Anxious Attachment 101 Chapter One: How it Develops

How An Anxious Attachment Develops

ALL attachment styles develop based on the way parents and caregivers respond when:

• a child reaches for connection, attention, or affection

• a child reaches for comfort for emotional distress (fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, etc)

  AND:

• what the child is rewarded for....how do they get attention? what do they need to do to feel accepted, worthy, or good enough?

SECURE ATTACHMENT: "when I need comfort or connection, I can rely on someone to be there for me most of the time. My feelings matter and I'm valuable even when I mess up"

DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT: "when I need comfort or connection, nobody is there. I get seriously emotionally or physically hurt by the ones I need the most. I need comfort and connection, but reaching for it isn't safe."

AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT: "my emotional world has never been seen or responded to so I've had to learn to stuff it out of awareness in order to protect myself from rejection and indifference."

Now let's talk about ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT........

Children are likely to develop an Anxious Attachment when their parents or important caregivers:

• respond unpredictably to the child's reaches for connection or affection: sometimes they respond, sometimes they don't. Child becomes hyper-vigilant ("will they respond to me this time?") and may develop acting out or testing behaviors as a way to feel safe.

• respond to the child's emotional distress with over- or under- reaction, shaming, rejection, and/or unpredictability (might respond/might not)

Child is Responded to When:

• they protest, take responsibility for parent's feelings (parenting the parent/role-reversal), demand, get critical, or otherwise display any sort of behavior to get the emotional care they need that is not simply asking for it. Unlike the avoidant child, they feel the pain of not being able to predictably find the emotional care they need. Reaching for attention or affection isn't enough, they have to fight for it.

Children are likely to develop an Anxious Attachment when their parents or important caregivers.

Repeatedly invalidate the child's thoughts or feelings:

"that's all in your head"

"you need to get over it and move on"

"that's the wrong way of seeing it"

"we're a happy family, not a mad family"

"I can't deal with you right now"

"you have no right to be upset"

"maybe you should think about how much I do for you"

"you're completely irrational"

"you're going to get a time-out if you don't calm down"

"none of the other kids act like this"

"math is easy when you put your mind to it"

"you let the whole team down when you play like that"

Parent's of anxiously attached kids often respond to the child from their own anxiety, not from intentionality: "I'm anxious inside so if I can get you to do/be a certain way, I'll feel safe and we'll all be okay."

Not knowing what else to do: "I don't know what to do with this behavior. I never learned and I'm overwhelmed. I have to get you to stop so I don't have to stand here feeling overwhelmed and powerless and angry at you for making me feel this way."

Or being so consumed with their own feelings that they can't be available:

"I'm so worked up about the argument I had this morning with my sister that I can't possibly be emotionally available to anyone else, so I need for you to leave me alone and go comfort yourself."

Sometimes children develop an anxious attachment when their parents are over-protective:

When children are over-protected or over-indulged, they get the message "you're not competent; you can't handle bad feelings; you are dependent; it's the job of others to keep you happy; we don't trust you to make good decisions on your own." Because children need to feel a sense of volition in life, when they're over-protected/indulged their need to feel a sense of volition is going unmet.

They need to know they can go out into the world, make mistakes, learn, and come back to you for guidance when they get overwhelmed. They feel safe in knowing the world doesn't revolve around them and that they're part of a broader community. Also, when they get out into the world and others aren't so accommodating to their every need, they won't understand or know what to do, and will feel anxious and/or resentful. Over-protection doesn't prevent anxiety. It fuels it.

Examples of Over-Protection and/or Over-Indulgence

• Giving the child toys, candy, device time, etc to distract them from their feelings or keep them from bothering you

• Planning all parts of life around the child (not leaving them with others from time to time, neglecting other relationships, only going on kid-related outings, centering life on child's activities.

• Not wanting to say "no"

• Being overly-strict

• Going above and beyond to keep the child from feeling pain, instead of making space for normal feelings

• Tip-toeing around the child when the child is upset

• Not having healthy boundaries around child's behaviors

• Demanding that schools and other institutions accommodate the child's needs to a level which is ultimately not good for the child's need to learn how to be flexible (not including areas where support is appropriate)

Those with anxious attachments spent more of their childhood feeling alone with their painful feelings than not. It doesn't have to be intentional on the part of the parents (most parents genuinely want the best for their children but either don't know what to do or are just trying to keep their own heads above water). Anxious attached children got what they needed enough of the time to know what it felt like and knew what to fight for. But they could never rely on it to consistently be there, so they had to work overtime to be seen, feel better, and feel a sense of control over their own lives. To varying degrees, those who grew up with anxious attachments felt a sense of nagging anxiety, punctuated by periods of high anxiety. This is exhausting work for a child's nervous system and the energy spent on being anxious is taken from other areas of development. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be coming soon in subsequent posts.

Please understand caregivers do not need to be responsive 100% of the time for a child to develop an anxious attachment. The statistics say that for a child to develop a secure attachment they need to feel emotionally attuned with their parent at least 30% of the time. The other time is spent just going about life, and some of that time is in misattunement (conflict, or periods of feeling misunderstood, etc), but the misattunement isn't permanent...they can work through it with healthy repairs. The important part is that when the child needs the parent for emotional support, the parent is reliably there or will be in the future ("I know you're upset. We're driving now. Let's talk about it when we get home.")

---

“Anxious attached children got what they needed enough of the time to know what it felt like and knew what to fight for, but they could never rely on it to consistently be there.”

— Julie Menanno

---

Other Posts You Might Like: