The Psychology of Anxious Attachment

We might expect that the most natural response to being told by a kind, patient and attractive person that they loved us would – after a small intake of breath – be to believe them. But little in our emotional makeup is ever quite as simple as it could be.

In order to trust that someone who tells us of their love is sincere – isn’t slyly mocking us, about to change their mind, in touch with someone else, or harbouring intentions to betray us or die – a lot needs to have gone right early on. For a significant number of us, a declaration of love – while intensely welcome in theory – can’t avoid feeling at some level unbelievable, peculiar and daunting and will therefore set up a violent oscillation between hope and despair, trust and fear, longing and scepticism.

We may call it anxious attachment, but this is too polite a term for what should, based on the behaviour it inspires on the ground, really be called angry attachment. In the face of love, some of us need to aggressively and explosively test what we are being given at every turn. We may need to break up with our lover eight times in a year, not because we really want to but because each occasion allows us to experience a cathartic dose of pure panic and then relief that the one we adore will have us back. We may feel compelled to make a jealous scene every time our partner goes out with a friend because we can’t deep down believe they could really love us and them. If they treat us to a nice meal or a present, we may unconsciously opt to puncture the mood and engineer a crisis – just to signal that we can’t easily be hoodwinked. We might accuse them of having betrayed us online and won’t be convinced otherwise until they’ve been submitted to hours of interrogation. Being in a drama can feel like the most relaxing of our options. It can be very painful for everyone.

In the past of the anxiously attached person, there will have been fierce threats to love’s integrity which will have made a vigilant stance feel like the only way to remain safe. Unlike the avoidant, the anxiously attached have experienced love, but they will have had to suffer grave dangers too: someone dying or going away, someone changing their mood or finding a new family to live with. The moral of childhood was that love can exist but never reliably and so must be permanently watched over with the ferocity of an Alsatian. 

The tragedy is that in their desperation to see if something is solid, the anxiously attached may end up – entirely unnecessarily – shaking it to pieces. A partner who may have started off with every intention of loyalty might – after being constantly badgered about their intentions – eventually start to wonder if they might not be better off with someone else. After the hundredth time of being doubted, a partner may in the end give off some serious reasons for doubt.

If the anxious can accept that their condition isn’t a sign of random sickness but is the result of a very identifiable sort of upbringing, they may develop the courage one day to explain their fears to a partner (and first, of course, to themselves). They can, without shame, teach their beloved that they don’t mean to be so cross, they’re just worried. They don’t want to doubt them, they simply don’t know how not to. They don’t want to have to keep breaking up, they can’t believe that things could be viable. As their partners will ideally eventually realise, they may need to be told – in the very nicest of ways, as they once again develop a terror or engineer a drama – to stop thinking, be quiet, and surrender to a very, very tight hug. 

The more they understand the origins of their behaviour, the more the anxious can perceive that it has outlived its uses. It may have made real sense to cling angrily to a parent at the age of five. They can be proud of the younger version of themselves for determining such a clever defensive strategy. But they can then also thank them gently and tell them that they have the situation in hand, and so can relax and enjoy some of the ease that should have been theirs from the start. The catastrophe the anxious fear will happen has already happened; it won’t – with a few standard adult precautionary measures in place, which have nothing to do with any need for ongoing theatrics or anger – ever need to happen again.