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!

What is an Anxious Attachment Style?

What is Anxious Attachment?

You may have been hearing more about attachment theory and attachment styles lately as this theory has started to become a little more popularized with social media. While there are multiple attachment styles, today we’ll focus on the anxious attachment style. Anxious attachment usually develops because of inconsistent parenting/caregiving (more on that later). This attachment style can make relationships feel tumultuous and/or reactive. Luckily, attachment styles are not permanent and can be changed! Keep reading to learn more about the characteristics of an anxious attachment style, the effects of an anxious attachment style on a relationship, and how to begin to heal attachment wounds that lead to an anxious attachment style.

Characteristics of Anxious Attachment:

At the core of an anxious attachment style is the fear of abandonment. People who grow to develop an anxious attachment style likely experienced inconsistent caregiving and frequent emotional misattunement—meaning that the caregivers were not in sync with the child’s emotional state and did not offer the appropriate comfort that the child needed at that time. Parents of these children may have also used their children to fulfill their own needs for love and connection and may have been overly involved or intrusive in their child’s life. This creates the dynamic that the parent’s needs are the focus, not the child’s.

As a result of these caregiver experiences, the child begins to develop an inability to trust that people will be dependable. Below are some common traits of anxious attachment style:

·      low self-esteem

·      clinginess

·      strong reactivity to perceived threats to connection/abandonment

·      jealousy or suspicion of their partners

·      intensely sensitive to, and sometimes threatened by, emotional shifts in their partner

·      hypervigilant to anything that is a perceived threat to connection or that seems like abandonment (like a constantly hyperactivated alarm system)

·      needing frequent reassurance from their partner

·      difficulty/fear being alone

·      reliance on others for emotion regulation and soothing

·      development of “protest behavior” in order to feel connected

Effects of an Anxious Attachment on Relationships

People with an anxious attachment style tend to put a lot of pressure on a relationship in that a relationship feels necessary for them to feel soothed/loved/safe, but having a relationship also causes them a great deal of anxiety and stress. The relationship can feel very up and down and intense because of this. Often, they will react intensely to perceived threats to connection, even if the threat is very small or not really an actual threat (ex: a partner takes a hour longer to return a text message, when they usually respond quickly—this will likely cause the person with anxious attachment to feel insecure and anxious about why their partner took longer to text back. They may perceive it as a sign that their partner is rejecting them or abandoning them).

Direct communication about feelings and needs may be difficult with this attachment style as well. As children, people with this style learned that their needs are not important and usually develop ways other than direct communication to get their needs met. Protest behavior patterns are one way that people with an anxious attachment style sometimes learn to communicate. Protest behavior is behavior that is designed to reassure a sense of connection; however, it is not skillful and can be harmful to the relationship. An example of protest behavior with the texting example mentioned a few sentences back would be calling their partner repeatedly to get a response, or waiting longer than their partner did to respond as a “keeping score” tactic. Obviously, neither of these behaviors directly communicate the person’s feelings or needs to their partner

So what can you do if you feel like you have an anxious attachment style?

Thankfully, attachment styles are not permanent. It’s totally possible to change your attachment style and work towards something call “earned secure attachment”. This is basically what is sounds like—through self-growth work you can earn a secure attachment style even if you did not have the foundation for a secure attachment growing up.  Here are some starting points to healing your attachment wounds:

1) Learn your anxious attachment triggers and reactions, and practice new skills. Think about your past relationship and identify the triggers to your attachment behavior. Note what emotions you were feeling when triggered and the behavior that followed. For instance: perhaps every time your partner was even slightly late without calling, you felt extremely anxious and called them repeatedly until they answered and then reacted angrily. This gives you a starting point for where you may need to improve your emotion regulation skills. Rather than calling repeatedly and becoming angry, you could work on self-soothing strategies and communication skills to share why their being late bothered you.

2)    Learn to identify securely attached people. Being in relationship with securely attached individuals can help you to change your behaviors as well. Practice opening yourself up to trust a securely attached friend, family member, or partner (or therapist!). Over time, this can help you learn that some people can be trusted, that intimacy can be safe and stable, and that when you communicate your feelings and needs you feel important and heard.  This may feel like taking a risk, but if you are identifying emotionally healthy people, the risk is more times than not going to pay off.

3)    Start therapy. A therapist can help you walk through this process.  Therapists are great people to practice having a secure relationship as you practice being vulnerable and trusting another person. Attachment focused therapists are skilled in understanding the dynamics of your attachment styles and can also provide you with new skills and ways of thinking about yourself and others that can be helpful for your healing journey.  

While attachment related behaviors and patterns can put strain on relationships, attachment styles can change. If you relate to any of the anxious attachment characteristics perhaps working in therapy could be helpful in healing wounds and patterns that interfere with your self-esteem and your relationships. Don’t hesitate to reach out to a therapist to start on your path towards healing your attachment wounds!

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, attachment issues, break ups, and trauma.

How to Develop a Secure Attachment Style

How to Develop a Secure Attachment Style

Attachment styles are developed based on the types of interactions we had with our early caregivers. Caregivers who were consistent and mostly accurate in meeting our needs helped us to form a secure attachment. Caregivers who struggled to meet our needs likely laid the foundation for an insecure attachment style.

Without any effort, our attachment styles usually stay consistent throughout the course of our lives; however, attachment styles are not permanent. Luckily, our brains can rewire pathways with the right kinds of experiences and attention. Basically, you can turn an insecure attachment style into a secure attachment style.

This article discusses what attachment styles are and how we can work towards achieving a secure attachment style.

What are attachment styles?

Attachment styles are patterns of behavior and feelings we experience and exhibit in relationships with others. There are four main attachment styes: secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and fearful-avoidant (or disorganized) attachment.

This theory was first proposed by doctors Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby in the 50’s. They recognized that attachment styles are created in infancy and early childhood based on experiences with early primary caregivers. Our attachment styles influence the way we interact with others and the way we respond—emotionally and behaviorally-- when in relationship with partners.

Secure Attachment: Research estimates that a little over 50% of the population is securely attached, according to Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A., authors of “Attached. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find--and Keep--Love”. Securely attachment individuals tend to feel at ease with intimacy, feel safe in connection with others, and are usually warm and loving. These individuals enjoy being close and are not overly sensitive to rejection. They tend to be straightforward communicators and can handle conflict in a without being overly dramatic or reactive.

Anxious Attachment: Approximately 20% of the population is anxiously attached (Levine & Heller, 2010). Anxiously attached individuals also desire intimacy but are extremely sensitive to perceived abandonment or lack of closeness. When they sense a threat to closeness, they often act out dramatically due to their lacking appropriate communication skills. Without a very calm, nurturing, and patient response from a partner, an anxiously attached person will feel amplified distress and will likely amplify acting out as a way of expressing their anxiety or fear of the loss of connection.

Avoidant Attachment: Around 25% of the population is avoidantly attached (Levine & Heller, 2010). Avoidantly attached individuals do have a need for intimacy; however, they are likely to feel smothered by closeness. One of their main desires is independence and they often pull away frequently from their partners. Rather than having direct communication, they are likely to avoid heavy conversations and distance themselves from the relationship when conflict occurs.

Fearful-Avoidant Attachment: It’s likely that 3-5% of the population has a fearful-avoidant attachment style (Levine & Heller, 2010).  People with this attachment vacillate between a combination of intense anxious and avoidant behaviors. They tend to have very unstable relationships with intense, and sometimes violent, behaviors.

How are attachment styles developed?

Our early caregiving experiences shape our attachment style, which then affects the way we attach in our adult relationships. For example, a caregiver who was sometimes attentive and present to their infant’s needs, but other times absent tends to create a sense for the infant that other people cannot relied on to get their needs met because they are unpredictable. An infant may respond to this type of situation by becoming very anxious and cling to their caregivers in the attempt to draw in closeness from a caregiver, despite not trusting them.

Alternatively, caregiver that become irritated or angry when a child shows emotions or that ignores their child’s cries or cues of distress, tend to cause the child to pull away, indicating a sense of understanding that no matter what they do their caregiver will not meet their needs. They tend to develop a very early sense of independence and a “swallowing” of emotions.

Finally, if a caregiver is erratic, abusive, and chaotic—sometimes exhibiting big shows of love, other times being completely absent or neglectful, or being extremely angry or aggressive, a child will likely develop a sense of fear and mistrust towards their caregiver. They may desire closeness with their caregiver, but when they get close, they notice a sense of fear and pull away or act out.  

So how can you change your attachment style?

We can change our attachment styles and overcome some of the struggles in relationships that occur as a result. Here are some of the steps to healing your attachment styles:

1)    Examine your past. By reflecting on your early experience and your relationship history, you can get a deeper sense of understanding about how you tend to behave in relationships and why this is the case. It can sometimes to be helpful to make a relationship timeline and look at the quality of attachments in each of the main relationships listed on your timeline. Think about how you felt in the relationships, how you behaved in the relationships and whether this seems to fall in line with your identified attachment style. It is also important to pay attention to the emotions that come up with you think about your early childhood caregiver experiences.

2)    Identify the “story” you hold about yourself and work to change it if necessary. Attachment wounds can affect self-esteem and beliefs about yourself. Identify how you feel and think about yourself and work to change unhelpful beliefs. For example, if you have a belief that you are unlovable, that will directly affect your relationships. You may need to work on letting go of these beliefs about yourself and creating new, more helpful beliefs.

3)    Learn your attachment triggers and reaction, and practice new skills. Think about your past relationship and identify the triggers to your attachment behavior. Note what emotions you were feeling when triggered and the behavior that followed. For instance: perhaps every time your partner was even slightly late without calling, you felt extremely anxious and called them repeatedly until they answered and then reacted angrily. This gives you a starting point for where you may need to improve your emotion regulation skills. Rather than calling repeatedly and becoming angry, you could work on self-soothing strategies and communication skills to share why their being late bothered you.

4)    Learn to identify securely attached people. Being in relationship with securely attached individuals can help you to change your behaviors as well. Practice opening yourself up to trust a securely attached friend, family member, or partner. Over time, this can help you learn that some people can be trusted, and intimacy can be safe and stable. This may feel like taking a risk, but if you are identifying emotionally healthy people, the risk is more times than not going to pay off.

5)    Start therapy. A therapist can help you walk through this process.  Therapists are great people to practice having a secure relationship as you practice being vulnerable and trusting another person. Attachment focused therapists are skilled in understanding the dynamics of your attachment styles and can also provide you with new skills and ways of thinking about yourself and others that can be helpful for your healing journey.  

Don’t hesitate to reach out to a therapist to start on your path towards healing your attachment wounds. Attachment styles are not permanent!

References

Levine, A., & Heller, R. (2011). Attached: the new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find--and keep--love . Jeremy P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc..

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, attachment issues, break ups, and trauma.

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.