r/AnxiousAttachment

Hi all,

34(F) here, I think I technically qualify as disorganised but have a strong anxious lean and I thought I'd come here for help.

I really do not like the version of myself that I become when I'm attached to someone. Morally, I'm a strong believer in personal autonomy and logical thought. Resultingly its distressing to watch myself become enamoured with someone I've just met and so fixated on trying to make them love me. Or to watch myself get so desperate over wanting a text back, or feeling the urge to blow up on romantic interests over things that are, in hindsight, not as terrible as they felt in the moment. Falling in love leaves me feeling possessed by the ghost of the girl in Obsession and I lose my respect for myself watching myself act like a petulant child.

I've just started therapy in an attempt to address this issue.

I'm not like this in my friendships or family relationships. If anything, I'm the opposite of clingy with my friends and family and my busy schedule can make it hard for me to afford them the attention they deserve.

Does anyone have any hints for pulling yourself out of that childlike state in the moment and maintaining focus on adhering to your morals/values/sense of self when an attachment wound is triggered?

I met someone almost three months ago. We met (in person) while he's on holiday in my country. He has been to many countries since, but we kept talking. I feel like I'm being introduced to a new pattern (in my brain).

Since the beginning, he's been a slow texter. The first time I chatted with him on Instagram, it took him hours to respond.

Throughout his travels, he would SOMETIMES leave me unanswered for 2 days max. I had other guys who would talk to me everyday, make fantasies, but it all led to nothing. Even a joke of an ex who I was with for 1 month who was intense, said "I love you" but left me.

So this isn't a case of someone texting me constantly from day 1, then dipped. Because we met in person, I got used to his texting pattern. I realized I also don't need to respond too quickly just to feel secure in the connection. Sometimes, I genuinely don't have anything to say because im too tired, etc. I got to focus on my day-to-day that when I finally do respond to him, I have a lot to talk about. I get excited when I get to say something interesting.

He doesn't make big promises or make fantasies. We talked about meeting in Europe in the fall where he expressed his desire to meet me there. Unfortunately, he has to find a job back home and I'm allowing myself to sit in this uncertainty. And he's also been open about that. He's just...warm and present..and slow (in a good way).

Regardless of whether he wants a relationship or not, it's the first time I felt truly grounded in my body. I tell myself, "I was okay before him, around him, and I will be without him." Of course, I'm not 100% in the clear and I think about him a lot, and I wonder what he's doing.

But I'm not panicking anymore. I eat and sleep well.

Crazy how one person can change things for you.

How do you stop replaying a dating situation in your head?
I recently had a situation with a guy I was seeing where I ignored a few things at first because I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Then his communication suddenly changed, plans got cancelled, and I eventually reacted emotionally.
I know I could’ve handled my reaction better, but I also know I wasn’t imagining the change in his behavior. Now I’m stuck regretting both my reaction and the things I tolerated beforehand.
For anyone with anxious attachment or who tends to overthink, how do you actually move past the regret and stop wondering what you could’ve done differently? I’m keeping myself busy, but mentally it’s still hard.

Thank you 🩷

What does your ideal relationship look like now vs what it looked like as an unhealed anxious? How different are your needs and expectations? How does your communication style and self soothing differ?

What exactly does it mean to emotionally manage your partner?

Trying to reduce your needs and communication to make them come back from deactivation?

Or basically self abandoning to have your needs met?

I dated someone for around two months. It started very intensely and, for the first time in my life, I experienced what felt like consistent romantic reciprocity.

He was very affectionate, communicative, intentional about seeing me, made me feel incredibly wanted and cared for... still every single day I was fighting a never ending anxiety that he was going to pull away... I had to put so much effort into knowing I was triggered and trying not to overtext or ask too much of him early on.

Towards the end, he started pulling away.
I became increasingly anxious and hypervigilant ... measuring response times, looking for changes in enthusiasm, wondering what everything meant.

Eventually I told him that communication no longer felt natural to me and that I needed some space. He acknowledged that he had been more absent, said he was sad about my decision but respected it, and told me I knew where to find him and that we could talk from time to time if I wanted.

We didn’t speak for over a month. Then he contacted me briefly this week about something relatively insignificant, and I feel like it reactivated something I had spent the entire month trying to let go of.

The thing is, I rationally understand this situation.
I know that relationship wasn’t making me feel secure anymore. I know I was becoming extremely activated and dependent on his behavior for emotional regulation. I know there are things I learned about him and his previous relationships that make me believe, with some distance, that this ending was probably the best outcome for me. I don’t actually think pursuing a relationship with him would be good for me.

I’m also doing okay in my actual life. I’m seeing my friends, making plans, trying new things, working, pursuing creative interests. I’m not sitting at home waiting for him. I barely talked about him for a while and felt like I was slowly taking away the enormous importance I had given him.

But emotionally, I can’t let go.

Since he contacted me, I think about him constantly again. I look at his Instagram even though I know it makes things worse. I fantasize about him missing me, wanting me again, us seeing each other and everything feeling electric again. I interpret things he posts and wonder whether they’re about another girl.. and then this tiny hopeful part of me wonders whether somehow they’re about me. I hate how much mental space I’m giving this.

And I think I’m beginning to understand that this is much bigger than him.

I’m 27, and this was genuinely the first time in my life that I experienced someone consistently making me feel romantically wanted, cared for and chosen.
I didn’t grow up with particularly emotionally stable parents, and I’ve carried a feeling of abandonment for a very long time. I think I’ve always unconsciously treated romantic love as this future place where eventually someone would choose me, see my value and give me the affection and consistency I’ve been looking for.

Except I had never actually experienced that reciprocity.

Then, briefly, I did.

And I remember essentially having this realization of: Oh. So this is what it feels like when someone actually likes me back.

Writing that at 27 honestly makes me incredibly sad lol.

So now I think part of me isn’t desperately holding onto him as much as it’s holding onto the only experience I have of feeling that way.

There’s this fear underneath everything that says: What if that was my only chance? What if nobody makes me feel that way again? When will someone choose me again?

And I notice that this belief follows me into dating too. Meeting someone can very quickly acquire the underlying weight of: “Will I finally be enough for this person?”

I know intellectually how unhealthy that is.
I know my life isn’t about being chosen. I know another person’s romantic interest isn’t evidence of my worth. I know I need to decenter romantic relationships and develop a relationship with myself where I don’t need someone else’s desire to prove that I’m valuable.

And I am trying to do that.

But there’s an emotional part of me that doesn’t seem to understand what my rational mind understands.

I also don’t want healing to become another way of rejecting myself. I can’t bully myself into not being sad. I can’t tell my body, “We’ve logically established that this person isn’t right for us, so attachment terminated effective immediately.” My body just doesn’t work that way.

My therapist has also told me that some relational wounds can’t necessarily be completely healed intellectually, and that healthier relational experiences can eventually be part of healing them.

That makes sense to me, but it also leaves me wondering what I can do for myself now, while I’m alone and this wound is activated.

I want to learn how to give myself some of the safety, consistency and sense of worth that I’ve spent my life hoping romantic love would finally give me.

So for people working on anxious attachment: how do you work with the part of yourself that understands all of this intellectually but is still desperately reaching for external reassurance? How do you stop feeding the fantasy without shaming yourself for still wanting it? And how have you learned to trust that losing someone’s love doesn’t mean losing your chance to ever feel loved like that again?

I’ve been with my avoidant partner for six months and the past 2 weeks have been really rough. I’m not good at communicating and I kind of unloaded on them some stuff I’ve been holding in and it caused a big rupture. Since then I’ve been on edge, I apologized to them and took accountability for how I communicated poorly. Anyway, I’ve been on edge since, extra monitoring, looking for signs they don’t feel the same, etc.

A few weeks ago they told me the amount of reassurance I need is annoying so I’ve been trying to deal with this anxiety on my own. They started a new job and have been less affectionate and I noticed they didn’t touch me the entire time we were in the car the other night which is unusual. They also left earlier than usual and that made me spiral.

I tried self soothing, I tried going for walks and cooking and doing stuff for myself but it sat in the back of my head the entire time. I tried being less emotionally dependent on them for a day and tried giving them space (without them asking) and I just spiraled completely, I never told them how I was feeling in fear they’d get annoyed. I was really trying to be healthy and deal with it on my own. I was reminding myself that we just spent 5 days together, they meet my bids for connection, that they do love me and it’s probably just because of their new job.

When I was trying to give them space they ask why I’m being off and why I feel a million miles away. I told them I was trying to give you space and they didn’t really respond much.

I’ve never been self aware of my spirals before, I’ve never been aware of my unhealthy habits before, now I am and I’m trying to work on them but it’s so hard. I feel like if I had been able to say “hey I feel a shift, is everything okay?” Or even “im feeling disconnected, can you give me some extra love?” They usually respond positively when I ask for extra love. I wish we could have talked about it a little before I spiraled for two days I wouldn’t have caused another issue.

The issue being them getting big news and telling me late at night. And me immediately being like why didn’t you tell me sooner, really weird you didn’t tell me sooner. They got mad and told me it was a turn off and annoying. I felt like feeling their distance and them waiting to tell me for a little bit was confirming my fear that they were shutting me out.

I felt so much shame and I’ve still been in this spiral of course.

Is it valid for me to want to be able to talk about my anxiety with my partner? or is this something I need to just deal with on my own? I really think if I had talked to them a bit and got some reassurance I wouldn’t have nearly as bad.

Edit: the things that threw me off were the fact they barley touched me and left early that one day, didn’t tell me they loved me before work, they usually say it every single day, and they didn’t text me back for 5 hours which they’ve never done before.

My partner and I have been together for 6 months, recently there has been a major shift in their texting habits, I know this is probably unhealthy but they text me “I love you” every single morning and before we were saying I love you they’d send me a heart every morning same time without fail, tell me they love me before going to work, and always say “im going to bed I love you” they also used to call me this one pet name every single day multiple times a day and they haven’t said it in 5 days which is so so unusual. There has definitely been a shift and it’s been sending me into a spiral.

They just started a new job and they have a lot of major life stuff going on, but still even in all that they would still be very consistent with those things and suddenly it just changed. Everything was fine over the weekend last week, they called me that pet name, we cuddled a lot, but then the next day after I left things were different.

I saw them in person yesterday and they kissed me when they saw me, put their arm around me when we were sitting and then kept pulling me in for hugs when we were standing outside. They said they loved me before they left.

But things still feel super weird over text. When I’m off over text they always ask what’s up. They say why do you feel like a million miles away, why are you being so weird. So I feel like it’s not weird for me to bring that up but I’m not sure.

I’ve just been really struggling. In the past I’ve brought up issues in a really unhealthy way and put them on the defense and made them feel attacked. I don’t want to do that anymore.

So how do I cope with this shift and how do I eventually bring it up in a healthy way and when?

I was reading that secure people notice shifts too they just bring it up and deal with it differently

I realized recently that I’m not nearly as healed as I believed I was. I guess because this is the first serious relationship I’ve been in a long time. My last serious relationship ended due to attachment issues and I’ve done so much work on myself regarding my anxiety and learned so much because I know that if I ever want a healthy and stable relationship I need to heal this part of me.

My current partner and I discussed our attachment styles and talked about how we want to break old patterns in this relationship.

Recently I’ve realized that I’m not nearly as healed as I thought I was, I react when I’m triggered, I ask for too much reassurance and rely on them too much to soothe me. I also communicate very poorly when I’m triggered.

This caused some issues and my partner told me the amount of reassurance I need is draining and I’ve noticed the way I communicate when I’m triggered is really unhealthy and just causes more issues.

I’ve decided to seriously dedicate time and energy to heal myself and work on these issues not only for myself but for this relationship as well. This is the best relationship I’ve ever been in, I’ve never been treated better, never had someone who matched my affectionate energy so much, or talked to me about a future together in such depth and this isn’t something I want to lose.

My partner and I agreed to talk tomorrow in person about understanding each other better, which was my idea, after I reacted to something while triggered and they got really frustrated.

I am planning on telling them that I am for the first time ever aware of my unhealthy behavior and see how it’s affecting our relationship and that I want to prioritize working on myself and my communication skills and that I’m sorry that my anxiety has caused so many ruptures in such a short amount of time. I want to take accountability and let them know I’m aware of it and serious about change and having a strong and healthy relationship. I want them to know that I care about their emotional safety as well and I want us both to be able to understand each other and communicate effectively during conflict.

I’m just not sure what’s right and wrong to say or if this conversation is needed at all. I know the best thing to do is just consistently better myself and work on myself and that’s the only way real change will happen.

I’m not sure if this is unhealthy or not or appropriate to communicate to a partner