Anxious Attachment Style and Relationship Anxiety? Acceptance Is the Key

A patient of mine, let’s call her Amy, has an anxiety problem. But you won't find it on any formal list of anxiety disorders.

Amy feels absolutely fine ... as long as she’s not dating anyone seriously. But within a week or two of getting seriously involved with someone, she finds herself preoccupied with the fear that they’re going to leave her.

She knows her anxiety is irrational, but she can’t seem to get control of it. And as a result, her relationships always seem to end badly.

Amy can’t figure out what’s wrong with her. She wasn’t abused or neglected as a child. And she doesn’t have any more anxiety than anyone else, as long as she’s not in a relationship.

What is anxious attachment style?

The fact is, there’s nothing wrong with Amy at all. She simply has what we mental health folks call an anxious attachment style.

Attunement to emotional danger is actually kind of a gift. But it’s a paradoxical gift. If you don’t manage it well, it can make your life pretty miserable.

That means she’s just more attuned than most people to cues that might signal possible danger in a relationship. Things other people might not even notice—like how many times the other person’s phone rings before going to voicemail.

That kind of attunement to emotional danger is actually kind of a gift. But it’s a paradoxical gift. If you don’t manage it well, it can make your life pretty miserable.

How your anxious attachment style makes you vulnerable to relationship anxiety

As you and I discussed in Episode 15, we humans are wired to need secure connections to the people around us. Which makes sense, since we’re a highly social species. In the state of nature 200,000 years ago on the plains of Africa, it was extremely dangerous to be out in the wilderness alone.

But people are very diverse. Some of us happen to be much more sensitive than others to perceived threats to a relationship.

In the 1960s, we made a big discovery—young children vary in how sensitive they are to abandonment. If you separate a young child from their mother for three minutes, then reunite them again, the most common result is that the child will get briefly upset, then quickly settle down and forget about the whole thing. But there’s a smaller population of kids who stay agitated for a much longer time, during which they hold on very tight to Mom and won’t let her out of their sight.

About 20 percent of adults—or one in five—have an anxious attachment style. They spend a lot...

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