How to tell the Difference Between Anxiety and Anxious Attachment

Today I'm answering three questions I get asked constantly. And I picked these three on purpose, because they build on each other. The first one is the controversial one: can a fearful-avoidant actually have a successful relationship WITHOUT going to therapy? People want me to say no. I'm not going to say no. But I'm also not going to give you the comfortable answer.

The second question is one almost everyone struggles with: how do I know if what I'm feeling is anxiety, or if it's a real need I should actually honor? Because those two things feel identical in your body, and most of the internet can't tell you the difference.

And the third one is personal, and a lot of you have felt it: "I feel abandoned every single time my partner goes off to a team dinner or out with friends. How do I get over this?" We're going to take that one apart together, because the real answer isn't what you think it is.

Transcript

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Today I'm answering three questions I get asked constantly, and I pick these three on purpose because they build on each other. The first one is a controversial one. Can a fearful avoidant actually have a successful relationship without going to therapy? People want me to say no. I'm not going to say no, but I'm also not going to give you a comfortable answer. The second question is one almost everyone struggles with, and that is, how do I know if what I'm feeling is anxiety or if it's a real need that I should actually honor? Because those two things can feel identical in your body, and most of the internet can't tell you the difference. And the third one is very personal. And a lot of you have felt it. I feel abandoned every single time my partner goes off to a team dinner or out with friends. How do I get over this? We're going to take that one apart together because the real answer isn't what you think it is. So let's get into it. So, can a fearful avoidant actually have a successful relationship without going to therapy? I believe they can. That's a full stop. But, and this is the whole thing, they need to have actual tools and they need to be working on them. So the answer is yes, with the condition attached. And the condition is everything. Therapy isn't the only path to healing, but healing isn't optional. Those are two different statements, and people collapse them together, generally so. They hear you don't strictly need therapy, and they hear you don't need to do the work. That is not what I'm saying. What therapy provides is the best, best case scenario, three things. It's going to present to you awareness, regulation, and accountability. If a fearful avoidant can get those three things, build real tools around them and actually use them, they can absolutely have a successful relationship. See, the method matters less than whether those things are really happening. Now, when it comes to awareness, you have to catch your patterns while it's happening, not three days later. When it comes to regulation, you need a way to calm your nervous system when the intimacy starts to feel like danger instead of just acting on the urge to run away and hide or shut down. The accountability, you have to own your impact on your relationship and repair it, not to get defensive or explain it away. Those are the tools. And here's my position as a coach. I think the tools are a part of people that are, or these these tools are what people are desperate for, they're starving for and not getting. Which brings me to something I need to say because it's going to help some of you who feel stuck. Not all help is created equal. You want to find the right person. And it's like dating. The right person for healing is like finding the right person for dating. You have to ask the right questions, and you are allowed to be selective. Here's what I mean. Some therapists don't specialize in attachment at all. We think that we go to a therapist and that's going to fix our problems, but not all specialists, or not all therapists specialize in attachment theory or attachment styles or give tools for attachment healing. That's not to knock on them. Attachment is a specific thing. And a wonderful therapist for grief or anxiety might not be the right person or the right fit for attachment repair. So you get to ask, do you work with attachment? You get to ask a therapist, what's your approach? Some therapists are brilliant at insight and they'll be able to help you understand your childhood deeply, but they don't send you out with practical tools to use in the actual moment your partner walks out the door or to dinner. Insight without tools can leave you very self-aware and still completely stuck. So you want to ask, will I leave with things that I could actually practice or just things to understand? And I'll say one more thing, and I'll say it carefully. Be discerning about who you take guidance from in this space, especially online. Some people are positioning themselves as experts, but what they're really building is an audience to validate their own unhealed wounds. They're processing their past in public and calling it teaching. You can usually feel the difference. You'll know. Real guidance will give you tools and point you towards your own life, the other kind that will keep you hooked on them and their story. They only validate. So you have to ask yourself, is this person making me more capable or more dependent? So when I say fearful avoidance can heal without therapy, I don't mean skip help. I mean the goal isn't the label in therapy. The goal is actually getting awareness, regulation, and tools from somewhere competent. For some people, that would be a great attachment-informed therapist. And I've met a few of them. They're out there. They're few, but they're out there. And for some, it might be coaching, which is where I sit. Because my whole job is handing people practical tools to use in real time. For some, it's a combination, therapy and coaching. They're not rivals, they assist each other, they do different jobs. Therapy can go deep into the wound and the past. Coaching is helping you, giving you the tools for the present. My own partner has been in therapy for over 30 years. I've also been in therapy for about seven years. So I'm the last person to try to get you away from therapy. I'm telling you to be intentional. I'm asking you to be intentional about how you allow people into your life and who you let guide you. So instead of asking, can they heal without therapy? Ask, is healing actually happening? And here's what healing will look like. No matter what method you use, can they catch their pattern earlier than they used to? Can they sit for repairs faster? Is their partner feeling more safe over time and not less? And can they take ownership without being dragged into it? If those things are happening, the tools are working. If they're not, then I'm working on it on my own, is just a story to keep you hooked, a way to sound like they're changing while they're actually avoiding the discomfort of actually changing. And here's the hard truth that nobody really wants to hear. And this is happening unconsciously, underneath it all, for a fearful, avoidant attached person. I can handle this myself. I don't need help, can be avoiding discomfort. That is the avoidance. The very thing that would help is the thing that the pattern is telling you to avoid. So I'm not against you doing this without a therapist. I'm against anyone who uses I can do it without a therapist as a hiding place. So you want to get the tools, use the tools, and let your partner actually feel the difference. If you're doing that, the label on who help you really doesn't matter. If you're not, no one's credential in the world is going to save the relationship. And I mean, let's be honest. About my own life here for a second. Therapy has helped me to talk through some things, but I had to figure out what tools I can use to change my situation. I didn't get a lot of tools as I give to my clients. Setting boundaries, I figured out an easy way to make sense of that. And I created a tool that I now give to my clients. How to have priorities and set them without feeling guilt. Yeah, I learned that on my own. Sure, my therapist said it's important and encouraged me to set boundaries and to prioritize and all those good things, but I had to find the know-how. And now I give my clients the know-how. So my actual answer to can a fearful avoidant have a successful relationship without therapy is yes. No, no therapy means I found another real way to get the tools and I'm using them. Never if it means no work. The relationship doesn't need them to carry a label of being in therapy. It needs them to be healing with real tools in real time. Those aren't always the same things, but they're not opposites of each other either. Question two, how do I know if it's my anxiety or a real need? This is one of the most important questions in all of our attachment work because here's the problem: anxiety and the real need feel exactly the same way in your body, same tight chess, same urgency to fix the problem, same, I have to do something right now. So you can't tell them apart by how intense the feelings are. The intensity is not the information. A real need can feel quiet, and anxiety can feel like a massive alarm going off in your head, and you just can't control anything. So we need a better test than how strong is it. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you four ways to tell the difference because no single test is going to be perfect. And when you run a feeling through all four, you will usually get the truth pretty clearly. Test one. The source of anxiety is usually about the past. Wearing, you know, it's the past showing up today. It's your nervous system's pattern matching a current situation to an old wound. It's something that has happened in the past, and now you're feeling that pain all over again. There is a link. What you want to do is ask yourself, have I felt this exact feeling many times before in other relationships? Even in childhood, if this feeling has a long history that predates this person, that's a strong sign. It's anxiety, not a response to who they actually are. A real need tends to be about something else specific that's actually happening right now with this person in this situation. Test two, the evidence. Anxiety runs on an assumption and a story. He didn't text me back, so he's losing interest. That's a story. There's no evidence in it, just a feeling that looks like a fact. A real need is grounded in something that you can observe and a repeated behavior. He's canceled the last four plans we made and hasn't suggested rescheduling. That there is evidence. So ask if I had to argue this in front of a neutral person. Do I have actual behavior to point to, or do I just have a feeling and a story I built around it? Test three. And this one is huge. What does the feeling actually want? Anxiety wants relief. It wants the bad feeling to stop right now, and it'll take any quick hit, any dopamine for reassurance. That's why anxious reassurance, seeking validation, never fills you up. You're always going to want something more because relief isn't the same as a resolution. You get the I love you and everything's fine. And 20 minutes later, you need it again. A real need wants resolution. It wants something to actually change or be understood. And once that need is met, it stays met. So ask yourself: if I got reassurance right now, would I be settled tomorrow? Or would I need it again? And if it's a bottomless pit, that's anxiety. If meeting it once would actually resolve it, that's a real need. And here is test four. The tone. Anxiety is urgent and demanding. It's controlling. It says, right now, or something terrible is going to happen. Think of a child that is asking for a lollipop and the parent is saying, No, I can't give it to you right now. And child's like, no, I want it right now. I want it right now. If you have that feeling of urgency right now, and you're afraid that if you don't get this thing, you're not getting the lollipop, you're not going to be happy. Right? A real need can be stated calmly and can usually tolerate a wait. You can wait in it. This doesn't mean that real needs aren't important or can be endlessly deferred. It means that a real need doesn't feel so urgent that it needs to be sorted out now or everything collapse. If you don't act on it in the next four minutes, everything falls apart. So if you can wait, if you cannot sit with the feeling for even an hour without acting, without just checking in text, that urgency is the information you're looking for. And that is usually anxiety and not the need. Now, here is the nuance the internet usually skips, and I believe it's the most important part. It is not either or. Most of the times it's both. You can have anxiety and a real need tangled up in the same moment. The skill isn't picking a team, picking which one's right. The skill is to separate the two. So you can regulate anxiety and still honor your needs. Here's how that work in practice. What you want to do is first regulate. You get your nervous system out of the alarm phase because you cannot think clearly from that flooded state of emotions. Then once you're calm, you check in on what's left. If the need completely disappears the second you're calm, it was mostly anxiety. If there's something there after you've been regulated, a real quiet, yeah, this is still, this is still important, this still matters to me, that's your real need. And it deserves to be communicated and honored. But first you want to regulate, then evaluate, because that order matters. What survives the calm is the real need. Right? When you're calm, regulated, and you're still feeling something's off, that there is the need. Usually it comes from when we feel like you know our partner is inconsistent, there's some sort of unsafety there. They said they were going to do something, they're not doing it. We're expecting them, they're not showing up. You need consistency. Or if you're trying to share your feelings and they shut it down for whatever reason, you're not feeling heard or respected. Respect is a real need. But the whole test is in that one sentence, and that's the perfect bridge to the third question, because it's a real life example of exactly what I just said. The inconsistencies we feel that makes us feel insecure in relationships. Third question: I feel abandoned every time he goes to team or friends' dinners. How do I get over this? Okay, a lot of us feel this way. We've felt this way at some point or the other. You're probably going through it right now. Your partner goes off to a work dinner or out with his friends, and something in you just drops. It feels like abandonment, it feels like being left. And then on top of the hurt, there's a second layer, shame, because some part of you know he's allowed to go to dinner, and you feel ridiculous for being upset about something that is so normal. First, I want to take the shame off. Because you can't heal anything you're ashamed of. It's information, the shame is information that there just sometimes when you want to be gentle with yourself. Because that feeling makes complete sense. If you have an anxious attachment, your nervous system learned at some point that connection is unreliable, that people you love can become unavailable without warning. So when your partner leaves, even for something completely ordinary, your system reads it as a threat to your bond. That's not you being crazy or controlling, that's an old scary alarm doing exactly what it was built to do. But, and this is the most loving part I can give. Understanding why you feel it doesn't mean you get to hand that feeling to him to manage. He shouldn't have to give up team dinners and friendships so that your past alarm system doesn't go off. That would shrink his life to manage your anxiety. And a relationship where one person disappears socially to keep the other one regulated is not actually secure. It's not healthy. It is just something that looks calm on the surface. Beneath it all, there's going to be a resentment being built up. So let's run this through a test. Just a few questions that you can ask yourself. Ask yourself is this feeling old? Almost certainly it is. The left behind feeling usually came a long time before this partner, and by decades. That points to anxiety. Evidence. You're looking for evidence. Has he actually abandoned you? Does he go out to dinners and then disappear on you for days, go cold, become unreachable? Or does he go have his dinner and then come home to you like he always does? If it's the second one, there is no evidence of abandonment. There's a story of abandonment that your nervous system is telling on top of the completely safe event. The goal is do you want him to not go? Do you want relief or do you actually want something specific that would resolve it? Is it a panicked don't leave me? Or could it become something you calmly request? Run through those two questions honestly. And for most people, most of the time, this one lands mostly on the anxiety side. So how do you actually get through it? And not just push through, white knuckle it. Let me give you a few real steps. Before he goes, name it to yourself. You can say internally or out loud, I'm noticing the abandoned feeling. This is from my past. It is not evidence that anything is wrong. When you name it, it creates tiny gaps between you and the feeling and a gap in your choice. You get to now choose how you're going to approach this. Then make an actual plan for your own evening. The goal is to have your own life, that something that lights you up, makes you happy when he's out, not to sit there waiting and watching the clock. Anxious attachment gets so much worse in that empty, waiting, sitting around posture. During regulation, regulate your body, breathe, take a walk, do some movement, call a friend, get into something that is absorbing. And here's the discipline part. And this is not easy. Don't text him to check the temperature of the bond. People do that. I'm just checking in. How are you doing? And when they get a response, ooh, this is nice and warm. When they don't get a response, ooh, this is cold. I don't like it. The have fun text, that's warm. Seven check-ins is your anxiety trying to get some sort of relief. But the best thing to do is appreciate that your partner is out there enjoying their time so they could come back to you all refreshed. Let him have his night. Right? After you notice that most important piece of the evidence will probably never be collected. You'll see that he comes back every single time he goes out and comes home. You are gathering proof that contradicts this old story. And that's how the nervous system actually relearns safety through repeated, lived experiences that's evidence, not through reassurance. Now I told you it's more than likely anxiety, but let's honor the part of you that this might actually be a real need because it's almost never zero, right? Maybe the real need isn't underneath don't go. Maybe it's a connection before and after. So to be totally fair, securely stated requests sounds like I love that you have your friends and your work dinners. I love that you enjoy them. Something that would really help me is a hug before you leave and a little reconnection when you get home. Can we do that? And notice what that does. It doesn't restrict him so suddenly he's not getting all defensive and feeling suffocated. It doesn't make his dinner the problem. He doesn't feel like I'm doing something wrong and you're going to be upset and you're going to leave him. It asks for connection instead of demanding that he does not go. You're asking for something. You're saying, Yeah, sure, go ahead. But can you also do this for me? And that's the real need. And it cleanly separates the feeling of being abandoned and now asking for connection. So the answer to how do I get over this is not by him staying home. You get over it by regulating an old pattern, an old feeling, an old behavior. And that you do by building your own life, asking for connection around everything that's going on instead of restriction and letting his consistent return to you slowly teach your nervous system that this time leaving and abandonment are not the same thing. And that's the work. That's the work that we have to do on ourselves. And it is so worth it. I've been through this, I know how worth it this is. It's something that I've done. I used to be afraid too that if my partner didn't respond, then he was going to be gone or whatever was going on there. And then I started to just look at his patterns and my body started to trust it. And now it's like I could text him, and if he doesn't respond all day or ever, I just know he forgot. He probably saw it and forgot. And that's the work that you do on yourself. Because having a healthy relationship, being able to love someone without having to control the narrative, just to sit back and relax and enjoy a happy, healthy relationship. It is so, so worth healing our anxious attachment and our avoidant attachment style. So let's put these three together because they're really pretty much the same thing, just they sound differently. Question one, an avoidant can heal without therapy, but only if real healing is actually happening with real tools and used in real time. Not if no therapy is just a polite way of saying no work. Question two, anxiety and real needs can feel identical. So you regulate first and then see what happens after you're calm. What is left is going to be the real need. If it's I still need to connect with my partner, that's the real need. But wait until you're calm. And question three is just the same skills applied to Tuesday night when he goes out with his friends or to dinner, and your nervous system is on high alert, you wait until you are calm and regulated and ask, Do I still feel unsafe? And again, remember when your partner is leaving and you feel like you're being abandoned, it takes time to see that they keep showing up for you and you don't have to be concerned. And that's when safety is built. But this takes time. I'm Annalisa Bahadur, and this is Decoding Attachment Style. Until next time.