Why You Keep Choosing Emotionally Unavailable People: Anxious Attachment Explained

Photo by Deise Elen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-using-smartphone-with-blank-screen-indoors-32619789/

You meet someone. The chemistry is electric. You text constantly for three weeks. Then they pull back.

Suddenly you're checking your phone every two minutes. Replaying every conversation. Wondering what you did wrong. Feeling physically sick when they don't respond. Making excuses for them. Convincing yourself they're just busy.

When they breadcrumb you with just enough attention to keep you hooked, the relief is overwhelming. You feel like you can breathe again. Until the next time they disappear.

You tell yourself you're being too needy. Too anxious. Too much.

Let me tell you what's actually happening: You have an anxious attachment style, and it's not a character flaw—it's how your nervous system learned to survive.

What anxious attachment actually is

Attachment theory explains how early relationships with caregivers shape the template for all your future relationships. When you're a child, you learn whether other people are reliable, whether your needs matter, and whether closeness is safe.

Anxious attachment develops when caregivers are inconsistent. Sometimes they're warm and attuned. Sometimes they're distracted, dismissive, or emotionally unavailable. You never know which version you're going to get.

Your nervous system learns: I have to work hard for love. I have to monitor constantly for signs of rejection. Closeness is wonderful but also terrifying because it could disappear at any moment.

This isn't about bad parents. A caregiver can be loving but overwhelmed, depressed, or dealing with their own trauma. Inconsistency can come from divorce, illness, addiction, moving frequently, or simply being raised by someone with their own unresolved attachment wounds.

The result is the same: you grow up with a hyperactivated attachment system. Your nervous system is constantly scanning for signs of rejection. You learned that protest—crying, clinging, pursuing—sometimes brings the person back. So your brain wired that pattern in deeply.

Anxious attachment affects approximately 20% of adults. You are not alone in this.

What anxious attachment looks like in adult relationships

If you have anxious attachment, some of these patterns will feel painfully familiar:

You're attracted to people who are emotionally unavailable, avoidant, or hot-and-cold. The inconsistency feels like home. Secure, consistent people feel boring or like something's wrong because there's no anxiety to signal that this is "real love."

You need constant reassurance. Not because you're needy, but because your nervous system genuinely can't register that you're safe in the relationship. The reassurance only lasts a few hours before the anxiety comes back.

You overanalyze everything. Tone of voice. Text response time. Whether they kissed you goodbye the same way as yesterday. Your brain is looking for threat because that's what it was trained to do.

You engage in protest behaviors. When someone pulls away, you pursue harder. You might text multiple times, show up unannounced, pick fights to get a reaction—anything to re-establish connection. These aren't manipulative; they're panic.

You have trouble being alone. Being single feels unbearable. You'd rather be in an unfulfilling relationship than face the void of no relationship at all.

You become the relationship manager. You're the one initiating, planning, checking in, doing the emotional labor. You convince yourself this is just being caring, but really you're trying to control the outcome by being indispensable.

You lose yourself in relationships. Your mood depends entirely on how they're treating you. Your interests, friendships, and goals fade. You become whoever you think they want you to be.

The relationship feels like an emotional rollercoaster. The highs are euphoric. The lows are devastating. This isn't passion—it's nervous system dysregulation.

Why "just be secure" doesn't work

Most attachment content tells you to "act secure" or "date secure people" or "work on your self-esteem."

This is useless advice because anxious attachment is a nervous system problem, not a mindset problem.

When someone you're attached to pulls away, your nervous system perceives this as a life-threatening emergency. Your amygdala lights up the same way it would if you were being chased by a predator. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. This is why the anxiety feels so physically overwhelming—it IS overwhelming. Your body thinks you're going to die.

You can't think your way out of a nervous system state. You can't CBT your way into feeling secure when your attachment system is screaming that abandonment is imminent.

This is also why anxious-avoidant relationships are so common and so destructive. The avoidant partner pulls away when things get close (their nervous system perceives intimacy as threatening). The anxious partner pursues harder (their nervous system perceives distance as life-threatening). This creates an endless loop where both people are in nervous system distress, constantly triggering each other.

What actually helps: Nervous system regulation first, then relational healing

Healing anxious attachment requires two parallel tracks: regulating your nervous system and building new relational experiences.

Nervous system regulation

Your first job is learning to calm your activated nervous system without needing another person to do it for you. This is called self-soothing, and it's not the same as "just calm down."

When you feel the panic of someone pulling away, your nervous system needs bottom-up regulation. This means body-based techniques:

Box breathing (4 counts in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold) activates your parasympathetic nervous system and signals safety to your brain.

Bilateral stimulation—tapping alternate knees or shoulders—interrupts the anxiety loop and helps your brain process the emotional activation.

Cold water on your face or holding ice triggers the dive reflex, which physically slows your heart rate.

Grounding techniques like 5-4-3-2-1 (name 5 things you see, 4 you touch, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, 1 you taste) bring you back into your body and the present moment instead of spiraling in worst-case scenarios.

The goal isn't to never feel anxious. The goal is to have tools that help you ride the wave without resorting to protest behaviors that damage the relationship.

Name the protest behavior before you act on it

Anxious attachment drives you to pursue, demand reassurance, pick fights, or create drama when you feel someone pulling away. These are protest behaviors—your nervous system's attempt to force reconnection.

Before you send that fourth text, show up at their house, or start a fight about something unrelated, pause. Say to yourself: "This is a protest behavior. My attachment system is activated. I'm not actually in danger."

This doesn't make the urge go away, but it creates enough space that you might not act on it. Over time, this builds what's called mentalization—the ability to observe your own attachment patterns instead of being controlled by them.

Distinguish between anxiety and intuition

Here's the hard part: sometimes your anxiety is your nervous system overreacting to normal relationship fluctuations. Sometimes your anxiety is actually intuition telling you this person is genuinely unavailable or treating you poorly.

Anxious attachment makes it almost impossible to tell the difference because everything feels like an emergency.

A rough guideline: If someone is consistently inconsistent—breadcrumbing, hot and cold, making promises they don't keep, only showing up when you're about to leave—that's not your anxiety being unreasonable. That's your nervous system correctly identifying that this person is not safe.

If someone is generally consistent but had a busy week and didn't text as much, and you're spiraling into "they don't love me anymore"—that's anxious attachment.

Therapy or coaching can help you learn to distinguish these. So can time. The more you practice nervous system regulation, the clearer your intuition becomes.

Build secure relational experiences

You can't heal attachment wounds alone. Attachment is relational, which means healing requires new relational experiences that contradict the old template.

This doesn't necessarily mean romantic relationships. Secure friendships, therapeutic relationships, support groups, even online communities can provide experiences of consistency, attunement, and rupture-and-repair that slowly rewire your attachment system.

In therapy, this happens through the relationship with your therapist. A good therapist will be consistent, will attune to your emotional state, and when there's a rupture (they're late to a session, they misunderstand you), they'll repair it. Over time, your nervous system learns: people can be consistent. Ruptures don't mean abandonment. You are worthy of repair.

In romantic relationships, this means choosing people who are securely attached or at least doing their own healing work. You need someone who can stay present when you're anxious instead of pulling away or getting defensive. Someone who can say, "I see you're scared right now. I'm not leaving. How can I help you feel safer?"

This feels counterintuitive because secure people don't create the anxious intensity that feels like love to your nervous system. You'll have to consciously override the part of your brain that says "no spark" when what it really means is "no anxiety."

Expect the healing to be nonlinear

You will have setbacks. You'll regulate beautifully for three months and then completely spiral when someone doesn't text back for six hours. You'll choose a secure partner and then self-sabotage because your nervous system can't handle the lack of drama.

This is normal. Attachment patterns were built over years or decades. They don't disappear in a few months of effort.

What changes is the recovery time. At first, a rupture might dysregulate you for days. After some healing, it's hours. Eventually, it's minutes. You still feel the anxiety, but you have the tools to move through it without destroying the relationship.

You're not too much

Let me be very clear about something: Anxious attachment is not the same as being needy, clingy, or too much.

Those are judgments other people place on you when they don't understand nervous system science or when they're avoiding their own attachment wounds.

Your needs for closeness, reassurance, and emotional availability are legitimate. The problem isn't the needs—it's that your nervous system overreacts to normal fluctuations in closeness, and you learned protest behaviors that push people away instead of bringing them closer.

Healing doesn't mean becoming less. It means learning to meet your needs in ways that don't dysregulate you or damage your relationships.

It means finding people who can actually meet you. And learning to recognize when someone can't or won't, so you can walk away before your nervous system gets hijacked.

What this means for your relationships going forward

If you have anxious attachment, your relationship with yourself has to change before your relationships with other people can change.

You need to learn that you can survive being alone. Not because being alone is the goal, but because when your nervous system believes abandonment equals death, you will tolerate absolutely anything to avoid it. You'll stay with people who hurt you. You'll betray yourself constantly. You'll lose your identity trying to become what you think will keep them.

The more you can regulate your own nervous system, the less power other people have over your emotional state. This doesn't mean you stop caring or become avoidant yourself. It means you can be in a relationship without losing yourself in it.

You also need to grieve. Grieve the childhood you needed where your caregivers were consistent. Grieve the relationships you've lost to anxious attachment patterns. Grieve the version of love you thought was real but was actually just anxiety.

And then you get to build something new. Relationships where closeness doesn't require panic. Where distance doesn't feel like death. Where you can have needs without feeling like you're too much.

That's possible. It requires work—nervous system work, relational work, probably therapeutic work. But it's possible.

Your attachment style is not your destiny. It's the starting point.

You meet someone. The chemistry is electric. You text constantly for three weeks. Then they pull back.

Suddenly you're checking your phone every two minutes. Replaying every conversation. Wondering what you did wrong. Feeling physically sick when they don't respond. Making excuses for them. Convincing yourself they're just busy.

When they breadcrumb you with just enough attention to keep you hooked, the relief is overwhelming. You feel like you can breathe again. Until the next time they disappear.

You tell yourself you're being too needy. Too anxious. Too much.

Let me tell you what's actually happening: You have an anxious attachment style, and it's not a character flaw—it's how your nervous system learned to survive.

What anxious attachment actually is

Attachment theory explains how early relationships with caregivers shape the template for all your future relationships. When you're a child, you learn whether other people are reliable, whether your needs matter, and whether closeness is safe.

Anxious attachment develops when caregivers are inconsistent. Sometimes they're warm and attuned. Sometimes they're distracted, dismissive, or emotionally unavailable. You never know which version you're going to get.

Your nervous system learns: I have to work hard for love. I have to monitor constantly for signs of rejection. Closeness is wonderful but also terrifying because it could disappear at any moment.

This isn't about bad parents. A caregiver can be loving but overwhelmed, depressed, or dealing with their own trauma. Inconsistency can come from divorce, illness, addiction, moving frequently, or simply being raised by someone with their own unresolved attachment wounds.

The result is the same: you grow up with a hyperactivated attachment system. Your nervous system is constantly scanning for signs of rejection. You learned that protest—crying, clinging, pursuing—sometimes brings the person back. So your brain wired that pattern in deeply.

Anxious attachment affects approximately 20% of adults. You are not alone in this.

What anxious attachment looks like in adult relationships

If you have anxious attachment, some of these patterns will feel painfully familiar:

You're attracted to people who are emotionally unavailable, avoidant, or hot-and-cold. The inconsistency feels like home. Secure, consistent people feel boring or like something's wrong because there's no anxiety to signal that this is "real love."

You need constant reassurance. Not because you're needy, but because your nervous system genuinely can't register that you're safe in the relationship. The reassurance only lasts a few hours before the anxiety comes back.

You overanalyze everything. Tone of voice. Text response time. Whether they kissed you goodbye the same way as yesterday. Your brain is looking for threat because that's what it was trained to do.

You engage in protest behaviors. When someone pulls away, you pursue harder. You might text multiple times, show up unannounced, pick fights to get a reaction—anything to re-establish connection. These aren't manipulative; they're panic.

You have trouble being alone. Being single feels unbearable. You'd rather be in an unfulfilling relationship than face the void of no relationship at all.

You become the relationship manager. You're the one initiating, planning, checking in, doing the emotional labor. You convince yourself this is just being caring, but really you're trying to control the outcome by being indispensable.

You lose yourself in relationships. Your mood depends entirely on how they're treating you. Your interests, friendships, and goals fade. You become whoever you think they want you to be.

The relationship feels like an emotional rollercoaster. The highs are euphoric. The lows are devastating. This isn't passion—it's nervous system dysregulation.

Why "just be secure" doesn't work

Most attachment content tells you to "act secure" or "date secure people" or "work on your self-esteem."

This is useless advice because anxious attachment is a nervous system problem, not a mindset problem.

When someone you're attached to pulls away, your nervous system perceives this as a life-threatening emergency. Your amygdala lights up the same way it would if you were being chased by a predator. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. This is why the anxiety feels so physically overwhelming—it IS overwhelming. Your body thinks you're going to die.

You can't think your way out of a nervous system state. You can't CBT your way into feeling secure when your attachment system is screaming that abandonment is imminent.

This is also why anxious-avoidant relationships are so common and so destructive. The avoidant partner pulls away when things get close (their nervous system perceives intimacy as threatening). The anxious partner pursues harder (their nervous system perceives distance as life-threatening). This creates an endless loop where both people are in nervous system distress, constantly triggering each other.

What actually helps: Nervous system regulation first, then relational healing

Healing anxious attachment requires two parallel tracks: regulating your nervous system and building new relational experiences.

Nervous system regulation

Your first job is learning to calm your activated nervous system without needing another person to do it for you. This is called self-soothing, and it's not the same as "just calm down."

When you feel the panic of someone pulling away, your nervous system needs bottom-up regulation. This means body-based techniques:

Box breathing (4 counts in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold) activates your parasympathetic nervous system and signals safety to your brain.

Bilateral stimulation—tapping alternate knees or shoulders—interrupts the anxiety loop and helps your brain process the emotional activation.

Cold water on your face or holding ice triggers the dive reflex, which physically slows your heart rate.

Grounding techniques like 5-4-3-2-1 (name 5 things you see, 4 you touch, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, 1 you taste) bring you back into your body and the present moment instead of spiraling in worst-case scenarios.

The goal isn't to never feel anxious. The goal is to have tools that help you ride the wave without resorting to protest behaviors that damage the relationship.

Name the protest behavior before you act on it

Anxious attachment drives you to pursue, demand reassurance, pick fights, or create drama when you feel someone pulling away. These are protest behaviors—your nervous system's attempt to force reconnection.

Before you send that fourth text, show up at their house, or start a fight about something unrelated, pause. Say to yourself: "This is a protest behavior. My attachment system is activated. I'm not actually in danger."

This doesn't make the urge go away, but it creates enough space that you might not act on it. Over time, this builds what's called mentalization—the ability to observe your own attachment patterns instead of being controlled by them.

Distinguish between anxiety and intuition

Here's the hard part: sometimes your anxiety is your nervous system overreacting to normal relationship fluctuations. Sometimes your anxiety is actually intuition telling you this person is genuinely unavailable or treating you poorly.

Anxious attachment makes it almost impossible to tell the difference because everything feels like an emergency.

A rough guideline: If someone is consistently inconsistent—breadcrumbing, hot and cold, making promises they don't keep, only showing up when you're about to leave—that's not your anxiety being unreasonable. That's your nervous system correctly identifying that this person is not safe.

If someone is generally consistent but had a busy week and didn't text as much, and you're spiraling into "they don't love me anymore"—that's anxious attachment.

Therapy or coaching can help you learn to distinguish these. So can time. The more you practice nervous system regulation, the clearer your intuition becomes.

Build secure relational experiences

You can't heal attachment wounds alone. Attachment is relational, which means healing requires new relational experiences that contradict the old template.

This doesn't necessarily mean romantic relationships. Secure friendships, therapeutic relationships, support groups, even online communities can provide experiences of consistency, attunement, and rupture-and-repair that slowly rewire your attachment system.

In therapy, this happens through the relationship with your therapist. A good therapist will be consistent, will attune to your emotional state, and when there's a rupture (they're late to a session, they misunderstand you), they'll repair it. Over time, your nervous system learns: people can be consistent. Ruptures don't mean abandonment. You are worthy of repair.

In romantic relationships, this means choosing people who are securely attached or at least doing their own healing work. You need someone who can stay present when you're anxious instead of pulling away or getting defensive. Someone who can say, "I see you're scared right now. I'm not leaving. How can I help you feel safer?"

This feels counterintuitive because secure people don't create the anxious intensity that feels like love to your nervous system. You'll have to consciously override the part of your brain that says "no spark" when what it really means is "no anxiety."

Expect the healing to be nonlinear

You will have setbacks. You'll regulate beautifully for three months and then completely spiral when someone doesn't text back for six hours. You'll choose a secure partner and then self-sabotage because your nervous system can't handle the lack of drama.

This is normal. Attachment patterns were built over years or decades. They don't disappear in a few months of effort.

What changes is the recovery time. At first, a rupture might dysregulate you for days. After some healing, it's hours. Eventually, it's minutes. You still feel the anxiety, but you have the tools to move through it without destroying the relationship.

You're not too much

Let me be very clear about something: Anxious attachment is not the same as being needy, clingy, or too much.

Those are judgments other people place on you when they don't understand nervous system science or when they're avoiding their own attachment wounds.

Your needs for closeness, reassurance, and emotional availability are legitimate. The problem isn't the needs—it's that your nervous system overreacts to normal fluctuations in closeness, and you learned protest behaviors that push people away instead of bringing them closer.

Healing doesn't mean becoming less. It means learning to meet your needs in ways that don't dysregulate you or damage your relationships.

It means finding people who can actually meet you. And learning to recognize when someone can't or won't, so you can walk away before your nervous system gets hijacked.

What this means for your relationships going forward

If you have anxious attachment, your relationship with yourself has to change before your relationships with other people can change.

You need to learn that you can survive being alone. Not because being alone is the goal, but because when your nervous system believes abandonment equals death, you will tolerate absolutely anything to avoid it. You'll stay with people who hurt you. You'll betray yourself constantly. You'll lose your identity trying to become what you think will keep them.

The more you can regulate your own nervous system, the less power other people have over your emotional state. This doesn't mean you stop caring or become avoidant yourself. It means you can be in a relationship without losing yourself in it.

You also need to grieve. Grieve the childhood you needed where your caregivers were consistent. Grieve the relationships you've lost to anxious attachment patterns. Grieve the version of love you thought was real but was actually just anxiety.

And then you get to build something new. Relationships where closeness doesn't require panic. Where distance doesn't feel like death. Where you can have needs without feeling like you're too much.

That's possible. It requires work—nervous system work, relational work, probably therapeutic work. But it's possible.

Your attachment style is not your destiny. It's the starting point.

Resources:

If you're struggling with anxious attachment and want support, I offer free 60-minute Clarity Sessions where we can explore your specific patterns and create a plan for healing. You can book at https://calendly.com/melanie-dupreez72/free-coaching-session .

For evidence-based attachment resources, Thais Gibson's Personal Development School and the Attachment Project both offer free content. For books, Attached by Amir Levine and Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin are excellent starting points.

If you think you might need therapy rather than coaching—particularly if you have trauma, severe anxiety, or relationship violence in your history—please reach out to a licensed therapist. Psychology Today's therapist directory and OpenPath Collective are good places to start searching.

Download the free guide: [Link to "Anxious Attachment Healing Workbook"]