3 Steps to Manage Anxious Attachment When Your Date or Partner is Pulling Away
It’s no fun when the person you want to connect with doesn’t want to connect with you. It can feel downright devastating, especially if it’s a partner who you’ve spent years with, building a life together. But even when you’ve only been dating a few months, when someone special starts pulling away, not returning texts for long periods of time or saying that they “need space”, it can push some painful buttons inside us. And that’s why someone not returning a text can be a huge trigger for the anxiously attached.
The anxious attachment style developed out of a lack of consistency and predictability in early parent relationships. For many people, a parent was available part of the time, or good at giving attention part of the time, but other times was distracted — by work, a sibling, or their own attachment wounds. This makes connection a bit unpredictable, and leaves someone always wanting reassurance that the relationship is okay.
So understanding your reaction is important. But once you understand where an anxious attachment reaction is coming from, what do you do about it?
Step 1:
Take steps to calm yourself. There are so many techniques and tools for self-soothing, and perhaps you have some favorite go-tos. An easy one is to take a gentle breath in and then exhale for a little bit longer. Some people like to count while breathing, for example counting to 4 on the in-breath and 8 on the out-breath.¹
Having an exhale that is longer than the inhale stimulates the vagus nerve and activates the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system — the branch responsible for functions like “rest and digest”.
Step 2:
Address the underlying fear. You may or may not be consciously aware of this fear, but fear of abandonment — the fear of being left — is at the heart of anxious attachment.
You might address this through working on self-love.
Or you might address this by working with the aspects of yourself that is afraid of being abandoned.
If you enjoy guided meditations, you can listen to a relaxing audio to work on releasing this fear, which will also help you with Step 1 - relaxing. Pollenating two flowers with one bee, as I like to say — because I love birds, and who wants to go around killing them, as in the saying “killing two birds with one stone”? That’s horrible.
Step 3:
Remind yourself who is in your life now.
This may be leaning into the feeling of the consistent, reliable people in your life now, or it may be simply making a list of all the people you have. Too often with anxious attachment, people can forget or ignore their own resources. There is a “yes but” that arises. Yes I have a friend, but she’s not always available. Well sure… but is anyone always available? Retraining our minds away from “yes but” and toward “Yes, I have this” is a key to moving towards secure attachment.
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If you find yourself stressing out about someone pulling away, and you have an anxious attachment style, you can find more methods like these in my course, Secure Attachment Rewire.
P.S.
If you want to feel relaxed *and* safe, and work on increasing the capacity for trust, you might enjoy my Feel Safe Pack.
Learn how to support your anxious attachment system with an upcoming LIVE visualization workshop created by a somatic attachment practitioner.
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Citations:
¹ Gerritsen, R. J. S., & Band, G. P. H. (2018, October 9). Breath of Life: The Respiratory Vagal Stimulation Model of Contemplative Activity. Frontiers in human neuroscience. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6189422/.
