Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Therapists outline the four different attachment styles—secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant—plus how to identify yours, cope, and change it.
Adults with the anxious–preoccupied attachment style often find themselves in long-lasting, but unhappy, relationships. [70] [71] Anxious–preoccupied attachment styles often involve anxiety about being abandoned and doubts about one's worth in a relationship. These kinds of feelings and thoughts may lead people to stay in unhappy relationships.
Analysis of the ECR and ECR-R reveal that the questionnaire items can be grouped into two dimensions of attachment. One group of questionnaire items deal with how anxious a person is about their relationship. These items serve as a scale for anxiety. The remaining items deal with how avoidant a person is in their relationship.
Anxious-preoccupied people with anxious-preoccupied attachment tend to be hypervigilant to signs of danger and worry or catastrophize about symptoms. In health care appointments, their narrative is full of intense negative emotion but is relatively sparse in the specific detail desired by health care providers.
The words attachment style or pattern refer to the various types of attachment arising from early care experiences, called secure, anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, (all organized), and disorganized. Some of these styles are more problematic than others, and, although they are not disorders in the clinical sense, are sometimes discussed ...
This attachment style is associated with a negative model of the self and a positive model of others, leading to a preoccupation with relationships and a fear of abandonment. [3] Anxious-preoccupied individuals tend to have a heightened sensitivity to emotional cues and a tendency to perceive more pain intensity and unpleasantness in others. [4]
Furthermore, fearful-avoidant adults also have a less pleasant outlook on life compared to anxious-preoccupied and dismissive avoidant groups. [120] Like dismissive-avoidant adults, fearful-avoidant adults tend to seek less intimacy, suppressing their feelings. [8] [121] [122] [123]
The least anxiety-provoking situations are ordered at the bottom of the hierarchy while the most anxiety-provoking situations are at the top. Exposure hierarchies typically consist of 10-15 items and will guide the client’s exposure practices. [1] An abbreviated example of an exposure hierarchy is pictured in Image 1.