20 Traits of the Anxious Attachment Style
In this post, I’m sharing 20 (perhaps lesser-known) traits of the anxious attachment style. As always, know that if you relate to these, there’s nothing wrong with you — you’re just doing your best to create safety for yourself, the only way you know how. And rest assured, having worked with thousands of others just like you, I promise there’s a light at the end of the tunnel!
Your sense of worth & wellbeing is tethered to the status of your relationship.
For anxiously attached people, it’s hard to separate how we feel about life & ourselves from how we’re feeling about our relationship. If things are good on the relationship front, we’re good - but the moment things start to feel bad, everything falls to pieces.
You struggle with separation anxiety and catastrophise if you can’t reach your partner.
Physical proximity and connection with your partner is very reassuring for anxious attachers — the flipside being that physical distance or separation can be very challenging. Add to this being unable to reach your partner, and there’s a good chance you find yourself immediately catastrophising that something is very wrong.
You struggle to believe that your partner really loves & values you.
Anxiously attached people tend to harbour low self-worth, and so can really struggle to feel an intrinsic sense of value outside of what they can do for someone else.
You feel easily threatened and compare yourself to others.
Related to the previous point, because anxiously attached people don’t see their own value, they’re also very prone to jealousy, feeling threatened by outsiders to the relationship (think exes, colleagues, friends), and will often obsess over comparing themselves to those perceived threats.
You have a hard time with needs & boundaries.
Anxiously attached people tend to struggle with needs and boundaries at every step of the way: (1) knowing what their needs and boundaries are or should be, (2) voicing those needs and boundaries to a partner, and (3) following through on advocating for those needs and boundaries on an ongoing basis or in the face of pushback.
You have a tendency to overstay in relationships that aren’t working.
Anxiously attached people have a really hard time with endings, and no where is that more apparent than when facing the prospect of walking away from a relationship with someone they’re attached to — no matter how dysfunctional or unhealthy the relationship is.
You have a saviour complex & are drawn to people who need “fixing”.
Many anxiously attached people derive a sense of worth and value from being able to help, fix or save someone, and so can often find themselves dating someone with unresolved issues who they think they can “redeem” with their love.
You don’t really know who you are outside of a relationship.
Anxiously attached people tend to derive their identity primarily from their relationship and their role as a partner, and will often struggle to know who they are outside of a relationship.
You tend towards overgiving & excessive self-sacrifice.
Most anxious attachers are givers, and will bend over backwards to try and please their partners and take care of their needs. This is often coming from a desire (consciously or not) to make ourselves more valuable or even indispensable, so that our partners won’t leave us.
You require a lot of reassurance from your partner (but struggle to believe it).
Anxiously attached people can try to manage their fears and insecurities by seeking ongoing reassurance from their partner — that everything’s okay, that they love them, that they’re not going anywhere. Trouble is, it’s often the case that no amount of reassurance is ever really enough to truly alleviate those worries.
You have an incredibly hard time with break-ups (& other endings).
No matter how much you might know that a relationship needed to end, going through the process of emotional disentanglement from someone you love is particularly excruciating when you have anxious attachment patterns.
You can’t help but be consumed by the perceived problems in your relationship.
For anxiously attached people, when something’s “wrong” with the relationship, it feels all-consuming and it’s likely all you can think and talk about.
You yearn for support but struggle with receiving it.
You may resent being the “giver’ and complain about imbalances in your relationship, but the truth is, you’re much more comfortable giving than receiving and can struggle with actually accepting and feeling worthy of the support you so deeply crave.
You become infatuated and attached to new people very quickly.
In early dating, you find yourself going from 0-100 at lightning speed, quickly becoming attached to someone before you really know them. Note, this can also apply to crushes while in a relationship.
You struggle with trust and feel threatened by your partner’s privacy.
Anxiously attached people love certainty, and so typically struggle with the element of the unknown involved in trusting someone. They also struggle to distinguish between healthy privacy and unhealthy secrecy, and tend to perceive a partner’s need for privacy as threatening and worrisome.
You are hyper-attuned to subtle changes in your partner’s mood or energy.
Your heightened attunement to others’ emotional states is both a blessing & a curse — while it allows you to empathically connect and understand people, it also makes you prone to hypervigilant monitoring of people’s emotional states and misinterpretation of subtle shifts as signs that something is very wrong.
You fear your partner leaving you for someone “better”.
As touched on above, jealousy and feeling threatened by outsiders is a big struggle for anxiously attached people, and many will have a lingering fear that given the chance, their partner will leave them for someone better.
You feel rejected if your partner devotes time to other relationships or areas of life.
Anxiously attached people will happily devote the vast majority of their time and energy to their partner and their relationship, and can’t understand why their partner wouldn’t want to do the same. As such, it’s easy for anxious attachers to feel hurt or rejected if their partner wants to do things separately or prioritises other aspects of life (like friendships, work or hobbies) that don’t involve them.
You find healthy, consistent, & available would-be partners “boring”.
While you might claim to want a healthy, stable relationship, you often find yourself more attracted to people with whom you feel intense chemistry and whose behaviour towards you is somewhat inconsistent and keeps you guessing on where you stand. Healthy, available and consistent partners might feel underwhelming or even boring to you.
You believe that changing yourself will make your partner love you more.
Anxiously attached people will often fall into the trap of convincing themselves that if they could be a little more of this or a little less of that, then their partner will show up for them in the way they long for. This can lead you down a rabbit hole of endless shapeshifting and self-improvement, all in the hopes of making yourself feel more worthy and deserving of love.
If you relate to these, I would love to see you inside my signature program, Healing Anxious Attachment. Over 1500+ students have taken the course with incredible feedback and results, and I’d love for you to experience the magic!