Anxious attachment
11 July 2026
Anxious attachment is not a wound. It's a strategy — a creative one, built by a child to get through their particular family of origin. And it comes with a payoff: a finely tuned read on other people's emotional weather, the kind of attunement that, later in life, looks a lot like emotional intelligence.
We've gotten used to calling anything other than secure attachment a problem to be
fixed. I think that habit says more about us than about the children in question. It's easier to squarely blame parents than to credit a child with the agency to have adapted, cleverly, to whatever they were handed.
Worth noting: Bowlby's own writing never uses the language of "wounds." His terms were separation, loss, mourning, insecure attachment — descriptions of a pattern, not an injury. "Attachment wound" is a more recent addition, popularized through
trauma-informed and emotionally-focused therapy traditions decades after Bowlby. It's a legitimate clinical concept in its own right — but it's not what Bowlby meant, and it imports a medical metaphor (scar, injury, damage) onto material that Bowlby treated as adaptive, relational, and human.
Call it a strategy, not a wound. It changes what you owe the child who built it — credit, not just sympathy.