Understanding the Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment Pattern
Today, I continue discussing attachment styles on the anxious portion of the spectrum. Understanding the various attachment styles, supports development of Emotional Intelligence, which creates a foundation for strong personal and professional relationships. When we understand these attachment styles, it is easier to decipher our own emotions and reactions; and to understand the emotions and actions of those around us. It is important to remember that attachment styles may fluctuate based on interactions with others. For example, one is likely to feel less anxious and more secure when interacting with a supportive person, and more anxious dealing with those who express anxiety or avoidance in tone of voice or body language.
Such fluctuations become internally controllable, when we learn how to shift ourselves into secure patterns. This is because when we learn our default attachment style and understand what secure attachment looks like, we stop expecting our insecurities to be validated by external sources. We begin to validate our own truths and needs, without worrying if we are “acceptable” to others or any desire to try to please or fit into what anyone else expects. This is the heart of personal empowerment.
In my coaching work, I discuss the anxious-preoccupied style as the attachment system that loves deeply yet feels chronically unsafe, as this is how I have personally experienced this style. It forms when early experiences teach the nervous system that love is unpredictable - available one moment and withdrawn the next. Such unpredictability causes those with this style to learn to monitor closeness, over-read cues, and chase connection as a way to avoid emotional abandonment. What may be perceived as “neediness,” is actually the nervous system doing everything it can to protect you.
Core Characteristics of Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment
This attachment style is highly loving, deeply intuitive, and relationally intelligent—but it needs healing, grounding, and emotional re-patterning. Core characteristics include:
- Emotionally attuned, often hyper-attuned emotionally (empathic)
- Fearful of disconnection, silence, or emotional distance
- Overthinking, overanalyzing, and overexplaining
- Losing yourself in relationships to keep closeness
- Seeking reassurance to stabilize your emotions
- Inconsistent boundaries
- Confusing intensity with emotional safety
How This Attachment Style Shows Up in Your Personal Life
Romantic Relationships
Those with Anxious-Preoccupied attachment tend to feel deeply and sometimes fearfully. The closer they get to someone, the greater the anxiety and fear of losing that connection becomes. One may experience the following symptoms related to romantic relationships:
- Worry about being “too much”
- Feel anxious waiting for replies
- Experience emotional highs and emotional crashes
- Internalize other people’s shifts in energy as your fault
- Prioritize others’ needs over your own
- Try to fix, help, or prove your worth
You want closeness, but your nervous system is scanning for emotional danger. Love becomes a cycle of desire, fear, and over-functioning. You may find yourself with Dismissive-Avoidant or “narcissistic” partners who become overwhelmed by the amount of effort and attention you pour into the connection to help stabilize these feelings within yourself. You become the chaser, and they become the runner. Learning to validate your own needs and developing a strong sense of self-trust and self-worth, allows you to free yourself from this insecure attachment style and move into a space where you know:
- You are not “too much” and your thoughts and feelings are perfectly valid even if another doesn’t wish to accept them
- You don’t worry about replies - whether one comes or not has no impact on your worth
- Your emotions are not based on the words or actions of anyone else, reducing the emotional roller coaster feeling that comes from working so hard for external validation
- You recognize emotional shifts in others as their own, rather than taking on accountability or responsibility for their feelings or blaming yourself when the shift has nothing to do with you
- You prioritize yourself without guilt or feeling selfish, because you know that nourishing your inherent value and worth allows you to connect with others, rather than enmesh yourself in their emotions or insecurities.
Friendships
In friendships, those with anxious-preoccupied attachment style experience similar emotions and anxieties as they do in romantic relationships, to a slightly lesser degree. You may:
- Worry about being forgotten
- Be hyperaware of tone changes
- Feel hurt when others pull back
- Carry friendships emotionally
- Apologize excessively
- Feel you're giving more than you receive
You show up fully, but sometimes at the expense of yourself. The shift to secure attachment allows you to accept that true friends won’t forget you, that changes in their tone don’t necessarily equal changes in their feelings of friendship towards you, and that you are not responsible for their emotional security. You no longer need to overgive or overapologize to feel accepted, because you know that any sense of being obliged to do so indicates an unhealthy, insecure connection. Secure friendships offer mutual acceptance, support, and generosity, without clinging or keeping score.
How Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment Impacts Your Professional Life
In my career, I have often heard that employees leave their personal lives at home and come to work without emotions. No matter how often I heard this, and tried to live up to the expectation, I found it to be akin to a request to cut off my left arm and leave it at home. Attachment style is primarily created from birth to age 7. We live the next decade or so according to these patterns, then we become employees. We don’t leave our attachment patterns at home once we reach working age. They follow us into the workplace; and no one teaches us about attachment styles or helps us to become securely attached, unless and until we seek our own therapists or investigate ourselves enough to know how to do the self work to accomplish this. Yet, everyday we are all expected to only express emotions and responses aligned with secure attachment when we show up to work.
Understanding our own default attachment style and all the other insecure types, along with what secure attachment is and what it looks like, helps us to check ourselves and to pick up on what coworkers may be experiencing through their default operating system. If we know, for example, that Joan is very anxious and afraid of rejection - while we recognize the high value of the work she produces - we can let go of negative perceptions and communicate in a way that supports growth in her confidence, as well as a sense of being an accepted part of the team.
Without understanding the various insecure attachment styles, and that everyone has a default attachment style, we cannot reprogram ourselves into secure attachment, nor can we express emotional intelligence in the workplace. I believe that an emotionally intelligent workforce is the intended goal of employers, who ask employees to leave emotions at home. I also believe that more companies should include the development of emotional intelligence in their training programs in order to create more grounded and cohesive teams.
With anxious-preoccupied attachment style, you may:
- Worry excessively about making mistakes
- Feel anxious about feedback
- Read into tone, emails, or silence
- Overextend yourself to maintain approval
- Experience imposter syndrome
- Struggle to trust your own competence
- Feel emotionally activated by perceived disconnection
Attachment healing helps you not only love better—but lead better, communicate better, and thrive professionally with grounded self-worth.
The Path from Anxious-Preoccupied to Secure Attachment
Healing this style doesn’t require becoming “less emotional.” You’re not too much. You’re not dramatic. Your emotional depth is power. Reprogramming your system to recognize connection as safe, stable, and available; and that you are worthy without proving, performing, or overgiving allows a sense of worthiness, acceptance, and belonging to strengthen confidence and self-trust. To get here, I guide clients through the following steps.
1. Build Inner Safety First
Secure attachment begins internally. This looks like:
- Validating your own feelings
- Learning to calm your body without external reassurance
- Separating your worth from anyone’s behavior
- Creating safety through routines, rituals, grounding, and self-soothing
When your body feels safe, relationships stop feeling like survival - regardless of the type of relationship.
2. Strengthen Emotional Regulation
Your emotions are not a problem. They are signals that connect to both fears and securities. Activation of your nervous system creates an inability to self-differentiate between the programming of the default insecure attachment style and secure thoughts and behaviors.
Practice:
- Deep belly breathing
- Counting breath cycles
- Sensory grounding
- Mindfulness
- Gentle movement
- Naming your emotion before responding
Regulation isn’t about suppressing feelings; it’s about supporting them.
3. Reframe Anxiety-Based Thoughts
The anxious mind assumes:
- “They’re pulling away.”
- “I did something wrong.”
- “They’re losing interest.”
As you heal, these become:
- “I can check in without spiraling.”
- “Their behavior is not a reflection of my worth.”
- “One moment of discomfort doesn’t mean abandonment.”
Thoughts shift. Emotions soften. Trust grows.
4. Create Healthy Boundaries
Anxious attachment often collapses boundaries to maintain closeness; if it does not avoid them altogether. By aligning boundaries to personal core values, we create emotional safety; whereas, collapsing them destroys personal safety and opens the door to having our core values violated. Allowing our core values to be violated, diminishes our self-worth, slashes our self-trust, and crushes our self-identity. After all, how could we be ourselves if we are constantly trying to be what we think others want.
Anyone who disrespects your boundaries, and does not work to correct their actions when you kindly express your boundary to them, does not have your best interest in mind. They will not like you more because you give in. Instead, they will feed on your self-sacrifice, until they annihilate your self-worth. At which point, they can “prove” they were right to be Avoidant. You see, anxious types and avoidant types are two sides of the same coin - and in both types boundaries are weak. Securely attached people will not knowingly disrespect a boundary, for it has no impact on them.
Healthy boundaries allow you to:
- Manage energy
- Protect your emotional bandwidth
- Communicate your limits
- Build respect and reciprocity
- Repair trust with yourself
You learn that you don’t lose love by honoring yourself.
5. Practice Secure Communication
Instead of hinting, overexplaining, or withdrawing:
- State your needs clearly
- Ask questions without fear
- Express emotions without expecting someone to fix them
- Share your truth without overjustifying it
Secure attachment isn’t perfect communication—it's honest communication.
What Secure Attachment Feels Like
When you shift into secure attachment, everything changes—from relationships to your career to your self-perception.
In Personal Life
Secure attachment feels like:
- Emotional steadiness
- Confidence in being loved
- Trust in yourself and others
- Comfortable independence
- Healthy interdependence
- Clear boundaries
- Repair instead of rupture
- Conversations instead of spirals
- Love without fear
Your relationships become grounded, reciprocal, peaceful, and deeply nourishing.
In Professional Life
Secure attachment at work feels like:
- Confidence without overcompensation
- Ease with feedback
- Self-assurance in your abilities
- Healthy communication
- Assertive boundaries
- Trust in your instincts
- A calm nervous system even in high-pressure settings
You step into your leadership energy—without losing your sensitivity or empathy.
Final Empowering Note
Healing anxious-preoccupied attachment isn’t about becoming “less.” It’s about becoming rooted, grounded, and emotionally whole. Your sensitivity is your superpower. Your depth is a gift. Your emotions are wise. Your heart is becoming secure, strong, and radiant.
**Please check out my Self-Guided Programs, under Services, on my website, for 21 day program guides for a deeper dive into Values Development, Boundaries, and Emotional Intelligence. Committing to 30 minutes to an hour of focused work each day for 21 days will create new habits and support your shift into a securely attached life. I am here to help guide you through personal coaching - including a FREE initial consultation.**
Coaching Worksheet: Rewiring Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment
Use this worksheet to support your personal transformation.
1. Pattern Awareness
What situations most activate your attachment anxiety?
(Ex: silence, slow responses, uncertain plans, emotional shifts.)
List three recent triggers:
1.
2.
3.
2. Emotional Mapping
When I feel anxious, the story I tell myself is:
The deeper emotion underneath is:
☐ fear
☐ sadness
☐ unworthiness
☐ rejection
☐ abandonment
3. Nervous System Support Plan
My top three calming strategies:
1.
2.
3.
What helps me return to myself?
4. Rewriting the Narrative
Choose a recurring anxious thought.
Old Narrative:
Secure Narrative:
5. Secure Communication Practice
Write a grounded, honest message for moments of activation.
Secure Statement Example:
“I’m feeling a little activated and wanted to check in. Our connection matters to me, and I’d love some clarity when you have a moment.”
6. Boundary Awareness
Which type of boundary do you need to strengthen?
☐ Emotional
☐ Time
☐ Communication
☐ Energetic
☐ Relational
Boundary I will practice this week:
7. Self-Worth Ritual
Write three self-affirming statements that support secure attachment:
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