Emotional Hygiene: 5 Psychological Wounds of Insecure Attachment

#1. Rejection

Ah, rejection. The emotional injury that is essentially most unavoidable in life. Whether it’s a child not being picked for the school sports team, to an adult not getting the job they want, or being turned down on a dating app. Rejection is part and parcel of life. Regardless, this fact doesn’t mean that rejection hurts any less. In fact, scans have shown that rejection triggers the same areas of the brain as physical pain.

The reason why rejection stings our psyche so badly is because we are inherently social creatures.

The basics of Bowlby’s Attachment Theory explain it quite well, as it focuses on our need for connection with our primary caregiver in our formative years as a means of survival. So, even as adults, feeling socially rejected triggers a sharp psychological pain. However, for some of us, the pain of rejection hurts more than for others.

Insecure attachers come from a childhood where they perceived that their needs were repeatedly rejected by their caregivers.

Therefore, someone with an insecure attachment style typically creates strategies that prevent them from feeling further rejected in adulthood. It could be the boundaries that someone high on attachment avoidance puts in place to prevent rejection. Or it could be the often clingy behaviors in relationships that those high on attachment anxiety enact to avoid abandonment. Regardless, these strategies often become self-sabotaging actions, which increase the chances of feeling rejected.

In addition to actual physical pain, rejection can lead to aggressive outbursts and low self-esteem. It’s best to target the sting of rejection when we first feel it rather than leave it festering and creating further hurt.

#3. Low Self-Esteem

Our levels of self-esteem can mitigate the impact of negative life events in our day-to-day lives. Those of us with healthy self-esteem will still sometimes experience disappointment and knocks to our ego. Still, we would then be more likely to process the event healthily and move on with our lives without too much difficulty.

However, those of us with low self-esteem may be more vulnerable to the harfmful impact of negative events.

As Guy Winch put it,“Having low self-esteem is akin to having a weak immune system: It renders us more vulnerable to many of the psychological injuries we sustain in daily life.”

For this reason, people with low self-esteem typically have lower moods. They are often more pessimistic in their outlook and less motivated than those with healthy self-esteem.

Research has demonstrated that insecure attachment styles – especially the anxious and disorganized styles – link to outlooks on life that predispose those with them to lower levels of self-esteem. These lower levels of self-esteem directly relate to prolonged psychological stress, anxiety, and depression.

When attempting to administer emotional first aid for low self-esteem, consistency, time, and effort are essential. This is because our outlook on ourselves and how we fit into our world was fostered at such a young age. These patterns of thinking are thus well entrenched.

We may not be able to change our self-esteem overnight, but we can promote balanced, more stable attitudes towards ourselves over time.

#4. Loneliness

The experience of loneliness differs from person to person. Because loneliness has many possible causes, we don’t really know what exactly it is about certain experiences that creates feelings of isolation. In fact, many people can be physically close to others but still feel like they’re not connecting in a way that fulfills their social needs.

Inherently, we are social creatures, so we tend to exhibit strong negative emotional and physical reactions if we feel disconnected from others.

Seeing as insecure attachment styles can inhibit how we connect emotionally to others, insecurely attached people are likely more prone to feelings of intense loneliness.

For example, people high on attachment anxiety are prone to feelings of loneliness when actually involved in romantic relationships – and even more so if the relationship ends.

In contrast, avoidant attachers are highly independent, so they may not be as emotionally dependent on their partners. Yet, their avoidant behaviors can make it difficult to forge meaningful or long-lasting relationships. As a result, some avoidant attachers may feel disconnected from the social world.

Also, aside from the physical and emotional effects of loneliness, it has a further profound impact on how we view ourselves and other people. Feeling isolated leads us to view our current relationships negatively, and can also result in us becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meaning that we act in self-defeating ways which damage our relationships even further.

For these reasons, treating the emotional wounds that loneliness creates – as well as targeting its associated self-defeating behaviors – can reduce the negative effect of social isolation on our lives.

#5. Emotional Trauma

In more extreme cases, some insecure attachers – such as disorganized attachers – may have experienced traumatic events in their formative years. What’s more, the effects of this trauma often impact an insecure attacher’s ability to connect with the important people in their adult relationships.

In some ways, this effect is due to the fact that trauma creates an early template that guides how we view relationships, our identities, and the narrative of our lives. This template structures how we make sense of the world. As a result, an insecure attacher may often feel like they’re not worthy of love and see others as untrustworthy. What’s more, their outward behaviors in the different areas of their lives reflect these feelings.

In our second article of this Emotional Hygiene series, we share emotional first aid exercises that may help you address certain aspects of your trauma – especially if you experience new events which retrigger your feelings of past trauma. However, it’s important to remember that if your feelings are too intense, then it’s best to refer to our guide on finding a mental health professional that suits your needs.