Ep. 236 How Your Attachment Style Influences Anxiety and Stress in Midlife Relationships

Why does Valentine’s Day bring up anxiety and stress in midlife—even when love is present?
If this week feels complicated, you’re not broken—your nervous system is responding to real relational patterns.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     How attachment styles shape anxiety, stress, and emotional safety in relationships

2.     Why love is one of the most powerful coping skills for calming anxiety and stress

3.     How understanding your attachment patterns helps you give and receive love with more ease and agency

🎧 Take 13 minutes to understand your attachment patterns and build coping skills that support calm, connection, and self-trust—you’re worth it.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and  practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how understanding your attachment style can reduce anxiety while helping you cultivate love and calm. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast this week is Valentine's Week. And relationally, that can mean very different things depending on where you are in your life. For some people, Valentine's Day is about romance. For others, it highlights what's missing. And for many in midlife, it brings up a mix of love, longing, disappointment, gratitude, and stress. all at the same time. But at its core, Valentine's Day is about love, Real, grounded, messy human. Love is actually one of the most powerful ways to calm, anxiety, stress, and overwhelm. So this week on the podcast, we're gonna focus on love as a coping skill, not love as a feeling. You wait for not love as something someone else has to give you perfectly, but love as something you can understand, cultivate, and practice starting with how you relate. Today we're gonna look at love through the lens of attachment in a way that helps you heal and step back into your agency to love more, not only others, but yourself. Because love, like calm doesn't just happen in a culture like ours. It actually needs to be cultivated. It's easy to get stuck asking, do people love me the way I need? But there's another question that gives you far more agency. How do I love and how does that shape my sense of calm connection and relationship? In this episode, you'll discover what attachment really is and why it affects how Valentine's Day lands for you. How attachment styles develop across a lifetime and within a culture, not just a family. And how understanding your attachment style can help reduce anxiety and increase your capacity to give and receive, love. Trust me, this is a powerful coping skill. Let's start with what attachment actually is. First of all, attachment is complex. Even if those online tests or a podcast like this makes it seem simple, it's not. It's not all or nothing. It's not a label that defines you forever. Think of attachment as more of a continuum, a set of patterns that influence how safe, connected, and regulated you feel. In relationships, attachment just doesn't develop between you and your parents. It also forms within the culture, time period, and social context. You were born into Attachment Theory was developed by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, and it's grounded in decades of research on relationships, development, and emotional regulation across the lifespan. This isn't pop psychology. It's a well-studied way of understanding how humans learn to connect, protect and repair in relationships. One important piece that often gets missed when we talk about attachment is biology. You're born with a certain temperament and nervous system sensitivity. Two children can grow up in the same home and develop very different attachment patterns. Not because one was loved more, but because their systems responded differently to the same environment. And that matters because understanding attachment isn't about diagnosing yourself or blaming anyone. It's about noticing patterns that can help you cultivate more calm and more love in your life. Right now, in my 40 years of clinical work, I've worked with many clients from large families. One client, one of seven children. Took an online attachment test learned her attachment. Leaned anxious. She came to therapy upset that her parents hadn't been able to give her much one-on-one attention, something she was committed to offering her own children when she placed her experience in context, her father working three jobs and her mother managing a full household. She softened. She moved from blame to a deeper understanding and appreciation. Most models describe four attachment styles along with secure attachment. I want to make these real, not abstract, so I'm gonna give you a simple example of each. Let's start with secure attachment because this is what we all hope to develop. Secure attachment develops when care was generally consistent and responsive. When someone leans towards secure attachment, they might notice that something feels off in a relationship and they can say, I'm feeling a little disconnected. Can we talk? When there's secure attachment, you don't panic, you don't shut down. You trust that repair is possible. That trust is regulating that trust becomes the foundation for creating loving and healthy relationships. That's secure attachment. Let's talk about anxious attachment. This is one of the most common attachment styles that I see in my office. Anxious attachment often develops when care was inconsistent. Love felt unpredictable, so closeness can feel urgent. Anxious attachment can also be the result of a nervous system that is highly sensitive. You may notice that when someone doesn't text back, your mind fills in the gaps. You replay conversations. You wonder if you said something wrong. Your anxiety isn't about the text. It's about losing connection. That makes a lot of sense. A number of years ago, I worked with a young newlywed couple who felt overwhelmed every time they disagreed and began questioning whether they should have gotten married. Both partners had anxious attachment styles in therapy. We worked on understanding that difference and disagreements are normal parts of a healthy relationship, not signs of danger or failure. Another attachment style is called avoidant attachment. Avoidant attachment can develop when emotional needs weren't reliably welcomed. Independence felt safer than vulnerability. You might notice that when someone wants to talk about feelings or difference, you feel tense or irritated, you tell yourself you're fine, but inside your system is saying closeness feels like pressure. Distance becomes the coping strategy. Often when someone has this style, when there's a conflict, they flee either physically, mentally, or emotionally. The last attachment style is known as disorganized attachment. Disorganized attachment can develop when care was both comforting. And frightening. This creates conflicting needs for closeness and distance. You may deeply want connection, but when it shows up, you feel overwhelmed or suspicious. You move towards love and then pull away just as quickly. This pattern isn't confusing'cause you're difficult. It's confusing because your nervous system learned mixed signals early on. I once worked with a man whose mother was comforting and whose father was frightening because of an anger problem. Both of these experiences lived inside of him. His work in therapy was to honor each part of his history and do the Inner work of healing and nurturing so he could cultivate real grounded love in the present rather than protecting and reacting from his past. Here's the most important thing to remember. These are adaptive patterns, not personality flaws or things that cannot be changed. Isn't it interesting that you can be 20 or 30 or 40 years away from when these patterns developed and still be living as if you were in the same context today? They formed to help you survive and connect in the environment you were given. And the good news is patterns can soften. Why? Because no one's adulthood is the same as their childhood where these patterns developed. We learn lots of new things in adulthood. Why not learn to love and relate to others and ourselves in a healthier, more satisfying way? Understanding your attachment style, doesn't trap you. It gives you choice, and choice is one of the fastest ways to reduce anxiety and stress. One thing I wanna be careful about here, a lot of people take online attachment quizzes and walk away blaming their parents or themselves. That's not the purpose of attachment theory at all. The goal isn't to say, well, this is why I'm stuck. Can't do a thing about it. The goal is to say. Oh, now I understand myself more and this is what I can work with. Attachment knowledge is most helpful when it's used for growth, not blame. Or excuses. Most people have a dominant pattern, but also flexibility depending on the relationship and life stage. Understanding your patterns gives you choice, and choice reduces anxiety. It's also important to put attachment into generational context. Many midlife listeners were raised by Boomer parents who valued independence, resilience, and pushing through often with less language for emotional processing. At the same time, many are parenting or relating to millennials or Gen Z adults who were raised with more emotional language and different expectations around connection. Neither approach is wrong, but these differences shape attachment expectations. Online quizzes rarely account for this complexity. They tend to oversimplify something deeply contextual. Understanding this can soften judgment toward yourself and towards others. So let's talk briefly about online tests. They can be directionally helpful, but they're not diagnostic. They offer a snapshot, not a full picture. The most accurate understanding of attachment comes from noticing your reactions over time, paying attention to what triggers anxiety. Or withdraw. observing how you repair and reconnect. Even basic awareness without a label can increase your capacity to be loved and to love more intentionally, and that's where the coping skill lives. Here's your Inner Challenge for today. Notice one relationship where you feel a little activated, more anxious, more distant, or more self-protective. Instead of judging that reaction, gently ask, what might my attachment system be trying to protect right now? What would a small act of secure love look like here that might be pausing before reacting, expressing a need, calmly, offering warmth without overgiving. Small shifts matter. In this episode, we talked about why Valentine's Day can stir anxiety and stress in midlife, how attachment shapes your experience of love and why. Understanding your attachment style isn't about blame. It's about agency. When you understand your attachment patterns, you're not stuck with them. You can work with them, and that understanding alone can create more calm, more compassion, and more connection. On Thursday, let's take this one step further and focus on how to grow love in the life you already have. Using your attachment style as a guide, not just this Valentine's Week, but every day. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife calm.