How does your attachment pattern impact you and your life?

Aside from the strain being anxiously attached can cause your relationships, being anxiously attached increases one's vulnerability to anxiety and depression, personality disorders such as BPD, anti-social tendencies and addictions and suicidality. Anxious attachment is associated with interpersonal anxiety and depression, such as a sense of loss, loneliness, abandonment, and helplessness.

We often think of our attachment patterns in connection with romantic dynamics, however, attachment patterns can impact all relationships. Keep in mind, you might be anxiously attached in one area, and less so in other areas. So while you might find yourself anxious to lose your romantic partner or a potential romantic partner, you could be moderately secure with friends and at work. You might be very secure with one parent and not at all with the other. Still, our attachment patterns have a way of trickling into all of our interpersonal dynamics in a similar way. Attachment patterns can feel like a part of your personality.

Attachment Patterns influence many aspects of your life:

• They may influence the intensity you experience and how you regulate your emotions.

• They may influence the way and degree you experience and manage conflict in relationships.

• They can impact your mental and behavioural strategies in relationships.

• They dictate how you monitor and appraise cues of availability and accessibility from others.

• They can determines the extent you worry about whether you are loved by those close to you and believe you are loveable.

• They can influences how you read facial cues.

• The can influences your susceptibility to relationship challenges and endings.

• They can greatly impact your mental and physical health.

• They can determines your comfort socializing, meeting new people and staying connected.

• They can influences your relationship expectations and accompanying perceptions and misperceptions.

Are you an Anxious Attacher?

Anxious attachment is also referred to as preoccupied anxious or ambivalent attachment and while it can make relating and coupling cumbersome, there are also strengths and positives to leaning on this end of the attachment scale, especially if you learn to work with this pattern instead of it overtaking you. Those with anxious attachment typically have a more negative view of themself and a positive view of others. In anxious attachment, there is a strong drive to maintain closeness with high anxiety and negative emotional responses when closeness appears to waver. Additionally, there is hypervigilance about the connection being threatened and the perception that others are not responsive.

Being anxiously attached often results in a preoccupation with relationships, both making them and keeping them which leads to focusing on others' behaviour toward you and fixating on how others might feel about you. You may pay attention to how others feel toward you more than you think about how you feel about them. You may notice you have frequent changes and unstable evaluations of others and experience confusion, self-doubt and anger if your close others are not reassuring you. You may feel that you are yearning for someone and frequently feel that you cannot have what you want, finding yourself in many unrequited love scenarios. Not only does this strain your relationships, particularly romantic ones, but it also feels like an emotional rollercoaster because your mood and emotions are so strongly determined by someone else and by the threat of losing connection.

What leads to anxious attachment?

While attachment patterns largely result from early life experiences, your temperament combined with childhood experiences influence your level of attachment security. Your attachment security is a response to your ability to feel safe, attuned to, supported, protected, loved and known in childhood. Even if your parents or primary caregivers expressed love and protection toward you, in anxious attachment, there tends to be inconsistency. If your parents did not provide accurate mirroring, possibly due to their own insecure attachment, a broken connection forms. As a result, your brain and nervous systems' threat response gets exaggerated, which can lead to making it difficult to trust others will be responsive and consistent.

Common childhood experiences of someone with anxious attachment:

1. Inconsistent Caregiving

• Caregivers alternate between being highly responsive and emotionally unavailable, leaving the child unsure of what to expect.

• This unpredictability fosters a sense of insecurity, as the child feels they must work hard to gain attention and care.

Example: A parent is warm and loving sometimes but distracted or preoccupied at other times, perhaps due to stress, mental health challenges, or personal issues.

2. Emotional Unpredictability

• The child receives mixed signals from caregivers: affection and support one moment, and criticism, neglect, or withdrawal the next.

• This inconsistency creates confusion and a heightened sensitivity to any perceived signs of disconnection or rejection.

Example: A parent might shower the child with praise but later scold or withdraw affection over minor mistakes.

3. Overly Dependent Caregivers

• Some caregivers may rely on the child to meet their emotional needs (a form of role reversal known as parentification), leading the child to prioritize the caregiver’s emotions over their own.

• The child learns to stay hyper-attuned to the caregiver’s emotional state, often at the cost of developing their own sense of security.

Example: A parent confides adult problems (e.g., financial struggles or marital conflict) to the child, fostering a sense of responsibility in the child to keep the parent emotionally stable.

4. Excessive or Unreliable Reassurance

• Caregivers who are overly reassuring in some situations but fail to provide consistent support can inadvertently create dependency and doubt.

• The child becomes reliant on external validation and fears being left without it.

Example: A parent may soothe a child only when the child is visibly distressed but not proactively nurture emotional security.

5. Fear of Abandonment

• Anxious attachment often stems from real or perceived abandonment experiences.

• Even subtle cues, like a caregiver’s prolonged absence, the silent treatment or an emotionally withdrawn demeanor, can trigger intense fear of being left alone.

Example: A parent might travel frequently for work or emotionally shut down during times of stress, leaving the child feeling unsupported and anxious about their availability.

6. Overprotection Coupled with Criticism

• Caregivers who were overprotective, intrusive and overbearing, alternating with unavailability.

• Highly critical caregivers combined with intrusiveness can foster a cycle of seeking reassurance and fearing criticism.

Example: A parent micromanages a child’s activities to keep them safe but harshly critiques their mistakes or perceived failures.

7. Unresolved Attachment Trauma in Caregivers

• A caregiver with their own attachment issues may unconsciously project their insecurities onto the child, perpetuating patterns of emotional inconsistency.

• This unresolved trauma affects the caregiver’s ability to provide stable, nurturing care.

Example: A parent who was abandoned in their own childhood may overcompensate with attention at times but also struggle with emotional regulation.

What are the strengths of being anxiously attached?

Although it may not feel like a strength if you are in the grips of anxiety and wondering if you are seeing accurately or not, there are some qualities of being anxiously attached that make you a great friend and a thoughtful partner. You are a great listener and considerate. You are a person who is willing to learn and grow with those around you. You are a devoted and loyal friend, parent and partner for those you care about. Once you learn to connect with yourself and trust you will be okay without excessive reassurance or validation, you can be extremely discerning about others and highly intuitive. You can read the room and feel the needs of others which makes you highly empathic and caring and very good at attuning to others.

AND the good news is that You CAN become more secure.

You do not need to do this alone. If you would like the help of a trained therapist to support you through your process, please get in touch today.

Take the attachment quiz:

https://traumasolutions.com/attachment-styles-quiz/

References

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