Attachment anxiety

A hallmark of attachment anxiety is excessive fear and worry about attachment figure’s availability and responsiveness. Unsurprisingly, attachment anxiety is closely linked to increased interpersonal sensitivity, or the exaggerated awareness and vigilance of the actions of others. If a significant other (parent, romantic partner) fails to respond to their bids for connection, highly anxious individuals are prone to interpret that as proof of their own lack of value or worthiness. Over time, this strengthens their negative view of self.

A person with a negative self-view (known as the internal working model of self in attachment theory) responds to distress by sinking into hopelessness and panic. Anxiously attached people with negative views of self tend to have low self-worth, and struggle with self-defeating attributions and an image of themselves as weak and helpless. This further limits their capacity for self-soothing and compassionate self-responding.

Instead, people with high attachment anxiety rely on others to provide them with feedback needed to regulate distress and regain a sense of self-worth. Therefore, anxiously attached partners tend to overly rely on emotional co-regulation, and have a hard time with self-regulation when distressed. However, their failed attempts to motivate or coerce significant others into providing them with care can create a sense of frustration and doubt in anxiously attached individuals. They can become hypersensitive to even the smallest perceived signs of rejection and react to it with anger and blame. Their partner, on the other hand, may react to that with defensiveness or push back, which further reinforces the anxious person’s fear of rejection. This is often how negative cycles in distressed relationships form and persist.

What happens if the partner is on the polar opposite dimension of insecure attachment? More on attachment avoidance in the next post.