4 ways to become more secure in your relationship

Do you feel like you're always chasing your partner, trying to get them to commit or even just respond to a text? Here, leading psychiatrist Jessica Baum helps you shake off your anxious attachment

- By Jessica Baum

We begin learning about the world from the day we are born, and the most important person in that world is our primary caregiver, usually mum. There’s an energetic dance that goes on between baby and mother, where a baby learns to trust and get their needs met through all different ways, which includes crying, but also energy, reaching out, touch, and facial expressions.

How mum responds when her baby reaches out influences whether the baby learns inherent trust or not – which means whether baby learns that things are okay and their needs will be met, or whether they learn that their emotional needs might not be met.

There's no judgement against mum here: she could have been going through her own stress or depression, or other problems. But baby picks up on that, and develops a sense that sometimes they get their needs met, sometimes they don't.

When that baby grows up, they become hypervigilant and attuned to their partner, because they had become more attuned to their mum. They usually want to know what their partner feels and what they're thinking, so they can stay in connection. This is what we call an anxious attachment style.

An anxious person wants to be physically, emotionally, spiritually close and enmeshed together, rather than a secure person, who wants to be interdependent on each other, where you can both bloom and grow together, but are not fully enmeshed.

When someone disconnects and pulls away from someone with an anxious style, if they experienced a lot of disconnection as a baby, there's going to be what we call implicit memory. So the more the person disconnects from you, the more you're going to feel it in your body, which means it's trauma from early in their life.