Attachment styles play a huge role in Mental Health and overall well-being. Lessons you learned and experiences you had as a child set the tone for how you view yourself and your relationships throughout your adult life.
Because Mental Health Disorders are intertwined with negative emotions, maladaptive interaction styles, and unfavorable world views, it makes sense that insecure attachment styles directly impact feelings such as anger, passive aggression, emotional instability, defensiveness, reactivity, volatile temperament, and high levels of impulsivity. These negative feelings and other adverse effects of insecure attachment styles influence your relationships with family, friends, romantic partners, colleagues, and professional endeavors, including therapeutic exchange during any psychiatric treatment. Identifying attachment styles and defining their role in these adult experiences is the key to healing anger, passive aggression, and achieving treatment success and properly intervene with maladaptive behaviors in order to change the trajectory of your future and adult relationships. This involves creating more stability in relationships, achieving overall mental health, and emotional well-being.
Read on to explore how insecure attachment styles in childhood affect anger, passive aggression, addictions, impulsivity, and acting out behaviors and see how you can overcome these issues with the help of a Licensed Clinical Psychologist.
The Effects of Insecure Attachment Styles
Insecure attachment styles develop as a result of unstable, unreliable, abusive, negligent, or inconsistent relationships between an infant and their caregivers, parents, or guardian figures. These insecure relationships have a significant impact on the infant’s developing mind, neural pathways in the brain structure, maladaptive thought patterns, negative associations, teaching them that they cannot trust, connect, bond with, or rely on other people for positive attention, affection, protection, or other forms of genuine care.
There are different styles of insecure attachment, each with different causes and effects. Ambivalent attachment stems from an inconsistent infant-caregiver relationship and leads to clinginess, neediness, codependent behaviors, and a fear of abandonment and rejection. Avoidant attachment often stems from neglect or being ignored and leads to strict independence and a fear of emotional and physical intimacy. Disorganized attachment often stems from abuse, neglect, and other traumatic childhood experiences. It involves drastic switches between the fear of and desire for emotional intimacy.
Though each attachment style is different, they share many adverse consequences and can have similar negative influences on Mental Health and all aspects of your adult relationships. Many people with insecure attachment styles experience emotional dysregulation, high impulsivity, reactivity, defensiveness, addiction issues, low self-esteem, poor self-image, Personality Disorders, and many struggles with a negative sense of self. They also often face challenges with communication, dysregulation of mood or affect, inability for stress management, self-imposed crisis, addictive behaviors, and other maladaptive patterns. These issues make you more susceptible to Mental Health Disorders, exacerbate negative emotions such as anger, passive aggression, negative feelings, adverse behaviors, inappropriate interaction styles, impulsivity, and create challenges in your adult relationships.
Mental Health Disorders, Anger, and Passive Aggression
Anger, aggression, or passive aggression can stem directly from insecure attachment styles in childhood. However, they can also stem from other Mental Health Conditions that arise because of an insecure attachment style. Insecure attachment adversely affects the development of key cognitive skills, such as emotional regulation, distress tolerance, stress management, cognitive processing abilities, capacity to modulate affect, skill building habits, mental faculties, and more.
As a result of this and the traumas sustained in childhood leading to insecure attachment styles, they create a predisposition to Mental Health Disorders, such as Depressive Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Personality Disorders, Reactive Attachment, and Addiction Disorders. These comorbid disorders often include symptoms such as anger, impulsivity, aggression, and passive aggressive behaviors. Moreover, they exacerbate insecurity, isolation, stress, Mental Health Disorders, and other negative emotions, further fueling factors that can lead to anger or passive aggressive behaviors.
Emotional Dysregulation and Anger Management
Part of emotional maturity is developing the ability to regulate your own feelings, mindful behaviors, and optimal emotional state. This does not mean rejecting all negative emotions and never feeling angry, anxious, fearful, depressed, stressed, scared, or sad. It simply means being able to experience and process those negative emotions in a healthy and productive way, so they do not overwhelm you or others or negatively influence your words and actions.
A secure attachment style makes the development of this skill easier, but an insecure attachment can lead to emotional dysregulation, high levels of impulsivity, defensiveness, maladaptive behaviors, and reactivity to perceived stressors. This makes it harder to face and process negative emotions. As a result, feelings such as anger become more intense and overwhelming, leading to vindictiveness, volatile emotional outbursts, passive aggression, and other challenges with poor anger management in your life and relationships, which ultimately can destroy your relationships.
Stress and Other Negative Emotions
Emotional dysregulation also makes it difficult to handle stress. Poor stress management exacerbates anger and other negative emotions. It also leads to unhealthy habits, such as turning to addictive behaviors or substances to deal with stress rather than facing the issue in a productive manner. These factors make anger more overwhelming and create greater challenges when processing and handling negative emotions, which can lead to negative outcomes.
Communication Habits and Aggression
Insecure attachment styles also affect aggression and anger because they create challenges for proper communications, adaptive social skills, and ability to process information without reactivity or impulsivity in your behaviors. Clingy or closed-off behaviors make it hard to express or listen to others or the ability to integrate positive feedback.
This, in turn, can lead to increased anger or passive aggression. If you cannot adaptively communicate, you cannot get the help you require to benefit from mental health interventions and therapeutic effects. Without intensive interventions—and without people who can provide you with required treatment—you are more likely to turn to vindictiveness, anger, or passive aggression. You might take revenge from others or make inappropriate demands by being needy, manipulative, deceitful, disingenuous, emotionally combative, mentally abusive, impulsive, emotionally immature about what you want because that is the only way you know how to get it. Some children might even learn that the only reliable way to get attention is to cause trouble, turmoil, wreak havoc, creating unnecessary clinical emergencies in treatment, and negative attention seeking, in order to make a point or be heard or be seen in the worst possible ways. This leads to maladaptive encounters, unsuccessful interaction styles, and dysfunctional relationships in your adult life.
As a result, these habits and experiences grow with you into adulthood, creating negative communication habits that contribute to a prevalence of vindictiveness, passive aggression, and anger in your friendships, professional relationships, and romantic partnerships causing them all to eventually fail.
The Relationship Between Anger and Self-Worth
Insecure attachment affects self-worth. Self-worth affects anger. When you have a poor sense of self, you struggle to process negative emotions in a healthy, productive way. Moreover, you see those negative emotions—such as anger, worry, or sadness—as a threat to your sense of self. You might view yourself as a mean person because you have bouts of overwhelming hate, rage, passive aggression, resentment, or anger. This creates a cycle of poor self-esteem and overwhelming negative emotions; this cycle feeds into comorbid Mental Health Disorders, addictive behaviors, passive aggressive behaviors, emotional reactivity, impulsivity, and other challenges.
Negative Emotions and Impulsivity Lead to Anger
Attachment style directly affects your relationships throughout life. An insecure attachment style makes it difficult to build stable bonds with others, which means you might not feel like you have a strong support system when hardship and conflict arise. This also makes it more difficult to maintain relationships when you experience bouts of hate, rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, anger or passive aggression.
Building a Secure Attachment Style in Adulthood
If attachment style is at the root of your anger management issues, then that is what you must address. Trying to improve distress tolerance and build more positive thought patterns to create lasting, effective change, you must consider the insecure attachment at the root of the issue.
Working with a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who has experience in addressing both attachment issues and anger management issues is the key to finding lasting treatment. If you are looking for treatment from a Psychodynamic Therapist in Irvine, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, and the surrounding areas, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
