5 Ways to Support an Anxiously Attached Partner
In this post, I’m going to be sharing 5 ways that you can support your anxiously attached partner to feel more loved, safe & secure. This blog post is based on an episode from my podcast, On Attachment. To subscribe, click here.
1. Prioritise openness and transparency
The first tip in supporting your anxiously attached partner is to prioritise openness and transparency wherever possible. Have you ever noticed that your anxious partner tends to overshare and over-explain? That’s because they love details and information.
For the anxiously attached person, uncertainty is a big trigger. That means that as soon as there's any vagueness, uncertainty, or doubt, the anxious person will typically fill in the blanks with a really catastrophic interpretation, or the worst case scenario. Information is the antidote to that.
Now, as the partner to an anxiously attached person, that's not your responsibility — it’s not your job to caretake or to ensure that their anxiety is not exacerbated. But with that said, you can really profoundly contribute to their experience of safety by offering up more information and disclosure than you otherwise might (of course, while still respecting your privacy).
For example, if you’re heading out for the night to catch up with some friends, your partner will very much appreciate knowing which friends are going, and where you’re headed. Try not to perceive this as meaning you’re doing something wrong or that they’re trying to control you (hello avoidants, I see you!) — just understand that the more detail they have, the more comfortable they’ll be (and in turn, the less likely it is that they’ll feel the need to control or intrude).
So if you want to support your anxiously attached partner, prioritise openness and honesty, and definitely steer clear of anything that might come across as secretive (ie, don’t tilt your phone screen away when they’re sitting next to you — they will start to freak out, guaranteed).
2. Offer reassurance proactively
The next tip that I want to offer you is to give regular (and ideally, gratuitous) reassurance to your partner.
What I often see is that reassurance is only given after the anxiously attached partner has been triggered into insecurity. In other words, there’ll be some sort of fear bubbling away under the surface, which prompts the anxiously attached partner to launch into their protest behaviours (e.g. getting critical and nitpicky, or becoming really melodramatic and sulky in the hope that you’ll ask what’s wrong). They might say something like, “You don’t care about me, you never ask me how I am, if you really loved me you would…” — which you might respond to by giving them the reassurance that you do love and care about them.
Now, let’s just be clear that these behaviours of the anxiously attached person are not ideal and we don’t want to be enabling or encouraging this kind of communication (to read more about anxious attachment, conflict and communication, click here).
But ultimately, this article is about how you can best support your partner to feel more secure — and the fact is, reassurance in response to insecurity doesn’t quite land the same way as if you’d told them how much you loved and appreciated them without being prompted.
3. Create space for them to voice their needs
The next tip is to create space for your partner to voice their needs. It’s important to understand that it is really challenging for anxiously attached people to ask for what they need directly. And so it can be really helpful for you to open up that conversation and ask them what they need, how you can support them, and how they are going (ideally at a deeper level than a run-of-the-mill check-in).
For anxiously attached people, there is a tendency to chronically self-sacrifice and put themselves last. This creates a situation where many anxiously attached people don’t even really know what their needs are, and certainly don’t know how to go about getting those needs met in a way that feels comfortable.
By contrast, if you’re a secure or more avoidant-leaning person and you want or need something, you’d probably feel reasonably comfortable with voicing that need and then taking the requisite steps to get that need met. You wouldn’t have a lot of fear attached to that experience, nor would you worry about the ramifications or what someone is going to think or feel about you as a result.
For an anxious person, it doesn't quite work like that. They are so afraid of putting themselves first because they've got a learned story that the way to be loved by someone is to do things for them, to attend to their needs, to care for them, to give relentlessly. They've learned that that's how they make themselves useful and worthy in a relationship. From that starting point, it can be really hard for them to prioritise themselves, to take up space, to use their voice, or to be proactive in asking for what they need.
So, again, while that's not your responsibility to solve that for them, it can really help to create more safety for them if you proactively show that you care about their needs by opening up the dialogue. Giving them the space and opportunity to open up will be so appreciated and will ultimately make it easier for them going forward to speak up when something is on their mind, because they’ll trust that you care and want to hear it.
4. If you need space, tell them when you’re coming back
This next one is mostly directed to avoidant partners: if you need space, particularly during times of tension or conflict, please be sure to put boundaries around when you're coming back.
If you say to your anxious partner, “Look, I just need some space”, and that's the end of the sentence and you don't give them any indication of when you're coming back, that is going to be intensely distressing for them. No matter how innocuous it seems to you, no matter how obvious you think it is that you will come back and everything is fine — I promise you, your partner is going to be really, really anxious about it.
It's so important to understand that a fear of abandonment is at the heart of anxiously attached people's programming around relationships. They have this deep fear that they're going to be left and they don't know how to navigate that fear other than to hold on for dear life. To cling, to grip, to try and control their way to connection.
And so if you are feeling the need for space or time to yourself, whether that's in conflict or otherwise, it is so essential that you make it clear (a) that everything is okay, (b) that you are coming back and (c) when you are coming back. For example, rather than saying “I just need some space” and leaving, you could say “Hey, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and think I could really use some time to myself. I don’t want you to worry though, everything’s fine and I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Love you.” These two examples are worlds apart in terms of the response you’ll get from your anxiously attached partner.
Putting boundaries around your need for space is the ultimate win-win: you get your space, and they get their reassurance that there will be a reunion on the other side of that space.
5. Learn to speak their love languages
If you're in relationship with an anxious person, I really encourage you to speak and learn their love languages. For anxiously attached people, this is almost always a combination of words of affirmation, physical touch and acts of service.
Of course there’s huge individual variation, but I tend to find that anxiously attached people show their love primarily through acts of service but particularly appreciate receiving love via words of affirmation and physical touch.
Giving compliments, telling them that you love them (and why), telling them how attracted you are to them, how much you appreciate them and why — all of these things are so meaningful to an anxiously attached person, and will really contribute very profoundly to their sense of safety.
In terms of physical touch, anxiously attached people are very affectionate. They tend to really value not only sexual intimacy (although that’s usually true), but also feeling connected through holding hands, eye contact, cuddling, kissing and so on. You can really help your partner to feel very loved by initiating more physical touch and affection in your relationship.
If you enjoyed this blog post, please spread the word and share on socials or with someone you think might need it.