3 Things Anxious Preoccupied Individuals Look For in Perfect Relationships

Do you constantly feel the need to strengthen your bond with your partner?

Maybe you need reassurance and affirmation to strengthen your view of your relationships?

To some, these questions will produce an immediate head nod in agreement, while for others, different needs exist to create their view of a healthy relationship.

Your needs in a relationship develop from your attachment style, and it creates subconscious expectations that affect how you show up for your partner.

For the anxious-preoccupied attachment style, you might feel like your needs are reasonable, but the truth is due to your attachment style, you’ve built a mix of healthy and unhealthy expectations.

Connection

The anxious-reoccupied individual has a core would from a fear of abandonment. While you might feel like you want to connect with your partner, this can turn into codependent behavior.

The perfect relationship for this person has a constant connection through intentional time and communication, whether it be in person, through text, or even on social media.

• The issue is that you struggle to build a connection to yourself, so you seek validation through the bond with your partner.
• You are filling an emotional void within yourself by seeking it through another person. When they don’t meet your expectation, it becomes a pain point for you.
• You won’t always have the same communication style as your partner, and your expectation could be excessive compared to their view.

An issue that arises in relationships is we have needs and expectations, but we do not create an action for our partner to follow as a roadmap. For example, “I want to connect more” is not a valid need.

Create actions, and examples, so your partner knows how to show up and be present. You have to create activities for connection to self as well. Your need for closeness must be separated, or you will constantly feel let down and abandoned.

Soothing

Piggybacking off the first point, the anxious preoccupied individual has difficulty self-soothing due to an expectation that their partner will meet their needs all the time.

You might have a view that if we both meet each other’s needs all the time, then the relationship will be perfect and create a sense of a soothing dynamic.

• Your partner can not be responsible for constantly meeting your needs. You have to challenge yourself to find ways to meet your expectations alone.
• Gaining the ability to self-soothe and regulate your emotions will release you from the subconscious expectation that it has to come from your partner.
• Your sense of self will become linked to the identity of your partner’s ability to show up for you, creating an unhealthy dynamic.

The anxious preoccupied individual has to shift away from the idea that their partner is the central resource for their needs. Yes, you want to be in a loving and caring relationship, but this can turn unhealthy if you can’t do this alone.

Reattach yourself to the idea that you are in a loving relationship and can take care of yourself independently. You are paving the road to volatility because you will poke holes in every moment that they don’t fulfill your expectation since your sense of validation is deeply connected.

Alignment

The anxious preoccupied individual has a deep emotional connection to their feelings. They will have layers of thoughts around one central idea.

The dynamic can create a rift when a partner does not have as deep a connection to an idea because it will come off as not caring.

• As an anxious-preoccupied, you desire to dig into topics layer by layer. You can not hold your partner to the same standard.
• Your partner won’t always agree with your stances. Since you have dug in so deeply, you feel that their stance comes with careless thinking.
• It can turn into an unhealthy expectation because you can build a thought frame of,” if they loved me, they would agree.”

It is damaging to expect your partner to be on the same page as you all the time. It can also create the feeling that you are disconnected. As you know by now, this can cause you to spiral as the connection is a core need.

It is vital to share your thoughts as your thoughts. You have developed this view that your bond is because you have identical needs, the same desire to connect, and the same aligning thoughts.

Conclusion

While the elements you look for in relationships are not unhealthy at a base level, they can become destructive when you create a dependency on them to generate happiness.

You create a subconscious sense of self-worth when you can’t create a feeling of fulfillment independent of your partner being the source.

In a healthy relationship, your partner will be there to meet your expectations, but those expectations must be attainable.

Your needs should be vocalized and put into actionable words instead of a broad version with no central focus.

A connection to yourself must be in place before someone can build upon that and create a sense of balance in your life.

The fight for the anxious preoccupied individual is to search for what you can accomplish for yourself, whether it’s emotionally or fulfilling boundaries around your needs.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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