joy. There is a general sense of both people caring about one another and being available and supportive. Both people expect to be valued and loved because this is what they’re used to.
Securely attached people find it easy and desirable to be in a relationship and find a balance between being independent and being connected—interdependent. They can understand their partner’s experiences and listen to complaints without it affecting their self-esteem, and they can be vulnerable and hold space for their partner’s vulnerability.
Securely attached people can feel activated (experience strong emotions and body sensations) and still identify what they need and reach out for it in the relationship. When they receive what they’ve asked for, they can accept what has been offered and feel calm again. They have strong self-esteem and can self-regulate; this means when emotions come up, they notice the feelings and have healthy ways to cope with them and self-soothe.
Being with someone safe and loving
Remembering a secure experience
This exercise teaches you to amplify and draw on past experiences that have felt safe and connected. Research has shown that drawing on these experiences leads to behaviour change where we act more securely (Hudson, Chopik, and Briley, 2020). A guided audio recording of this exercise is available at http://www.psychotherapycentral.health/anxious-attachment.
Take a moment to think back to a time when you felt loved and safe in the presence of another living being. It might be a relative, friend, teacher or pet.
Let yourself go back to that time in your imagination. Where were you? Notice what you can see, hear and smell. What did it feel like to be in their presence? What sensations do you feel in your body?
Notice what kind of contact you’d like to have. What kind of touch would make you feel the most loved, connected and safe?
Allow yourself some time to be in this space, noticing their desire to be with you, to protect you and their love for you.
You might like to thank them for their presence in your life and for the special moments you shared.
When this feels complete, gently bring your awareness to your whole body. Gently rub your hands on your thighs and notice the friction. When you’re ready, open your eyes and look over one shoulder, noticing a few things in the room as you do so. Then look over the other shoulder until you feel you’re back in your space and grounded.
Take a moment to journal about your experience with this exercise.
Jennifer Nurick, MA is a Clinical Psychotherapist, Counsellor and Energetic Healer with over two decades of expertise in the field of healing.
Excerpted from the book Heal Your Anxious Attachment: Release Past Trauma, Cultivate Secure Relationships, and Nurture a Deeper Sense of Self. New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Copyright © 2024 Jennifer Nurick.
image 1: Vika_Glitter; image 2: Ben_Kerckx; image 3: Pexels
