I did want to share some really cool updates before I dive into the main topic of the blog, I now can say I’ve finished my master’s degree! It’s definitely been a busy summer with lots of time in the library writing, analysing, rewriting, questioning whether any of this makes sense, and then rewriting it again. But yeah, my dissertation is handed in, and everything is done. I’m now in a slightly weird period where I have a few weeks to breathe and get into a routine again before starting my PhD in October (had to hard launch it haha!).

I’m very excited about the direction I’m heading in. My research is going to continue to explore some of the questions I’ve become increasingly interested in over the past year, particularly how people make sense of their experiences within relationships and how those experiences can shape the way we understand ourselves afterwards. So while these next few weeks are technically a break from academia, my brain has not caught up yet.

This also feels quite relevant to the direction I’m taking with this page. The more my academic life revolves around relationship research, and the more I reflect on my own experiences, the more interested I become in the grey areas. I’m less interested in asking, “Who was the toxic one?” and much more interested in questions like: Why did this dynamic develop? Why did certain behaviours feel so difficult to recognise at the time? Why can we understand someone’s behaviour and still struggle to set boundaries around it? And perhaps most importantly, how do we learn to trust our own perceptions again?

I’ve talked quite a bit on here about boundaries, self-abandonment, emotional abuse and the ways we interpret other people’s behaviour. I’d like to use this space to promote more open conversations about these topics, and one concept that sits underneath many of them is attachment.

When Distance Starts to Feel Like Rejection

You’ve probably heard the term “anxious attachment” thrown around online. It has become one of those psychological concepts that seems to have escaped the psychology textbooks and entered everyday relationship vocabulary. And while I think that increased awareness can be genuinely useful, I also think the way we talk about anxious attachment can sometimes become a little too simplistic. Anxious attachment is often reduced to being needy, overthinking, seeking reassurance, or being afraid that someone will leave. But what actually happens when uncertainty starts to feel like rejection? And how do we distinguish between an attachment wound being activated and our relationship genuinely giving us something to be concerned about? That’s what I want to explore here, and I think this piece complements my last post on avoidant attachment quite nicely. You can read that one here: https://thesecureperspective.com/2026/08/23/the-psychology-of-avoidant-attachment/ .

When Anxiety Meets Uncertainty

I think one of the most difficult parts of anxious attachment is that the feeling can arrive before the evidence does. A message takes longer than usual to receive. Someone seems slightly quieter. Plans change. Their tone feels different. They want a little more space than usual. On their own, none of these things necessarily mean that something is wrong. But when you’re particularly sensitive to changes in closeness, uncertainty can become difficult to sit with. A small change in someone’s behaviour can quickly become a question about the relationship itself.

Are they losing interest? Have I done something wrong? Are they pulling away? Before long, the question isn’t necessarily “What is happening?” but “How do I make this feeling go away?”

That’s where reassurance can become so important. Reassurance isn’t inherently unhealthy. In fact, reassurance is a completely normal part of close relationships. We all have moments where we need to hear that we’re loved, valued, or that everything is okay. The difficulty comes when reassurance becomes the primary way we regulate uncertainty.

Someone tells you that everything is fine, and for a little while, you believe them. The anxiety settles. But then another small change happens, and the uncertainty returns. So you ask again. And again. Not necessarily because you don’t believe the other person, but because the feeling of uncertainty itself has become difficult to tolerate.

From the outside, this can look like neediness. From the inside, it can feel much more like an attempt to restore a sense of safety.

But What If Something Really Is Wrong?

But there’s another side to this that I think is equally important: sometimes the relationship really is creating uncertainty.

This is where I think attachment language can become unhelpful when it’s used too simplistically. If someone is consistently inconsistent, frequently withdraws without explanation, repeatedly breaks agreements, or leaves you unsure about where you stand, it would be strange to suggest that every uncomfortable feeling you experience is simply an attachment wound that you need to work through.

An anxious response can be triggered by our own history. It can also be a response to something happening in the present. Sometimes it can be both.

That’s an important distinction because the solution isn’t always to become better at tolerating uncertainty. Sometimes the more useful question is whether the uncertainty actually needs resolving.

The Anxious-Avoidant Cycle

This can become particularly complicated when two different protective strategies meet. Imagine one person feels insecure when they sense distance. Their instinct is to move closer: talk about what’s wrong, seek reassurance, ask questions, try to repair the connection. The other person experiences that pursuit as pressure. Their instinct is to create more distance: withdraw, become quieter, avoid the conversation, or ask for space.

That withdrawal then creates even more uncertainty for the first person. So they pursue harder, which makes the second person withdraw further. Suddenly both people are responding to the behaviour of the other person rather than the original problem.

Neither person necessarily set out to create this dynamic. Both may simply be trying to regulate their own discomfort. But understanding the pattern doesn’t necessarily make the pattern healthy.

I think this is where attachment theory becomes most useful when we stop treating attachment styles as fixed personality types and start thinking about them as patterns of responding. The anxious person isn’t simply “the needy one.” The avoidant person isn’t simply “the uncaring one.” Both people may be trying to protect themselves.

However, this is something that stays in my head: understanding why someone behaves a certain way doesn’t automatically make the behaviour healthy.

Maybe I Wasn’t Actually That Anxious

That distinction has become particularly important to me because, for a long time, I actually thought I probably had a more anxious attachment style. There were certainly moments in relationships where I could overthink things, want reassurance, or become very focused on trying to understand what was happening. And, as I’m sure most people can relate to, when you care about someone, uncertainty can sometimes get under your skin.

That said, the more I thought about it, the more I noticed that a lot of what I was reading or watching online about anxious attachment didn’t quite fit me.

Me personally, I’ve always felt pretty comfortable expressing my emotions. I’ve been very fortunate to have an amazing family and some brilliant friends around me who I can talk to when something is bothering me. I don’t see emotional vulnerability as something I need to avoid or be embarrassed about.

I’ve also generally felt comfortable grieving the end of a relationship. Of course, I can be hurt. I can miss someone. I can spend far too long thinking about what happened and analysing conversations that probably didn’t need analysing quite that much. I’m human, after all. But eventually, I’d get back to myself. I’d spend time with the people I love, focus on fitness and my academic work, pursue the things that make me feel like me, and gradually rebuild my confidence. I could be sad about losing a relationship without feeling like I’d lost myself along with it.

The more I recognised this pattern, the more I started questioning whether anxious attachment really explained what I was experiencing. Maybe the issue wasn’t necessarily that I was unable to cope with distance or the possibility of someone leaving. Maybe it was that, while I was in relationships, I wasn’t always particularly good at protecting myself from things that didn’t feel right.

In other words, my issue often wasn’t recognising that something bothered me. It was setting a boundary around it. And I think that’s an important distinction.

Because we sometimes talk about attachment as though it explains everything about how someone behaves in relationships. If someone worries, seeks reassurance, overthinks, or struggles with uncertainty, we can quickly reach for the label of anxious attachment. But anxiety isn’t necessarily the same thing as anxious attachment.

You can overthink something without your entire approach to relationships being organised around fear of abandonment. You can want reassurance without being incapable of self-regulation. You can become deeply invested in someone without losing your sense of self.

Secure With Leaky Boundaries

Now, this is my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt but from my own experiences, I feel that someone can be relatively secure while still having what I’ve started thinking of as “leaky boundaries”.

I don’t mean this as another attachment style. It’s more a phrase I’ve started using to describe the gap between knowing what you’re comfortable with and consistently acting on it. You might be comfortable with intimacy. You might not be particularly afraid of being alone. You might be capable of communicating your needs and tolerating disagreement. And yet, when someone crosses a boundary, you might still struggle to follow through on the consequence you’ve said would matter to you.

One of the ways my boundaries became “leaky” was through my tendency to prioritise communication and repair. If something went wrong, my instinct was often to understand it. Could we talk about it? Could we explain where we were both coming from? Could we find a way forward? And I still think those are valuable instincts. Healthy relationships need communication, accountability and repair.

But I’ve also learned that not every relationship problem is a communication problem. Sometimes we can communicate a boundary perfectly clearly and the other person can still choose not to respect it. Sometimes the same issue has been discussed repeatedly. Sometimes you’ve already given someone opportunities to change. And sometimes continuing to search for the perfect conversation becomes a way of avoiding the much harder decision: I need to walk away.

That’s probably where my understanding of “leaky boundaries” has become most useful. A boundary isn’t simply knowing what behaviour you’re uncomfortable with or communicating that discomfort. It’s also being willing to act when the situation doesn’t change. Otherwise, we can end up endlessly explaining ourselves while remaining in the exact situation we’re trying to protect ourselves from.

Walking away can feel particularly difficult when you understand the other person. You can understand why they behave the way they do. You can recognise their insecurities, their history, their intentions, or even their capacity to change. You can still love them. You can still believe that they aren’t entirely defined by the things they’ve done.

For me, the uncomfortable realisation wasn’t necessarily that I was secretly anxious. It was that I could sometimes understand someone else’s behaviour so well that my understanding started to interfere with my boundaries.

I could recognise their perspective. I could understand where they were coming from. I could appreciate that people are complicated and that relationships rarely fit neatly into categories of good person and bad person.

But there is a point where understanding someone can become a loophole. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe I should be more understanding. Maybe this deserves another chance. I do think this can also be an issue for people who have struggled with people pleasing.

In many ways, I think that being understanding can be a strength, but sometimes if we’re not careful, it can become a loophole through which our boundaries disappear. That doesn’t mean we should become rigid or unforgiving. Relationships require flexibility, repair, compromise and the ability to recognise our own mistakes. Having a boundary doesn’t mean refusing to ever change your mind. But there is a difference between being able to understand someone’s behaviour and feeling obligated to remain available for it.

You can understand why someone behaved the way they did and still decide that you don’t want to experience that behaviour again. You can recognise someone’s insecurity without taking responsibility for managing it. You can have compassion for someone and still decide that they no longer get the same level of access to you.

What Security Actually Looks Like

If the goal is simply to become “less anxious,” it’s easy to imagine that the answer is to need less, ask for less, tolerate more, and become increasingly independent. But that’s not necessarily security, and it’s definitely not authentic!

Security isn’t the absence of needs. It isn’t never feeling anxious. It isn’t being completely unaffected when someone creates distance. And it certainly isn’t learning to tolerate behaviour that makes you unhappy simply because you’re afraid of being labelled “anxious.”

Maybe it’s being able to experience uncertainty without immediately abandoning yourself to resolve it. You can pause. You can ask yourself what you actually know. You can separate what happened from what you fear it means. You can communicate rather than mind-read. You can ask for reassurance without making another person entirely responsible for regulating your emotions. And you can recognise when the answer isn’t to become less anxious.

Sometimes the answer is to recognise that something isn’t working for you. Because there is a subtle difference between saying, “My anxiety is telling me they will leave,” and, “Their behaviour is showing me that I don’t feel secure here.” Learning to tell them apart might be one of the most important parts of developing a more secure relationship with both other people and yourself.

Maybe becoming more secure isn’t about reaching a point where distance never bothers us. Maybe it’s learning to sit with that discomfort long enough to ask what it actually means.

Is this an old fear? Is this something I need reassurance about? Or is this relationship genuinely giving me information I shouldn’t ignore?

Perhaps the goal isn’t to become someone who never feels anxious. It’s to become someone who trusts themselves enough to listen to the feeling without automatically believing it, and trusts themselves enough to act when the evidence tells them something is wrong.

Because ultimately, I don’t think secure attachment means never needing anyone. I think it means being able to love someone deeply without losing your ability to hear yourself.