On Attachment

#198: What Anxiously Attached People Need to Thrive in a Relationship

• Stephanie Rigg • Season 1 • Episode 198

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When you have an anxious attachment style, it can be hard to know what you actually need to feel secure — especially if past relationships have left you second-guessing yourself or trying to manage your anxiety by suppressing your needs.

In this episode, we’re exploring five key ingredients that help anxiously attached people thrive in relationships. These aren’t about seeking constant reassurance or outsourcing your self-worth — they’re about being in relational environments that support security, growth, and genuine connection.

What we cover in this episode:

  • How consistency supports nervous system regulation and builds trust over time
  • The importance of emotional validation in helping you feel understood and connected
  • Why clear and reliable communication matters more than constant contact
  • The role of safe conflict in creating long-term security and repair
  • How having a shared vision helps settle the fear of uncertainty and misalignment

Whether you’re currently dating or in a relationship, this episode will help you get clearer on what’s supportive for you — and how to recognise when your needs are being met versus when you’re stuck in a cycle of over-functioning or hoping for crumbs.

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Speaker 2:

You are listening to on Attachment A place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships, and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge, and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I, I'm your host relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Speaker:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about what anxiously attached people need to thrive in a relationship. So this is a follow up to last week's episode, which was what avoidant people need to thrive in a relationship. And as promised, I am serving up the other side of the equation today in discussing the qualities, the conditions, the dynamics that are going to be most supportive for people with anxious attachment patterns to feel safe and secure in their relationships. So my hope in sharing this is that if you are more anxiously attached, you'll know what to be looking for, to be trying to cultivate, uh, you maybe know what to steer clear of. And if you are the partner of someone who's more anxiously attached, this might give you a little more context for your partner, the things that they struggle with and how you can best support them. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get into that, a couple of quick announcements. The first being that I have a brand new free training all about breakups. So if you're someone who is going through a breakup, or maybe you've been through a breakup in the last few months and you're still kind of struggling to process it and move forward. This new free training is gonna be hugely helpful. It's titled The Top Three Mistakes, keeping You Stuck After a Breakup, and What to do Differently If You Want to Heal and Move on. So I really aim to distill down into this training, the key missteps that I see time and time again from having supported thousands of people through this, uh, you know, where you might be keeping yourself stuck even though you're really trying to do everything you can to move forward. Things like comparing your process to that of your ex. I talk about in this training how. Anxious and avoidant people differ in terms of how they process breakups, much like how we differ when it comes to relationships themselves. Breakups are no different, and I go into what you might see from someone who's more avoidant as someone who's more anxious in terms of how they move through a breakup and, and why it's not particularly helpful to compare and to make meaning out of the way that they're showing up. Uh, and I also talk about what it really takes to move on and how you can do that even if you don't feel ready, even if you're still missing them, even if you still love them. Uh, you know how you can really dig deep and support yourself to move forward with your life and to actually make the most of your breakup. And that might sound a bit crazy, but, uh, I really believe that breakups are a beautiful opportunity to turn towards ourselves, to learn the lessons, and almost to go into a little cocoon and then emerge a beautiful butterfly on the other side. So if you are going through a breakup or you've been through a breakup recently, uh, definitely check out my new free training. The link to register for that is in the show notes where you can also head to my website and find it there. Second quick announcement is just a reminder about my upcoming event in London. So if you are in or around London, or you will be on the 13th of September, I would love to see you there. It's gonna be a really lovely intimate gathering. I'm gonna be giving a talk and then there'll be plenty of time for q and a and I'll be sticking around afterwards to say hi to everyone. So I would absolutely love to see you there. Okay, so let's get into this conversation around what anxiously attached people need to thrive in a relationship. The first one is consistency. So I've spoken about this many times before on the show, that consistency is so important to anxiously attach people because inconsistency is really at the heart of the anxious attachment origin story. It is oftentimes the. Relational pattern that gave rise to our anxious attachment patterns in the first place. So that might have looked like a lot of different things, but the overall feeling tone, the overall impression is I cannot trust in the reliability of love and connection. It feels so good when my connected, but I never know if it's gonna be there when I reach for it. And so I become hypervigilant to all of the conditions surrounding, you know, my relationships, my environment. Uh, and I feel like I have to monitor for threats. I feel like I have to always be on the lookout. And even when we are connected, I'm waiting for that connection to be withdrawn or to suddenly change or shift, uh, because it never feels steady and reliable and predictable. And so what often happens is we end up recreating these patterns in our adult relationships. We end up. Gravitating towards partners who are maybe unavailable or who are maybe inconsistent themselves. Sometimes they're there and warm and loving and then suddenly they pull away and we don't know what's happening. Uh, and while that's deeply triggering for us, there's also a familiarity to it that we maybe don't register as being unhealthy or unsupportive. And so. It doesn't sound the alarm in the sense of maybe this relationship isn't right for me, it just sounds the alarm in terms of this is what I've come to expect of relationships. So what did I do in the past to try and take care of this situation? You know, how have I dealt with this previously? So as is the case for all of us, no matter what our patterns are, when we don't have that awareness and we don't have that intentionality, we do generally gravitate towards relational environments, relational dynamics that fit our adaptations, and that the extension tend to mirror our early caregiving environments in one form or another. So all of that to say that inconsistency is likely to keep you in your anxious attachment patterns because all of the ways in which you have learned to adapt and all of your protective strategies, so your people pleasing, your fawning, your information gathering, you're playing detective, you're walking on eggshells. All of that is in response to inconsistency. And so it's gonna be really hard if you are in a relationship that feels inconsistent and unpredictable, it's gonna be really hard to shake those strategies'cause that's what those strategies are designed to respond to. And you've got a lot of. Practice in reaching for those things in response to inconsistency. So if you're wanting to shift your anxious patterns and feel more secure and really thrive in a relationship, you're gonna wanna look for consistency. So a partner who's steady and reliable, who you can really depend on and count on who you don't have to doubt their love and their feelings and their affection. A relationship that really feels like a resting place rather than a rollercoaster is going to be really supportive for you in. Eventually, and at first it might feel uncomfortable, right? You might not really know what to do with that level of safety and predictability because your system is so wired for fret and unpredictability. Uh, but eventually as you are acclimatized to a more steady pace of relationship, you might find yourself being able to slowly step off the ledge and maybe let down your guard, let down some of those more hypervigilant protective strategies that were adapted to that inconsistent and unpredictable environment. You might find that all of a sudden you don't need to lean on those things so much because you do have this really safe, consistent, steady presence in your relationships, and that really allows you to soften into a bit more trust. Okay, the next thing that's really gonna support anxiously attach people to thrive in relationships is validation. So a really validating partner and relational environment. So again, I've spoken. Many times about invalidation as being part of that early environment for anxiously attached people. So feeling that you are too much, you are too needy, you are too sensitive. Uh, becoming so hyper attuned to the moods and emotions and thoughts and feelings of the people around you, almost to the point where you take those on as your own or you're certainly more attuned to them than you are to yourself. Uh, and what that can lead to is, you know, many things. One of them being a loss of self or disconnection from yourself, um, but also this inability to really validate your own experience and this over reliance on other people telling you that you're allowed to have the experience that you're having. So if I express an emotion and someone says, oh, that makes so much sense. That must be so hard for you. Oh, I'm so sorry. Then I sort of go, okay, great. I'm allowed to have the emotion, but. If someone says to me like, what are you talking about? You're being so dramatic. You always do this, I then very quickly backpedal and feel like I'm not allowed to have that emotion and start doubting myself. And oftentimes what you'll see for anxiously attach people is we do that before we even open our mouths. We go around and around in circles on, am I asking too much? Am I being too demanding? Am I being too needy? Am I being too sensitive? And we're sort of preempting someone's defensiveness and rejection of us, uh, to the point where. We end up suppressing a lot of things and biting our tongue, uh, and feeling like what we're experiencing, the things that we might be really worried about, or scared of, or insecure about, that we're not allowed to bring those up because we're going to get shut down. Uh, we're gonna be met with defensiveness, we're going to be met with dismissal or all these other things that can feel deeply invalidating. Uh, but what we tend to miss is. We're doing that to ourselves. We almost silences ourselves before someone else can silence us because that feels less painful somehow, and allows us to feel a bit more in control of the situation, a bit less rejected by someone else, or you know, less like the connection is under threat. Uh, as I've spoken about before, you know, recently in my episode on self abandonment, we would rather abandon ourselves than have someone else abandon us. So all of that to say, a relational environment where you can share something openly and have someone say, wow, that makes sense. Or, you know, I hadn't really thought about it that way, but now that you say it and I'm hearing it, I get it. Or I don't see things that same way, or, this is my perspective, but your perspective matters, right? All of these different ways of saying, I believe your experience, your experience is real. And I can see that and that matters to me because it matters to me that you feel safe and cared for and loved here. Uh, and I'm not gonna push you away to deal with that on your own because I don't wanna have anything to do with it. Whenever you are coming up against that kind of energy in a relationship, you are going to be deeply triggered in that way, feeling in validated, feeling alone, feeling emotionally abandoned. Uh, and that's. Kind of the opposite of what thriving is gonna look and feel like for you in a relationship. So looking for someone who is really validating, who can really hold those emotions, not in a way that's expecting your partner to be apparent to you. Uh, it's not a substitute for you being somewhat regulated and self-responsible in your emotions. It's not like you get to go and emotionally dump on someone and they have to, you know, be your therapist. That's not what I'm talking about, but having someone, you know, when you can bring a concern and you can bring that in a mature and self-responsible way that they can hear you, that they can validate and mirror back and you can have, you know, a conversation about that, that's gonna feel really, really good for someone with anxious attachment patterns. Okay. The next one is clear and responsive communication. So again, it goes without saying that anxiously attached people having a really hard time with like infrequent, patchy, um, unpredictable communication. So if you text someone and you don't hear back from them for three days, uh, that's gonna send you into a tailspin. You are gonna be wondering, you know, do I taste again, what's going on? I don't wanna be too needy. I don't wanna be clingy. Where are they? What's going on? Are they ignoring me? Are they gonna ghost me? Just save yourself the trouble of all of that anxiety by finding someone who can communicate reliably and directly without a big fuss, without it feeling like you are, you know, drawing blood from a stone to get a response to a text message. Um, I say this, having been in a relationship with someone where it was exactly like that. It was just the most basic things like. Answering the phone when I called or responding to text messages that, you know, he had read. And then I'd send another one and he'd read that and he'd ignore that. And it just drove me absolutely crazy. And when I look back on it, it's just such an unnecessary headache that I was giving to myself by persisting with someone who is showing that they either didn't have the capacity or the willingness, uh, to engage in basic communication in the way that I felt was reasonable and was in line with what I was wanting and needing. Uh, now caveat here, it's not about finding someone who wants to text all day every day while you're at work. I'm really talking like within reasonable parameters here, but, um, again, hopefully we can all understand that there are extremes And as always, we're aiming for something that's in the healthy middle. So, uh, at one extreme we've got, you never know if they're gonna pick up the phone or call you back or respond to a text message in a timely manner. Uh, and you feel like you're constantly reaching for them and never knowing if they're gonna be there sort of loops back to the consistency point in number one. Just having this overall sense that if you need to get in contact with them, that's gonna be easy to do. They're going to be responsive within a reasonable time. And to the extent that you can't reach them, it's not because they've gone awol, it's just because they are legitimately busy and you know that as soon as they can, they will get back to you. That's kind of the tone that I'm talking about here, and that just alleviates so much unnecessary anxiety for someone with anxious attachment patterns. It just removes all of these unnecessary conflicts and friction points that you would otherwise have, uh, and allows you to again, rest in trusting the relationship, trusting that this person cares about you and respects you and thinks of you, and treats you as a priority, uh, you know, is considerate of your time. All of those basic things that are gonna really matter for someone with anxious attachment. And obviously, you know, the counterfactual, the, the opposite of all of those things, super triggering. Probably frustrating for anyone, but very triggering for someone with anxious attachment. So steer clear of that, uh, and if that's present in your relationship, I'd be looking to set some clear expectations and boundaries around it, and if things don't shift, then I'd be seriously considering whether that's a compatible relationship moving forward. Again, just'cause it saves you so much headache to not have to worry about those things. Okay, the next one is the ability to both navigate conflict and repair after conflict effectively. I've talked about anxious attachment and conflicts and all of the layers that can make this really hard, some anxiously attached. People actually feel quite comfortable in conflict because it feels like a form of intense connection and depth, and at least we're talking about the thing and we're having at it and it's open forum. Uh, and I feel much more comfortable in that space even though there's a lot of tension there, uh, that feels better than turning our backs on or sweeping it under the rug, which feels really tolerable. Other anxious attaches might lean more towards tiptoeing. And I don't even wanna go there because the conflict itself makes me feel so stressed and scared that something bad's gonna happen. And so I quickly pull back from conflict. Either way, there's a good chance that you have some sort of threat coding around conflict, that conflict registers as unsafe in your system and that it is, you know, a threat to the relationship overall. Whether that's because I only know how to express my needs in conflict and it tends to come, you know, wrapped in blame and criticism and attack, uh, or because I feel like. The moment I speak up, if I say anything, you are gonna threaten to leave. Uh, so whatever that looks like for you in your relationships, uh, it's so important that you can have conflict without it feeling like an existential threat to the relationship. Uh, you know, if you've got it looming over you, that any conflict could spell the unraveling of the relationship, and particularly in circumstances where breaking up has been used almost as ammunition in conflict. So whether one or both of you has said during conflict, I can't do this anymore. I'm, I, I give up whatever. That is really, really damaging because it then always waiting in the wings is this potential escalation that, you know, if I really stand firm here or if I really advocate for myself, you might say Enough, I'm not doing it, I'm done. Well I'll just leave. Uh, and the person who's holding that Trump card is always gonna have more power. And we don't really want conflict in relationship to be a power struggle. We want it to be an opportunity to yes, deal with whatever friction or tension might be there, but in a way that honors both of us and allows us to understand each other better and go, ah, there are unmet needs here that we maybe had blind spots around, or we were so in our own experience that we didn't realize what was going on for our partner. It allows us to negotiate new ways of doing things that are ultimately in service to the relationship So being able to do that safely, and you know, there's plenty of research on this that having safe conflict and repair is what sets apart healthy couples who go the distance from those who. Don't, or stay together in really unhappy relationships. So for someone with anxious attachment patterns, feeling like you can have conflict and disconnection without it, meaning this visceral existential threat, that is a very, very healing experience for you, and that's gonna really allow you to thrive in a relationship. Even though if you experience it for the first time, you might not trust it or believe in it, you probably still will feel like conflict is really. Scary and that it could mean the end of everything and that might. Influence how you show up. But over time, as your system becomes accustomed to, oh, we're like, we're staying in this, I'm like, someone can be upset with me and still love me. Someone can be disappointed in me or frustrated with me and still wanna be with me. Being able to hold those things,'cause for a lot of us, we've always felt like I have to be perfect in order to be lovable. And so to the extent that I've done something to upset you, then you must not love me anymore. Having safe conflict teaches our body and our system that that doesn't have to be true. That we can be imperfect, that we can mess up, uh, and that we can come back together and repair and actually be stronger for it. Okay. And last but not least, a sense of shared vision and commitment. So again, it's no surprise to anyone that anxiously attached, people are very future oriented in their relationships. And I think in part, this can be coming from a place of, you know, fear of abandonment and those sorts of things that, uh, we wanna lock something down to buffer against those fears. But equally we do just tend to be, oriented towards commitment and being all in and wanting to build something with someone, which I actually think can be a beautiful trait. Uh, and so being in a relationship with someone who is similarly minded, who is all in where you don't have to doubt, you know, what we are and what we're doing and where it's going, uh, obviously within reason, like you don't need to have it locked down on the second date. But if you are in one of those long, drawn out. Situation trips or a relationship where they're resisting a label or there's this overall sense of uncertainty in their commitment to you and their relationship. I know how easy it is when you're in one of those dynamics to tell yourself that, you know, we'll just wait a little longer and I'm just being sensitive and all of that, and that's great. But at the same time, trust me when I say that you are going to do way better with someone who is sure about you, and you know, relationships are really hard. If this is gonna be a long-term relationship and you are moving through life together, there are gonna be lots of bumps in the road. And doing that with someone who is at least sure that they wanna be with you and they wanna do that with you, and they're all in, I think that that is really, really non-negotiable. And so having that sense of like both being on the same page. We are both on the same train. We are going to the same destination. Um, we're both excited about being there and doing that together I think is really gonna help you to thrive and again, to relax into the relationship rather than always being on the lookout for signs that everything's gonna unravel and fall. Part. Uh, and I think a really lovely bonus of having that is that you get to talk about those things and make a plan and have that shared vision which tends to be a really beautiful source of connection for anxiously attached people because you get to feel like I'm choosing them and they're choosing me and we're doing this together and we're working towards something. I think for any couple, that's a beautiful experience, but particularly for someone who has always carried fears around not being chosen. And you know, people always leave me and I always want it more than they do. Having that deep embodied sense of. Reciprocity and mutual commitment is going to be so nourishing for you as someone with anxious attachment patterns, and will really support your journey to a more secure way of being in relationships. Okay, gonna leave it there. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. I really hope that this has been helpful and has given you something to work towards, something to strive for, something to cultivate in your relationships, whether you're in one at the moment or you are, you know, visioning out what the future might hold. I hope that this has given you a bit of a yardstick. Uh, otherwise, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks guys.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you wanna go deeper on all things, attachment, love, and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at Stephanie under Reig or@stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review on a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.