What Is Anxious Attachment Style — and Do You Have It?

Do you feel insecure in most of your relationships? Are you in need of constant reassurance that you are enough for the people you care about? And do you find yourself caught up in catastrophic thoughts that your relationships could end at any moment? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you may have an anxious attachment style.

Clinical psychologist Kendra Mathys, PsyD, explains what the anxious attachment style entails and how you can make it work in virtually any relationship.

What is the anxious attachment style?

An anxious attachment style is an insecure attachment style that’s characterized by a strong desire for meaningful relationships, a fear of abandonment and rejection, and a high need for reassurance and support. It’s also known as preoccupied attachment or anxious-ambivalent attachment because of the combined elements of anxiety, low self-esteem, and an intense need for love and affection.

Causes

As one of the four main pillars in attachment theory, the anxious attachment style is thought to form from inconsistent or unpredictable caregiving during childhood.

“When a caregiver is sometimes responsive and nurturing but other times dismissive of the child, it can lead to this working model or belief system that it’s hard to know what to predict in relationships,” explains Dr. Mathys. “That is where the need for reassurance is really coming from.”

Other potential causes for an anxious attachment style include:

• Getting ghosted
• Dealing with ambiguous loss (having no closure when a short- or long-term relationship ends)
• Harboring resentment from past relationships
• Trauma

“If a person has secure attachment throughout their childhood and into early adulthood, but then they experience something really significant that shifts their worldview and their belief system, it’s understandable that it might shift their attachment style as well,” she adds.

Signs

You may have an anxious attachment style if you’re:

• Preoccupied or fixated on your partner’s needs
• Prioritizing your partner’s needs over your own
• Experiencing fear of rejection or abandonment
• Questioning your self-worth
• Having a strong need for validation or reassurance that you are loved
• Experiencing patterns of heightened anxiety or worry
• Experiencing mistrust or jealousy in your relationships
• Having difficulty with healthy boundaries
• Having difficulty expressing or understanding your own emotions

“With the anxious attachment style, there tends to be this pattern of heightened anxiety until the other person is able to soothe or reassure them,” shares Dr. Mathys. “It calms down until the next stressor in the relationship brings up that heightened anxiety again.”

Impact of anxious attachment style in relationships

There are two sides to the anxious attachment style:

• In times of stress, you may come across as “needy” or “clingy” and participate in reassurance-seeking behaviors that risk pushing your partner away.
• When things are going well, you may be more in tune with your partner’s needs and may go out of your way to prioritize their needs before your own.

Because of these characteristics, people-pleasing is a common behavior that occurs when someone has an anxious attachment style.

“But with that comes a strong fear of rejection or abandonment, which can lead to heightened jealousy or mistrust in the relationship and feeling insecure in terms of their own self-worth in the relationship,” says Dr. Mathys.

In terms of non-romantic relationships (like with friends or coworkers), someone with this attachment style might experience heightened anxiety or catastrophic thoughts about the friendship ending if there’s an argument.

"Such experiences might also have you questioning your self-worth and your place in the lives of the people you care about if you fear there’s danger of being abandoned,” she notes.

How to fix anxious attachment style

If you’re dealing with more negatives than positives, there are things you can do to help improve your interactions in relationships and strengthen your ability to cope when conflict comes up. Solving for an anxious attachment revolves around finding ways to heal your wounds of the past while also setting up healthy boundaries for current and future relationships.

“A large piece of resolving an anxious attachment style is building your self-awareness and recognizing the individual behavior patterns that are there with your associated core beliefs,” explains Dr. Mathys.

Identify your triggers

Identifying your anxious attachment triggers is key to understanding what causes them and how to combat them. The next time you experience an intense, sudden emotion, take a deep breath. Label the emotions you’re feeling and where you feel it in your body. And ask yourself if this feeling reminds you of unresolved issues you’ve dealt with in the past.

Common triggers associated with the anxious attachment style include differences in your partner’s behaviors, unforeseen circumstances or surprise situations that disrupt your day-to-day routines, and any perceived threats to your relationship (like an ex coming back into the picture).

“It can be hard to recognize the thought patterns that are causing these intense emotions right away, but a helpful clue is realizing when you experience a really quick change in how you’re feeling, either physically or emotionally,” says Dr. Mathys. “It may feel like a wave of anxiety, or all of a sudden, you feel your heart racing, or there’s a pit in your stomach.”

Express how you feel

You can express how you feel without pushing someone away or blaming them by focusing on using “I” statements.

For example, saying, “I feel anxious when you don’t respond to my text messages because of how I’ve been treated in the past,” gets closer to the root of the problem. It’s a really honest way of examining the situation. It also puts less blame on the other person than if you were to say something like, “You make me anxious. Why won’t you be more responsive?”

“You want to focus on your own individual experience because it helps reduce defensiveness in the other person and helps you increase your own self-awareness about where your feelings are actually coming from,” states Dr. Mathys.

Communicate your needs

We all have different needs that should be met in any relationship. If you find that anxiety and rejection are pain points for you, it might be important for you and your partner to build up supports around that.

For example, let’s say you have heightened anxiety whenever your partner leaves the house or when a friend isn’t being so responsive over text messages. It’s OK to take a minute before your partner leaves to talk about their plans for the day or share an intimate hug. It’s also OK to share your anxieties with your friend and ask them to be more responsive if they’re able. And if your friend says it’s nothing personal, maybe they can offer a brief explanation whenever they do respond just to help settle your anxieties.

There’s always some benefit to talking about these experiences and allowing yourself to trust others when they respect your needs.

Reinforce positive behaviors

When someone does something to help alleviate your anxiety, whether they do so intentionally or not, it’s helpful to acknowledge how their behaviors make you feel in a positive way. So much of anxious attachment rears its head in the face of conflict. If you also take time to acknowledge the positives and get comfortable with expressing your gratitude, it could only further benefit communication between all parties involved.

Learn how to self-soothe

That said, other people aren’t always responsible for how you feel. While we should hold each other accountable for respecting boundaries and treating each other with dignity, we have to hold ourselves accountable for the ways we react. That’s how we grow. And true growth becomes easier once you learn how to practice self-love and self-soothe whenever you’re in an uncomfortable or less desirable situation.

“The general idea of self-soothing is to not completely take away the emotional reaction that’s there, but to help bring down the intensity of it, so that it feels a bit more manageable,” explains Dr. Mathys.

Maybe you work through your negative predictions and catastrophic thoughts by doing grounding techniques or journaling about your emotions. Or maybe you look to other forms of validation like volunteering or doing an activity you love instead of relying on the reassurance of others.

“Over time, these activities can help increase your comfort with physical and emotional distance in a relationship,” she says. “In turn, you learn to live with and confront your anxiety in healthy ways.”

Try therapy

None of this is ever easy. That’s why you may want to consider finding a therapist who can help guide you through this process. In therapy, you’ll learn how to identify your triggers, how to communicate more effectively, how to self-soothe your anxieties and ways to improve your self-worth.

Living with an anxious attachment style

Understanding what makes you tick and unlearning unhealthy behaviors takes time. The more you rely on open communication and healthy coping strategies, the less intense the fallout. You may even find that your attachment style can change.

“It’s possible to develop a secure attachment style through self-awareness and self-development,” encourages Dr. Mathys. “It helps when you connect with other people who have a healthy secure attachment style, too.”