Love me, don’t leave me: anxious attachment from the inside out

Anxious attachment is not simply an "abandonment issue." Surprisingly, it doesn't usually stem from the absence of love either. Often, it grows from inconsistency in some way. Connection was there, love was there, and so was attention, but not necessarily in a dependable way. Love – or the feeling of being loved – carried a precarity. Present one day, absent the next, warm one moment, cold the next.

To the simple mind of a child, unpredictability is tough going. They don’t have the mental capacity to appreciate that this behaviour isn’t about them personally if they’re shown what feels like the opposite.

Unpredictability forces a child to adapt and become exquisitely, exhaustively attentive to their caregivers with lab-like precision, tracking mood, body language, likes and dislikes, and everything in between.

Children who came to learn that being loved depended less on who they were and more on what they did, learned that love could be given and taken away, often without warning or explanation.

The result? They adapted. To ensure they got as much love as they could, when they could, the child became extra sensitive, hyper-attuned, and even more lovable in the eyes of their caregivers.

Beyond the clichés of clinginess and neediness

Anxious attachment exists on a spectrum and varies person to person, with context, as everything about us does as humans.

Someone may appear extremely laid-back and pro-social yet has an undercurrent of insecurity that soothes itself by being overtly attentive to their partner, generous, flexible, and affectionate. Someone else may wear their anxiety with playfulness, where jealousy, possessiveness, and loyalty are badges of honour. The variations that anxious attachment presents are endless.

For example, I once worked with someone who described lying in bed alone, and as their aloneness became more noticeable, a feeling of sinking emerged, as if they were falling into an endless void, where nothing felt solid beneath them. With an automatic shudder and a sharp breath in, they suddenly realised they’d been bracing, as if holding themselves together the whole time.

They couldn't describe the nothingness. Nor did it frighten them. It just appeared, quietly, when they were on their own and had done so for as long as they could remember. Their struggle with relational anxiety was less about not trusting those close to them and more about holding onto their sense of self without anyone there to reflect it back.

From this perspective, reassurance-seeking isn't a romantic "Tell me you love me again"; it's closer to “Help me know I am here. Help me know I am real again.”

You, me, and us 

People who've loved someone with this pattern often describe a strange, painful contradiction: an intense focus that feels more like being looked at than being seen.

This can sometimes happen when your attention is organised around threat detection rather than around encounter. When part of you is scanning for signs that someone might be pulling away, you're not fully free to discover who they are, here and now. You're listening for evidence.

For someone with anxious attachment, silence, even briefly, can feel unbearable. It isn't the distance that's frightening, but more the felt sense that they might disappear if no one reflects them back.

Needing to know we're OK to feel that you’re OK is often tangled up with something else too: a struggle to tell what our intuition is sensing right now versus the past projecting itself onto the moment (Heller and LaPierre, 2012).

Understandably, relational insecurity like this demands a type of me-first focus that makes it hard to meet another person and truly connect with them.

The cost and the terrible irony

To a child, being made responsible for continually regulating someone else's fear and anxiety is exhausting to carry. Unsustainable, even.

The same applies to the partner of an adult living with anxious attachment. The more reassurance is needed, the harder it can become for reassurance to feel like enough, since no answer can soothe the fear driving it.

Not because the anxious partner was unlovable or too much, though that's often the fear. It can be a drain on love when you have to explain your love. This painful irony can feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy: when a partner eventually runs out of energy and calls it quits, it can reopen the original abandonment wound all over again.

Here, we see two people running up against each other's needs for connection, trust, autonomy, attunement, and love. There's no blame in this dynamic, but there can be accountability, and possibility to relate differently, to learn how to relate securely. First with ourselves, and then with others.

Getting love by getting real

The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch described love as the discovery of reality: meaning, the realisation that something other than oneself is really, fully, real (Murdoch, 1999).

A love like this includes accepting that others have independent minds, feelings, and perspectives that do not revolve entirely around us. For someone with anxious attachment, deepening this capacity is challenging but central to finding new ways – steadier ways – to relate to others.

For example, if our partner is to become fully real, separate, trustworthy, and allowed to be themselves, we must somehow learn to feel solid and steady enough to hold ourselves, even in the face of silence or distance.

In part, this is supported by showing ourselves an attuned presence. We can’t just tell ourselves that we are safe if we don’t believe it. Believing it often comes with tiny repeated signals that we give our nervous system. Our realness and congruence can only be something we know is so when we sense it’s so.

Similarly, we can learn to bring deeper awareness to the content of our thoughts to minimise catastrophising and getting swept away by our abandonment fear.

From longing for another to encountering another 

Attachment-based therapy here isn't about teaching someone to need people less. That would be its own kind of self-abandonment, because we do need each other.

The real question is whether connection and a steadier sense of self can exist together, whether we can care deeply about someone without needing their every mood to confirm we have a right to exist. To be seen. To be loved.

Perhaps the sadness and loneliness that come with anxious attachment are longing for another person so much that little space is left to encounter who they are, once we find them. The work, then, isn't to stop longing for love. Nor is it to become so fiercely self-sufficient that we no longer need anyone.

Might it be through learning that we don’t have to work quite so hard to keep love close? That another person can move towards us and away from us without either of us disappearing, and that the attention we once had to place so exquisitely on others can gradually include exquisite attention to ourselves?

We still get to need each other. We just don't have to lose ourselves in the needing. Maybe this is where we can be met, while still being able to meet another. The kind of intimacy we've so longed for.

References

Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.

Murdoch, I. (1999). The sublime and the good. In P. Conradi (Ed.), Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature (pp. 205–220). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1959).