Signs of Anxious Attachment Style: 5 Most Common Traits in Adults

Do you feel more emotionally invested in relationships than the people around you? Do you often feel on-edge about where you stand with someone else, or unsure whether they feel the same way about you as you do about them? If yes, then you may have an anxious attachment style. Anxious attachment styles can lead to difficulties in relationships and, as the name suggests, anxiety. Once you know why anxious attachment styles develop and how they can impact your relationships, you can start taking steps toward a learned secure attachment style and healthier partnerships; but first, you need to know how to spot an anxious attachment style.

What Does Anxious Attachment Style Look Like?

Your attachment style influences how you see and interact with others and how you feel about yourself. If you have an anxious attachment style, you might struggle with low self-esteem and turbulent relationships. We’ll take a closer look at the signs of an anxious attachment style, but first, it’s useful to understand how they come to be.

TAKE A LOOK AT THE ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT WORKBOOK

How Anxious Attachment Develops

Attachment systems develop when we’re infants, in response to the way our caregivers respond to our needs. There are three organized attachment styles: secure, anxious, and avoidant. If your caregiver generally responds to your needs appropriately and in good time, you learn that others can be relied upon and develop a secure attachment style – their responses don’t have to be perfect, just mostly good¹. However, if your caregiver doesn’t often respond appropriately and quickly, but they still do sometimes, you may develop an anxious attachment style. This is because, as an infant, working hard for your caregiver’s attention sometimes works. You learn that people can’t really be trusted to stick around, but that if you make a lot of noise about your emotional needs you stand a better chance of getting them met. These experiences form an internal working model, or a way of seeing the world, that says “people are unreliable and I have to work to be cared for” – and this pattern of attachment can continue into adult relationships.

Examples of Anxious Attachment in Adults

In adulthood, an anxious attachment style is also called an anxious-preoccupied attachment style. People who fall into this category typically score highly on measures of anxiety in relationships and low on avoidance – high anxiety and high avoidance together is a category of its own. Adults with anxious attachment styles tend to find it difficult to emotionally regulate and may be more impulsive than others, which can lead to a higher risk of symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety¹. People with anxious attachment styles also often have negative views of themselves, and this can lead them to look for reassurance from the people around them².

Anxious Attachments in Relationships

The negative impacts of anxious attachment styles can cause relationships to suffer, even though they stem from your desire to bring your partner closer. In relationships, people with an anxious attachment style may see their partner in a less forgiving light, question their motives, and keep a close eye out for signs of abandonment². These behaviors also interact with your partner’s attachment style – a partner with a secure attachment style may be able to meet their anxious partner’s needs and help them to develop a learned secure attachment, while partners who score highly on anxiety or avoidance can have a harder time responding to anxious behaviors. Learning the main signs of anxious attachment styles can help you to understand how they might be affecting your relationships. With this deeper awareness, you can learn how to counteract anxious attachment and move toward a more secure attachment style.

5 Main Signs of Anxious Attachment

The concept of attachment anxiety is well defined and thoroughly researched, and lots of tests have been developed to help us to measure it in adulthood³. There are a few different ways it can show up within yourself and your relationships – here are 5 of the most well known:

Low Confidence

Someone with an anxious attachment style might have low-self esteem because of the negative internal working model that develops when infant care is sporadic. It’s theorized that the experience of working hard for attention tells them that they are not inherently worthy of care from others, and studies have shown that people with high attachment anxiety tend to have lower self-esteem⁴.

Separation Anxiety

One of the hallmarks of attachment anxiety in both children and adults is anxiety when separated from the attachment figure. In relationships, this could look like feeling stressed when your partner is away, worrying when they don’t reply to messages quickly, or feeling on edge when you don’t know when you’ll see them again.

Fear of Abandonment

In the same vein, people with attachment anxiety have a strong fear of abandonment. Their internal working model says that attachment figures are unreliable and could withdraw at any time, so a great deal of their anxiety comes from the fear that their partner will leave.

Heightened Threat Vigilance

Since they’re on the lookout for things to go wrong, people with anxious attachment styles can be extra alert to potential signs of abandonment. Crucially, they aren’t always accurate – studies show that relationship anxiety tends to lead to an overestimation of your partner’s negative feelings, and sometimes a false belief that hurtful behavior is intentional and personal⁴.

Intense Emotional Expression

Infants with inconsistent care aren’t able to learn emotional regulation – instead, they learn to intensify their emotions until someone else comes to soothe them. When this continues in adulthood, people with attachment anxiety can be quick to anger and anxiety. They might feel that they need their partner to calm them down, but aren’t able to self-soothe before communicating their needs.

Discover If You Have an Anxious Attachment Style

If these signs sound familiar, you or your partner might have an anxious attachment style. There’s nothing wrong with an anxious attachment style and fulfilling relationships are entirely possible, but you might encounter difficulties related to attachment anxiety until you develop a more secure attachment style. This is possible with patience and time, but first, it’s important to have a deeper understanding of your attachment style as it is now. Take our attachment style test for a detailed analysis of your attachment anxiety and avoidance.

TAKE THE ATTACHMENT QUIZ

Conclusion

An anxious attachment style can cause repeated challenges, even outside of the context of relationships. Signs of anxious attachment styles like separation anxiety, intense emotional expression, and low-self esteem can sometimes cause people to act in ways that push their partners further away; because of this, many people do want to know how to become more secure. You may feel the same way, but remember that your attachment style is not something to fear – it kept you safe as an infant, and with introspection and positive action you can rewire your attachment system to become more secure as an adult. Is an anxious attachment style affecting your relationships? Find out more about attachment styles at our blog and take our Attachment Quiz.

References

1. Marganska A, Gallagher M, Miranda R. Adult attachment, emotion dysregulation, and symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety disorder. American journal of orthopsychiatry. 2013 Jan;83(1):131.
2. Campbell L, Marshall T. Anxious Attachment and Relationship Processes: An Interactionist Perspective. Journal of Personality. 2011 Dec;79(6).
3. Shaver PR, Mikulincer M. What do self-report attachment measures assess. Adult attachment: Theory, research, and clinical implications. 2004:17-54.
4. Bylsma WH, Cozzarelli C, Sumer N. Relation between adult attachment styles and global self-esteem. Basic and applied social psychology. 1997 Mar 1;19(1):1-6.