Understanding the Anxious Attachment Style — 7 Signs You’re Anxiously Attached in Relationships
The Anxious Preoccupied (AP) attachment style shows up as a deep yearning for emotional closeness and a heightened sensitivity to signs of rejection or abandonment in relationships.
This attachment pattern can lead to a rollercoaster of emotions and a fear of being alone, making it essential to understand to create relationships based on authenticity, genuine intimacy, love and trust.
In this article, we will go over:
What Exactly is an Attachment Style — A brief overview of attachment theory
Secure vs. Insecure Attachment — The fundamental differences between secure and insecure worldviews
7 Signs of Anxious Attachment — How to recognize this attachment style in yourself or your partner
Is Attachment Theory Valid — A brief look at the history and scientific validity of attachment theory
What Exactly is An Attachment Style?
Attachment styles are the ways we learn to connect with and depend on others during our formative years.
You can think of them as strategies you developed throughout your childhood to protect yourself — mentally, physically and emotionally — and get your needs met in the environment you grew up in.
Your attachment style is not an innate trait, but a learned mechanism that evolved and adapted over time based on what worked best in your unique circumstances.
As you grew up, these approaches became more sophisticated and, through constant repetition and emotional reinforcement, they became habitual ways of thinking, feeling, behaving and responding.
These learned approaches shape our self-image, guide our interactions, and leave a lasting impact on our relationships and personal well-being. There are four main attachment styles: Secure, Anxious Preoccupied, Dismissive Avoidant, and Fearful Avoidant.
These styles significantly influence how we perceive ourselves and others, ultimately shaping the quality of our connections and overall life experiences.
Our attachment styles show up most noticeably in our romantic relationships, where we tend to feel the most vulnerable. However, they also affect every other area of life, including our friendships, career, mental and physical health, finances, and spirituality, as well as our overall worldview and our relationship to authority.
Secure vs. Insecure Attachment
Individuals with a secure attachment style generally have positive and compassionate views of themselves and others. They exhibit a sense of emotional security and confidence in their relationships.
This inner security allows them to trust both their own worthiness and the intentions of others. As a result, they tend to have more fulfilling and harmonious relationships, experiencing less fear, anxiety, or mistrust in their interactions.
On the other hand, individuals with one of the three insecure attachment styles — Anxious Preoccupied, Dismissive Avoidant, or Fearful Avoidant — often carry negative emotions such as anger, shame, guilt, fear, mistrust, and anxiety in their perceptions of themselves and others.
This insecurity makes it challenging for them to fully relax in relationships and trust the intentions of others. They may struggle with doubts about their worthiness and whether they are lovable, leading to more challenging and often painful experiences in their relationships.
7 Signs You May Have an Anxious Attachment Style
With an anxious attachment style, you may feel like a love addict and experience intense anxiety, jealousy and insecurity in relationships.
As a result, you may find yourself obsessively thinking about your partner or love interest, doubting their commitment to you and seeking frequent reassurance of their love and validation of your worth, lovability and desirability.
Interestingly, this attachment style is common among artists, musicians and poets, so you will often hear songs and poems describing the experience of being anxiously attached in relationships.
Here are 7 signs to consider if you think you may have an Anxious Preoccupied attachment style.
1. You tend to feel your emotions intensely
You may struggle to process and regulate your emotions on your own.
You feel relatively comfortable expressing your emotions openly and vulnerably — both in real life and in art.
You may often be told that you are exaggerating, being dramatic or overly reactive.
You may feel like your emotions take over and consume you.
2. You tend to worry a lot in your relationships and have pervasive fears of rejection and abandonment
You tend to be on a constant lookout for signs that your partner is pulling away and losing interest.
You cope with this fear by holding on tighter, seeking frequent validation and reassurance that you are loved and everything is okay.
You struggle to affirm and validate yourself, so the validation and reassurance you receive from others never truly feels enough.
When conflicts arise in the relationship, you feel an almost overpowering need to resolve them immediately, making it hard to focus on other things.
3. You tend to idealize others and put them on a pedestal seeing yourself as not good enough
You struggle with feelings of unworthiness, inferiority or not being good enough, causing you to idealize and place others on a pedestal, especially your romantic partners.
You may look up to others with admiration or envy, which can lead you to feel like you must constantly earn or prove your worth.
4. You tend to overinvest in relationships
In relationships, you may feel like you are always the one who loves more, cares more, wants more, gives more and does more.
While the connection may feel amazing and bring relief to the intense emotions you experience — like a soothing balm to a stinging wound — the lack of reciprocation often leaves you feeling unfulfilled, hurt and resentful.
You may feel like you are always the one who is pursuing, chasing and initiating contact in the relationship. It may feel like the other person has all the power.
You relate to being an empath or people-pleaser.
5. You struggle to set and maintain boundaries with others and tend to feel rejected when they set boundaries with you
You may believe that setting boundaries will push people away, so you prefer not to.
You may not even know what your boundaries are.
You may associate boundaries with separation and may believe that there shouldn’t be any boundaries in intimate relationships.
6. You tend to become intensely infatuated with people and prefer to move quickly in relationships
You develop intense crushes on people to the point where they consume you.
Love and intimacy feel like drugs to you.
While you enjoy the initial thrill of meeting someone new, you don’t really like the uncertainty of the dating stage of relationships. You prefer to get to know them intimately and commit as soon as possible. This tendency may have overwhelmed or pushed people away in the past.
You may have been called needy, clingy, or “too much” by partners who prefer to maintain more space and autonomy in relationships.
7. You tend to become preoccupied with the person you are dating and may neglect other areas of your life
When you are in a romantic relationship, most of your attention goes towards your partner and the relationship.
Relationships are a high priority for you, and you tend to prioritize your partner's needs over your own. You may try to meet most of your personal needs through the relationship.
While dating, you may take on their interests and try to be more of what you think they want you to be, while hiding the parts you think they may not like or approve of.
Taking time for yourself and finding other ways to meet your own needs may feel less satisfying than doing things with or for other people, especially your partner.
Is Attachment Theory Valid?
Attachment theory is considered a valid and well-established framework for understanding human development and relationships.
The theory was originally developed by Dr. John Bowlby in the 1950s and 60s and was further reinforced, modified and expanded on by other psychologists in the field, such as Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, Hary Harlow and Patricia Crittendon.
It has been widely researched, tested, and applied in various contexts across cultures since its original conception.
Of course, researchers continue to explore and refine the theory, allowing room for ongoing discussions and developments in the field.
Conclusion
An important thing to recognize is that the four attachment styles are not neat little boxes we can pigeonhole ourselves into. Each attachment style is nuanced, complex and dynamic. It exists on a broad spectrum and can manifest differently in different people.
While I have given you a general overview of the Anxious Preoccupied attachment style, keep in mind that these are common characteristics that anxiously attached individuals tend to have. However, it is not an exhaustive list and you may not identify with every single point.
Furthermore, you may also recognize yourself in some or all of these traits if you have a Fearful Avoidant attachment style, which I will go into more deeply in a future post.
Take care.
Hi, I’m Noemi, a certified relationship coach. I help you understand your patterns and cultivate self-love, confidence, and compassion to create the deep, fulfilling conscious relationships your heart desires.
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