Why do you have an anxious attachment style?

Transcript:

I’m a therapist so of course I’m going to blame your parents or caregivers. And while they maybe should shoulder most of the blame, I want to go over several reasons you may be anxiously attached in relationships. By the end of this video you should have a much better understanding of where exactly your anxious attachment style comes from. Having this info will make it easier to manage or change if you want to feel more secure in relationships.

Okay so like I went over in the last video, an anxious attachment style can cause you to feel pretty insecure in relationships. The insecurity can manifest as a low grade constant worrying about the relationship possibly ending which can cause a feeling of neediness. You might feel clingy and crave validation on a regular basis. While I hope your partner can experience your anxiety as endearing I know that it can feel downright awful to experience.

Okay first let’s blame your parents.

When you’re a child you need your basic needs met so that you can physically survive. Those basic needs include shelter, food, clothing, medical care and protection from harm. You also have some basic emotional needs that should be met. Those emotional needs are to feel cared for, to be loved and understood, to have your feelings be recognized and acknowledged, to feel appreciated and connected.

Folks who have an anxious attachment style typically have parents or caregivers who met their physical needs, at least met them well enough to keep them feeling okay, but failed at consistently meeting their emotional needs.

And because they can’t meet their emotional needs it creates an environment of stress and unpredictability. The kid is craving consistent emotional connection but they just don’t get it enough. It could be that the parent just doesn’t have the time or energy to connect. Or maybe the parent doesn’t have the emotional intelligence. The family could be going through trauma, transition or there may be other children that are asking for more emotional needs to be met and you happen to be last in line to receive love and care.

What happens when we are infants, toddlers and children is that when our emotional needs aren’t met, we blame ourselves. We can’t not blame ourselves. Developmentally our little baby brains are so self absorbed that the only thing we know how to do when our needs aren’t being met is to be like, “well I guess it’s my bad.” Every single child’s brain works that way.

And what that does is it creates a narrative as you grow older that you must have done something wrong and that’s why you didn’t receive the love and care that you so badly wanted. So that’s how you view the world. You start to become worried that you’re gong to do something that will cause someone not to love you anymore just like what you think happened when you were a kid.

While blaming our parents feels kinda nice, it’s not the only way you may have developed an anxious attachment style. While most anxious people can remember inconsistent care they received there may also be other factors that have lead to your attachment style.

For instance, some of your early romantic relationships could have had a large impact on you. Think back to when you first started crushing hard on some of your peers. And try to remember what those really early dating experiences were like. Chances are they were kind of a train wreck.

Tweens and teens have very poor relationship skills and this is when a lot of us first started falling in love. If you found yourself in a relationship with someone in middle school or high school chances are you did not get your emotional needs met very consistently. And it may not have been because you were with someone who was a turd, it just could have been that the kid you were dating had zero idea how to make you feel emotionally validated and reassured.

And as teenagers do, they can be pretty hard on themselves if things don’t work out. Which could lead to low self worth and crippling self doubt, an anxious attachment could start developing as they start to over worry about what they’re doing to cause the demise of a relationships. The anxiety they develop could follow them through high school and college if left unchecked. Which would only create more failed relationships which would lead to more self criticism and helplessness.

A trusted adult, such as a parent, counselor or mentor, needs to step in during this time to educate the kid that it’s not solely their fault when relationships end. There are all sorts of reasons and you need to have a wider perspective of all the things that can go wrong. The blame can be passed around and not shouldered just by them.

Another thing that can cause an anxious attachment style is dating people as an adult who just make you feel like you’re a problem. If you have a string of relationships where you’re told that you’re too much, too needy, too sensitive and too clingy than you’re gonna start believing it. And if the belief of you being “too much” starts to become a core belief, then you’ll most likely continue to magnetize relationships that confirm your reality.

The unfortunate effect of having an anxious attachment style is that more often than not you’ll find yourself dating someone with an avoidant attachment style and basically 10 out of 10 times you’re going to leave that relationship feeling even more anxious and bummed about yourself. I’m going to devote an entire video later in this series to anxious babes dating avoidants. I’ll just say that consistently dating people that make you FEEL needy will cause you to act needy.

So while we can probably put the blame on people that have had a negative effect on our lives, and that might make you feel better because at least it’s not your fault, in the end you’re going to have to figure out how to heal your past wounds and take action moving forward so that you’re not overly anxious in future relationships. We’ll get into that in the next video!

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