What is An Anxious Preoccupied Attachment?

What is My Attachment Style?

How your parents or caregivers raised you and your interactions with them significantly influence how you perceive yourself and the world.

This is known as your attachment style.

It’s a set of subconscious rules that shape your behaviors, emotions, and beliefs about yourself, your relationships, and the world around you.

Regardless of cultural background, race, or gender, everyone develops an attachment style, making it one of the most profound influences in life.

Your attachment style is created from how your parents or caregivers fulfilled and provided your emotional (love and care), primary (food and shelter), and physical (support and affection) needs during your upbringing.

If your parents were supportive, emotionally open, and transparent, you would typically foster a "secure attachment style" in adulthood.

Conversely, if your needs aren't consistently met – inadvertently or not – you might develop an "insecure attachment style".

Attachment styles generally fall into four categories : secure, fearful avoidant (disorganized), dismissive avoidant, and anxious-preoccupied (or anxious-attached).

These styles profoundly shape how you approach relationships and navigate emotional connections throughout your life.

What is Anxious Preoccupied/Anxious Attached?

Anxious preoccupied (also known as anxiously attached) is an insecure attachment style based on fears of abandonment, low self-esteem, and insecurity of being underappreciated. It’s all developed in a childhood filled with inconsistency in love and parenting.

This results in the person becoming “clingy” and “people-pleasing” if they fear they’ll lose the relationship (or if someone gives them too much space). That’s because they lack the ability to self-soothe themselves, instead seeking it from others.

However, despite this upbringing, anxiously attached individuals desire a loving, close, and intimate relationship filled with validation and certainty while being seen, heard, and understood.

They are genuinely (and generally) kind, charismatic, warm, and likable individuals who prioritize their relationships and social interactions.

If you have an anxious preoccupied attachment style, understanding it on a deeper level can help you overcome your fears and traits to obtain your dreams and hopes.

What Causes Anxious Attachment?

Anxious, preoccupied individuals often grew up in households of inconsistency, whether that’s absent parents or a lack of consistent emotional connection between the child and parents. There are two prime examples.

If your parents were incredibly busy and didn't spend dedicated time with you, and when you had a close relationship with one parent because the other was often absent.

These fluctuations in availability and connection create deep-seated fears of abandonment and instill a sense of unpredictability, as you are unsure if you can expect love and from whom.

This inconsistency prevents you from learning proper self-soothing techniques, resulting in behaviors that cause you to establish security and avoid your perceived threat of abandonment.

As a result, you become anxious (or clingy) about being rejected, abandoned, and alone in adulthood unless you learn to overcome them.

What Does Anxious Preoccupied Look Like?

Despite your inconsistent upbringing, which left you unequipped to self-soothe and longing for connection, you have many positive attributes as an anxiously attached person.

You can be charismatic, warm, dedicated, and attentive in close relationships. You tend to prioritize and value relationships and social interaction with everyone, from partners to friends and family.

However, beneath the happy exterior, you might experience some overwhelming emotional patterns, including loneliness, insecurity, anxiety (about relationships – no shocks there), and sadness.

Other notable characteristics are that you tend to self-sabotage and overstep boundaries to get closer to someone, putting more strain on a relationship, and you might place partners on a pedestal and “please” them to avoid conflict or harm the relationship.

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How Anxious Attachment Style Affects Relationships

Having an anxious attachment style ( or dating one ) feels like being on an emotional rollercoaster, juggling your fears and desires with those of your partner. You desire constant love, connection, reassurance, and your partner's validation and approval. In this search for love, you might fall into a codependent relationship .

Noticeably, anxiously attached people have very high expectations in relationships, including that a partner “reads my mind”, is responsible for meeting their needs, and the relationship is the highest priority.

That can lead to conflict, which you tend to avoid or resolve quickly through overstepping personal boundaries (to maintain proximity) and constant communication.

You also tend to use agreeable language and discuss how your feelings are affected by things. If annoyed, you can become critical of your partner while also testing them to act or do something in a certain way.

However, if the relationship is healthy and supportive , you can be a great partner: one who reinforces and loves their companion and tries to grow the relationship.

• Has unreasonable relationship expectations
• Desires a constant need for validation and reassurance
• Avoids or looks to resolve conflict immediately
• Looks to maintain proximity to your partner
• Openly communicates emotions and perspectives
• Fawning or placing a partner on a pedestal
• Indirectly avoids disapproval or interpersonal conflict
• Good at sharing and being vulnerable
• Falls into a codependent relationship
• Wants your partner’s approval and presence

What Triggers Anxious Attachment?

Because the root causes of anxious attachment are abandonment, low self-esteem, or rejection, if you think someone will leave you, feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, and betrayal surface.

These moments tend to trigger some intensive coping mechanisms.

Most commonly, you can become clingy (such as constantly trying to text them or not giving them any boundaries), provoke the "right" emotions from your partner (like making them jealous), or test them to see if they “live” up to your standards of a relationship.

In more severe situations, you might become frantic and anxious, obsessive to the point of control, and seek attention through radical actions.

All this can lead to intense emotions and strain for your relationship. That’s why learning how to self-soothe and manage these triggers is the most effective way to overcome them.

What Anxious Attachment People Need?

As an anxiously preoccupied person, because you didn't get it in childhood, you desire one thing more than others: to be loved and valued in a relationship.

You want a consistent and committed relationship full of intimacy and closeness with a partner who openly validates you and prioritizes the relationship. You want your partner to see you, value you, and want to be with you.

That desire for stability and certainty makes sense, considering the instability and inconsistency you experienced in childhood.

However, you can react intensively and angrily if a partner doesn't meet your expectations or triggers your coping mechanisms.

Developing healthy habits to replace these intense reactions can help bring more calmness, clarity, and love to a relationship.

How to Fix Anxious Attachment Style

Your anxious preoccupied attachment style influences your behaviors and can impact your ability to thrive in both life and relationships.

Upon discovering this, you might wonder, "Can I fix my anxious preoccupied attachment style?"

The answer is yes.

There's a common belief that attachment styles are fixed and unchangeable, but our life-changing and powerful approach has debunked this notion.

You can learn to rewire your anxious preoccupied style towards having and living with a secure attachment. We have scienitific-backed methods to facilitate this transformation.

Here’s how:

1. Uncover the root causes of your fears
I’ll help you understand where your fears originate and how they impact your life. From there, I’ll teach you to overcome them through specialized tools.

2. Learn to self-soothe to bring greater care to yourself
The ability to self-soothe and treat yourself with care and love will help you develop a stronger sense of boundaries and needs in times of emotional crises.

3. Question the stories you tell yourself
We’ll provide you with the tools to change the narrative about you, your life, and your relationships. This will lead you to embrace a more positive and beautiful future.

4. Adopt healthier habits to overcome self-abandonment
Abandonment issues can be challenging to manage, but by building intentional habits and utilizing action reprogramming, you can overcome these fears to have a happier life.

5. Process your thoughts and emotions
Learn to recognize and strategize to meet your needs by processing your thoughts and emotions. Daily practice will help you feel more at peace with your inner self.

6. Become securely attached
Our courses provide simple-to-learn tools, tips, and hacks to apply that can move you away from being anxious attached to become securely attached.

More Information To Help You

27 JUN 2023

11 Anxious Attachment Triggers and How to Manage Them

People with an anxious attachment style are very easily triggered. Here are 11 anxious attachment style triggers and how you can manage them.

28 SEP 2023

7 Ways to Self-Soothe If You Have An Anxious Attachment Style

Some tips to self-soothe if you have an anxious attachment style: call a friend, distract yourself, and practice deep breathing. Click here to learn more.

31 AUG 2023

Dating an Anxious Attachment Style

Dating a person with an anxious attachment style can be challenging. Our guide explains what to do if you’re dating one or are one yourself!