Transcription
An anxious attachment style is driven by fear of abandonment. This fear permeates a lot of the choices, actions, and communication of someone who is anxiously attached and disrupts their life and relationships. Stay tuned to learn how to shift into a secure attachment style, starting from an anxious attachment style.
Hey everyone, welcome here. I'm MyKaa, psychologist. Thanks for being here.
An anxious attachment style develops when a child isn't given consistent emotional support and its emotional needs aren't met consistently. There is some support, but the child can't ever trust that it'll be there the next time it needs it, because often enough, it finds itself on its own trying to process a difficult experience. It can't ever relax into the security of knowing a parent will be there. This child learns to become hypervigilant towards any signals from the caregiver to try and stay up to date with where the emotional connection is at.
Today, the anxiously attached adult is similarly overly focused on their partner's behavior and preoccupied with trying to improve the emotional connection by changing their partner's behavior. Often, because they're driven by fear, their attempts at improving the relationship end up contributing to the relationship problems. This means they might be obsessed with never-ending arguments and when they're unsatisfied, then to switch into to silent treatment out of protest. They might test their partner's love repeatedly, but then never really feel satisfied with the result. They might strive for some sort of perfection in the relationship to increase their sense of safety and control. They might keep raising the bar or have little or no standards at all for their partner. They often tend to display their emotions very intensely to be seen and heard, and along the way, they end up exhausting themselves and their partner.
Next, I'll share seven things you can focus and work on to leave your anxious attachment style behind.
Number one: Relocate more power and control into yourself. Because of the way an anxiously attached person's primary caregivers showed up and didn't show up for them in their childhood, their sense of self developed very much tied to their primary caregiver. They learn to be overly focused on their primary caregiver to increase the odds of attachment safety. They define themselves through the eyes of their primary caregiver: "Your experience defines me. You decide what is true for and about me." Now that you're an adult, practice relocating this power and control into yourself. Take back the power you learned to give away as a child. Feeling powerless is a major source of your anxiety, and when you take your power back, you gain inner security. Taking your power back means reminding yourself that you decide who you are and what makes you valuable. Whenever you feel that habitual impulse to excessively seek reassurance from somebody else, it means to make more choices by yourself. It means to stop asking for permission where none is due. It means to learn to better emotionally differentiate yourself from your partner by getting in better contact with what's going on in your body and in our world. It also means turning your other-focused approach to change into an approach that is more inclusive of yourself and your partner's needs as well. It means not only seeing what your partner did wrong, but also looking within and noticing what's going on there, where it came from, and how it can be resolved, and allowing for the creativity to find several approaches and not only to focus on the one that is exclusively directed at your partner.
Number two: Learn to distinguish enmeshment from actual emotional intimacy. Anxiously attached people are attracted by the idea of merging with their partner. They can rush into relationships and want to melt together as quickly as possible in an attempt at safety and closeness. It can also have a quality of wanting to be rescued by their significant other. The result isn't actual emotional intimacy, but enmeshment. Actual emotional intimacy can be scary for someone who is anxiously attached because it requires authenticity and room for individuality and difference. Authenticity scares them because they're afraid they won't be loved for their authentic self, and room for difference and individuality scares them because they fear it's an expression of or will lead to abandonment. However, the more you practice authenticity, the more you take note of when your partner's experience is different from yours and allow it to be different, the more you allow for vulnerability in your partner, the more you take responsibility for your own healing, the closer you'll move to actual emotional intimacy, which is a lot more satisfying to your and your partner's attachment needs.
Number three: Change your rules about solitude and disconnection in your mind. Solitude equals loneliness and abandonment. Your inner child seeks constant proximity. Learn to soothe this inner child from your adult self so you can feel more comfortable with a certain natural amount of space in your relationship. That way, you can stop chasing constant proximity and overextending yourself to prevent perceived abandonment. Also, practice noticing whenever your inner child starts panicking in normal moments of disconnection that come up in any relationship. It's okay to feel this disconnected sometimes. You can give yourself and your partner time to figure it out. Also, allow for alone time for your partner. Constant proximity isn't sustainable.
Number four: Practice self-regulation. Because you didn't receive much guidance from your parents, you never really learned how to self-regulate. Your preferred way of regulating is with your partner through affectionate words and touch. This is called co-regulation, and it's super important and effective at the same time. Again, it's not sustainable if it's the only way you know to regulate your nervous system. Self-regulation can have many shapes. It means doing something on your own that you know will benefit your health, well-being, mental state, and sense of security. It can take the form of helpful self-talk, physical exercise, sleep, healthy meals, grounding exercises for your nervous system like progressive muscle relaxation, taking time off to relax, and much more.
Number five: Learn secure, non-fearful communication. Point five is about learning how to express yourself so you get seen and heard without exhausting yourself or pushing your partner's nervous system into fight, flight, and freeze. It starts out with focusing on one thing at a time to communicate and reestablishing an affectionate, appreciative, validating tone. I've got lots of other videos on this channel in my relationships playlist where I talk in more detail about effective communication like this.
Number six: Let go of unrealistic fantasies about romantic love. Here's another important thing to consider. Reflect on the realistic effect a romantic relationship can have on your life and happiness, and the things you'll never be able to get from a romantic relationship, no matter how great it is. What are experiences and forms of happiness that don't come from romantic love, but from other sources like value-based living, autonomy, authentic friendships, and contributing in ways that are meaningful to you? If you sort this out, your happiness will rest on more than one pillar, which makes it more stable and secure, and allows you to be less shaken by the imperfections of your romantic relationship. It takes unrealistic pressure off and makes room for gratitude for what you've got. It allows you to stop trying to force reality to align to your fantasy and to focus on actual, wholesome sources of happiness, which of course includes emotional connection in some shape or form, but also has room for other options.
Number seven: Work on your sense of self-worth. Be more authentic. Because I have a whole playlist on this topic on this channel, I'll keep it short here. In short, the more you can trust and feel into the reality of your worth that's independent from another person's attention and approval, the stronger your self-esteem will get. The root of an insecure attachment style is almost always also an insecurity about yourself, and developing relationship security also requires developing security in yourself. You can do this through action by doing the things you would do if you were more secure in yourself. That way, security will follow. You can also approach this by working on self-talk, emotion regulation skills, and core beliefs.
I wish you all the best for your journey or a continued journey. Till next time, take care and remember, anxiety, fear of abandonment, is not you. You experience it, and you can shift into a different, secure experience.