Breaking The Anxious Attachment Cycle with Dr. Sam

Anxious attachment can convince you that love means urgency, intensity, and proving yourself. When someone pulls back, it can feel like your whole body is on fire, and you’ll do anything to get close again, over-text, over-give, over-think, and over-function. I’m sharing a solo, deeply personal look at how that pattern has shown up in my life, why it can feel just like addiction, and what I’m doing to change it after 17 years sober.

We break down what anxious attachment actually looks like day to day: getting “all in” too fast, obsessing about someone’s availability, and unraveling when the relationship hits a bump. I walk through the moment a friendship rupture snapped me into awareness, and the sentence that captured the whole wound: “If I love you hard enough, maybe you won’t leave me.” From there, we trace the roots back to childhood, where hypervigilance and self-silencing can become survival skills that later shape adult relationships.

Then we get practical. I share the framework that guides my healing, repair what you can and mourn what you can’t, plus the slow, steady building blocks of secure attachment: pacing new connections, treating instant intensity like a red flag, and letting people earn access to your love and attention. When you feel activated, I offer a simple body-based self-soothing practice (hand on heart, speaking to the younger parts) to ride the emotional wave without acting it out.

If this hits home, share it with someone who needs it, subscribe, and leave a review so more people can find the tools to move from anxious attachment to secure attachment. What pattern are you ready to notice first?

To book a FREE discovery call with Dr. Sam, click the link below:

https://calendly.com/drharte/free-discovery-call-w-dr-harte

Transcript

Why Anxious Attachment Shows Up

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Waking up at the desperation call.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Welcome back, everybody, to the truth about addiction. Today is just a solo episode with me. And what I'm gonna talk to you guys about is a specific attachment style that I have a lot of experience with, and what I'm doing to overcome it. Number one, number two, what I do to help clients overcome it. So I'm a gal who's 17 years sober from drugs and alcohol, which is an amazing thing. And the truth is, when you put the substance down, you begin to uncover what it was there to cover up in the first place. And I will say, partly I think because it's one of the deepest wounds I have, and partly because there's been a lot of other really big ticket items I'd I've had to reconcile with prior to this. Anxious attachment has been the root of my heartache. And only in the last two or three years has it been something that I have been ready to truly face.

The Behaviors That Fuel Obsession

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Where does anxious attachment come from? What does that even mean? I mean, literally, it means you are anxiously attached to whatever it is. Typically, a person could be a friend, could be a romantic partner. And the way that it presents is you're all in. You're all in to the point where you give yourself away. You will go to the ends of the earth for this person, you will stick your claws into them, you will shower them with gifts, you will obsess over their whereabouts, their well-being, why they haven't written to you and why they have. And when they do not reach out, do not respond, or even worse, when they end the relationship with you, you will utterly come undone. You will not be okay unless, and that's really the danger of this pattern. And I will never forget being in this friendship a couple years back, you know, the best friend, the friend that was gonna have to be my friend forever and ever until the day I died, or else, right? Or else I wasn't gonna be okay. When that friendship hit enough speed bumps that the car really broke down. It was as if I was zapped into a state of consciousness on that particular day. It was as if decades and decades of living in this attachment style was brought into my conscious awareness and I could see it for what it was. And I always say pain is a circuit breaker, it's a beautiful thing because it makes the unconscious conscious. And until the unconscious becomes conscious, we will just live out our lives and call what is happening to us our destiny. When this pattern came into my conscious awareness, the through line that occurred to me was if I love you hard enough, maybe you won't leave me. Essentially, I was trying to love at a level that required so much self-abandonment because I felt like if I didn't, you would leave. And you know, the irony of anxious attachment is that you end up overgiving and over loving to a person who hasn't earned the right to receive it, and they do leave you. And if you're not careful, you'll use that as evidence that you

Pain Makes The Pattern Visible

SPEAKER_01 4:35

aren't lovable. Instead of using it as evidence that there's something inside of you that needs to be healed, and that there's nothing inherently wrong with you. Because why do we get these attachment styles in the first place? They're adaptive survival skills that we picked up as kids. So I have a mom who's mentally ill, and she's been self-medicating for as long as I can remember. And my earliest core memory is of her taking a bunch of pills in the evening, her eyes glazing over, and then shoveling so much food in her mouth in the kitchen, more food than she would eat in an entire 24 hours. She ate like a bird normally, and just feeling really frightened by the presentation. It was as if my mother became a ghost and she was unrecognizable. And so the following day, I marched up to her and said, Why do you have to take those pills every night? That was just me

Childhood Roots Of Hypervigilance

SPEAKER_01 5:45

being my true self, asking what I really wanted to know. And she shut that shit down. And she did it in a way that was very insidious, and I don't think she meant to be manipulative, but it was incredibly manipulative. And it was also deflective. So she took no accountability in that moment and sort of turned it on to me. And remember, I'm four, okay? But this is one of those imprints that was left on my nervous system and it went on for decades and decades. So by the time I was an adult, I had no idea how to form a secure attachment. She said to me, Do you like the things that you have? And I nodded my head in agreement. Yes, of course I do. She said, Okay, well, in order for me to get you the things that you have, I have to work. In order for me to work, I have to sleep. And in order for me to sleep, I have to take those pills. That was just the end of the conversation. So, what did I learn in that moment? I learned, well, there's no negotiating out of this. And and this is like, mom has to do this. And she has to do this because I want things. And and I still want them. And so, as long as I want them, if this is what she has to do in order to sleep and work and get the money to get me the things, then I guess it's kind of my fault. And so let me not ask that again. And and actually, when I have an inclination to ask a really hard question to express what I need, I probably shouldn't. And you know what I should do? I should, I should just make sure mom's okay. So no matter how I'm feeling, no matter what I need, I need to become hyper-vigilant. Antennas up, and take the emotional temperature of the room, especially the room that mom is in, and whatever it is I think she needs in that moment, I need to do that. It does not matter what I need, it matters what you need. Because if I loved my mom hard enough, maybe she wouldn't emotionally leave me. You see, and so in this friendship, decades later, when that insight finally came to me, here's the epiphany, right?

Repair What You Can Mourn The Rest

SPEAKER_01 8:30

On the one hand, I really believe in the concept of it's not about the rupture, it's about the repair. What does that mean? That means in relational dynamics, we're gonna have ruptures, small and big, all the time in the course of our lives with people that we love and care about, right? There's gonna be stuff that happens. We're gonna get angry at each other, we're gonna say and do the wrong thing, we're gonna hurt each other's feelings. And I think it's wonderful and very important when we can to try and repair the ruptures. That's not always gonna be the safest and smartest thing to do, right? We do need an equal participant to meet us in the reparation process. The second part, though, is the more striking part, which is that which cannot be repaired must be mourned. I'm gonna say that again. That which cannot be repaired must be mourned. In these friendships where I was anxiously attached, I was unconsciously trying to repair the ruptures from my childhood. All of the moments that my mother couldn't meet me in the emotional places and spaces that I was in. And I was trying to love the friend so much that they would never leave me like mom did. But you see, I can't repair that. Those ruptures are there. I can work very hard to heal them, but I can't fix or change what happened. And so, in order for me to move from anxious attachment to secure attachment, I had to grieve. I had to become so present with the pain of all the needs that were never met and feel what need needed to be felt around that. And quite frankly, tend to the younger parts of me that were kicking and screaming and just wanted to give away my love into the next person, long enough to let that emotional wave run its course, not act out on it, and then have an intuitive next right action become revealed to me. So, in the wake of this level of self-awareness, in the attempt in the last several years of my life of moving from anxiously attached to securely attached, here's what it looks like.

Slowing Down To Build Security

SPEAKER_01 11:40

In general, it's no different than being addicted to a substance. Because when you get into these sort of infectious relational dynamics that make you feel high, it's literally like a dopamine hit. And then when they pull their love away, it's like a crash. So, similarly, when you're getting sober, you're gonna have all the cravings. And in the beginning, you're just trying to abstain from the behaviors that got you in trouble in the first place. Abstinence gives you a little bit of a pause button to then tend to the ache underneath. So if I meet somebody and immediately feel all fired up, like I want to talk to them every day, like they're gonna be my next best friend, like I absolutely need them in my life. I actually look at all of that as a siren wailing. I look at that as a red flag because what I'm gonna want to do is throw myself into that person. And so I intentionally don't. I intentionally slow everything down, every desire, every initial impulse, and I say, do I really need to say that right now? Do I really need to do that right now? Can I actually just slow down long enough to let this person show me who they actually are? And let them prove to me that they've earned the right to receive my love, my affection, my attention. And that's the beginning of the building blocks of secure attachment.

Self-Soothing The Younger Parts

SPEAKER_01 13:29

The other side of that coin is when I feel activated, which has totally happened in the last couple years, when I feel like all I want to do is just rush back into the arms of some person or relation, relationship, friendship that was really fiery but tended to explode and end badly. I know there is a younger part of me that is dying to be seen, just the way I wanted my mom to see me. And so the work in those moments is to actually make physical contact with my own body. So typically I'll put a hand on my heart, and it's as if I'm confronting and consoling my younger self. And I just say, I see you. I see you. I see why this matters to you. I see why this is so hard for you. I see what you had to do when you were young. I'm so sorry that you had to go through that. I love you, and I just want you to know I'm here with you now, and I love you, and I see you. And I'll tell you, I've never been healthier in regards to having securely attached friendships in my life than I am today, and it's taken me a really long time. So, for the the person who's anxiously attached, who's listening to this, I hope this is helpful. I know that it's scary. If nothing else, you can just dial up your conscious awareness to these patterns and behaviors, and that is already making a huge start because you might not be ready to sit with the grief that's underneath it, and that's okay too. So send this to a friend that you know needs it, listen to it again if it's helpful. And just know that by you listening to this episode and taking time out to digest a podcast about freeing yourself from an attachment style that is no longer serving you, you're already in the work. And I'm proud of you. I'll see you guys next time.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Waking up at the desperation call.