Photo by Luke van Zyl
Preoccupied & Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment
Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who is really clingy? Like, can’t-catch-a-breath, stuck-to-your-side sort of clingy? I don’t mean, celebrating half-year-anniversaries and leaving love notes in your lunch every day. I mean, constantly fielding a barrage of text messages, the day-in-day-out demands on your attention, the expectation that most, if not all, nights will be spent together. It’s an exhausting assignment: constantly trying to reassure, walking on eggshells, and making sure your partner knows that the relationship is solid.
Or perhaps you are the clingy person. Under the right circumstances, we all have the propensity to become suffocatingly clingy. As a couples therapist, I’ve seen boomer-generation men who have spent their whole lives swimming alone in the cultural streams of individualism go through a tectonic life change, and suddenly become as needy as a lovestruck teenager in their first relationship.
If you’ve felt this desperate never-ending need for reassurance, you know what it's like to live with an anxious attachment style. You also know something that can be hard to see from the outside: it’s even more exhausting to be the one clinging so desperately than it is to be clung to. Let me explain:
You’re five years old, and the sun is hot and barnyard smells waft through the air, tickling your nose. It’s the county fair, mid-July, and your grandparents just bought you a bright red balloon with our favorite cartoon character on it. It bobs and tugs, threatening to fly away in the deep blue sky at any moment.
First order of business, as soon as money was exchanged, was to tie it around your wrist. But at five years old, it’s hard to trust that the tie is really going to hold, so with white knuckles, you grip the string in your little hands all afternoon. The sweat makes the already-too-thin curling ribbon slide through your fingers, so you have to constantly pull it back down, ensuring that it doesn’t get too far away. About two feet above your head feels like a comfortable distance, which happens to be right at the level of bumping all the adult’s faces, but letting it any higher make you feel nervous.
You spend the afternoon eating corn dogs, sliding down burlap sleds on slides, watching a hypnotist show, and looking at animals. All the while, your attention is always split, a little bit allocated to ensuring the balloon isn’t slipping from your hands. It’s hard to be fully present, to explore the fair and notice everything, with your mind on the balloon. It’s better than losing the balloon, but it’s also exhausting, in a way that’s almost hard to put your finger on.
This is why we call it preoccupied attachment, you are so preoccupied with the state of your relationship, it’s hard to focus on much else.
Where it Starts
In some families, the child ends up feeling that keeping connection and closeness rests wholly on their shoulders. It prevents them from ever resting in the embrace of a loving parent, and pushes them to anxiously cling like they are a helium-filled balloon, just waiting to fly into the ether the moment we relax our white-knuckled grasp. It’s exhausting, but better than being abandoned to disconnection.
In healthy families, children trust that their parents will respond and rescue them from disconnection, at least most of the time. But what if you grow up in a family where it’s more likely that your cry will be ignored than responded to, moments of distance feel terrifying. You're unsure if you'll be rescued, or if you'll feel abandoned to the utter hopelessness of isolation. It’s a scary thing to be alone in a world where no one comes to save you from the painful feeling of disconnection. So we create a pattern of frantically calling out for help, and eventually focus all our energy on preventing disconnection from ever happening in the first place.
When we can't trust our caregivers to get close in our time of need, we have to scheme up our own ways to get closeness. Those early experiences of disconnection feel like the death of the relationship, and because we’re created for connection, a deep anxiety develops. We know that our parents care, but we’re not sure if they care enough. Skeptical that they will help up during the agony of disconnection, our best strategy becomes avoiding any distance at all. Our relationships begin to feel like helium balloons, constantly bobbing and pulling, threatening to fly away unless we grip tight the strings that hold them close. It’s safer to sit next to mom on the bench at the park than take the risk of playing on the playground. What if she’s not paying enough attention when you venture out on your own and get hurt or scared? The best bet is to cling to mom’s skirt, and endlessly keep a sharp eye out for the slightest sign of disconnection.
Anger
The other term for this attachment style is “anxious-ambivalent,” which is a confusing term. While we often consider “ambivalent” to mean the absence of any strong feelings, it actually indicates an experience of having two strong conflicting emotions. When Ainsworth observed children with an anxious-ambivalent attachment, she noticed that they were incredibly distressed when separated from their parents but would push away when the parents returned. They both wanted their parents close and were incredibly upset with them at the same time. We see this occur in adult relationships, where a preoccupied partner will show a lot of anger toward their partner, but it’s because they don’t feel close, and they want to feel secure. They are angry that the relationship doesn’t feel as stable as they want it to.
Healing for this Attachment Style
Therapy
There are a few different types of attachment-informed or attachment-compatible types of therapy.
Community
Those with anxious/ambivalent & preoccupied attachment tend to focus intently on one person in their life, usually their romantic partner. It can be helpful to consider who else in your life is important to you, and challenge yourself to invest in friendships in your community.
Emotional Regulation
Those with this attachment style typically have difficulty calming down, because they didn’t have a secure relationship early in life that helped their nervous system practice regulation. Specifically focusing on emotional regulation through guided meditations, working with a therapist, or finding coping skills can be incredibly helpful. That being said, we know that co-regulation with someone who really care about you and can listen to your emotions is one of the best coping skills we have as humans.
Spiritual Practices
Having an anxious-ambivalent attachment with God can be utterly exhausting (something my co-host, Amy and I talk about on this episode of Attached to the Invisible). Finding symbols and reminders of God’s unending delight and love can be helpful. Sometimes it’s helpful to create your own art, or perhaps read a book like “Beloved” by Henri Nouwen.
Learn More!
Read this article about what this attachment style looks like with God.
Amy and I talked about this attachment style and what it looks like in relation to God in a couple of Attached to the Invisible Podcast episodes.
And here’s another podcast episode on the topic:
Therapist Uncensored Episode 60: Preoccupation in Relationships: Signs and Solutions to Anxious Attachment