Additionally, your attachment style may make more sense than you think.

In this context, Attachment Therapy Brisbane offers a helpful perspective.

Additionally, you know your partner loves you, which is relevant to Attachment Therapy Brisbane.

But they seem slightly distant today, and something in you changes, Attachment Therapy Brisbane.

Perhaps you start wondering what you’ve done wrong. You replay the last conversation. You want reassurance.

Or perhaps it’s the opposite.

Someone wants more closeness from you and suddenly you feel uncomfortable. You want space. You feel pressured, even though part of you genuinely loves this person.

These experiences can be confusing.

We often understand them intellectually.

“I know they’re not leaving.”

“I know there’s nothing wrong.”

“I know I should be able to talk about how I feel.”

And yet something else seems to happen.

This is where understanding insecure attachment can be helpful.

Not as another label for what’s wrong with you.

But as a way of becoming curious about what you may have learned about closeness, safety and needing other people.

What is insecure attachment?

Insecure attachment describes patterns of relating that can develop when closeness, comfort or emotional availability haven’t always felt predictable or safe.

As children, we’re constantly learning about relationships.

Not through theory.

Through thousands of small experiences.

• What happens when I cry? • Does somebody notice when I’m frightened? • Can I ask for comfort? • What happens when I’m angry? • Can I make mistakes? • Is there room for my feelings? • What happens when someone I love is upset with me?

Gradually, we form expectations.

Not necessarily conscious beliefs.

More like an embodied sense of how relationships work.

Perhaps:

“I need to keep people happy.”

“People leave.”

“My feelings are too much.”

“I shouldn’t need anyone.”

“I need to stay alert to how other people are feeling.”

These patterns may have made considerable sense in the relationships where they developed.

The difficulty is that we can carry them into relationships where the circumstances are now very different.

What causes insecure attachment?

There isn’t one childhood experience that creates insecure attachment. The causes of insecure attachment are rarely a single event — more often, it’s a pattern that builds gradually over time.

And having insecure attachment doesn’t automatically mean you had terrible parents.

Sometimes the picture is much more subtle.

A parent may have been loving but emotionally unavailable.

Perhaps they were struggling themselves.

Maybe emotions weren’t talked about in your family.

Perhaps affection was plentiful when everything was going well, but anger or sadness wasn’t particularly welcome.

Maybe you learned that being the easy child, the successful child, the funny child or the helpful child kept things running smoothly.

Or perhaps relationships really were unpredictable.

There may have been • frequent conflict • emotional neglect • criticism • addiction • mental health difficulties in the family • separation • inconsistent caregiving • trauma • a parent whose emotional needs regularly took priority over your own.

Children are remarkably adaptive.

We learn how to maintain connection with the people we depend upon.

Sometimes those adaptations follow us into adulthood. If this sounds familiar, you might also find it helpful to read more about childhood emotional neglect and how it can shape adult relationships.

What does insecure attachment look like in adults?

Often it appears in very ordinary moments.

Your partner doesn’t answer a message.

Someone’s tone changes.

A friend seems distracted.

Your partner wants some time alone.

Someone is disappointed with you.

Nothing dramatic has necessarily happened.

But inside, something shifts. This is often what an insecure attachment style in adults looks like: not one dramatic moment, but a repeated internal reaction to small, ordinary relational shifts.

Common characteristics of insecure attachment include:

You may notice • relationship anxiety • fear of abandonment • needing reassurance • overthinking conversations • people pleasing • difficulty trusting • becoming highly sensitive to another person’s mood • avoiding conflict • withdrawing emotionally • difficulty expressing your needs • fear of intimacy.

What interests me isn’t simply the behavior.

It’s the moment just before it.

What happened inside you?

What did you feel?

What did you imagine was about to happen?

And what did you do next?

Anxious attachment

People with more anxious attachment patterns often experience uncertainty in relationships quite intensely.

You may be particularly alert to changes in another person.

A shorter message.

A pause.

A different expression.

Suddenly your mind begins working.

“Are they angry?”

“Have I done something?”

“Are they losing interest?”

You might seek reassurance, analyze conversations or try to repair a problem before you even know whether there is one.

From the outside, this can sometimes be dismissed as being “needy.”

I don’t find that particularly helpful.

I’m more interested in what the need for reassurance is protecting.

Perhaps somewhere along the way you learned that connection could disappear.

If so, becoming highly skilled at noticing signs of disconnection makes some sense.

Avoidant attachment

For someone with more avoidant attachment patterns, the movement can be almost the opposite.

Closeness may feel good until it becomes too much.

Someone asks how you’re feeling and you genuinely don’t know.

Conflict happens and you want space.

Another person’s emotional needs begin to feel overwhelming.

You might value independence enormously and find relying on others uncomfortable.

Again, rather than immediately deciding this means you’re emotionally unavailable, we can become curious.

What if self-sufficiency once made sense?

Perhaps relying on people wasn’t particularly reliable.

Perhaps vulnerability wasn’t welcomed.

Perhaps needing less protected you from disappointment.

The strategy may have been intelligent.

The question is whether you still need it in quite the same way now.

When you want closeness and fear it at the same time

Attachment isn’t always neatly anxious or avoidant; understanding the 3 types of insecure attachment can help explain why. Sometimes we desperately want closeness and then become frightened when we actually experience it.

Sometimes we desperately want closeness and then become frightened when we actually experience it.

We reach towards somebody.

Feel exposed.

Pull away.

Become lonely.

Reach towards them again.

It can become an exhausting movement between • longing for connection • fearing rejection • becoming overwhelmed by intimacy • withdrawing • missing the person • reaching out again.

This is one reason I’m cautious about turning attachment styles into personality types.

Human relationships are messier than that.

Your attachment style isn’t your personality

Attachment theory has become enormously popular online.

There are quizzes, videos and social media posts explaining how anxious people behave, how avoidant people behave and who should date whom.

Some of that can be genuinely useful.

It gives people language for experiences they may have struggled to understand.

But there is also a danger.

“I’m anxiously attached.”

“He’s an avoidant.”

Suddenly a pattern becomes an identity.

From a Gestalt perspective, I’m more interested in what happens between a person and their environment.

You may experience yourself very differently in different relationships.

Perhaps you’re secure with friends but anxious with romantic partners.

Maybe you’re comfortable with closeness until conflict appears.

Perhaps one relationship brings out enormous anxiety while another doesn’t.

The line between secure and insecure attachment isn’t always fixed; it can shift depending on who you’re with.

So instead of only asking:

“What attachment style am I?”

I think there’s a richer question:

“What happens to me when connection feels uncertain?”

Insecure attachment can be felt in the body

Attachment isn’t only something we think about; insecure attachment in relationships is often experienced physically long before we understand it intellectually.

We experience relationship physically.

Someone becomes distant and your stomach drops.

A disagreement begins and your breathing changes.

Someone raises their voice and your shoulders tense.

You sense disappointment and immediately want to explain yourself.

Or someone wants emotional closeness and you notice an almost physical urge to get away.

The body can respond before we’ve consciously decided anything is wrong.

This is one reason I bring a somatic approach to attachment therapy.

We can slow the experience down.

• What happens in your chest? • What changes in your breathing? • What feeling appears? • What impulse comes next? • Do you move towards the person or away? • What are you expecting to happen?

Sometimes there’s a whole relational history inside those few seconds.

Can insecure attachment change?

I don’t think attachment patterns need to become a life sentence.

They were learned in relationship, and new experiences in relationships can matter too.

Change doesn’t necessarily mean becoming someone who never needs reassurance, never feels jealous, never withdraws and handles every disagreement perfectly.

That’s probably another fantasy of self-improvement.

Perhaps change is subtler.

You notice the fear before sending the fifth message.

You recognize you’re withdrawing and manage to say, “I need some space, but I’m not leaving.”

You tell someone you’re hurt rather than pretending you’re fine.

You tolerate another person’s disappointment without immediately abandoning your own needs.

You let somebody care for you.

Small moments.

But different ones.

Therapy and attachment

One reason therapy can be particularly interesting for attachment work is that therapy itself is a relationship.

You might worry about disappointing your therapist.

You may automatically say everything is fine.

You might wonder whether you’re being judged.

Perhaps you find asking for something uncomfortable.

Maybe something the therapist says annoys you and your immediate instinct is to say nothing.

Those moments can become part of the work.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote about I-Thou, a quality of relationship in which we genuinely encounter another person rather than relating to them simply as something to manage, fear, please or control.

I think there’s something important in that for attachment work.

We aren’t trying to perfect ourselves so that relationships can finally become safe.

We’re learning how to meet another person while remaining more fully ourselves.

A different way of understanding yourself

Perhaps insecure attachment isn’t evidence that you’re bad at relationships.

Perhaps some of the things you struggle with today began as ways of protecting something important.

Connection.

Belonging.

Safety.

Yourself.

Understanding that doesn’t mean every behavior becomes acceptable.

We still have responsibility for how we treat other people.

But shame rarely gives us much room to change.

Curiosity does.

Instead of:

“Why am I like this?”

we might begin with:

“When did I learn that I needed to do this?”

And then, perhaps:

“Do I still need to?”

Attachment Therapy in Brisbane

If you recognize yourself in some of what I’ve described, I offer attachment therapy in Brisbane for adults experiencing anxious attachment, avoidant patterns, fear of abandonment, relationship anxiety, people pleasing, difficulty trusting and recurring relationship difficulties.

My approach is relational, somatic and Gestalt-informed.

You don’t need to know what attachment style you have.

We can begin with what actually happens in your relationships.

Sometimes that’s much more useful than another quiz.

You can read more about my Attachment Therapist Brisbane service, or book a free 30-minute consultation if you’d prefer to have a conversation first.