If you're looking to improve your mental health and well-being, then keep listening. I'm Dr Liz White, a consultant clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience. Whether you're a frazzled parent, a stressed out professional or finding your way through the challenges of midlife, you're in the right place. Through a mix of solo episodes and insightful conversations with expert psychologists and therapists, I'm bringing you evidence-based tools and strategies to help you navigate life's ups and downs with confidence, clarity and compassion. With confidence, clarity and compassion this is your space to feel seen, supported and empowered. Welcome to Hello Therapy. If you have ever found yourself worrying whether your partner still loves you or you pick fights just to get reassurance that they do, you are not alone. Today I'm talking about attachment anxiety and I'm going to take you through why we sometimes act out or do things in our relationships even when we know it doesn't help. And, most importantly, I'm offering practical tips to help you break free from these patterns and move towards a more secure, fulfilling relationship. And if you want a little extra help with this, head over to Substack, where you can download my mini guide to attachment anxiety, which is packed full of insights and tips. The link is in the show notes, so let's dive in. Firstly, what is attachment? Attachment in romantic relationships is thought to have its roots in early childhood, specifically experiences with our caregivers. The idea is that we form emotional bonds to our caregivers. That gives us a kind of relationship template for later on in life. Through this experience with our caregivers we develop a sense of ourselves, of other people and, most importantly, we learn what to expect in relationships. And another word for this template of relationships is attachment styles. Now, if we have experienced our caregivers as attentive, meeting our needs most of the time available to us, most of the time, we develop a positive sense of ourselves and of other people and this in turn leads us to feel secure in our relationships with others. Ie, you developa secure attachment style. But the opposite can be true if we haven't had that experience growing up, and this can result in an insecure attachment style. Now part one of this video series on attachment talks through in more depth about attachment styles, what they are, the types, etc. So if you want to learn more about that, then go and check it out.
Speaker 1:So next I'm going to talk you through what attachment anxiety is. So it's generally accepted within the research literature that there are two really important factors that make up the attachment experience attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance and they exist on a continuum, so you can be low in attachment anxiety or high in attachment anxiety or anywhere in the middle, and the same goes for attachment avoidance, and within these dimensions you get the attachment styles. So if you have high attachment anxiety, you tend to adopt something called hyper activating attachment strategies. Hyper activating attachment strategies are behaviors that you adopt in order to get your partner's attention, and this is so that you can receive care, love and support when you need it. So the key thing to understand here is that these are coping strategies that have been learned from very early on in someone's childhood, so they are essentially survival strategies, and research and studies have shown that people who have had experiences with their caregivers where their caregivers were inconsistent or unreliable in their care and their support and their love this can lead to these types of coping strategies. Now, when you're in that hyper-activated state of mind, you are much more attentive to threat related cues to do with someone's availability to you. So in the context of a romantic relationship, this might show itself as you being very worried, very anxious about whether the person is going to leave you or reject you in some way. So you adopt these hyper activating coping strategies in order to pull the person closer to you, to make sure that they are there for you and that they are going to stay in the relationship.
Speaker 1:Now, as I alluded to earlier, there are certain coping strategies that can come along with having high attachment anxiety. Sometimes they're called defence mechanisms and I'm going to talk about them now. Now, all of this is based in research. Research has shown that there is like a cluster of coping strategies that people who are high on attachment anxiety tend to do, and these are chronic proximity seeking rumination to do. And these are chronic proximity seeking rumination, compulsive caregiving, consumption, defensive protest and, lastly, ambivalent splitting. So first up is chronic proximity seeking. Chronic proximity seeking is when someone has an almost obsessive need to be connected and close to their partner. So you may text your partner through the day, not just to chat, but because you feel anxious when you're not in contact with them. You might panic if you think that your partner is taking longer than they should to reply to you because you're assuming the worst. Have they found someone else? Are they going to leave me? Sometimes people insist that their partners spend every spare moment with them, making it difficult for them to have their own lives, see their own friends, and so on. So if this resonates with you, here is a tip Try to build in gradual independence from your partner. Practice spending small amounts of time alone so you might want to pursue your own hobby or see your friends separately, and within that, it's also about learning how to sit with the anxiety that that might bring up for you, and I've got a couple of videos on how to manage anxiety, so do go and check them out.
Speaker 1:Next up is rumination. So rumination is when someone plays over and over and over in their mind negative or anxious thoughts about their partner or about the relationship. So, for example, if you've had a disagreement with your partner, you may replay what was said over and over again, trying to remember what you said and what you should have said differently, and it can go on and on in your mind. Sometimes rumination is about trying to prevent future mistakes, so you try and work out what went wrong there, and I need to prevent that from happening again. So again, what we know about these types of coping strategies is that it makes you hyper vigilant to cues that your partner might not be interested or is losing interest. So say they're quiet at dinner, and your mind might go off into oh my goodness, why are they being quiet? Are they losing interest or are they planning to leave me? And it's that rumination that will go round and round your mind. Now here's my tip for rumination if this is something that you're experiencing, try and diffuse or step back from the anxious thoughts and worries that are in your mind. So that would involve really noticing when you are worrying and stepping back by labeling it or naming it as worry, as rumination. Ah, here is rumination that's not helpful to me and, again, I have a couple of videos on this. So go and check those out, because they're really helpful in taking you through the detail around how to manage difficult thoughts.
Speaker 1:Next up is compulsive caregiving. So another defense mechanism or coping strategy if you have high attachment anxiety is compulsive caregiving, and this is where you spend most or all of your time looking after your partner, and you look after your partner at the expense of your own needs. You go over and above, but in doing so, you neglect yourself, neglect your own needs and your sole focus becomes on the other person, and what this can do in a relationship is that your world becomes a lot smaller. You might stop seeing your friends or doing things that you enjoy because you're so focused on attending to your partner's needs. So my tip here is this really have a think about what is a healthy boundary for me in my relationship. You might want to think about the ways in which you are giving too much, and once you've identified them, it will be about thinking in terms of well, how can I do things a little differently? How can I support my partner without just completely neglecting my needs? And sometimes what can be helpful is talking to friends, you know, seeing how they manage those boundaries.
Speaker 1:Next, I'm going to talk you through something called consumption. So when you have high attachment anxiety, you might engage in something called consumption, and essentially this is intense emotional dependency. So this can show up as someone who is constantly venting and dumping their problems and their emotions and their feelings on their partner and expecting their partner to fix it. Now, of course, it is natural to rely on your partner, particularly when you're going through a tough time, but not when it comes at the expense of your partner's needs, of your partner's emotional well-being, and when it exhausts your partner. So on a day-to-day level, that might look like someone who is constantly messaging their partner you know the problems of the day and and expecting their partner to respond straight away, and this can be really exhausting for the other person. Now my tip to cope with this particular coping strategy is to try and look for alternative sources of support, for example, journaling, finding a therapist, chatting with friends rather than solely relying on just one person your partner.
Speaker 1:Next is defensive protest. Now, defensive protest in the context of high attachment anxiety in a relationship is when someone acts out in the relationship, and essentially they act out to get attention or to receive love and care. So a really good example of this type of strategy is when someone repeatedly threatens a breakup, because what that does is that it causes a lot of distress for the other person, and so that means the other person moves much closer to them, and then you have the whole makeup scenario, and this helps a person feel more reassured that the person actually loves them. You may also intentionally ignore your partner's texts, and this has the effect of making your partner concerned because you're not responding. Or you may intentionally flirt with other people in front of your partner. Flirt with other people in front of your partner. Now, all of these strategies are intended to get the person's attention and bring the person closer to you, basically so that you feel more secure in the relationship. My partner really does love me because they got really angry when I flirted with that person. Or now I know they really want to be with me because when I said I was breaking up with them, they got really, really upset. Now, if this is resonating with you, try direct communication instead. So express your anxiety openly with your partner. You might say something like you're going away at the weekend and I'm feeling really insecure about it. Can we book a call in or can we make sure that we speak over the weekend? So that direct communication is really important because it helps foster trust and is a much healthier way of getting the support that you need and getting that sense of security.
Speaker 1:Last up is ambivalent splitting. So ambivalent splitting is seeing your partner and your relationship in extreme black and white or all or nothing terms. You may idealize your partner one day, but then the next day, when they didn't respond to your text message, the relationship is over in your mind. So the thing with ambivalent splitting is that you, you exist in these extreme terms, so they're either wonderful or they are not, and that's a really difficult way to experience a relationship, not just for you, but for your partner as well.
Speaker 1:So my tip is this the key thing is to try and be aware that you are thinking in those black and white terms, and once you are aware that you're doing it, you are much more better positioned to step back and try and see the middle ground a bit more. So you might say something like okay, my mind is telling me that it's this or this, but what is the middle ground in this particular scenario? What's a more helpful way of thinking about this and literally ask yourself that question? So I've taken you through all of the different types of defense mechanisms or coping strategies that can occur if you experience high attachment anxiety. The thing to try and remember with this is that all of these strategies have come from a place where you have experienced a really difficult attachment relationship with a caregiver. So it's important to not step into a very blaming state of mind towards yourself. Try and come at this with self-compassion and try and understand the behaviours that you're getting into within the context of your relationship. And, as I've said before. The key thing is knowing that you're doing it is being aware of the unhelpful patterns of behavior that might be harming your relationship with your partner.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Hello Therapy. We'd love for you to join our growing community over on Substack. You can sign up for free or become a paid subscriber for access to exclusive perks like never before seen video interviews and downloadable guides designed to support your mental health. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe so you never miss a new release, and if you got value from this episode, it would mean the world if you left a five star review. As always, check the show notes for my full disclaimer. Thanks again for listening.