Nurturing Secure Bonds: How Anxious Attachment Impacts Your Marriage and Ways to Minimize Its Impact

The worry starts as a small knot in your stomach when your spouse seems distant. Then it grows into full-blown panic, convinced they will leave you. The highs are so high, but the lows leave you devastated. You obsess about every text, every absent kiss. Your emotions spiral out of control despite your best efforts. You know your reactions only push your partner away, but you feel powerless to stop them.

You desperately long for unbreakable bonds of love and security, but your patterns keep sabotaging it. It hurts. You feel like something is deeply wrong with you. But the truth is, your reactions make total sense based on your experiences. With compassion for yourself and some new relational skills, you can minimize an anxious attachment style's impact on your marriage. You deserve to feel secure. Let's walk through this together.

The Impact of Anxious Attachment on Marriage

If you have an anxious attachment style, you might feel like the fear of abandonment is always looming over you. It can seem like your partner leaving you is a constant possibility, even if there are no signs of it happening. That's why you may crave constant validation, like hearing "I love you" or being held in an embrace. But the thing is, this need for constant reassurance can put a strain on your relationship.

Your partner may start feeling like they're not doing enough to make you feel secure and can become resentful over time. Additionally, you may find yourself overthinking or worrying excessively over small issues or perceived rejections, feeling overwhelmed by anything from missed phone calls to canceled plans.

Communication, which is key in healthy marriages, can be particularly difficult in anxious attachment marriages. Anxious attachers who struggle to discuss their emotions, anxieties, and needs may avoid vulnerability, fearing rejection or abandonment. This makes it harder for their partner to understand their emotions and respond appropriately, leading to frequent misunderstandings, conflicts, and emotional reactions that erode trust and communication over time.

Furthermore, when your anxieties get triggered, you may feel like you're in a state of emotional turmoil, with heightened anger, sadness, or anxiety. Managing conflicts and resolving issues can also grow more difficult, as struggles to regulate emotions lead to engagement in repetitive behaviors like clinginess, jealousy, or hypervigilance. In some cases, the impact of anxious attachment may extend to parenting, potentially shaping their children's emotional well-being and relationship behaviors.

 Ultimately, anxious attachment significantly impacts overall relationship satisfaction over time. The constant need for reassurance and emotional fluctuations can lead to feelings of unhappiness and unfulfillment, hindering the growth and development of the marriage. If left unaddressed, these patterns can cause long-term damage to the relationship. But by addressing these impacts of anxious attachment on marriage, individuals and couples can better understand their challenges and work towards creating a more secure and fulfilling relationship.

Nurturing Secure Attachment in Your Marriage

While anxious attachment presents challenges, with understanding and effort, you can minimize its impact and nurture more security.

Recognizing Your Attachment Style: To initiate change in your attachment style and its impact on your marriage, start by gaining self-awareness about how it shapes your relational dynamics. Reflect on questions like, "Do I often fear abandonment?" or "Am I overly dependent on my partner's reassurance?"

Identifying Triggers and Patterns: Uncover the specific situations or interactions in your relationship that trigger your anxious attachment tendencies. Notice recurring themes, like perceived distance or ambiguous communication, to better understand and navigate your reactions.

Expressing Needs and Fears: Foster emotional intimacy by openly sharing your attachment-related needs, thoughts, and fears with your partner. This vulnerability provides insight into your world and helps them offer support and appropriate reassurance.

 Active Listening: Effective communication goes both ways. Actively listen to your partner's experiences and emotions to build empathy and trust, creating a healthy attachment environment. 

Setting Healthy Boundaries: One of the biggest struggles for anxious attachment is setting healthy boundaries in relationships. But the more you practice setting and maintaining comforting boundaries that prevent emotional overwhelm without feeling guilty, the more you'll understand that boundaries are not walls but bridges to healthier connections.

 Prioritizing Self-Care & Self-Love: Avoid neglecting your needs to put your partner first, as it reinforces unhealthy patterns. Prioritize self-care to reduce stress and communicate to yourself the validity of your needs.

 Self-Soothing & Mindfulness: Harness self-soothing techniques like deep breathing or grounding exercises to gain control over emotional reactions. Practice mindfulness to recognize and choose healthier responses to attachment triggers.

 Coregulation: Embrace coregulation, a powerful attachment concept, by calming an activated nervous system through shared calmness, active listening, physical touch, and non-verbal warmth. Let your partner's regulated presence soothe your distress.

 It's essential to understand that anxious attachment doesn't define you or your ability to have a healthy relationship. It's a pattern that can be understood, addressed, and worked through with your partner – but it all starts with you.

Therapy for Anxious Attachment in Marriage

Anxious attachment is an understandable response to unreliable early relationships. But if you struggle with an anxious attachment style, attachment-based therapy is a powerful option to improve your marriage.

Attachment-based therapy starts with increased self-awareness, allowing you to understand the origins of your attachment style and how it impacts your relationship behavior. You'll learn coping skills to manage anxiety and insecurity through techniques like mindfulness and self-soothing. Through this process, your self-esteem and self-compassion will increase,  leading to a more secure sense of self and reducing the need for constant reassurance from your spouse.

What's really impactful about this therapy is the therapeutic relationship you develop with your therapist. This relationship offers a secure base for healing attachment wounds and experiencing healthy attachment dynamics. You'll develop trust and feel secure, which can translate to other relationships, including marriage. Ultimately, you'll gain the tools and insights to navigate your attachment style and build a healthier, more fulfilling marriage.

So, if you want to improve your marriage and heal from attachment wounds, try attachment-based therapy! Seek support from me at Hannah Dorsher Counseling in Florida or Colorado. You can also download my FREE 4 Steps to Go From Anxious to Secure Attachment Guide here and get started now. With time, effort, and commitment, you can minimize the impact of anxious attachment on your marriage and cultivate a secure and loving marriage.

About the Author

Hannah Dorsher, MA, LPC, NCC, CAT, EMDR is a therapist in Fort Collins, CO who specializes in helping those struggling with anxiety, self-esteem, toxic/unhealthy relationships, anxious attachment issues, break ups, and trauma. I work with clients in CO and FL. Schedule a free consultation call with me here!

4 Ways to Break Toxic Relationship Patterns

Breaking Toxic Relationship Patterns 101

So you have found yourself single once again…. Or maybe you find yourself in a relationship that you just know isn’t healthy—the bad times outweigh the good significantly—and you know that there is an expiration date on the relationship—It’s just a matter of time. You may be thinking, “why does this keep happening to me,” “why can’t I seem to ever have a happy, healthy relationship!”.

            It’s not uncommon for people to have a pattern of unhealthy relationships. Having a history of unhealthy relationships is problematic in that it creates a feedback loop for the individual in the relationships—meaning that we tend to start creating stories about ourselves, about others, and about relationships based on our experiences. For example, if you have been cheated on, the story your brain may create could be something along the lines of  “it is stupid to trust people” or “I am not good enough”.

Our stories affect how we participate in the world going forward—especially the dating world. The way you feel about yourself influences who you are attracted to, your behaviors in a relationship, and even the behaviors you will tolerate (or won’t tolerate) in a relationship—we tend to attract people with similar levels of health. An unhealthy relationship can contribute to further damage to self-worth, which then goes on to influences the type of relationships we participate in. If the cycle is allowed to continue, the negative stories are reinforced even more (ex: “see, I really am not good enough because here am I getting cheated on AGAIN”). Or we may even sabotage what could be a healthy relationship (it’s easy to create conflict when you have a hard time trusting your partner which could lead to the end of the relationship). And the cycle goes on.

            So, how do we break this cycle and elevate the health of our relationships and ourselves? We need to change our stories. Simple, right? Conceptually yes, but in real life this takes a little time and consistent practice. Here are a few things you can do to change the stories that may be keeping you stuck in unhealthy relationship patterns.

1)   Identify the stories that you hold about others, about yourself, and about relationships. You can do this by considering the common phrases in your self-talk—the internal dialogue that is probably running continuously in your head. Start by writing these down in your notes section in your phone, or in a notebook for a few days. Just notice which phrases come up frequently. They may be “I am” statements (“I’m such an idiot”); they may be commentary about others (“people are liars”) or about relationships in general (“relationships just never last”). Once you have identified some of your common themes you can start to rewrite your stories.

2)   Question the story. Once you have written your main stories down, take a good hard look at each of them and ask yourself where this story came from? Which experiences created this story? Ask yourself “is this story completely, unquestionably true”… it probably isn’t. For example—is it 100% true that ALL relationships never last? No, obviously this is not true 100% of the time. When we start to questions are stories we poke holes in them and can start to loosen their foothold in our brains.

3)   Ask yourself what a person who has healthy thoughts about themselves and relationships would think in this situation. Think of a person you know or can imagine that has high self-esteem and has had healthy relationships and think about how they would think and act in a given situation. For example: if you find yourself thinking you are not good enough for a healthy relationship, stop and think what would a person with healthy thoughts about themselves think and do in the situation?

4)   Create compassion for yourself. These stories rarely just develop out of nowhere—they often find their genesis in the wake of traumatic experiences. Compassion is important in fostering self-love. A good first step is just to say a few compassionate phrases out loud to yourself each day, or whenever you notice yourself thinking something unhelpful. An example may be something as simple as, “I am worthy of love” or “I am doing the best I can right now”.

It may also be time to work through these patterns in therapy. Therapists can offer an objective view, helpful insight, and will gently challenge thoughts and behaviors that may be holding you back. You deserve happy, healthy, fun, fulfilling relationships, often times this starts with a healthy, happy YOU!

Colorado residents can click the button below to contact Hannah Dorsher to schedule an appointment today.

About the Author

Hannah Dorsher, MA, LPC, NCC, CAC I is a therapist in Fort Collins, CO who specializes in helping those struggling with anxiety, self-esteem, toxic/unhealthy relationships, attachment issues, break ups, and trauma.