What Creates Anxious Attachment? Childhood Experiences that can Create Anxiously Attached Adults

Imagine it’s your birth day today, the very first day you arrive on the outside. There’s a person or two to take you home and whether they realise it (or are ready to) or not, they’re about to start shaping the adult you become.

Their job on top of that, is to keep you alive until you’re old enough to do it yourself. Your job, as a brand new being, is to do the things that encourage the people to meet your needs. Early on, you’re running on pure instinct. You make the noises that your ancestors have made for all of human history to get the caretakers to take care of you.

Somewhere deep in that ancient wiring of yours is the awareness that there is a delicate ecosystem that exists between you and the grown-ups. You need them. It doesn’t take long for your incredible brain to start to notice patterns, to learn what is effective and what is not with this particular set of caregivers.

The set that you have received are an interesting pair.

One is omnipresent. It feels wonderful, so safe. Their presence is always within your tiny reach. They are right there whenever you open your eyes. You never need to make too many of the noises you can make, because they seem to know what you need before you even need it.  

The other one doesn’t register in your awareness as much. Sometimes they appear and try to take you out of touching distance of the omnipresent parent. It’s not very nice and you scream and squall and that soon gets you put back in your rightful place, in the arms of the one that knows just the right way to make you feel safe and relaxed.

As you grow, it’s like you and the omnipresent parent grow more and more in sync. The other one, to their credit, improves in your estimation too. They are quite fun when they’re around, and they seem to like playing with you now you’re a bit bigger. You’ve learned just the way to get them to laugh and play just a bit longer. Sometimes they stop abruptly, which feels terrible, but thankfully omnipresent parent is always right there soothe you.

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Now you are five. You go to school. Omnipresent parent – omnipresent no longer, thanks to this forced separation, so let’s call them Parent A – drops you at the classroom door each day. You make all the noises you can think of to get them to stay. They look very sad too but they won’t.

After school though Parent A is still there for everything you need or want, you lucky thing. They make everything special. You barely know what it means to feel disappointment, or hurt, or fear. If one of those emotions even looks in your direction Parent A is there to chase it away.

If Parent A is your magical protector, Parent B is your best friend. When they’re not busy, of course. Or tired. Or in a bad mood. But when they’re none of those things, they’re the funnest and you feel like the most special kid in the whole world.

And, clever little thing that you are, you’ve developed a radar for when Parent B isn’t in the mood for you. By the time you are 7 you can tell this by how Parent B pulls into the driveway. Sometimes when you detect the bad mood you can do funny things or sweet things and the mood drops away, but sometimes that backfires too. Parent A wipes your tears while shooting daggers at Parent B and tells you not to worry and that Parent B loves you very much.

And they do, you know that. Later, Parent B will pop their head round your bedroom door with a grin and a cuddle and all will be right in the world. Your radar is sharpened. Next time, you’ll know just what to do.

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This story is a fictional example illustrating two of the possible routes to the development of an anxious-preoccupied attachment style.

Parent B demonstrates the more classical interaction pattern between a caregiver and child that leads to anxious attachment. The inconsistency in how Parent B responds creates a child that learns to moderate themselves to try and appease the parent, and maintain a sense of care, attention, and connection.

The child who learns to gauge their parent’s mood by how they enter a room becomes the adult who scans faces and feels a sense of disquiet if their partner is breathing differently. They often feel a sense of responsibility for managing others’ feelings and experiences, as well as tend to assume others’ moods are a direct result of their own actions. This can lead to the people-pleasing and self-sacrificing behaviours that the anxious attachment style is known for.

Parent A is an illustration of a less-discussed pathway to anxious attachment — the overly protective parent. Whether driven purely by well-intended love or the parent’s own fears and insecurities, always protecting a child from experiencing and learning to manage more difficult feelings does them a disservice. The child is deprived of the opportunity to learn self-regulation skills that underpin self-trust and self-confidence. They internalise that the only source of comfort is another person, and that being alone (or independent) is frightening.

In the story, Parent A also provides an extreme model of love. In attempting to be nearly perfectly attuned to the child, the child learns that a) This is what it means to be loved, and b) This is what it means to show love. An adult with anxious attachment might pursue an idealised version of connection, believing that this unattainable, perfect standard is what they should both give and receive with a partner.

All this might feel like it’s impossible for parents to raise securely attached children. Too little love? Bad. Too much love? Bad. Thankfully, children and their attachment systems are not as delicate as we might think.

Parenting like that of Parent A or Parent B (or the parents in the avoidant attachment story) is not an unavoidable, inevitable pathway to attachment issues for everyone. Perhaps through a combination of individual personality and experiences of other more steady relationships, some people will still arrive to adulthood largely securely attached. Or they may have slight tendencies towards anxiety or avoidance when an important relationship is under stress but be able to cope without derailing. This is the point many people with anxious or avoidant attachment styles arrive to after working on their patterns and they are able to have very fulfilling, happy relationships. Don’t feel hopeless or pressured that a person must be entirely securely attached in order to love and be loved.

The idea of “good-enough” parenting matches well with secure attachment — enough consistency that the child knows that they will be lovingly cared for even when there are inevitable mis-attunements and relational ruptures. Experiencing and navigating these bumps in the road helps to create adults that can tolerate and work through the normal missteps in healthy, happy, adult relationships too.

If you have been operating from anxious attachment, please know that it isn’t a fixed personality trait but a learned pattern. Being able to identify the origin of your own anxious attachment can be a helpful (though not always necessary) part of unlearning your default responses in relationships and learning how to create a truer internal sense of security with a partner.

 Whether you can put your finger on where it began or not, becoming aware of how anxious attachment behaviours have both tried to help you and held you back in your relationships is a first step to making change and building relationships that feel steady, calm, secure, and lasting.