Anxiety in Relationships 101: Understanding Anxious Attachment

Learn to heal your anxious attachment

He didn’t respond to your text.  You wait in anticipation for that sound on your phone.  It doesn’t come  Wow… the pain of rejection is fierce.  The pain lives in the body and feels like anxiety… a racing pounding heart, holding your breath, tightness in your chest and throat.  You can’t think about anything else.  Your brain is completely focused on this rejection, and it’s difficult to calm.  Your thoughts are running rapid. It feels like the only thing that will bring relief is hearing from him.  So you start thinking of ways to reach out so he’ll have to talk to you.  This is the experience of those who are considered anxiously attached or preoccupied.  

The research tells us that if you have an anxious preoccupied attachment style, you were probably raised by one or more parents who were inconsistent in how they responded to you when you were a baby through childhood, especially when you were upset and needed reassurance. Sometimes the parent is warm and accepting and at other times cold and rejecting or simply unaware and unavailable. They could have been busy with your sibling or working or just simply distracted. The key is that you never know what you are going to get, if you will get a response the that you need or not. Because children need to feel safe in their relationships with parents, those children will learn to closely pay close attention to their parents so that they can tell if it is a good day or a bad day. This observing allows the child to behave in a way to stave off painful rejection. In the short term, this coping strategy works. The problem is that with consistent practice it becomes automatic.

So, if you have this style, you are likely to pick up easily on subtle emotional cues from others, experience strong emotional reactions, take a long time to come down from those reactions, and dwell on and have your thoughts take over while you are activated. Your thoughts that are causing the anxiety then tell you that you have to fix the situation to quell that discomfort and get your need met. You enact behaviors to do just that. The problem is that what you do to fix things often results in just making them worse.

That can look like repeatedly calling or sending texts. Typically, those texts have the intention of getting a reaction, a response, to alleviate the feeling of being rejected and abandoned. The need to have reassurance that the person is still there is overpowering. The feeling of abandonment and rejection is excruciating, and you feel like you need to get his attention for your survival. That is what got wired in when you were a baby and throughout growing up.

One reason it is hard to control your thoughts taking over, even though you know you really shouldn’t send that text, is that the wiring from your senses to your brain’s threat detection center - fight or flight - is quicker than the wiring from your senses to your cortex - where the conscious thought occurs. So, by the time you figure things through rationally, you have already experienced a surge of adrenaline which tells the rest of your brain that there is a threat out there that has to be eliminated.

The good news is that you can learn to manage your preoccupied attachment. Here are some steps you can take:

1. Realize that your emotional gauge is too sensitive and gives you false positive readings and makes it hard to think clearly when you are emotionally activated. This can lead to jumping to conclusions and creating a story about what is happening. This just exacerbates your anxiety. Learning emotional regulation is a key to calming that anxiety.

2. Give yourself time outs. Take an extra 30 minutes or more before clicking “send” on that text. When you know you feel anxious from rejection or abandonment feelings, take a time out to breathe, take a walk or call a friend before reacting.

3. Distract yourself. Go do something else to take your mind off of it. That will give your anxiety time to calm down and the possibility to see things differently. Go for a walk, engage in a hobby, listen to music, practice yoga - find something that feels good and allows you to be distracted and calm your center.

4. Finding a close relative or friend to talk it through to get out of your emotion mind and into your logical mind to allow you to see more clearly. The intention is not to get stuck in the story but to have your thoughts and feelings validated so you can let them go. You have the right to feel what you feel; you just don’t want those feelings taking over and controlling your behaviors.

5. Learning mindfulness techniques helps calm down the flight or fight response. Tools to calm your nervous system, such as taking a slow deep breath in and a longer slow breath out, can help soothe your anxious pathway and quell overreacting. Try practicing taking a deep breath throughout your day so that when anxious thoughts and feelings take over, you remember that breathing calms you and you feel better.

Remember, there is nothing wrong with you! Your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are normal reactions of your biological wiring in your brain responding to the environment. If you can accept that it was the environment that shaped your emotional system and personality, you will be able to stop blaming yourself and find tools that help you change.

The first step to healing anxious preoccupied attachment is awareness.  Healing does exist and you can have a healthy secure relationship. If you want to learn more and find the tools to help you rewire your anxiously attached brain so that you feel better in your relationships, contact me, an anxiety and relationship therapist, at (561) 406-4398 or contact me here.