Understanding Anxious Attachment

Understanding the psychology behind pursuit, protest, and the fear of abandonment

If you've ever been told you're "too needy" or "clingy" in relationships, you're probably familiar with anxious attachment—even if you've never heard the term.

Anxious attachment isn't a personality flaw. It's a protective strategy that formed early, in response to inconsistent or unpredictable caregiving. And it shows up in adult relationships as a heightened sensitivity to connection—and disconnection.

This article explores what anxious attachment actually is, how it manifests in relationships, and why understanding it matters for couples stuck in pursuer-distancer dynamics.

(This is part of a series on anxious-avoidant relationship patterns. For a comprehensive overview, see Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Patterns.)

Attachment patterns form in early childhood based on the consistency and responsiveness of caregivers.

For anxiously attached individuals, early caregiving was often:

• Inconsistent (sometimes responsive, sometimes unavailable)
• Unpredictable (you never knew if your needs would be met)
• Conditional (love felt earned through performance or pleasing)

This taught the nervous system a critical survival lesson: Connection is unreliable. You must work to keep it.

The anxious attachment strategy developed as a way to manage this uncertainty. If closeness couldn't be trusted to stay, you learned to:

• Monitor for signs of disconnection
• Escalate when connection felt threatened
• Protest when needs weren't being met

This wasn't manipulation. It was survival.

And in adulthood, that same protective strategy continues—even when the threat of abandonment is no longer real.

Anxious attachment doesn't look the same in everyone, but common patterns include:

Hypervigilance to connection:You track your partner's mood, tone, responsiveness. Small shifts—a delayed text, a shorter conversation, less affection—feel like warnings of abandonment.

Reassurance-seeking:You ask questions to confirm the relationship is okay: "Do you still love me?" "Are we good?" "Is something wrong?" Even when your partner says yes, the relief is temporary.

Protest behaviors:When you sense distance, your nervous system escalates. This can look like emotional intensity, pursuing conversation, criticism, or attempts to re-engage your partner through conflict.

Difficulty self-soothing:When your partner isn't available—physically or emotionally—it's hard to regulate on your own. You may feel abandoned, even when your partner is just tired or processing internally.

Fear of being "too much":You're aware of your own intensity. You worry that your needs will push your partner away. So you oscillate between expressing needs and suppressing them—which creates its own kind of instability.

None of this is intentional. It's a nervous system response to perceived threat.

From a nervous system perspective, anxious attachment operates through what's called the protest cycle.

When connection feels threatened, the nervous system activates. This activation isn't cognitive—it's physiological. Your body interprets disconnection as danger.

The protest response looks like:

• Pursuing conversation or closeness
• Asking repeated questions
• Emotional escalation or intensity
• Criticism (as an attempt to re-engage)
• Anger or frustration (to signal distress)

The goal of protest is to restore connection. It's the nervous system saying: "I need you. Don't leave. Come back."

But here's the problem: protest often pushes away the very connection it's trying to restore.

For partners with avoidant attachment, protest feels like pressure, overwhelm, or demands they can't meet. Their response is often to withdraw further—which confirms the anxious partner's fear and intensifies the cycle.

This is how anxious-avoidant dynamics become self-reinforcing. (For more on this dynamic, see Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Patterns.)

It's easy to pathologize anxious attachment. You might think: If I could just stop being so needy, the relationship would be fine.

But anxious attachment isn't a defect. It's a protective part that developed to keep you safe in an environment where closeness was unreliable.

From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, the anxious part is doing its job: monitoring for threats to connection and escalating when necessary to prevent abandonment.

This part isn't wrong. It's adaptive.

The work isn't to eliminate this part. It's to:

• Understand what it's protecting against
• Recognize when it's activated
• Develop capacity to regulate without needing your partner to fix it

This doesn't mean suppressing your needs. It means understanding the protective strategy beneath them.

Anxious attachment doesn't exist in isolation. It shows up most intensely in relationship with avoidant attachment.

Here's why:

The anxious partner's pursuit triggers the avoidant partner's need for space.

The avoidant partner's withdrawal triggers the anxious partner's fear of abandonment.

Each partner's protective strategy reinforces the other's fear—creating a cycle neither intended but both perpetuate.

The anxious partner thinks: If I don't pursue, I'll be abandoned.

The avoidant partner thinks: If I don't withdraw, I'll be consumed.

Both are responding to real, historical wounds. Neither is trying to hurt the other.

But without awareness of these dynamics, the cycle continues. (For more on the anxious-avoidant trap, see Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Patterns.)

Anxious attachment isn't fixed. It's a learned strategy—and it can become more flexible with awareness and practice.

What helps:

Recognizing the pattern in real time:When you can notice "I'm in protest right now" or "My nervous system is activated," you create space between the impulse and the response. This doesn't eliminate the fear, but it gives you a choice.

Developing self-regulation capacity:Learning to co-regulate with your partner is important. But so is developing the ability to self-soothe—to sit with discomfort without needing your partner to fix it immediately.

Understanding the protective part:When you recognize that protest is a protective strategy, not a personality flaw, it becomes less shameful. You can start to work with this part instead of fighting it.

Working with a depth-oriented therapist:Anxious attachment isn't resolved through communication tools alone. It requires exploring the early relational experiences that shaped the pattern and working with the nervous system states that drive it.

As a licensed couples therapist (LPCC) specializing in anxious-avoidant dynamics, I work with couples to understand the unconscious forces driving their patterns—not just manage symptoms.

This approach integrates:

• Nervous system regulation: Learning to track and regulate activation states

• Parts work (IFS): Understanding the protective strategies driving anxious behaviors

• Psychoanalytic depth: Exploring the early attachment injuries shaping current dynamics

• Somatic awareness: Working with the body's signals of threat and safety

The goal isn't to eliminate anxious attachment. It's to develop awareness, regulation capacity, and compassion for the protective strategies both partners bring to the relationship.

For more on how this work addresses anxious-avoidant dynamics, see Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Patterns.

If you recognize anxious attachment patterns in yourself or your relationship, depth-oriented couples therapy offers a way to understand the forces beneath the cycle—and develop more flexibility in how you respond.

This work is available for couples in Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, and throughout Boulder County.

Schedule a free 20-minute consultation to explore whether this approach is right for your relationship.

Text: (303) 641-1514
Or book online: calendly.com/ksignoracci

About the Author:

Keri Signoracci, MA, LPCC, is a couples therapist in Boulder, Colorado, specializing in anxious-avoidant attachment dynamics and depth-oriented relational work. With advanced training in PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy), Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic therapy, and psychoanalytic approaches, Keri helps couples move beyond surface-level tools to address the unconscious forces shaping their relationships.

Serving couples in Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, and throughout Boulder County, Colorado.

Related Articles:

For a deeper understanding of anxious-avoidant relationship patterns, explore these related topics:

• What Is Avoidant Attachment? - The protective strategy of withdrawal and shutdown
• The Anxious-Avoidant Trap - Why you keep repeating the same dynamic
• Why Communication Tools Don't Work - Understanding why skills alone don't fix attachment wounds
• What To Expect In Depth-Oriented Couples Therapy - The process, timeline, and what actually changes
• Is Couples Therapy Right For Your Relationship? - Deciding whether this approach is the right fit