What Olivia Dean Teaches Us About Anxious Attachment

Olivia Dean’s “Women Room” tells a love story—and an attachment story—that we hardly ever hear in popular culture. A narrative wherein she stays related to herself, whereas additionally navigating the complexity of attachment dynamics in her relationship. Reasonably than collapsing into the connection (the “I’m nothing with out you” trope) or fleeing the connection (the “I don’t want you. I don’t want anyone” trope), Dean rejects each scripts and reveals us a 3rd choice.

The monitor, from her 2023 album MESSY, opens by naming the dynamic immediately: her accomplice will get anxious when she’s feeling unbiased, and she or he meets him with each boundaries and reassurance.

Don’t kick up a fuss once I’m feeling unbiased / Don’t imply you’re not sufficient /

What’s so hanging to me, as a therapist, is that she meets her anxiously connected accomplice with compassion, with out getting pulled into the cycle that anxious attachment tends to create. She’s saying, My independence isn’t supposed to be a risk to you. You’re sufficient. You’re entire. I’m sufficient. I’m entire. I wish to join from that place inside ourselves.

This stance is a throughline in Dean’s work. She makes the same level in “One thing Inbetween” from her 2025 album, The Artwork of Loving: “I’m not leaving / Simply really feel tightly squeezed in / Love wants respiration.” This dialog between songs, and throughout albums, expresses that love, gripped too tightly, is tough to stay inside. And he or she’s exhibiting us what it sounds prefer to ask for air with out operating out the door.

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Anxious attachment and the pursue-withdraw cycle

Attachment methods are survival methods. They’re the methods we realized to narrate to our closest individuals, rooted in our earliest relationships: our guardian–little one or caregiver–little one relationships. In childhood, these methods had been extremely adaptive. They had been unconscious makes an attempt to get our wants met and shield ourselves by sustaining connection to the individuals we had been dependent upon for survival. Additionally they get recreated in grownup romantic relationships. Attachment is how the previous lives by way of the current.

Anxious attachment is a hyperactivating technique. When connection feels threatened, the anxious accomplice’s system turns the quantity up: clinging, pursuing, protesting, searching for fixed reassurance.

Avoidant attachment is the mirror picture: a deactivating technique. When intimacy feels engulfing, the avoidant accomplice’s system turns the quantity down—withdrawing, shutting down, and retreating into the self.

When these two methods meet, they lock into what Sue Johnson, the founding father of Emotionally Targeted Remedy, calls the pursue-withdraw cycle. The anxious accomplice pursues; the pursuit overwhelms the avoidant accomplice, who withdraws; the withdrawal confirms the anxious accomplice’s deepest worry of abandonment, in order that they pursue tougher—and spherical and around the couple goes, every accomplice triggering the opposite’s oldest wounds. It’s a cycle of disconnection the place each persons are combating for the connection in ways in which slowly erode it.

While you take heed to the pre-chorus by way of this lens, you possibly can choose up on the attachment dynamics.

You’re projecting, overstepping, no, I don’t have to decide on / That is approach much less about me and far more about you / I really like being in your house, typically I would like some room /

Her accomplice is exhibiting the signatures of anxious attachment: projecting, overstepping, studying her independence as proof that he isn’t sufficient. His system, possible formed lengthy earlier than she arrived, registers the house between them as a risk. She nods to this, reflecting to him that is “far more about you,” about his previous, concerning the relational template he shaped lengthy earlier than her.

Right here’s what makes the music fascinating: she doesn’t withdraw

Given the pursue-withdraw mannequin, you would possibly anticipate Dean to play the avoidant position—to reply his pursuit by pulling away, going chilly, retreating into herself. However she doesn’t.

As a substitute, she teaches us that independence and avoidance usually are not the identical factor.

Avoidance says: connection feels threatening, so I must retreat into myself.

Independence says: for this to work, my self has to exist inside our connection.

What’s difficult is that, to an anxiously connected accomplice, independence and avoidance can each register as a risk. Each sound like I would like some room.

When he reads her independence as the start of her leaving, he’s studying it by way of the lens of his personal attachment historical past. He’s taking an peculiar state of affairs—she desires to remain on the celebration a bit of longer—and operating it by way of a relational template shaped a very long time in the past, in a guardian–little one relationship the place that sign most likely did imply leaving.

Which leaves her with what seems like two choices: contort herself to placate him, or pull again from the entire alternate. She takes neither. She stays related to herself and sends him a sign of security: you continue to belong to me.

That is what separates independence from avoidance. Avoidance is a deactivating technique, so retreat is the knee-jerk response—much less contact, no more. Her affirmation is the inform. She is reaching towards him in the identical gesture that asks for house. She isn’t pulling away from the connection itself, however from the sample that asks her to depart herself.

So, darling, don’t try this with me / I would like you to see / Darling, you continue to belong to me / And it’s not that deep

That is fairly near what safe attachment seems like. Securely connected people are snug with each intimacy and autonomy, flowing between “we” and “me” positions with ease. You may really feel this ease from Dean as she holds the connection in a single hand and selfhood within the different. She units limits and affirms the connection in the identical breath, permitting each to coexist.

Although dismissive on the floor, her line “it’s not that deep” is making an attempt to speak one thing necessary. I don’t suppose she is making an attempt to shrug his ache right here; I believe she’s making an attempt to find it precisely. His panic is actual, and it’s surfacing of their present-day dynamic—but it surely wasn’t constructed there. The worry, and the technique he makes use of to handle it, had been shaped elsewhere, lengthy earlier than this relationship, in a context the place that worry made sense.

The twin wants each relationship has to carry

Beneath the attachment dynamics, “Women Room” reveals a structural reality of romantic love: relationships have to carry two opposing wants without delay.

Esther Perel, a famend {couples} and intercourse therapist, has spent a lot of her profession illuminating this pressure. In Mating in Captivity, she argues that love and need, whereas dwelling in the identical relational house, run on totally different gasoline. Love means “to have”; need means “to need.” Love thrives on intimacy, closeness, the recognized. Want requires a touch of autonomy: elusiveness, otherness, the house between self and different. Relationships want each.

The analysis reinforces Perel’s observations from the remedy room. Researchers on the College of Texas Austin discovered that essentially the most profitable relationships are those characterised by mutuality: excessive intimacy paired with excessive autonomy, held collectively moderately than traded off.

That is the association Dean appears to be advocating for. She’s not asking for much less relationship. She’s asking for a relationship spacious sufficient to carry intimacy and autonomy, closeness and independence. For a relationship the place they’ll belong to one another and nonetheless belong to themselves.

So what does it seem like to be in a relationship with an anxiously connected accomplice?

That is the place Dean’s music turns into a masterclass on love—as a result of the anxious–safe pairing has work on each side.

For the anxious accomplice, the work is each sensible and historic. On a sensible stage, the anxious accomplice must discover ways to self-soothe sufficient to tolerate their accomplice having an unbiased self. When this sensible step feels troublesome, it’s time to show to the previous, to reprocess the attachment trauma beneath the protecting technique, so the nervous system can cease studying peculiar house as abandonment. Modalities like attachment-focused EMDR and components work (Inside Household Techniques) are significantly suited to this, as a result of they go to the origin of the technique moderately than simply managing its signs.

A notice to the anxious accomplice (howdy, it’s me) studying this: these attachment methods usually are not your fault. They stem from painful experiences whenever you had been a baby. However they’re your accountability to work by way of, to be able to go away the previous up to now and meet your accomplice extra totally within the current.

For the accomplice on the receiving finish—in Dean’s place—the work is a dance: staying related to your self, setting limits, and affirming the connection.

Title the cycle, don’t level fingers at your accomplice.

In Emotionally Targeted Remedy, the cycle is the enemy—not your accomplice, and never you. The second you possibly can describe the loop you’re each caught in, you cease being opponents and begin being two individuals with a shared drawback. So moderately than saying “You’re projecting and overstepping,” use observational language to explain the sample.

The cycle: “I believe we get caught in a cycle. After I make plans alone, I can really feel you begin to attain for me—which makes me need my independence much more, which makes you attain tougher. Then we’re each caught. I don’t need us to maintain doing that.”

The sensation beneath: “After I really feel that pull, what comes up for me is a worry that I’ll lose myself on this. That’s not about you not being sufficient. It’s about me needing to take care of myself in right here—in our relationship.”

The necessity: “I would like to have the ability to go, and I would like to have the ability to come again to you. How can we collaborate to make that occur?”

Pair house with reassurance.

This interrupts the cycle. You may take house for your self (your wants), whereas additionally affirming the connection (your anxiously connected accomplice’s wants). For instance, “I’m going to exit dancing with the women for a number of hours. After I get again, I’d like to have some high quality time with you.” Or, “I would like a while to myself to decompress, can we reconvene in a single hour?” Area and connection, held in the identical breath. You may be compassionate with out self-abandoning.

The conclusion the music already is aware of

“Women Room” reminds us that the autonomy-intimacy dialectic is just not an issue to be solved. It’s a pressure to be managed—repeatedly and imperfectly, for the life cycle of the connection.

Dean intuits this. When the music ends, we aren’t left with a clear decision. However we’re left with the impression that she continues to be within the relationship and nonetheless in herself, holding each. She’s not going dwelling—not leaving the celebration, not leaving the partnership, not leaving her personal physique to handle this.

Maybe that is the deepest instructing right here. Perel writes that in long-term relationships, we have a tendency to scale back our personal complexity. Over time, we simplify ourselves to remain shut, abandoning or softening the components of us that really feel inconvenient to the “we.” The tragedy is that in flattening ourselves, we additionally flatten the connection. The complexity and multidimensionality that the particular person as soon as fell in love with, and that after invigorated the connection, can slowly disintegrate if we’re not aware. That is precisely the dynamic that Dean is refusing. She’s retaining her dimensionality, her authenticity, herself. She’s saying: if I get to maintain me, you then get to maintain me. This relationship doesn’t require my disappearance. It requires my full presence.

“Women Room” is what it seems like when somebody is aware of that essentially the most loving factor you possibly can carry to a relationship is a self that also exists.

This text was initially printed on the writer’s Substack, Inside Currents. Reprinted with permission.