How To Stop Being Clingy In Relationships

Tribe is the source of our power, and anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional. We rely on each other for physical nurture, emotional mirroring, knowledge, synergy, creativity, companionship, reproduction, and so much more. Those who learn to effectively cooperate and connect with others go far in life.

Then there are those of us who need others that little bit too much. We might be desperate for their approval, their attention, or their validation. We walk around with an insatiable hunger, a corrosive anxiety, an implacable ache in our chest.

When in the presence of certain people, we feel the scale ever-so-gradually tipping in their favour. Our energy becomes drawn to them, and we grow anxious and reactive. We get paranoid that we may offend them, and second-guess everything we say. We track their movements, and grow resentful and frightened when they speak with anyone else. We think about them often, and daydream about how amazing they are.

What is going on?

Attachment: The Love Highway

The psychological manifestation of ‘people needing other people’ is attachment.

Attachment is like an invisible, two-way, emotional umbilical cord. The more positive experiences shared between two people, the more threads become added to the attachment, and the stronger it becomes.

Attachment takes time to develop, and radically transforms how we relate. When you are attached to someone, you become utterly invested in them. Their well-being becomes paramount to you, and you do everything you can to ensure they remain healthy and happy. Their opinion carries immense weight. Their disapproval hurts. Their growth becomes your growth. All of this is incredibly important for humans to survive and thrive.

Attachment becomes a part of us much like a limb, and therefore losing an attachment figure is deeply painful. Their absence, whether temporary or permanent, feels like losing a limb. Phantom pains from an attachment to someone who is no longer there can haunt us for months, and often years.

It is not only physical absence which can hurt, but also emotional absence. When someone is present with us, emotionally attuned and caring to us, our attachment to them thrives. When they are distracted, emotionally numb and contemptuous, however, we experience a psychological break in the attachment. This leads to the fear of abandonment, along with the shame of feeling not good enough for that person. When experienced early on in life, it can impact our relational blueprint for the worse.

Anxious Attachment: The Root Cause Of Clinginess

Not all attachments are equal. In childhood, the first attachment we have is with our mother. If she is consistently present, calm, attuned and attentive to us, we develop a secure attachment to her. Using our attachment to her as a blueprint, we then seamlessly connect with others and develop satisfying attachments as we go through life.

However, if our mother has been inconsistent in her presence, calmness, attunement and attentiveness, we would have experienced many breaks in the attachment, where we would have been flooded with terror and shame. Many mothers do their best, but are hindered by abusive husbands, stress, mental disorders and addictions.

Most mothers will try to be attuned and loving, which instils hope in their child that they can develop a secure attachment to her. Over time, however, her capacity to attune and attach becomes compromised, and the child has no idea why. All they know is that their mother is sometimes available and loving, while other times she is cold, touchy or even angry.

There is no rhyme, reason or predictability to such a mother’s behaviour. She is random in her love and availability. This results in an anxious attachment, since the child never knows when the blanket of attachment will be snatched away from them. Much like a slot machine, the anxious child’s mother offers them intermittent reinforcement, with the child being ‘rewarded’ with love at random moments, before suddenly being deprived for no reason.

Understanding And Coping With Anxious Attachment

The anxiously-attached child brings an anxious style of relating into all their relationships. As a result, they are constantly plagued by two major core wounds:

1. Chronic shame: The anxiously-attached person has an inferiority complex. They cannot help but feel flawed, unworthy and not good enough.
2. Abandonment trauma: Because they feel they are not good enough, the anxiously-attached person remains hyper-vigilant and afraid that people will leave them. The harrowing terror of being emotionally abandoned by their mother in childhood remains wedged in their soul and psyche, haunting them at all times.

Due to their abandonment trauma from childhood, the anxiously-attached person is terrified of being alone. Also, because their intermittent reinforcement has permanently marked them, they can never feel completely secure in their attachment to someone. They are constantly hyper-vigilant, looking for any sign of rejection or abandonment.

The anxiously-attached person’s solution to their anxiety and shame is to ensure that they remain perfect, never doing anything wrong. Meanwhile, they track the other person’s every movement and never leave their side, lest they be abandoned. Most of this happens in their imagination, as they project their trauma and anxious blueprint on someone who is likely having a completely different experience of the relationship.

Living in such a state is exhausting and destructive. The more clingy you are to someone, the more they pull away. The more they pull away, the more shame you feel. The more shame you feel, the more inferior you feel, and the more certain you become that the other person will leave you, hence making you cling tighter, and the cycle repeats.

To end this vicious dynamic, you will need to confront the root causes head-on. This involves diving into the heart of loneliness, as well as facing and releasing the core of your anxiety: your shame-based inferiority complex.

Enter The Void: Confronting The Fear Of Loneliness

Anxious people cling because they are terrified of being alone. Even if they are just emotionally abandoned, terror grips them. Therefore, they try to ensure physical proximity to their attachment figure while remaining on their best behaviour, hoping that it wins them attunement, attention and affection.

The most powerful way to deal with fear is to ask what the worst-case scenario is, and then dive into it head first.

In the case of the anxiously-attached person, they can imagine that the person they are most attached to hates their guts and then abandons them forever. What would happen next? Would they drop dead? Would the resulting terror and crippling shame leave them broken and destitute? Would the entire world find out and then collectively ridicule and want nothing to do with them?

Not likely. But being emotionally or physically abandoned by your attachment figure can feel like the end of the world. Even the thought of it can be terrifying.

The first step out of this handicap is to isolate yourself, to spend time alone, and meditate on the resulting panic. This can be going for a long walk, spending a day in your room with no outside contact, or can go as far as travelling alone to another place.

Immersing yourself in solitude can feel impossible when you are anxiously-attached. At first, it will utterly cripple you. You may even experience panic attacks. The idea is to start with something manageable, and then increase the difficulty level. Maybe don’t travel to the other side of the world on a one-way ticket to start with, but rather, go to the movies alone, or take a walk somewhere you haven’t been.

When practicing isolation, reduce contact with your attachment figure, and try to leave your phone off or at home. You should have no ‘lifelines’ to fall back on. It should be you and the abyss. This requires a warrior mindset, and a willingness to dive into the heart of fear. If you can deal with the tension and discomfort of this, you will transform your anxiety into inner calm and resolve. It is a beautiful spiritual practice.

Inferior No More: Dealing With Shame

Clingy behaviours can be so absolute, so all-consuming, that the anxious person completely misses the root cause.

Shame is the emotion you feel when you fail to measure up to a standard you deem important. If your primary attachment figures become disappointed in what you do, you feel guilt. However, if they blatantly reject you based on who you are, you feel shame.

Not only can people induce shame, but so can arbitrary standards. If you want to be skinny, you may feel shame when you put on weight or if you meet someone who looks fitter than you. Ultimately, shame is the emotion which reminds you that you do not measure up. That you are not good enough, regardless of what ‘good enough’ may mean to you. It is mostly subjective person-to-person.

The anxiously-attached live with a constant sense of being not good enough. They are riddled with shame, and to avoid the agony of feeling their repressed shame, they do everything in their power to ‘measure up’. They appease and cooperate with others to prove their lovability. They flatter others and put them on a pedestal, which helps them feel secure in their attachment to someone ‘superior’.

To overcome anxious attachment for good, you will need to cut out your people-pleasing behaviours, and then allow the feeling of shame to wash over you. At first, it will be a horrendous experience. A lifetime of shame can lead to ‘shame episodes’ which cripple you for days at a time, perhaps even weeks. You feel lethargic and depressed. Your brain stops working. A critical voice in your head lashes out at you, telling you how worthless and shit you are. You start chronically comparing yourself to others, finding ways to prove how everyone else is better. Your shoulders collapse, and you look down and stop making eye contact. You get an overwhelming desire to hide from the world and never come out.

This is shame. It is the emotion that all anxiously-attached people carry yet rarely acknowledge. Much like abandonment trauma and the fear of being alone, the only way out is through. The more shame you allow yourself to feel without reacting to it, the more you can release. It may take months or longer, but it will release. You may have weeks of empowerment, but then be triggered back into shame again. Everyone goes through their own process.

Shame will likely arise when you are in solitude, as you will feel like a loner who nobody values. If you resist it or convert it into thoughts, it will recycle itself. If you can sit with it without engaging it, it will gradually fade. Wanting it to fade will keep it there. Sitting with it lovingly without expectation is enough, even when you feel you need to react to it.

When shame gets overwhelming, a lifeline you can use is to share it with another person. Perhaps you have a therapist, a close friend, a relative or a support group. This can be as simple as saying “I’m feeling shameful”, or “I’m feeling inferior/unworthy/unlovable”. This differs from clinginess because it is authentic, and it involves you owning the responsibility for how you feel. By sharing your shame, the loving eyes of another human can help to heal it. When shame breeds in secrecy, exposing it to the light can heal it. So remember that you don’t have to always carry it alone, especially when it is still heavy.

To feel your fear and shame without distraction, without ‘doing’ anything, is the foundation for healing your anxious attachment. The process is arduous, but well worth it. And there are no shortcuts. Yet when you emerge from the turbulence on the other side, you will be transformed. You will have the option of being alone if you choose, and you will stop comparing yourself to others and pedestalising them. You grow calm, confident and content.

It is only from such a state that you can form authentic relationships based on mutual respect, rather than a hierarchy built on clinginess and neediness. It is only from such a state that you can move toward secure attachment once and for all.