Anxious Attachment at Work, Avoidant in Love: Why Different Situations Bring Out Different Parts of You

Why different situations bring out different versions of you

I've found something genuinely interesting about myself lately, and I wanted to write it out properly rather than just posting about it and moving on because I think it says something useful about how attachment actually works, not just for me.

If you asked me to describe my attachment style in relationships, I'd probably say I lean avoidant. Give me a difficult conversation or a need I need to express, and I suddenly develop a very keen interest in my own independence…I've done a lot of work to understand that pattern, where it comes from, and mostly, I feel like I know myself pretty well in that part of my life.

Work, though? Apparently that's where my anxious attachment has been quietly hiding this whole time.

What's actually going on

I'm about to take over my manager's role for twelve months while she's on maternity leave. I've known since April. I've prepared properly. I know I'm capable - I wouldn't have been asked to do it otherwise - and on paper, I'm really excited about it. (Okay, somewhat excited about it 👀)

And yet, several days before it starts, I've been completely dysregulated. Poor sleep. Running through what feels like 847 different scenarios on a loop. That familiar flooded, overwhelmed feeling I associate far more with relationship anxiety than with my career.

My first instinct, if I'm honest, was something close to “FFS this again, come on, I thought I'd worked on this." A little flash of frustration at myself for not having this sorted, given how much time I've spent thinking about exactly these kinds of patterns.

But I caught that thought, and I want to explain why I think it's worth catching, especially if you've ever wondered can you be anxiously attached in one area of life and avoidant in another?

We can get too attached to "this is just how I am"

It's very tempting to build a tidy story about ourselves.

“I'm avoidant. I'm anxious. I'm not good under pressure. I'm a worrier.”

These labels feel true because they're often based on real, lived patterns, but attachment style isn't always as fixed as we assume.

The truth, at least for me right now, is that your attachment style can look different depending on the situation. I can be genuinely calm and secure in one part of my life, and completely out of my depth in another. That doesn't mean one version is the "real" me and the other is some kind of failure or regression.

It means different situations activate different parts of us, and a new role with new levels of responsibility and visibility is exactly the kind of thing that can quietly press a very old button, even when your anxious attachment usually shows up somewhere else entirely, like dating or relationships.

In the Transactional Analysis framework I work within, we'd talk about this in terms of different parts of us getting activated by different situations, not because we're inconsistent or broken, but because certain circumstances echo something from further back, regardless of how "sorted" we feel in general.

Why attachment style shows up differently in different areas of life

This is something I think gets missed in a lot of the content around attachment styles, the idea that you're simply "an anxious person" or "an avoidant person," full stop, in every context, forever.

In reality, attachment is far more situational than that. You might feel completely secure with your closest friends and anxiously attached in romantic relationships. You might feel avoidant with a partner and anxious with a demanding parent. Or, like me this week, you might feel calm and secure in love right now, and find your anxious attachment surfacing somewhere you'd never have expected - like a promotion at work.

Understanding this matters, because it changes the question. Instead of asking “why am I like this?" as a fixed identity question, you can start asking “what does this specific situation remind my nervous system of?" which is a much more useful, and much kinder, place to start.

What I'm actually trying to do about it

Not force myself to feel calm. Not tell myself I "shouldn't" be feeling this way, given everything I know. That approach has never actually worked for anyone, in my experience - professionally or personally.

Instead, I've been trying to get curious rather than critical:

- What am I actually afraid of here?

- What am I telling myself this situation means?

- What do I actually need right now - more preparation, reassurance, rest, or just permission to feel unsettled without it meaning anything is wrong?

And the question that's landed hardest, the one I keep coming back to: “can I let myself feel anxious without deciding that means I'm not capable?”

Because those two things - the feeling and the story I attach to it - aren't the same thing. Feeling anxious doesn't automatically mean I'm underprepared, or the wrong person for this, or heading for failure. It might just mean something old has been switched on by something new, and it's asking for a bit of attention rather than a diagnosis.

Why this matters beyond my week

This is honestly one of the things I find most interesting about the work I do with clients navigating relationship anxiety and attachment patterns. We can know ourselves really well on paper - we understand our patterns, our history, our tendencies - and still be caught off guard by a real-life situation showing us there's more to understand. That's not a failure of the self-development work, it’s just what being a person, with a nervous system and a history, actually looks like.

The goal was never to become someone who stops feeling anxious, uncertain, or overwhelmed altogether. I don't think that version of "healed" exists, for me or for anyone. The more useful goal is recognising what's happening when it shows up, getting curious about it instead of critical, and trusting ourselves enough to know that feeling something doesn't mean we have to believe everything it's telling us.

Anyway, the next few weeks should be interesting. I'll let you know how the anxious, high-achieving, slightly-avoidant-in-relationships version of me gets on.

Sending love,

Tiffany xx