#247: Is It Your Anxious Attachment... or the Wrong Relationship?
If you’ve ever found yourself spiraling over a relationship, asking “Is this just my anxious attachment… or is something actually not okay here?”—you’re in very good company. This is one of the most common questions I hear from people with anxious attachment patterns. And it makes sense, because when you’re used to feeling insecure, overwhelmed, or unsure in relationships, it can be incredibly hard to tell what’s coming from you… and what’s actually about the dynamic you’re in. So let’s unpack it.
If you’ve ever found yourself spiraling over a relationship, asking “Is this just my anxious attachment… or is something actually not okay here?”—you’re in very good company.
This is one of the most common questions I hear from people with anxious attachment patterns. And it makes sense, because when you’re used to feeling insecure, overwhelmed, or unsure in relationships, it can be incredibly hard to tell what’s coming from you… and what’s actually about the dynamic you’re in.
So let’s unpack it.
Why This Question Feels So Hard
At the heart of this question is something many anxiously attached people struggle with: self-doubt.
When you’ve internalised messages like:
You’re too sensitive
You’re overthinking it
You’re too much
…it becomes second nature to question yourself.
So when something feels off in a relationship, you don’t just feel the discomfort—you immediately start trying to invalidate it:
Maybe it’s all in my head
Maybe I’m just being insecure
Maybe I shouldn’t say anything
And yet, what often goes unnoticed is that this self-invalidation mirrors the very thing that hurts most when it comes from others.
The Two Extremes (and the Middle Ground)
When it comes to navigating your emotions in relationships, many people fall into one of two camps:
1. Dismissing your feelings entirely
Telling yourself you shouldn’t feel that way. Pushing it down. Ignoring it.
2. Treating your feelings as absolute truth
Assuming that because you feel anxious, something must be wrong—and reacting urgently to fix it.
Neither of these is particularly helpful.
The work of building security lies in the middle:
Acknowledging that your feelings are real and valid
And zooming out enough to assess the situation with clarity
It’s not about ignoring your emotions—but it’s also not about letting them completely run the show.
The Truth: It’s Rarely “Just You” or “Just Them”
As much as the anxious mind craves a clean, definitive answer, relationships don’t really work like that.
It’s very rarely a case of one person being “the problem” and the other being “the victim.”
Relationships are relational systems.
We influence each other. We trigger each other. We co-create patterns.
Your fears might be activated by someone’s behaviour.
Your responses might, in turn, activate their defenses.
And around you go.
That’s why the question “Is it me or them?” often doesn’t have a satisfying binary answer.
When It’s Not Just Your Anxiety
With that said, there are certain patterns and behaviours that would leave almost anyone feeling anxious, insecure, or unsafe in a relationship.
Some examples include:
Chronic inconsistency (disappearing for days, hot-and-cold behaviour)
Repeatedly saying “I don’t know what I want”
Breaking up and coming back multiple times
Refusing to communicate about problems or emotions
Shutting down or walking away from conflict without repair
Dishonesty or repeated breaches of trust without accountability
These aren’t just “anxious attachment triggers.”
They’re genuinely difficult relational dynamics.
And while an anxiously attached person might respond by trying to fix, chase, or accommodate those patterns… someone more secure might look at the same situation and say:
“This isn’t a dynamic I want to participate in.”
That distinction matters.
Why Inconsistency Feels So Familiar
One of the trickiest parts is that for many people with anxious attachment, inconsistency feels normal.
If your early experiences of connection involved unpredictability—attention followed by withdrawal, closeness followed by distance—then relationships that replicate that pattern can feel strangely familiar.
Not good… but familiar.
So instead of recognizing inconsistency as a red flag, you might interpret your anxiety as the problem:
Why can’t I just relax?
Why am I so triggered by this?
But in many cases, your nervous system is responding exactly as it was wired to:
to inconsistency, unpredictability, and emotional uncertainty.
The Bigger Picture Matters More Than the Details
When anxiety is high, the instinct is to zoom in:
Analyzing every text message
Replaying conversations
Trying to decode someone’s behaviour
But often, that hyper-focus keeps you stuck.
What’s more useful is doing the opposite:
Zooming out.
Ask yourself:
What is the overall pattern of this relationship?
How do I feel, most of the time, in this dynamic?
Is there consistency, safety, and mutual effort here?
Because more often than not, the answer isn’t hidden in a single interaction.
It’s in the overall climate of the relationship.
You Can’t Heal in a Dynamic That Keeps Triggering You
This is a hard truth, but an important one:
If you’re in a relationship that is fundamentally inconsistent, unpredictable, or emotionally unsafe, your anxious attachment patterns will continue to be activated.
Not because you’re failing at healing—but because the environment keeps reinforcing those patterns.
There’s only so much internal work you can do when the dynamic itself mirrors the very blueprint your nervous system is wired around.
So… Is It You or Them?
A more helpful question might be:
“Is this relationship environment one in which I can actually feel safe, secure, and able to grow?”
Because sometimes the most important insight isn’t whether it’s technically “you” or “them.”
It’s recognising:
What this dynamic is costing you
Whether anything meaningful is changing
And whether this is a relationship that aligns with the kind of experience you want to have
And sometimes, the very fact that you’re constantly trying to figure it out—constantly analysing, deciphering, and second-guessing—is information in itself.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to have perfect clarity to take yourself seriously.
You don’t need definitive proof to acknowledge that something doesn’t feel right.
And while it’s important to take responsibility for your own patterns, healing anxious attachment isn’t about learning to tolerate dynamics that leave you feeling chronically anxious, confused, or small.
It’s about developing the self-trust to say:
“My feelings matter—and so does the environment I’m in.”
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[00:00:57]:
Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode we are talking about how to know if the things that you're experiencing are because of your anxious attachment patterns. So the fears, the insecurities, the intrusive thoughts, all of that. Is that because of your anxious attachment? Or is there something going on in your relationship that is genuinely not okay, that feels emotionally unsafe? Which is a long winded way of saying is it me or them? And that is something that I've been asked more times than I could ever tell you it is. One of the most common points of rumination for folks with anxious attachment patterns is like, how do I know if basically, is this all in my head? Is this just because I'm insecure and this is what my brain and nervous system does in relationships? Or are the things that are bothering me, that are scaring me, that are leaving me feeling insecure because there's something legitimately, objectively wrong here and it's really, really hard? There's so many layers to this and I'm going to do my best to not answer it too cryptically while also acknowledging that there's a lot that's subject here. So that's what we're going to be unpacking in today's episode. And before we do that, I just wanted to share if you're new here or you haven't gotten around to it. I have a free training on how to heal anxious attachment and finally feel secure in life and love.
[00:02:15]:
In this training, I cover my three part framework for healing anxious attachment. I cover why you might still feel stuck even though you've been doing so much work for such a long time, which I know is the case for so many anxiously attached people. And I also talk about exactly what we're going to talk about today. How, how do I know if it's me or them? And I give some really specific points around behaviour that's just not okay or that would leave anyone feeling anxious. And also some signs that maybe it's your own stuff that you're bringing to the relationship that you can be working on. So definitely worth checking out if you're someone who struggles with anxious attachment. And I'll link that in the show notes. It's about a 75 minute training, so well worth coming along too.
[00:02:56]:
Okay, so let's talk about this question of how do I know if it's just my anxious attachment or I'm in the wrong relationship or there's something else that's just not okay about what's going on out there? So I want to talk first about why this is such a common question. And I think a really key piece of that is that anxiously attached people tend to experience significant amounts of self doubt and we tend to really chronically invalidate ourselves without even realising it. Which is ironic in some ways and yet also makes sense because we struggle so much and experience such a lot of pain when we feel invalidated by others, when we feel dismissed, when we get the messaging of you're too sensitive, you're too much. Do we really have to talk about this again? Here we go again. All of that kind of sentiment, when it comes our way, feels so hurtful and distressing and often leaves us spinning in our anxiety, feeling a lot of self doubt and questioning whether we're being unreasonable, whether we really are too much, whether we are overthinking it, whether it's all in our head that can feel really noisy and confusing. And yet what we don't realise is that we routinely do that to ourselves. We often will have a worry, have a fear, and then quickly dismiss it or try and push it back down from this place of telling ourselves that we're not allowed to feel that or that we're going to push them away if we say something, or it's probably all in our head. It's probably just because we're insecure.
[00:04:23]:
And so it sort of makes sense against that backdrop that we would struggle so much with this question of how do I know if something's really not okay or whether it's all just me? Right? And I think that's why a huge part of the work more broadly of healing anxious attachment, of developing self worth and a clearer Sense of self trust is knowing like that actually what I'm feeling makes sense and I'm allowed to feel the way I feel now. That doesn't mean that we have to be completely guided by our feelings all the time and that the urgent need to fix something or to get reassurance or to find out information that we might be driven to from our anxiety and other feelings is the right thing to do. But I think what a lot of us do by default is either dismiss the feelings altogether and try and stuff them away because we've decided that they're unreasonable or unacceptable, or we take the feelings as fact and are totally led by them in our choices and our actions. And I think building more security requires us to find a healthy middle there whereby we can acknowledge our feelings and validate them and recognise that they're very real and they exist for a reason. And also take in the full situation and go, well, okay, what are my values require of me in this situation? What does integrity look like here? What kind of person do I want to be and how do I want to show up and conduct myself? And being able to pull from both of those sources and make choices from that more centred, steady, grounded place that is the work for anxiously attached people. Anyway, I sort of digress there, but I think that when we come to this question of how do I know if it's me or them? The truth is it's almost always some combination of both because there is very rarely just a villain and a victim in relationships, right? Relationships are relational and we bounce off each other. They're feedback loops. And that is both frustrating for the anxious mind that wants certainty and wants to be able to isolate cause and effect.
[00:06:24]:
In part because we just like certainty and we like knowing where we stand, but also because when we can figure out who the problem is or where the problem resides, then we can reverse engineer a solution and we can figure out, oh, it's just my anxious attachment, then I can try and solve that or stuff that away or be different so that I can change the relationship, I can change how someone is towards me. So in reality, relationships are messier than that. And the whole point of attachment patterns is that my fears and sensitivities get triggered by your behaviour and the way that I habitually respond can trigger your wounds and sensitivities and fears. And then the ways that you habitually respond trigger me. And off we go. Right? That's kind of the. The anxious avoidant trap, in a nutshell, is that we fit together like puzzle pieces and the bite fits the wound, as Stantatkin says. So it's very rare that you're going to be able to point to one person as being the problem in a relationship, as being the source of all of the drama.
[00:07:29]:
Because even if one person's behaviour is objectively problematic, what we maybe miss in that is that the way that we respond to it is probably not helpful either. And this is something that I often hear from people is like even a secure person would be bothered by this kind of behaviour. And that may be true a lot of the time. There are certain classic avoidant behaviours that anyone would find really difficult. But the key is in how we respond. And for anxiously attached people, the response tends to be to move towards difficult behaviour and try and fix it. Whereas some, someone who's more secure might take in the situation as a whole and say, well, maybe I'm not going to make myself available for a dynamic where this is the norm, where this keeps happening. So with that being said, I think some behaviours that we could acknowledge are objectively problematic or are going to be very difficult to build a healthy, secure relationship, if these things are part of the status quo of the relationship, would be very inconsistent communication in the sense of non responsiveness for dating days at a time or more things like someone frequently saying I don't know what I want or going away, coming back, breaking up, getting back together, stuff like that is going to breed insecurity for most anyone.
[00:08:50]:
Someone storming out during conflict and not coming back, so leaving conflict being very open ended, that's going to be very hard. Someone flat out refusing to talk about anything that is bothering you. So if they very quickly shut down any conversation about fears or worries or feelings or needs, if they're blanket dismissive of that, because for whatever reason that conversation is not one that they're open to, that's going to be really hard to work with. Similarly, if there's no openness to repair after conflict, that's going to be really challenging to work with just because it's such a fundamental part of creating emotional safety. Some other things might be around trust and honesty. So if someone is repeatedly lying, that is going to create insecurity for any relationship. You know, if someone has breached trust and isn't willing to do the work to repair that, of course trust will and does get breached in all sorts of relationships all the time. But being able to meaningfully and effectively repair after that is absolutely essential.
[00:09:56]:
And so if someone has done something to breach trust and refuses to engage or just wants to sweep it under the rug or keeps doing the thing, knowing the impact that it has. Well then that, that's certainly something that has to be looked at because it's just not sustainable if you want to build a healthy relationship to have those sorts of things lurking in the corner that you just keep avoiding. Now obviously I could go on, you know, list of problematic relationship behaviours is a long one, but I'm giving you some there that are maybe a little bit more line ball. And I know that these sorts of behaviours are ones that anxiously attach people, maybe when they're not so extreme. Those are the ones that we tend to struggle with a bit more, the ones that fall in this grey area area. And particularly for people with anxious attachment patterns, remembering that part of our original template around relationships is inconsistency, so it doesn't necessarily register as abnormal. If someone goes away, then comes back, if they give us attention, then withdraw it. We don't necessarily clock that as being a really big problem.
[00:10:59]:
We just clock that as being a normal part of relationships and how we're kind of accustomed to feeling. And so I think relationships that have that quality of inconsistency or someone being unsure about you or someone breaking up with you, then coming back and saying I made a mistake, like we don't necessarily see that that's a problem in the relationship. We instead go, well, am I just being anxious? And the answer there is no those sorts of behavioural patterns. Without placing blame, we can just acknowledge that, like that's not really workable and it's going to be really, really hard to build a healthy, secure, balanced relationship with someone who is very inconsistent, whose beh leaves you feeling unsure of where you stand, who goes and comes back, who refuses to talk to you, who shuts down, who is non responsive, all of those things are the opposite of the qualities of a secure relationship. I did an episode recently on the hallmarks of a secure relationship, which I can link in the show notes and you can listen to that and get a sense of like, oh yeah, that's what relationships are meant to be like. And when all of those really fundamental qualities of emotional safety are lacking, then anxious attachment or not, it's going to be really, really hard to build something secure there. So I think that if that's present in your relationship, it's not to say that you have to break up, that you have to walk away, but certainly something has to change. And your anxious attachment patterns and all of the behaviours and insecurities that flow from that will always be activated in dynamics that are characterised by inconsistency and unpredictability, because that is at the very heart of anxious attachment.
[00:12:42]:
And you won't be able to grow out of those pattern while you're in a relationship that embodies the origin storey of your patterns. It's just too triggering. And all of your protective mechanisms belong in that environment. So you're not gonna be able to let go of them. Okay, so I'm gonna leave it there. The thing that I really wanna leave you with is something that I've said many times before. And so you've probably heard me say this, but oftentimes when we're in the thick of it, our anxiety tells us to zoom in, to go through everything with a fine tooth comb, to try and dissect this and that text message and all of the things in this very magnified way. And often that's the opposite of what we really need.
[00:13:24]:
What we really need is to zoom way out and to take in the big picture and go, what is actually happening here? And sometimes it's exactly what it looks like. We want to find some kind of unlock or some special mysterious explanation for behaviour that seems really difficult and challenging. Because if we can just find all the answers, then we can solve it and, and that allows us to feel some semblance of control. But oftentimes that control is an illusion and actually it's just our way of avoiding the painful reality of the situation we find ourselves in. And so it's not to say that you just have to leave, but something's got to give. And the fact that you're in that mode of trying to decipher, trying to pick apart someone's behaviour, trying to figure out is it me or them, that often tells you a lot more than the answer to the question that you might eventually find. And so sometimes we do just need to take a step back and go, okay, what is the big picture of this telling me? What does the zoomed out bird's eye view of this look like? And is that what I want for myself? And if not, what are the more tectonic shifts that need to happen here? Not how can I say that one thing to them differently so that they respond differently in that one siloed conversation? Because it's almost never about one thing, it's about the overall climate. And that's the thing that needs to shift if something's going to shift.
[00:14:46]:
Or maybe there's, that's the thing that we just have to acknowledge is not working and that we ultimately need to step away from because we can see what it's costing us. And again, if you're in a relationship that feels very insecure, inconsistent, unpredictable, volatile, that's just, of course, you're going to be feeling anxious all the time because anxiety is a very natural response to that setting. And so sometimes we do just have to help ourselves out and go, I don't see a version of this relationship where I'm actually going to feel safe, secure, loved, loved, and thrive, ultimately, which is what we want. And again, if you need to go back and listen to that episode on the hallmarks of a secure relationship, to give yourself a bit of a vision for what that can and should ideally look like, that is definitely worth doing, particularly if you've never had a reference point for that, as many people haven't. If your parents didn't have a healthy relationship, if the people around you don't have particularly aspirational relationships, sometimes we don't really have a blueprint to follow. And so it can be helpful to consult some sources that can paint that picture for you. You okay? Gonna leave it there, guys. Thank you as always for your support of the show.
[00:15:52]:
I'm deeply appreciative of you, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks, guys.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
anxious attachment, emotional safety, self doubt, insecure relationships, attachment patterns, inconsistency, avoidant behaviours, self validation, trust issues, relationship repair, honesty, behaviours in relationships, communication problems, emotional triggers, self worth, self trust, relationship anxiety, intrusions thoughts, healing attachment, secure relationships, relational dynamics, conflict resolution, avoiding difficult conversations, relationship boundaries, unhealthy patterns, breakups, insecure partner, zooming out perspective, blueprint for healthy relationships, protective mechanisms