Anxious Ambivalent Attachment Style and How It Affects Your Relationships

Attachment styles are how we form bonds with other people. This starts at birth, beginning with how you bonded with your parents and caregivers in childhood, particularly in the first 18 months of life. This strongly affects your self-worth, your ability to show care, and how you relate to the world as an adult. Your attachment style influences your sense of safety, security, and meaning you attribute to life experiences.

Types of Attachment

• Secure
• Disorganized
• Anxious-avoidant
• Anxious-ambivalent

Understanding your style will help you understand how you feel and react in your adult relationships. From there, you can learn what you need and how to overcome issues.

Brief Descriptors;

Secure Attachment

• Have empathy but set boundaries.
• Have good self-worth.
• Can openly express feelings.
• Enjoy being in other's company but aren’t anxious spending time alone.

Disorganized Attachment

• Fearful Attachment.
• Feel they don’t deserve love.

Anxious-avoidant (dismissive)

• Avoid connection with others. Rely on themselves. Crave freedom.

Anxious Attachment (pre-occupied)

• Fiercely independent and feel you don’t need others,
• Want to be close but fear trusting others.
• Have low self-esteem.
• Struggle to be alone.
• Struggle to accept criticism.

This post will focus on anxious attachment, which is extremely common. Studies show that more than 40% of adults have elements of an anxious attachment style.

Someone who is anxiously attached can be sensitive, with strong emotional needs, and highly attuned to their partner’s behaviour and needs. They often require reassurance and affection in order to feel safe and secure in the relationship. If this is not provided in the way they need, they start to feel worried, and riddled with doubts. This lack of affection is internalized as not being worthy of love. Their biggest fear is rejection. To avoid this, they may become overly clingy, hypervigilant, or sometimes jealous. This overwhelm can lead them to do anything to maintain their relationship.

Anxious-ambivalent - (preoccupied attachment)

Characteristics and contributing factors:

• Tend to have higher needs, rooting from low self-esteem. 
• Caregivers provided inconsistent attention, altering between warmth and availability to cold rejection without an apparent cause.
• Childhood was strife with disappointment, frustration in trying to please parents as well as role reversals.
• Experiences re-hashing of past hurts and rejections.
• Often takes the lead, sometimes to a point of being over-controlling.
• Very critical of self. 
• Insecure within self, strife with double. 
• Seeks reassurance from others. 
• Struggles with rules or authority. 
• Can be impatient, critical and sometime argumentative. 
• Fears abandonment by friends or romantic interests. 
• Can engage in elements of self-sabotage. 
• Struggles to truth others. 
• Can get emotionally enmeshed with parents and family issues.

In relationships this can look like; 

• Neediness 
• Lack of boundary-setting
• Hiding vulnerability 
• Anxious when away from partner 
• Easily obsessed or fixated on someone
• Needing regular reassurance of how a partner feels about you
• Can sabotage relationships by starting fights / seeking conflict 

This does not mean you lacked love as a child completely, more so it is that you did not get the consistent and reliable emotional attention that you needed. Personality and life experiences will be contributing factors as well.

What triggers anxious attachment? 

• Noticing inconsistencies in partner’s actions or words 
• Your partner starts to pull away or act distracted 
• Your partner behaves inconsistently in how they interact with you. 
• Your partner struggles to control their emotions.
• You feel pressured into making a commitment 
• Your partner is asking for increased communication or attention.

If elements of this style of attachment sounds relatable, here are some things you can do;

Questions to Ask Yourself

• How do you think your attachment style affects your life? Does it hold you back? In what ways?
• How does it impact your relationships, family life, work, career.

How to Heal

Self-awareness
Work on your self-awareness. When you feel anxious again, notice what you’re thinking and feeling. What could be underneath this reaction?

Increase Communication Skills
Practice expressing your emotions, asking for what you need in a relationship.
Notice their non-verbal cues, so you can better understand and react to a situation.

Improved Relationship Choices
Seek secure attachment-style relationships. This may feel uncomfortable at first because it is new for you. Experiencing this will help you understand healthy and safe connections. Look for this in both your friendships and romance. Surrounding yourself with people who have high self-esteem and good boundaries will have a positive effect on how you feel and conduct yourself.

Talk to a Therapist
This can help heal childhood experiences that contribute to what formed your relationship forming blueprints. Together, you can work on how to form healthier patterns. Remember, therapists from Counselling For All are here for you - make a call to start discussing your options.

References
Attachment Project (2024). Anxious Attachment Relationships.
https://www.attachmentproject.com/anxious-attachment-relationships/

Between Sessions (2021). What is Your Attachment Style. https://www.betweensessions.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/What_Is_Your_Attachment_Style.pdf

WebMd (2024). Mental Health. What is Anxious Attachment.
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-anxious-attachment