Why Anxiously Attached People Struggle with Break-Ups

If you’re someone with anxious attachment patterns, you probably don’t need me to tell you that break-ups are rough. More than any other attachment style, anxiously attached people will typically find themselves spinning out of control in the wake of a relationship ending, feeling lost, lonely and desperate to reconnect. In this article, I’m going to share some context as to why those with an anxious attachment style have such a hard time with break-ups, and how you can best support yourself to move through this period with grace, care and self-trust.

1. The Primacy of Connection

For folks with anxious attachment patterns, connection equals safety. We value connection above all else, and will work tirelessly to secure, maintain and protect the connection with our romantic partner.

In other words, “if we’re okay, I’m okay.”

While this isn’t a problem per se, it can become so when the anxiously attached person becomes over-reliant on romantic connection as their sole source of meaning, safety and comfort, as often happens.

This both stems from and reinforces the tendency in most anxiously attached folks to have an underdeveloped sense of self and capacity to self-soothe. When the other person becomes the safety blanket and the power source, the anxiously attached person makes themselves very vulnerable to distress and anxiety if ever the connection is threatened.

While this is no-doubt challenging for those in a relationship, you can imagine how a break-up acts as a multiplier on this baseline tendency. After all, if the anxious attachment motto is “if we’re okay, I’m okay”, the other side of that coin is “if we’re not okay, I’m not okay”. This is true even if the relationship was unhealthy or dysfunctional, as the loss of connection will often still be intensely disorienting and devastating.

Whatever problems existed in the relationship suddenly pale by comparison to the overwhelming void created by the break-up, and the anxiously attached person will feel an intense urge to reconnect and alleviate their pain and fear.

In short, a break-up pulls the rug out from under the anxiously attached person and leaves them treading water, not ever having taken the time to learn how to swim on their own.

2. Break-ups Trigger the Abandonment Wound

The abandonment wound is at the heart of anxious attachment — the fear that we are unworthy, that no one will ever love us as much as we love them, that nothing we do is enough to be fully chosen by someone, and that rejection, abandonment and loss are always lurking around the corner.

Needless to say, a break-up can bring these wounds to the surface in profound ways, confirming all of those painful stories that already plagued us and drove our insecurities in the relationship. In this way, we can experience a break-up as an affirmation of all our worst fears, and spiral into stories that prolong our suffering.

This wound also tends to feed a lot of shame and self-blame, wherein the anxiously attached person attributes the break-up to all the mistakes they made, all the things they did wrong, all the ways that they pushed someone away — generally overlooking the ways in which the other person contributed to unmet needs, unhealthy dynamics and the eventual breakdown of the relationship.

3. Anxious Attachment & the Saviour Complex

Many people with an anxious attachment style have some form of saviour complex — meaning, a (subconscious) drive to pursue people who they feel they can help, fix or save. This is what drives many of us to fixate on someone’s “potential” to extreme degrees, while completely ignoring the reality of who they are in the present.

How does this relate to break-ups? Well, many anxious folks will make it their mission to change their partner and transform the relationship into something fundamentally different. The internal script goes something like “If I can just get them to change, then everything will be perfect and we’ll be happy.” And the subconscious tail-end of that sentence is “And I’ll finally feel worthy.”

Against this backdrop — where the anxiously attached person is pouring ever-more energy into their relationship project — a break-up becomes a personal failure of extreme proportions. Not being able to achieve the change or transformation in a partner that we wanted and feeling like if we’d been different in some way (more attractive, smarter, more confident, less needy, more relaxed) then they would’ve made the changes we wanted them to, turns the end of the relationship into a comment on our inadequacy and not-enoughness.

While this can be really painful (trust me, been there), it’s important to recognise how much of our suffering stems from trying to control something that was never ours to take on as our responsibility (ie, someone else’s willingness and capacity to be in relationship with us in the way we want and need).

4. Break-ups Involve Uncertainty (Which Anxious Attachers HATE)

One of the hardest things about break-ups for the anxiously attached person is that they inevitably propel us into a realm of uncertainty. The relationship — no matter how dysfunctional or fractured — was “the devil we knew”. And transitioning from togetherness to separateness when a relationship ends involves a process of venturing into the unknown and being with the discomfort of uncertainty.

While this is part of what makes break-ups hard for everyone, anxiety loves control (or at least, the illusion of it) and fights desperately against uncertainty. We can see this so clearly in the ways that anxiously attached people tend to act post-break-up — ruminating, obsessing, re-reading old text messages, stalking social media — all of these behaviours are ways to gather information and try to make sense of the situation so that we can create some semblance of control for ourselves.

For anxiously attached people, a break-up and the transitional season that follows will confront us with the need to let go of our attachment to control and embrace the inevitable unknowns.

5. Self-Abandonment and Loss of Identity in Partnership

The final piece on why anxiously attached people struggle so much in partnership is that they have a tendency to self-abandon while in relationship, leading to a loss of connection with themselves. Particularly as a relationship becomes more strained, anxious folks will dial up the intensity in terms of how much time, energy and attention they devote to their relationship — often neglecting other areas of life in the process.

What this means is that once the relationship ends, anxiously attached folks can be hit with a double whammy: they’ve lost their partner, and then look around at the rest of their life only to realise that there’s not a whole lot going on because of how laser-focused they became on their relationship.

While this might sound dire, it’s actually why break-ups are a blessing in disguise for anxiously attached folks — because they invite us back into ourselves and present us with an opportunity to rebuild our foundations of selfhood from the ground up. Nevertheless, the initial shock of detaching from someone only to realise that you don’t know who you are without them can bring up a huge amount of grief.

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And if you’re going through a break-up, take a look at my best-selling course Higher Love. You can use the code PHOENIX to save US$150!