New Perspectives on Anxious Attachment Style
People who experience anxious attachment styles are intelligent. They sit in my office with careers in engineering, social work—they’re CEOs and branch managers. But their minds are tangled in knots, their hearts twisted with fear, hands holding documents, books, and podcasts—all about their anxious attachment style.
They tell me, in the first session, that they know their root belief is that they are fundamentally unworthy of love and good things, and they look at me with desperation. What do I do now? How do I stop raging at my partner when they don’t text back or analyzing every inch of our relationship to the point of near death?
They also can’t sleep, have irregular eating habits, and either exercise too much or not at all.
As a therapist, one of the most incredible things that has come out of the internet is the incredible access to information. Have codependency? Google it, and out pop podcasts, journals, blog posts, and books on the topic. Have depression? Here comes the names of therapists and life coaches who promise a cure.
But for my anxious clients, the volume of information can be a curse. For every possible outcome, there’s a Reddit thread to confirm—or temporarily ease—an anxiety. Especially for those with anxious attachment styles: go on TikTok, and you’ll see six videos in a row about how your partner could possibly be the worst partner in the world because they dropped the weekly flower habit (you were perfectly happy 30 minutes ago).
With that being said, here are my two cents, as a therapist—but also as a person with anxious attachment, far into recovery:
Cent One: You Can’t Solve Matters of the Heart by Figuring Them Out in Your Head
For most of us who spend a tremendous amount of time thinking, it might be best to practice meditation—the art of getting out of the endless hamster wheel of thoughts and into the groundedness of the body.
As Geneen Roth put it in her New York Times bestseller Women, Food, and God:
"Minds are useful when we need to conceptualize, plan, theorize. But when we depend on them to guide our inner lives, we’re lost. Minds are excellent at presenting a thousand different variations of the past and conjuring them into a future. And then scaring us with most of them." (Page 111)
For the person with anxiety, asking them to meditate or pay attention to the sensations in their bodies is like asking them to intentionally suspend themselves over a vat of jumping Great White Sharks, à la James Bond victim. I know this because I personally avoided meditation actively for four years and experienced that exact sensation of free-falling the moment I decided to sit criss-cross applesauce and let the thoughts come and go.
For those with anxious attachment, one of the main struggles is with speed and time: jumping to conclusions, having racing thoughts, analyzing the relationship—or feeling the excruciating wait for the text back. Meditation is crucial for creating distance and space: distance between thoughts, assumptions, and worst-case scenarios, as well as emotions; space to give yourself the opportunity to view a situation more objectively.
Decentering our thoughts is a big part of meditation. When you sit down to meditate, you take the attention away from your thoughts and toward the sensations in your body. And when thoughts become loud or distracting, you disengage. You don’t negotiate with thought terrorists—which many anxious thoughts are. They are designed to be sticky, keeping us stuck in our heads to distract from the emotional experience below. (My sister’s therapist calls particularly sneaky anxious thoughts “sleazy salesmen,” which I thought was great.)
The second part involves noticing sensations in our bodies. Geneen Roth describes this as “inquiry,” explained below:
"Inquiry is body-based; not a mental process. You sense what it feels like to be inside your skin, your arms, your legs. You notice the sensation and you notice the location of the sensation. Sensation, location, sensation, location. If, for instance, you are feeling sad, you ask yourself where that feeling is located in your body. You notice a gray heap of ashes in your chest, and up pops the belief that ‘love exists for other people but not for me.’ You become curious about this belief. How old were you when you first learned that? And what were your feelings at the time that never got noticed or understood?" (Page 104)
Cent Two: Love Requires Surrender
(Grief and loss) Love requires your utmost surrender and devotion, especially because, on planet Earth, endings seem to be part of the fabric of our existence. You could pick the most perfect partner (in your definition) in the whole world, and you would still have to surrender to the fact that loss will occur. No amount of planning—prevention planning, crisis planning, having plans A through R—will erase the "that sucks" or the total heartbreak of loss.
(In this moment, as you’re reading this, I ask you to check in with your heart. Take a few deep breaths and assess if this is triggering you or if you are ready to proceed.)
Here are your options:
Avoid love altogether! Hermit mode: shut people out and down (people-pleasing, avoidance, numbing behaviors like drugs, alcohol, or scrolling for hours on end).
Accept the conditions of life on Earth and open your heart. You will feel everything—loss, pain, anger, envy—while also opening yourself to joy, pleasure, ease, amazement, and wonder.
Come up with a plan to avoid a painful end: force your partner to eat vegetables so they don’t get heart disease and die a painful death (even though they’re going to die, eventually).
For the person with an anxious attachment style, control is a natural companion. If we’re not trying to control our inner worlds and thoughts to be the perfect partner, we’re thinking of all the ways our partners could improve or comparing them to someone else who would make our lives better.
In reality, we can’t see anything in our lives clearly because we’re so clouded by our own suffering.
The quickest and most effective way to clarity, confidence, and peace is to accept life just as it is—warts and all.
What now?
Now, you start living again, by bring yourself back into the present moment. Over and over and over again. You take care of yourself- whether thats by eating a nutritious meal, sitting out in nature, or reaching out for professional support. You get to regain authority back over your life, and you recommit to yourself over, and over, and over again.
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Katie VanderWeide, LMSW is a licensed clinical masters level social worker with six years of clinical experience. With a background training in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Katie uses a integrative, person-centered approach with her clients, pulling in her training from the Internal Family Systems model and the Gottman Method for Couples to facilitate healing and growth for her clients. Katie has a special interest in working with women struggling with codependency, young adults/teens, and couples.
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