Anxious Attachment’s Hidden Narcissism
First, let’s clear something up. Having anxious attachment doesn’t mean you’re an anxious person overall. It means that when the person you love pulls away, your system goes into overdrive.
Your mind spins with worst-case scenarios.
You feel the urge to over-text, withdraw in protest, or even make them jealous just to get a reaction.
Your body burns with urgency until the conflict is resolved.
If there’s tension, you feel they must talk to you right now—because waiting feels unbearable.
When people first discover attachment theory, it’s tempting to see the avoidant partner as “the selfish one.” After all, they’re the one who shuts down, pulls away, refuses to compromise, or goes cold when closeness is most needed. From the outside, that can look like classic narcissism—no empathy, no warmth, only self-protection.
By comparison, the anxious partner seems like the opposite. You chase love. You long for closeness. You “just want to be loved.” How could that ever be selfish?
Here’s the hard truth: sometimes it is.
When I was 20, my mother told me something I’ll never forget. I was begging my avoidant boyfriend for devotion he simply didn’t have the capacity to give, not even to himself. She said it was like asking someone in a wheelchair to do a backflip, then accusing them of not loving me enough when they couldn’t.
It was unfair and selfish. I wasn’t seeing who he really was — I was seeing who I wanted him to be. I was seeing my understanding of love that when you really love someone you change and grow and give. But he did not have that capacity to change, even for himself. Trying to make it about me was the innocent, immature part of me. It made me demand things from him he could not give – which if you really think about it lacks compassion.
Part of healing anxious attachment is realizing this: Wanting love isn’t wrong. But demanding it from someone who cannot give it will only keep you stuck in pain.
Here’s where it gets complicated:
The Anxious Blind Spot
Avoidant behaviors look more narcissistic because they’re about distance, coldness, and self-protection. The avoidant will starve someone of love and not realize it.
Anxious behaviors look like love, but often they’re about soothing the anxious person’s own terror of rejection and abandonment. Instead of withholding love from another, they withhold love from themselves by convincing themselves to stay in an environment where inconsistent love is served. The anxious will starve themselves of love and not realize it.
Think of it this way:
The avoidant’s wound says: “Don’t need me or have any expectations. It feels suffocating to me.”
The anxious wound says: “Need me and reassure me, or I’ll always feel you will leave.”
To the anxious person, this need feels like survival. If they don’t feel wanted, needed, or reassured, their world collapses. They play games, such as walking on eggshells to seem “less needy,” trying to spark jealousy, or melting down in temper tantrums of begging and pleading for change. All of this not to dare to ask the truth straight out: Are you willing to meet my needs, consistently? That is because they know they are with someone who can’t give them what they want. Instead of demanding change, help or leaving, they walk on eggshells, as they know demands will make the other person shut down or leave.
Here’s the truth: a healthy, secure person doesn’t do this, not more than once. I am not saying this to shame you. I am saying this so you can have a reference point for healthy behavior. Maybe the healthy secure person will over-text once, plead once, wait a little too long once. But after that, they stop. They stop because staying in a place where they are not treated well consistently, while hoping their patience and devotion will one day be noticed, is a recipe for abuse and chronic emotional unavailability.
The healthy person doesn’t keep making excuses for this pattern. They don’t say that a good person would be able to endure this, because they know that is not true. They walk away.The anxious one stays, and calls it unconditional love and patience.
Anxious Attachment and Narcissism
Anxious attachment isn’t “bad” or “selfish” in the usual sense. But research shows it overlaps with vulnerable narcissism, the hypersensitive kind, marked by:
fear of abandonment,
craving constant validation,
making the partner responsible for soothing every ache.
It’s not that anxious partners don’t care. They care a lot. But their love can feel like pressure: “If you really loved me, you’d answer right now… you’d never need space… you’d reassure me again and again.”
That isn’t malicious. But it can still suffocate the relationship.
If you are the type of person that does this, but also pushes away your partner, you are not an anxious attacher, but a disorganized attacher or another name for it is fearful avoidant.
How It Shows Up in Real Life: 5 Short Stories
The Late Reply
Sarah texts her boyfriend, “Good morning ❤️.”
Ten minutes go by. No answer. Her chest tightens. By 30 minutes, she’s already typing, “Are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong?”
When he finally replies, “Sorry, I was in the shower,” she feels relief, then guilt. But tomorrow, the same cycle repeats.Giving to a Nongiver
James bends over backward for his avoidant girlfriend, running errands, planning dates, sending long love notes.
But deep down, every act comes with an invisible tally: “I do this so she can see how wonderful I am and that I do love her.”
When she doesn’t reciprocate on his birthday, his chest fills with rage: “After everything I do for you, how can you just act like this day doesn’t exist?”
But James doesn’t realize it is unhealthy to downplay how she often doesn’t show up for him on a daily basis and to wait for one big moment. He should love himself enough to see how disengaged she is most of the time. If your person doesn’t see your value without you bending over backwards, then they never will.
The Storm
Anna cries in front of her partner after a small disagreement. She gets nervous that she was too much. She begs, “Please don’t leave me, I don’t want to do this without you.”
He tries to comfort her, but her fear doesn’t stop. She keeps wondering if he will break up or cheat on her. She tries to make it up to him. Hours later, he feels drained. He wants to run, not because he doesn’t love her, but because he feels she doesn’t have a handle on herself or reality.The Jealousy or Social Media Spiral
Malik notices his girlfriend didn’t like his Instagram post.
His brain spins: “She liked other people’s… why not mine? Is she embarrassed of me? Is she planning to leave?”
He confronts her, and she feels cornered, even though Malik insists, “I just love you so much.”
Instead of learning to ask directly for what he wants such as words of love and affection, he accuses her or gets upset hoping that she will give him the reassurance he needs to hear. Malik will need to learn to ask for his true needs, instead of covering them up with other issues.
I Don’t Want to be “Too Much”
Rachel gets upset because she wants more intimacy from her partner. When I asked her if she ever asked him directly for what she really wants – daily words of love and appreciation, Rachel thought about it and said no.
That was the secret. As the anxious attacher Rachel would try to get the words of love, appreciation and praise from him, but when she would not get it, she would contract inside. She would get bitter, resentful and angry, but he would be confused. Why is she acting differently.
Then she took my advice. She asked him outright: Hey, I need something from you that will calm down my nervous system. I would like to receive it once a day. I would love a few words of praise, love or appreciation.
When he had a difficult time articulating things, Rachel did not take it personally. Rachel would help him find the words and he would repeat them back to her and she would squeal in joy. This is learning how to work with each other and coming to a place of truth.
The Key Difference
Remember, we can have narcissistic traits without being a narcissist.
Avoidant narcissistic traits → tries to protect the self by withholding love, putting a partner on a pedestal, then finding something to criticize about them to get space. Pull you in just to push you away. Then the cycle of being punishing with being defensive, creating distance, silence and rage, keeping each other on the wheel of relationship suffering.
Anxious narcissistic traits → tries to protect the bond by overgiving love, blaming oneself for not being loveable. They break their own hearts. Punishing with demands, tantrumming and accusations, but not walking away from inconsistent love.
Neither anxious nor avoidant attachment is narcissism itself. But both can look narcissistic when the need for survival outweighs the ability to truly see and care for the partner.
The Hard but Healing Truth
Yes, anxious attachers can carry narcissistic traits. Not the cold, entitled kind. But the fragile, hypersensitive kind that says: “If you don’t reassure me, I’ll collapse. If you are not okay, I don’t know how to be okay. I can’t be without you”.
The anxious does want love. Fiercely. But when that want turns into a demand, when the partner is asked to endlessly hold up the anxious person’s self-worth — the relationship starts to crack under the weight.
This doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have needs. It doesn’t mean you should swallow your feelings, stop making requests, or never have a meltdown. You’re human — you get to want, you get to cry, you get to ask.
What it does mean is this: your mistake isn’t in needing love. Your mistake is in insisting on staying where a warm, heaping plate of love is never served. Where you’re scraping crumbs off the table and calling it dinner.
Real love exists. The kind that feeds you every day, not just when it feels good to your partner. The only reason you haven’t tasted it yet isn’t because it’s rare, it’s because somewhere deep down you’ve convinced yourself you’re not good-looking enough, not sexy enough, not interesting or worthy enough to be loved that fully. So you keep making the scraps work. But you’re not meant to live on scraps. You’re meant to be fed so well every day that you lose the taste of needing consistent reassurance.
Stop Trying Harder
You tried all the advice… because you were told that if you just communicated clearly, your relationship would finally feel healthy, right?
But here’s the truth no one told you:
If it isn’t emotionally safe to share your needs, saying them out loud only reopens the wound.
You don’t realize you’re stuck in a cycle of emotional manipulation. Every time you try to self-advocate, it turns into shutdown, deflection, or blame.
Here’s the loop you know too well:
➡️ You ask respectfully for what you need.
➡️ They dismiss what you say and defend themselves then shut down.
➡️ You feel hurt, like you don’t matter, and even more alone.
➡️ You try again, softer, clearer, explaining it differently.
➡️ They get upset, accusing you instead.
➡️ Now you feel small and confused, wondering WTF just happened?!
You keep reaching, overexplaining, bending yourself into shapes to hold the connection together. And all you do is reinforce your anxious attachment and the belief that you have to earn love by proving yourself.
You have done so much to learn good communication, but if it doesn’t work, then to continue is self-abandonment masquerading as unconditional love or patience. Everything shifts in your ability to manifest incredible love when you stop trying to prove you are worth listening to. Healing begins the moment you choose you, when you decide you’re no longer available for a dynamic that leaves you unseen, unheard, and emotionally drained.
You fix your relationship by communicating perfectly. You heal by setting a boundary. A deadline for changed behavior. They call that demands, you begin to love yourself enough to know it is the bare minimum request. Because when you finally choose to be the protective parent for your scared inner child, your truth, your dignity, you break the cycle.
With fierce devotion,
Gigi 🌹
Ps. 👉 Take the relationship quiz here