Where’d I Go? Perspectives on Anxious Attachment
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Listicle-led blogs about anxious attachment abound. They dominate the first pages of over eleven million Google results for anxious attachment. We get presented with 5-6 bullet points that includes “symptoms” such as: fear of abandonment. “Neediness” that demands constant reassurance (yet rarely feels reassuring). Tracking the mood and behaviour in others. Overthinking interactions. People-pleasing. Difficulty in setting boundaries. Feeling anxious when a loved one feels distant.
Condensed into a bulleted list, we get an SEO-friendly Attachment Theory 101 of symptoms.
Which is very unhelpful because the anxiously attached person gets lost amongst them.
And ironic, as most clients identifying with an anxious attachment style often describe precisely this - that a part of them feels somehow missing. So, no listicles here. Instead, we dive into the crux of it:
When your attention is directed towards someone else, what happens to your own sense of self?
Where’d I go? When our centre of gravity tilts out, not in
In secure attachment, we gradually learn to regulate in two directions: with another person and within ourselves. We can reach towards someone for comfort without our entire sense of steadiness depending upon the response we’re given.
In anxious attachment, that balance tilts heavily outwards until it can feel as though I only exist in response to you.
The psychoanalyst David J. Wallin (2007) describes this dependency as an over reliant need for interactive regulation, one where our attention is organised around the person we're attached to. We watch them. We track them. We learn to read their face, voice, mood, and response to the slightest detail. Because knowing how they are lets us know how we are.
When You’re OK, I’m OK
Wallin vividly describes clients speaking as though their “centre of gravity” (2007, p. 110) existed outside themselves, in the minds and reactions of others. Logically then, if my centre of gravity lies somewhere in you, then knowing how you is essential to knowing how I am.
Seen this way, hyper-attunement in anxious attachment looks far less like “neediness” (an expression I find deeply dismissive) and more a life-or-death adaptation to remaining in relationship (Heller and LaPierre, 2012).
Here, the distinction between attention and attunement is important because we can pay extraordinary attention to another person without necessarily encountering them.
When every shift in their face, voice, or behaviour impacts us, looking at them really becomes a system for tracking safety.
Hyper-attunement - a story from therapy
I once worked with a client who brought this to life.
Week after week, as I walked down the stairs to let them in, through the little square of glass in the door I'd see a wide smile - followed immediately by the same question: “Hi Kate, how are you?”
For weeks, I thought little of it, until one day in early spring, something was off.
It felt like my client was staring at me - almost studying me as I let them in.
They were quieter walking upstairs and looked nervous.
Once we were sitting down, they struggled to answer me when I asked what they’d like to explore.
Two minutes in, they stopped mid-sentence and looked at me with a frown.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to pry but are you sure you're OK?” they asked. “You don't look your usual self today,”
They were so concerned about me that for a second, I hesitated, wondering why they were so distracted.
And then, it dawned on me: for the last three months, they had been tracking me as closely as I'd been tracking them.
“I’m OK, I just have hay fever. Got the sniffles and my eyes are streamy, but I’m fine, honestly”, I explained.
I will never forget what came next. Their entire demeanour eased in a nano-second.
“Ohmygod, thank God!” they gasped. “I thought … I thought you'd been crying!” they exclaimed, before looking down and adding tenderly, “I thought you were upset.”
Reading between the lines
My client’s weekly “How are you?” wasn't simply politeness. Knowing something about my internal state helped them establish whether our relationship - and the very room they were entering - was safe.
This encounter marked an important opening in our work: what happened inside them when something changed in me?
Hyper-attunement like this reveals a profound sensitivity and genuine care - as you can see, I hope.
However, in anxious attachment, this care and sensitivity got put to work, and became a full time job way before it ever should.
The sensitive child became a watcher. A guard. A toy soldier. A protector of parents who lacked the capacity to protect.
In anxiously attached individuals, this watching and standing guard spreads into all other relationships, including therapy.
When noticing becomes watching, then attunement becomes a safety mechanism. We are no longer simply looking into the eyes of another, we are looking for something: namely, what everything about them might mean for us.
Finding ground and staying grounded
If our internal alarm is already sounding, we have very little room to wonder about what we're experiencing. A changed expression can become evidence. A delayed reply can become certainty.
Something feels wrong quietly becomes something is wrong, and then - something is wrong with us.
Feeling enough ground in our body interrupts that movement. Less by making the feeling of groundlessness disappear, and more by creating enough space to recognise it as a shift - one that is happening within.
When we sense, “something happened in me when your face changed” webring curiosity to our own lived experience before rushing to fix it, numb it - or, become stressed and collapse into it.
Instead, we learn to reflect and tune in.
Where did I feel that?
What am I imagining has happened?
What do I actually know?
What don’t I yet know?
Can I hold not knowing, just for a moment, even though it’s super uncomfortable?
Shifting Storylines
Something shifts when we can hold what is happening inside us alongside the possibility that something quite different may be happening inside the other person. Neither can be known with certainty from a facial expression, a silence, or a text message.
There is a kind of groundlessness here. The story we've quickly constructed about ourselves, the other person, or what is happening between us may feel like solid ground but often it’s a projection of stories that shut down curiosity, and push us into overthinking and catastrophising.
Finding solid ground isn’t about finding ways to avoid feeling anxious - although one can try!
It’s more about finding enough internal steadiness to tolerate it. To bear a little groundlessness while remaining present, connected, and in relationship.
Where do I end, and you begin? Blurry boundaries and anxious attachment
When so much of our attention has been organised around others, turning it inwards often reveals two unexpectedly challenging questions:
What do I need?
What do I want?
For someone who has spent years noticing what other people need, feel, expect or might be about to do, these are astonishingly hard questions to answer. Putting oneself first represents an existential risk.
This is why anxious attachment is linked to people-pleasing and boundary issues. Saying no. Disagreeing. Wanting something different. Or simply allowing another person to be disappointed weighs so heavy. Why? Because it can feel as though we’re putting the relationship itself at risk. Which sometimes, may well be the case.
Boundaries are a minefield if you’ve grown up feeling unsure of yourself and wary of others.
A boundary isn't simply a boundary that we set and stand by as books on the subject advise. It represents a core dilemma:
What happens to us if I stop being what you need me to be?
Why “you do you” is tricky in anxious attachment
The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler described separation-individuation as the gradual emergence of a sense of ourselves as separate while still in relationship with another.
Her original work has been re-evaluated with more recent infant research, but separation-individuation remains an important way of thinking about the development of Self and Other in psychology (Pine, 2004).
In our adult relationships, holding our ground while staying connected asks for something closely related: differentiation. This isn't another word for independence. It is our capacity to stay connected to our own centre of gravity while remaining in relationship.
Simply put, this means I can stay close to you without throwing my own needs out the window. I can care that you're disappointed without turning your disappointment into evidence that I've done something wrong.
Or, as I have often heard in therapy, that I am wrong.
When we can bear the discomfort of needing someone while still believing that what we need is just as valid, so we can gently ease our way back to connection.
Here the boundary between Self and Other becomes less like a wall and more like a meeting place. Where two experiences can exist at once.
This is incredibly hard for people with anxious attachment, but it’s where the heart of the work lies.
From longing for another, to encountering an Other
When we talk about attachment, what we are really talking about is Love.
A child doesn’t think in terms of attachment; a child either experiences love, or the absence of love (Heller & LaPierre, 2012). It is black and white because a small person has no capacity to see the greys. To reason. To comprehend context.
Approaching love from an existential lens, the author Iris Murdoch (1999) describes Love as the painful realisation that something other than ourselves is fully and independently real.
Allowing another person to be real includes accepting that they have moods we didn't cause, thoughts we can't read, and an inner life we can never truly know. Only imagine. Only long to feel that we are part of it.
For anxious attachment, this not knowing can evoke a feeling of separateness that is very, very scary. Terrifyingly lonely, even.
And yet, having a clear sense of where I end and you begin is where relationship becomes possible.
The philosopher Martin Buber (1970) offers another way of thinking about this through I–It and I–Thou.
Something changes when another person stops being someone we interpret, monitor, or look to for relief, and someone we can genuinely meet: another subject, with an experience separate from our own.
Yet to encounter someone as truly separate means giving up most of what we think we know about them.
Now, when other people are a source of bewilderment a lot of the time, it makes sense that monitoring their every move and mood becomes a way of trying to make a relationship feel more predictable and safe.
Except, it rarely does.
In the exhausting work of trying to keep “us” safe, there’s less room to discover who the other person really is.
When we long for another person so intensely there’s little space to really encounter who they are once we’ve found them.
It’s a painful cycle that feeds the loneliness anxiously attached people already feel.
Seeing myself in others
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the essence of an encounter beautifully:
El ojo que ves no es
ojo porque tú lo veas;
es ojo porque te ve.
Which translates as:
The eye you see is not
an eye because you see it;
it is an eye because it sees you.
(Machado, 1983)
When I talk about meeting ourselves in therapy, I don't mean searching for something to expose, challenge, or fix. This effectively lands us in Buber’s It mode.
What I mean is encountering ourselves by being encountered by an Other.Someone who allows us to be seen - and met - just as we are.
This is critical when most of our attention has learned to travel in the opposite direction: outwards, towards somebody else's needs, feelings, and state of mind.
Why Therapy is Less About Helping Someone and More About Meeting Someone
Over time, therapy can offer somewhere to experience another kind of relationship.
How?
Well, I can notice what happens in you without assuming it tells me everything about me. I can notice what happens in me without needing you to immediately change, fix, or get rid of what I find.
We become two people in the room with enough inner steadiness that they can see each other,we don't have to search the other's eyes to find our sense of ourselves.
We can meet there and relate to each other with reverence. As two perfectly imperfect humans, each trying to allow the other to simply Be.
As each of us does this together.
References
Buber, M. (1970). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner's Sons. (Original work published 1923).
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Machado, A. (1983). Times alone: Selected poems of Antonio Machado (R. Bly, Trans.). Wesleyan University Press.
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).
Pine F. (2004). Mahler's concepts of "symbiosis" and separation-individuation: revisited, reevaluated, refined. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52(2), 511–533.
Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
Did something here land for you?
If anything you’ve read brought up a feeling, explored a pattern, or made you question something in your life, you’re very welcome to get in touch. We can talk about whatever came up and see if working together might feel right.