How Anxious Attachment Shows Up in Real Relationships - 30

Attachment styles aren’t personality flaws — they’re adaptive responses shaped by early experiences, relationships, and nervous system learning.

In this episode, we explore anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment in a grounded, relatable way, with special attention to how these patterns often show up in women. You’ll learn why attachment is about emotional safety, not weakness, and how cultural conditioning reinforces self-abandonment and over-functioning in relationships.

The episode includes a guided reflection and journaling prompts to help you identify your own attachment tendencies with compassion and clarity.

This episode also introduces the Love & Attachment Detox, a 30-day premium podcast journey featuring daily shadow work, journaling, and somatic practices designed to support secure connection — with yourself and others.

Transcript

Autumn G Noble (00:00)

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. This month because it's February, the month of Valentine's Day, we are going through a bit of a love and relationships detox theme. In the premium podcast content, I'm going through a 30 day shadow work series, love detox. And I have really enjoyed going through it. It's been really powerful for me in understanding things that have made me uncomfortable in past relationships.

and why certain types of conversational topics are just really hard for me and kind of where that came from. So really powerful work. I know that I've told you about the premium podcast before it's $5 a month. It's a tremendous value and I'm migrating all of my private one-on-one coaching tools and modules there. So if you've ever considered life or career coaching and you just wanna know a little bit more about it, but you don't wanna spend a ton of money, this is the easiest way to go about it.

Okay, that's my spiel. We're gonna go ahead and dive into the first episode in this topic. And today we're talking about attachment styles with respect to love and relationships. And I gotta be honest, working through this topic and kind of researching it has just brought up a lot for me. So we're gonna do a little bit of oversharing today. So buckle up.

To set the stage a little bit, I don't want to get all clinical or diagnosis or check the box and this is your attachment style. I'm not a clinical psychologist or a therapist. I just know enough to be dangerous and I know what I see in the women and professionals that I coach and I know what I experienced in my own experience with toxic and abusive relationships. So today I just want to talk about attachment styles very generally and break it down in a way that I think is really accessible.

So I wanna talk about our attachment styles as something that we learned, something that was adaptive, and truly something that your nervous system developed to keep you connected and feeling safe. So if you have ever thought, why do I always act like this in relationships?

Why do I feel calm one minute and totally activated the next? If you can relate to that, this episode is not about fixing you. It's about helping you understand why those things happen.

And bonus at the end of this episode, I'm going to include some guided prompts and some journaling explorations to help you better understand how your attachment style shows up not only in your body, but in your relationships. And I want you to walk away with a small way to work with it and not against it.

So let's talk a little bit about attachment in general and specifically attachment as it relates to women. Attachment doesn't develop in a vacuum. Women especially are taught at a very young age that connection is currency. Humans biologically are taught that being part of a community means

Safety, you can't be the one rogue person out there on the savanna trying to survive. We need Community to feel safe. So it is very biological but studies on women specifically show that we are taught and sort of Cultured in a way that values connection over a lot of other things that might be healthier for us in fact research in developmental psychology and sociology shows us that

Young girls are often rewarded for being emotionally attuned, agreeable, accommodating, and subtly discouraged from being too much or bitchy or being too sassy or asking for what they want. All of those things were taught to us at a young age that it's not how little girls are supposed to be. not saying that's the case for everyone. I know I'm really painting with a broad brush.

But there is study to show that girls are taught this at a much younger age than our male counterparts. So there is support for this. It's not true in every case. So stop yelling at me through your email that you're drafting. We're gonna get there.

Not only do women and humans in general develop attachment styles in childhood, we start to refine them through adulthood, through experiences in the workplace, friendships, romantic relationships, and caretaking roles. Which means that when we talk about attachment styles in women, we're talking about nervous systems that learned staying connected matters, sometimes more than staying true to yourself.

Part of the reason this topic really resonated with me is that it helped me kind of unpack the way that I showed up in previous abusive relationships and why I kind of changed and was showing up the way that I did. And so I wanted to kind of explore how alcoholism or substance abuse can affect our attachment styles. And what I found was that alcoholic or substance affected relationships

they're often emotionally unpredictable. And that inconsistency is the single biggest driver of anxious attachment. And I felt that so deeply because when we talk about anxious attachment, I feel like I go right back to that young woman in this very abusive and toxic relationship and how I was showing up in order to stay safe. Because in those environments,

love and safety, they're intermittent. They're not absent, but they come and go without any indication or sign or predictability whatsoever. And it creates a tremendous amount of discomfort. In that space, your nervous system learns that connection can disappear at any moment. And I need to stay alert and vigilant to any change in the winds. That hypervigilance is really the foundation of anxious

attachment and that really kind of sums up that phase in my life. We'll talk more about that as we get there. But from a behavioral psychology standpoint, intermittent reinforcement, like unpredictable rewards, create the strongest attachment bonds. So if you think about alcoholic or substance abuse driven relationships,

You don't really know which version of the person you're gonna get. Every day you wake up and you don't know if what happened yesterday is gonna be acknowledged at all, or it's gonna pretend like it didn't happen, or you're gonna feel the same way, or are we just gonna move forward like everything's fine. So you start to learn to scan moods and tone and timing. And even as I'm saying this, it makes me so physically uncomfortable, but I just remember.

looking at my partner and trying just to watch the way he was moving, the way he was looking at me, the set in his jaw to get a sense of like, I in trouble today? Or like, we were just moving forward, like everything is fine. And for years after leaving that relationship, I really thought of myself as being weak and kind of like catering to his every whim and need and kind of walking on eggshells. But this doesn't mean that you're weak. It means that you start to adapt.

to instability to survive. And that was really the primary driver for me. just kept a common thought for me was I don't want to get in trouble. Am I in trouble? I don't want to get in trouble. It was constant. And so you learn to protect yourself. It's an adaptive strategy, not a character flaw. And I really had to kind of hear that in my bones because for the longest time, I judged that version of myself as

being weak for showing up the way that I did. And no, I was just trying to fucking survive. And thankfully I did, and here we are. But okay, too much of that. Why does this show up so strongly in women? Research and clinical observation both show that women are more likely to internalize relationship instability, respond with caretaking rather than distancing.

be socially rewarded for emotional labor. So instead of pulling away, a lot of us in those situations learn that, well, if I'm attentive enough, loving enough, flexible enough, everything's gonna stabilize and we're gonna get back to good and all this chaos is gonna be gone and go away. And that belief pattern is learned, it's not inherent. And even if you're not in a substance abuse related relationship,

you know, I think a lot of us can relate to this idea of internalizing relationship instability, that if things are chaotic and crazy, it must be something that we did or something that we're not doing right. And in sight of that instability and chaos, we respond with trying to like fix everything and care, take even more and like get in there even closer so you can't hit me, you know, or whatever. That sounds scarier than I intended it. But the point is,

when someone's being an aggressor towards you, we just come in close and try and love and care take to solve the problem. And I think a lot of us operate that way without realizing why we do that, where it comes from and how unhealthy it is. Because in reality, in a healthy relationship, we should be pulling away and thinking, this is not normal, this is not healthy. But instead of cultural things and experiential things, we just start to learn that well, if I...

If I'm more attentive, if I love more, if I'm flexible more, if I apologize more, the chaos will end. And again, it's a survival mechanism.

So fast forward years later, I got a front row seat to what anxious attachment starts to look like in life, post abuse and post addiction relationships. So for me, I started to really experience this kind of like fear of abandonment, even in like really stable relationships, kind of over-functioning emotionally. And I had a lot of difficulty trusting consistency.

And I kind of expected that real love, real relationships included some level of anxiety and high swings and high lows and high highs, and that love had to be really intense to be true intimacy. And in reality, I was just sort of addicted to the highs and the lows and the chaos of those relationships. And furthermore, moving forward in relationships, I recognize how like sensitive I was to any type of a...

change in tone or response time or availability. And I see it in women all the time, women that I know and women that I love. And I see them showing up in this way. And I can literally think, gosh, you know, like there's a deep hurt there. Like these are survival mechanisms that are actually pushing them away from the relationships that they want. And so we all have these in us in some sort of a way, but I'm hopeful that if you're listening to this, you know that you're here for a reason and it's invitation to

Do that deeper work. Spend the $5 and listen to the love and relationship detox this month. We'd have a whole week where we talk about attachment styles and kind of journaling through it and just see what comes up for you. And maybe it'll be a realization like, hey, I need some more help with this. And maybe it is going to see a licensed mental health care professional or maybe it's getting a coach or whatever. But I think you're here for a reason and I think we all have a lot to learn about our attachment styles.

As I moved forward out of that relationship and started recognizing my own sort of dis-ease with how a healthy and normal relationship worked, I started to do my own work to move forward and kind of heal that part of myself because I started to see that during that time in that relationship, which is nearly a decade of my life, my nervous system really adapted and it started to learn that connections

were fragile and the people around me could switch on a dime. And it caught me off guard to realize how guarded I was and how much damage had been done with my relationship with myself. And so in order to move forward and pass that, we have to start learning to restore our internal safety. And so for me, that meant being in a relationship and really experiencing that panic of

my God, why did they say it that way? Why has it taken so long for them to respond? They don't really like me. They're going to leave me. He's going to snap on me. my gosh, just one thing happened. He's going to lose his mind and get out, you know, realizing that being in a relationship meant living with all of that fear and letting it come up and seeing that nothing was going to happen and really forcing myself to experience it, observe it, observe those thoughts and learn I'm in a healthy.

place and I'm safe and what I experienced wasn't healthy and I can teach myself to let those thoughts, emotions and feelings come up and be okay. And over time they get softer and softer and less persuasive because I find that own safety internally. And as part of that you start to learn what consistency feels like. And I see this a lot in women leaving abusive or substance driven relationships.

we do get addicted to the highs and the lows. And we really do think that a meaningful and right relationship means extreme highs and extreme lows. And if that's not happening, this isn't it. This is not the one for me. It's not my soulmate. And the reality is that healthy relationships don't have extreme highs and extreme lows, right? Think about your friendships. Think about the people in your life that you love. If they're healthy,

there probably aren't a whole lot of peaks and valleys. It's probably sort of ho-hum most of the time with their own challenges and high points here and there. And so I had to really learn that I was kind of addicted to the drama and the chaos. And I got some sort of a high of that reconciliation after a massive, massive crazy fight. There was something in that that was very addictive and I had to really own.

how unhealthy that was to want that in a relationship, to expect that in a relationship, or to equate that with meaningful relationships. And so I had to learn in my body what consistency in a relationship and stability in a relationship felt like. So as you kind of come full circle on that, you start to recognize and separate present relationships from past instabilities. In fact, I remember at one point,

in the relationship that I'm in now, and we've been together for over a decade, but there was one point where something was said or something happened and I could feel myself responding in the same way that I did when I was in that abusive relationship. And I immediately went back to my therapist because I recognized that even though I've made so much progress, there were parts of me that was still blurring the lines.

in my reactions and how I was showing up, I was blurring the lines between the person I was with and this sort of ghost from the past and how they made me feel and the mental space they put me into. And so it is an ongoing process, especially when it's anxious attachment driven by some type of abuse or chemical dependency. So if you grew up around addiction or were in a relationship touched by alcoholism or addiction, you're

Anxious attachment is probably not random. It really is your body just remembering inconsistency and trying to prevent it from happening again. So listen, I've been kind of tap dancing around it and maybe I should have started there ⁓ with explaining what actually is anxious attachment, but we're ending here. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the different types of attachment styles. I know signs of them, how

how we can identify them and understand them. So starting with anxious attachment, what do I mean when I say that? Anxious attachment, it usually looks like really deep caring, but it's also like this hypervigilance where you notice little shifts in every person around you. My husband and I travel to, we travel to Ireland, every couple years we try to go and one time we were at a bar and...

and my husband had to run down a couple bars to find an ATM. So he kind of left me alone guarding our drinks and holding our spot. And so these men come over and we're talking and my husband comes back in. I'm like, he's gonna, I can't wait to see his face when he comes in. get these two guys just hanging out with me. And one of the guys said to my husband, you're shifty. And he meant it in this way. He meant it as in you are constantly scanning the surroundings.

the doorways, the people, the vibe. And for him, it comes a lot more from his work. He's a firefighter and a paramedic, so he's very attuned to our surroundings at all times. But he called him shifty. And I think of that word when I think about anxious attachment. It's not like shady, but it's sort of like you're just constantly vigilant and paying attention and noticing everything around you. And when someone feels anxious attachment, they feel closeness.

very intensely, again, likely because they really like that stream high and extreme low. They tend to overthink interactions. And culturally, women with anxious attachment are often praised for being emotionally intelligent and thoughtful, again, because we're shifty, we're always looking around, kind of gauging tone, just keeping a thumb and a pulse on everything around us. But truthfully, underneath that quote unquote emotional intelligence and thoughtfulness,

underneath that awareness is nervous system activation, a fear of problems or chaos or disconnection. Not because you're a needy person, but because closeness often felt very unpredictable and dangerous. And so you had to always be vigilant and paying attention to keep yourself safe. The next attachment pattern or type is avoidant attachment.

And avoidant attachment in women often hides behind competence. And I see this a lot in the professional women and lawyers that I coach. In this attachment style, you truly value independence. You don't want to rely a whole lot on anyone around you. You're often the one kind of holding everything together around you.

And unfortunately, in a culture that celebrates strong and capable women, this can look like women empowerment, right? And boss lady energy. But emotionally, it can actually be just protection. And this idea that I learned it was not safe to need anything. And I often see this in the women that I work with that were like the oldest child or kind of the middle child.

they were the ones that are expected to kind of take care of everyone else and not want anything for themselves. Or perhaps if you were maybe the only girl in the family, you were kind of looked to to kind of make sure everything was running smoothly around the home or with your siblings. And so you start to learn that you have to relegate your own needs for the greater good of everyone else. And so you could learn this like hyper independence. And you learn that

It's not okay to need things from other people. You're probably not gonna get it. Or maybe there's some disappointment there in your past that kind of created this. But you learn that it's safer just to be a silo and to kind of be on an island caring for yourself. This in professional women often leads to not asking for help when you need it. Not reaching out when you're not okay. I gave a seminar yesterday actually and I told the professionals, look.

I have met with hundreds and hundreds of professionals all over the world and 99.9 % of them are not okay. But on the outside, they look great. And I think a lot of that has to do with this sort of avoidant attachment that a lot of us were sort of taught that drives us to these hyper professional roles and jobs where we're really good at keeping it together.

and being alone and doing everything alone and not asking for help and support when inside, like we're just not okay. And we have a really hard time asking for help. I see it again and again and again. And it's so detrimental to professionals, mental health and job performance, quite frankly, because we create our own extreme highs of performance and extreme lows of crash and burnout.

The last one I want to talk about here is disorganized attachment. Disorganized attachment can feel kind of confusing. ⁓ You crave closeness, but you're also really overwhelmed by it. So it's sort of that like hot and cold, like you want it, but you also kind of makes you really uncomfortable or overwhelms you. You can feel really drawn to intensity, but unsettled by stability.

And so it's sort of like hot and cold. you're in relationship with someone that seems really in it, and then the next day they pull away dramatically, they're likely in this bucket. This often comes from early childhood experiences where love was present, but it wasn't consistent. And so this could be individuals who had a parent that was sort of...

in and out of the home, maybe they left, maybe they come back, maybe they didn't see them very often, maybe the primary parent just wasn't around a whole lot. So they know what love is, but it just wasn't consistent at all. So they want it, but they're also fearing that it's gonna be pulled away and left behind to kind of pick up the pieces. In those types of experiences, your nervous system is learning that connection really isn't safe.

but neither is being alone, right? And so it's like this big swing between wanting and not wanting the connection. So whether or not you fit in cleanly to one of these buckets is neither here nor there, but I share this to maybe help you

kind of understand a little bit more about yourself and maybe how you're showing up in relationships and the pattern that you may have in relationships. But really what I want you to hear is that your attachment style, it's not who you are and it's not who you always have to be. It's just what your nervous system learned to do when it felt unsure or unsafe. And the beauty of our brains and neuroplasticity and our...

beautiful human bodies and nervous system is that we can learn new experiences of safety and rewire those neural pathways that previously made us freak out.

So I want to just pause here and offer a really simple reflection that you can do now or later or when you have time, perhaps in a journal. And you don't need to get it right. But what I want you to do is just take a moment to be really honest with yourself and consider a couple questions.

When I feel close to someone I care about, do I lean in and seek reassurance or do I pull away and go quiet? Or do I feel both the desire to lean in and pull away at the same time? And just take a moment to see what comes up and be really honest with yourself. There's no right or wrong answer, but the goal here is understanding.

clarity. 

Another question you might consider in your journal or when you have a moment of quiet time. When I feel uncertainty in a relationship, do I become hyper aware of the other person, their tone, everything they're doing, all of that? Do I become hyper aware? Or do I disconnect from my own feelings and kind of put on that mask of like, I'm okay, it's okay, everything's fine. Or do I vacillate between the two?

There is no correct answer. Again, we're just noticing patterns so that we can maybe access some compassion for those automated reactions and learn how to fix them moving forward.

As a takeaway from this episode, you might also just consider, you know, when I feel activated in relationships, what is my first instinct? What do I do when I'm starting to feel emotional in any kind of a relationship? Or maybe as I went through the attachment styles today, you had one that really resonated or hit home and maybe journal about how you see that in yourself. And lastly, you might kind of consider, like I've shared today,

Do you have an attachment pattern from your past that once helped you find safety and peace in a space of chaos? And for me, that was anxious attachment. And it really, think in a lot of ways, kind of saved my life maybe. And again, this isn't about blaming our family or our parents or anything. It's about really honoring kind of the beauty and the intelligence of our...

nervous system and how it showed up to protect us and keep us safe while honoring that maybe it's time to evolve past that.

If you enjoyed this content today and some of the journaling and reflections, this is exactly the type of work that we do in the Love and Attachment Detox 30 days during the month of February. And it's all available on my premium podcast for $5 a month. So every day for 30 days, we're gonna work with short guided journaling prompts, somatic practices and meditations to help you support healing those attachments.

and grounded reflections around safety, self-loyalty and receiving love. It's not about fixing yourself,

It's about teaching your nervous system that connection doesn't require self abandonment. If you're interested, you can access the full series, including last month's 30 day shadow work on identity shifts, which is pretty amazing for any of you struggling in your career or professional life. You can access all of those $5 a month. The link is in the show notes and you can cancel at any time. There's really no reason not to give it a whirl and just see what comes up for you.

In closing today, I just want to stress that understanding your attachment style, it's not about limiting yourself. It's about giving yourself more choice. And choice is really where healing always begins. But we can't make a choice if we don't know what our automatic patterning is already doing without choice.

All right, my friends, thank you so much for being here. In the next podcast episode, we're going to be talking about healing self abandonment. So we're going to stay on this topic of love and relationships detox. It's February. It's the time of year where we talk about love in either a positive or a negative way. And I'm just diving in headfirst. I hope to see all of you there.