#267: Attachment & Conflict (Part 1): Anxious Attachment
Conflict is an inevitable part of any close relationship.
Yet for many people with anxious attachment patterns, conflict doesn't just feel uncomfortable—it feels threatening. A disagreement can quickly trigger fears of rejection, abandonment, or not being good enough, making it incredibly difficult to stay grounded and connected in the midst of tension.
This is the first article in a series exploring conflict through the lens of attachment theory. Today, we're focusing on the anxious attachment experience of conflict: why it feels so activating, the common patterns that emerge, and what it takes to create healthier ways of navigating disagreements.
Why Conflict Feels Unsafe for Anxiously Attached People
At the core of anxious attachment are a few deeply held fears:
Fear of abandonment
Fear of rejection
Fear of being "too much"
Fear of not being worthy of love
When these beliefs are operating beneath the surface, conflict can feel like much more than a disagreement about household chores, communication, or unmet expectations.
Instead, conflict can feel like evidence that the relationship itself is at risk.
When your nervous system interprets conflict as a threat to connection, it's natural that your protective strategies come online. The problem is that those strategies often make it harder—not easier—to get what you're really seeking.
Because underneath most conflict is a desire for reassurance, understanding, attunement, and connection.
The Anxious Attachment Conflict Cycle
One of the interesting things about anxious attachment is that many people begin relationships appearing quite conflict-avoidant.
In the early stages, there is often a strong desire to be easy-going, accommodating, and low-maintenance. You may:
Avoid raising concerns
Suppress uncomfortable feelings
Hesitate to ask difficult questions
Minimize your needs
Convince yourself things don't matter
The motivation is usually simple: you don't want to scare someone away.
But as the relationship becomes more established and commitment grows, something often shifts.
You start feeling safer expressing concerns, and all of the things you've been holding back may begin to surface.
Suddenly, conflict becomes much more frequent.
Not because you're trying to create problems, but because you're trying to protect the relationship.
When something feels off, it can feel impossible not to talk about it.
When Solving Problems Becomes the Problem
Many anxiously attached people become highly focused on identifying and addressing issues in the relationship.
The thinking often sounds something like:
"If we don't talk about this, it will get worse."
"If we don't fix this now, the relationship could fall apart."
"I need you to understand how much this is affecting me."
These concerns are usually coming from a sincere place. They're attempts to safeguard the relationship rather than damage it.
But when every issue feels urgent, conversations can start to carry a lot of pressure.
Your partner may begin to feel as though the relationship is defined by what's wrong rather than what's working.
And if your partner leans more avoidant, they may respond with frustration, defensiveness, or withdrawal.
You might hear things like:
"Do we really have to talk about this again?"
"You're never satisfied."
"Can't we just let it go?"
"Everything feels like a problem."
While those responses often come from their own overwhelm, they can feel deeply invalidating to someone with anxious attachment.
The result?
You feel even more hurt, unseen, and rejected.
And the cycle continues.
Why We Often Abandon Our Concerns Mid-Conflict
One of the most common patterns I see is that anxiously attached people bring up important concerns, but abandon them the moment the relationship feels threatened.
For example, you might raise a genuine issue that needs attention.
But if your partner responds with statements like:
"Maybe we're not compatible."
"Maybe I can't meet your needs."
"I don't know if I can do this anymore."
You may immediately shift gears.
Instead of discussing the original concern, all your energy goes toward restoring connection.
You apologize.
You backpedal.
You reassure.
You explain.
You do whatever feels necessary to stop the possibility of separation.
The problem is that the original issue never gets resolved.
Your hurt remains.
Your needs remain unmet.
And without realizing it, you're teaching yourself that preserving connection matters more than honoring your own experience.
The Hidden Cost of Unrepaired Conflict
When conflicts aren't properly resolved, the emotional residue doesn't simply disappear.
Every unresolved argument leaves behind a trace of hurt:
Feeling misunderstood
Feeling unseen
Feeling dismissed
Feeling alone
Feeling unimportant
Over time, those hurts accumulate.
The next disagreement isn't just about what happened today—it's also carrying the weight of every previous conflict that never fully healed.
This is why many couples eventually find themselves arguing about seemingly small things with enormous emotional intensity.
They're not just fighting about the dishes.
They're fighting with years of accumulated pain sitting silently in the background.
The Missing Piece: Self-Worth
When people start working on communication skills, they often focus on finding the perfect script.
If I say it the right way...
If I use enough "I statements"...
If I communicate calmly enough...
Then surely my partner will respond differently.
While communication skills absolutely matter, they're not the whole story.
Healthy conflict requires something deeper:
Self-worth.
Because when you have a strong internal foundation, conflict stops being a battle between:
"My needs"
and
"Keeping the relationship."
Instead, you can hold both.
You can say:
"I care about this relationship deeply."
"And this issue still matters."
"I want to understand your perspective."
"And I also need to honor my own."
That shift changes everything.
Building Security From the Inside Out
The goal isn't to become fearless in conflict.
The goal is to become anchored enough in yourself that conflict no longer feels like a threat to your survival.
When you know:
What you need
What you're available for
What you're willing to tolerate
Where you're willing to compromise
What supports your wellbeing
You show up to conflict from a very different place.
Not from desperation.
Not from panic.
Not from a fear of losing the relationship at all costs.
But from self-respect.
And from that place, healthier communication becomes possible.
Because secure conflict isn't just about saying the right thing.
It's about knowing that even if the conversation becomes uncomfortable, you won't abandon yourself in the process.
Final Thoughts
For people with anxious attachment, conflict often feels loaded with meaning.
A disagreement can quickly become a referendum on the entire relationship.
But learning to navigate conflict differently starts with recognizing that your worth, your needs, and your wellbeing don't have to be sacrificed in order to maintain connection.
In fact, the healthier your relationship with yourself becomes, the healthier your relationship with conflict becomes.
Because secure relationships aren't built on avoiding disagreements.
They're built on the ability to move through them with honesty, respect, repair, and a commitment to staying connected—to both your partner and yourself.
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[00:01:24]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. Today's episode is the first of a new series which is all about conflict in relationships. I've been experimenting with doing little series recently of episode topics because I feel like it allows me to go a bit deeper and to structure it in a more methodical way, which is fairly novel for me given that I usually just hit the record button and start talking. So we're going to be talking about conflict and today's episode is going to be all about anxious attachment and how you, as someone with anxious attachment patterns, might relate to an experience conflict. Next week we're going to talk about the avoidant experience of conflict. And then in part three we're going to talk about what it looks like to shift some of those patterns to fight more effectively and to repair more effectively. Although now that I'm saying that repair might become episode or part four of the series, depending on how we go.
[00:02:23]:
So I feel like this is really important because most of us with insecure attachment patterns don't have a great starting point when it comes to conflict. We tend to experience conflict as unsafe as threatening, it can really heighten so many triggers for us. And naturally, whenever our triggers are heightened, our protective behaviours are heightened. And whenever we're in that protective stance and our partners also there, naturally there's going to be a lot of opposition. There's going to be this sense that our partner is threatening to us, that our partner is the enemy, and that we need to protect against all of the ways in which they might hurt us. And while that makes so much sense and that feels so true in the moment, as I'm sure most of you listening will know from experience, I certainly do, having that kind of stance when it comes to our relationships is so self defeating, because it's. As much as it feels necessary in the moment, it actually blocks us from the thing that we're so yearning for, which is attunement, to be seen, to be reassured, to get back to connection when things feel wobbly or hard, or when we're feeling like there's an unmet need or something that's hurt us. Going in guns blazing in those moments tends not to get us what we really deeply, long for.
[00:03:43]:
And yet it feels so vulnerable and the stakes feel so high that it takes huge amount of courage and intentionality and practise to not just do the thing we've always done to protect ourselves, to actually be vulnerable, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable in those moments, is not easy. So I want to talk about it, because it's something that a lot of people struggle with. And naturally, in those heated moments, if things do get out of control, we can do a lot of damage. And I think the flip side of it, and why we'll be talking about repair as well, is that we then don't have the skills to repair. And so we just start accumulating all of these experiences of hurt without adequate repair. And then the next time we have a fight, we're bringing that residue of pain and aloneness and feeling unseen and feeling misunderstood and maybe feeling like we haven't been fully acknowledged. All of those things come with us and it starts to accumulate over time. And I think so many relationships ultimately end because of that pileup of hurts that has just never really been tended to and that can really drive a wedge through relationships over time.
[00:04:59]:
And so I think it's such a crucial skill if you want to build a healthy, lasting relationship, to know how to fight more effectively. Because I don't think the goal is no conflict. I think it's effective conflict and to repair, because things will go sideways There will be clashes, there will be moments where you'll say the thing you wish you hadn't have said, that you wish you could take back. We're going to get it wrong, we're going to make mistakes, we're going to do things that we regret. And so being able to repair, to own our missteps, to allow ourselves to down our weapons long enough to step into the other person's experience and get curious about how they are experiencing us, which again, takes a lot of humility and vulnerability. All of those things are really, really paramount if we want to experience healthy, secure relationships. So that's an extended preamble to today's episode and this series on conflict. If you're not already subscribed, whether you're watching on YouTube, listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts, make sure that you are following the show or subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss the next episodes in the series.
[00:06:09]:
And it's also a really helpful way to support my work at zero cost to you. So always hugely grateful if you could do that. Before we get into today's episode, a quick reminder, in case you hadn't heard me share share that I'm running a free workshop on understanding anxious attachment protest behaviours, which is very much in keeping with today's theme. For anyone who doesn't know what a protest behaviour is, it's basically all of the things that we do as anxious attachers when we're feeling hurt or triggered to try and test someone's love. So whether it's the slightly melodramatic sulking or folding your arms and saying I'm fine, or sending multiple texts in a panic when someone's not responding, or sending out these poison barbs or big accusations, or saying things like, you don't even care about me. There's so many different ways that we can engage in these protest behaviours, but for people with anxious attachment patterns, it's always coming from this place of reassure me, see me, show up for me, show me that you love me. And of course, it's coming from this place of not really trusting in someone's love and so wanting to kind of push against it to see what we get back to test our theory that we can't trust or rely on someone. And of course it's coming, coming from this place of deep longing to be fought for, to have someone say, like, of course I love you.
[00:07:32]:
Don't be silly. I would never want to do all of those things. Right? But naturally, it's not a particularly healthy or helpful way of expressing ourselves, of communicating, of getting our needs met. And in many cases it backfires because it is quite an immature and I say that lovingly as someone who has certainly spent many years doing all of those things, it is an immature way of getting our needs met. I think anxious attachers are often pretty self aware and I think we know that it's not the right way of going about it. We know that it's not going to get us what we want and yet we feel like we can't stop ourselves in the moment. So this free live workshop is going to be all about those behaviours, understanding why we do it, what needs are they trying to meet, what the unintended impact of those behaviours can be and what we can do instead. So I think it's going to be really helpful and will be so applicable whether you're in a relationship at the moment, whether you are going through a breakup, whether you're single and dating, it's really across the board going to be very helpful.
[00:08:36]:
If you have anxious attachment patterns, which I know is most of my listeners. So the workshop is on Thursday 9th July, which will be Wednesday 8th July. If you're in the US or other places in the northern hemisphere, there will be a recording available. Although I do encourage you to join live as there will be special bonuses and fun things for people who are with me live on the call and the link to register for that is in the show notes or the episode description. So I would love to see you there. Okay, so anxious attachment and conflict. Now as I said in the introduction, for anxiously attached people, conflict registers as really unsafe. And that makes sense when we consider that the core fears or core wounds for anxiously attached people tend to be around abandonment.
[00:09:21]:
So people always leave me, people never stay. Rejection. I'm going to be rejected if I really allow myself to take up space here to be authentic, to share what what's true for me that's going to be rejected or I won't be accepted in all of that and unworthiness. So I'm not good enough or I'm too much and I have to always perform or strive or prove in order to get someone's love and keep their love. So if we think of all of those patterns as forming the basis of our self view in relationships and our understanding of how the world works when it comes to relationships, naturally conflict is going to register as pretty threatening. So here's what I often see when it comes to anxious attachment and conflict, I think Often in the early stages of a relationship for people with anxious attachment patterns, you'll be quite conflict avoidant in the sense of keeping the peace, tiptoeing, not wanting to raise things, wanting to seem easygoing and low maintenance, not wanting to scare someone away, not wanting to be too intense or too much, and so not really talking about things that are bothering you, not asking questions that you are maybe afraid of knowing the answer to. There can just be a lot of avoidance on the anxious side. And I think that's, as a side note, a good reminder that avoidance is not the sole domain of people with avoidant attachment patterns.
[00:10:52]:
Anxiously attached people can certainly engage in avoidant behaviours, but as the relationship progresses and maybe there's more of a sense of commitment, you might start to feel like the relationship has enough sturdiness or enough containment to hold conflict in the sense that you're not afraid that they'll just up and leave. If you engage in conflict, and when that starts to feel true, then you might find yourself adopting quite a conflict forward stance in the sense of raising conflict or raising criticisms or concerns frequently, because you feel like there are all of these things going wrong or all of these unmet needs and you're feeling all this anxiety around it and suddenly ignoring that or not talking about it all the time feels really threatening and feels really unsafe. It can be this sense of, well, if we don't keep focusing on the problem, then it's just going to get worse and if it just keeps getting worse, then bad things are going to happen, because I'm already feeling so bad now and I really need you to understand how much I'm struggling with this so that things don't get worse or so that I don't have to keep feeling this way. And so we can flip from this very conflict avoidant approach early on to being quite ready and willing to engage in conflict and to talk about all the problems as the relationship kind of settles a bit and we start to feel a bit more not secure in an attachment sense, but secure in the sense of there's enough commitment that we feel comfortable in raising those concerns now, of course, from the other side, and we'll talk about this more in part two. When I go into the avoidant experience of conflict, having that bait and switch almost of like, everything was fine and now nothing's fine, that can feel quite jarring and that can feel quite exhausting for the other person to suddenly feel like everything's a problem and we just have to talk about the problems all the time. And you're never satisfied and you're always coming up with new things. And those are a lot of the phrases you might have heard from partners or maybe you're even in at the moment, like, oh, are you serious? Do we really have to talk about this again? Like, give me a break. And of course that feels really invalidating because when you're upset or when you're anxious or when something's bothering you to hear from someone, give me a break.
[00:13:15]:
Do we really have to keep talking about this? That feels really rejecting. And then of course that triggers all of your stuff around that around people don't care about me. If you loved me, you'd want to be there for me. And that defensive, dismissive approach to conflict and to you bringing concerns to someone that feels deeply personal and that does feel like a personal rejection. And so of course that then leaves you feeling wounded. And really, that adds to all of the hurt that you're already carrying. And off the spiral goes. Now where it gets really tricky is that oftentimes we'll bring all of the concerns and have all of these needs that we're suddenly very hell bent on making sure a front and centre.
[00:14:01]:
And again, like it comes from a place of wanting to protect the relationship. And it's not trying to be destructive, it's not trying to overwhelm the connection, it's trying to safeguard the connection. But when we do it with that air of urgency and almost being like a dog with a bone when it comes to talking about everything that's wrong, that can backfire and often does backfire. But because the relationship itself is always number one priority, as soon as that starts to feel threatened or in doubt in any way will often drop the concern and go, okay, whatever we need to do to just make the relationship be okay. So if you get pushback from someone, if they say things like, well, maybe this is just too hard, or maybe I just can't meet your needs, or I don't know if I can do this anymore, any of those things in response to your bringing of concerns, then what will often happen is you'll quickly backpedal, drop whatever things you are trying to raise, and suddenly feel like you've just either apologise or plead or explain or persuade or do whatever you can to restore the connection. And the concerns that you were bringing, the needs that you were worried about, suddenly pale by comparison to the possibility of the relationship ending. And so what that often means is that we bypass any sort of substantive repair because you suddenly just feel this Urgent rush to get back to connection, even if that means skipping over all of the things that were really genuinely bothering or concern. You can just feel this like overwhelming imperative to make everything be okay again by any means necessary.
[00:15:41]:
And so that's a really challenging portrait of conflict in relationships. And I think particularly for so many anxiously attached people who are really trying to work on self improvement and who might be reading books and doing the things and trying to do the perfect conscious communication and using the I statements and rehearsing what you're going to say in advance and trying to do everything right. If it still doesn't work, so to speak, if someone doesn't respond in the way that you'd hoped, that can just feel really defeating and you can feel all the more stuck as a result of that. So I think that all of those things can contribute to this overall impression of conflict being really unsafe. And of course, when we've had lots of experiences of conflict going pear shaped, then naturally that's our reference point and we feel even more anxiety around conflict and we feel even less confident in bringing a concern to someone because every time we do they get defensive and shut us down or it spirals into this whole big thing. And so when that's kind of the template that we're working with and maybe that's characterised all of our relationships and maybe that's how our parents fought and like that's our whole world when it comes to conflict, it just contributes to this overall thing of the stakes feeling very high. And so us not trusting in the possibility of conflict being had safely and then that makes our protective patterns even harder to let go of. Because if we feel like we're going into battle, then naturally we're going to have our guard up, whatever that looks like for us.
[00:17:16]:
So just to validate that if any of that resonates with you, you're far from being alone. I've had plenty of experience in that kind of dynamic and I know that most of the people who I support and teach will also see themselves in that. So it's not like you are uniquely broken or unskilled at conflict. Most people are unskilled at conflict. And it is something where, where so many of us just resort to whatever tools we've got. And most of those are things we've picked up along the way from less than ideal modelling or relationships where we didn't know any better and we just got stuck in these cycles. So as far as anxiously attached people, what you might focus on and we'll go more into this in part three of this series where I talk about how to fight more effectively. But just as a little teaser for that and specific to anxious attachment.
[00:18:10]:
I think so much of the work is actually building up yourself self worth and that might sound sort of peripheral to this topic of conflict. But as I've said before, I think a lot of people skip ahead to trying to just say the right thing in the right way and if I just set the perfect boundary then someone will respond the way I want them to and then happy days. All my relationship woes will dissolve. And of course that's just not the case because we need to have the internal sturdiness and self validation and this sense of like I know what I'm available for, I know what I need, I know what I'm willing to tolerate, I know where I have some flexibility, I know where I'm willing to compromise. All of that internal security creates a completely different starting point when it comes to hard conversations or conflict in your relationships because you don't have this seesaw or this constant balancing act between the things that are bothering me and the fact that that when it comes down to it, I will drop all of that to hold on to you when we actually have this internal anchor of yes, I want to find a path forward, yes, I want to work through this with you, yes, I want to understand your perspective. But I'm unwavering on the things that I know are really crucial for me to feel good about being in a relationship. And I'm actually more steadfastly committed to that and to my wellbeing and to what I know is right for me than just holding on at all costs. And we can only really reach that place when we've worked on our self stuff.
[00:19:47]:
That's why it's at the heart of everything that I teach really franciously attach people in. Shifting those patterns is not about fixing a relationship. First and foremost it's about rebuilding your inner relationship so that you can then create healthier relational experiences so that you can go to your partnerships on a level footing rather than feeling like this person holds all of the power and I'm just, just kind of on my knees begging for scraps and clinging to them and saying please don't leave me. It's so, so hard to build something healthy and secure from that really asymmetrical starting point. And that is an inside job. We've got to be able to come to relationships from this like mature, self respecting place knowing that we won't hold on at all costs. We won't tolerate anything and everything in order to stop someone from leaving us or whatever it might be. We've got to have those standards, we've got to know what supports our wellbeing and we have to be committed enough to that that we will stand behind it.
[00:20:48]:
And that is all of our background work that then allows us to do conflict differently. So while all of the conflict specific and communication tips and all of those things are hugely valuable, they've got to have the backing of solid self worth if they're going to actually stick and be effective. Because otherwise we'll say the thing and put the new skill into pract. But if we get any pushback, we'll just crumble because we don't actually trust that we are deserving of more than that. It becomes a bit of all bark and no bite. So next week is going to be an inside look at the avoidant attachment experience of conflict, where the challenges are why conflict is so threatening to someone with avoidant patterns, how they typically respond, defensiveness and all of those pieces. And then part three will be more about tips on both sides. And as I've just said, I will give specific in the moment tips for both anxious and avoidant people.
[00:21:50]:
But I do think particularly for anxiously attached people, there is this big other piece that is kind of a prerequisite to any of that producing lasting change and that is really working on the self worth and the self respect piece because that is what produces all of the other change that's kind of like the trunk of the tree and then all of the branches off that are all of the other wonderful benefits of healthier relationships and communication and everything else. Okay, gonna leave it there guys. Thank you so much for joining me. And don't forget to sign up for my free training on anxious attachment protest behaviours. This one is a one off, so definitely worth signing up for. It's not something that you'll be able to join. After the date, there'll be time for Q and A as well. So bring your questions for me.
[00:22:38]:
All about protest behaviours and conflict and communication. And I look forward to seeing you there. Okay.
[00:23:14]:
Thanks, guys.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
conflict in relationships, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, insecure attachment patterns, relationship triggers, protective behaviours, relationship repair, emotional safety, attunement, unmet needs, self worth, protest behaviours, communication skills, confrontation, relationship anxiety, abandonment fears, rejection fears, unworthiness, self view in relationships, conflict avoidance, relationship criticism, relationship concerns, validation, defensive responses, self improvement, conscious communication, relationship boundaries, self validation, healthy relationships, relationship wellbeing