High-conflict separation, especially when drawn out through the family court system, can be one of the most emotionally destabilising experiences a person can go through. If you already live with an anxious attachment style, this process may feel like confirmation of your deepest fears, of being abandoned, misunderstood, or rejected. When the future of your relationship with your child feels uncertain and you are being scrutinised at every turn, your nervous system can easily move into a chronic state of survival. Everything in you may want to act, fix, fight, or plead. But the very behaviours that once helped you feel connected in a relationship, clinging, chasing, or over-explaining, may now be working against you in both your parenting and your legal standing.
Let me be honest, these patterns never truly work for you in a relationship either, its just that you have used these patterns to soothe your emotional needs, through external sources rather than from with-in.
What’s often overlooked in this process is how the same emotional overwhelm that impacts you as a parent can unintentionally affect your child. Under intense stress, it’s natural to become preoccupied with your own fears, of losing your child, of not being heard, of being misrepresented. But when we become consumed by our own pain, we may become emotionally inconsistent or unavailable to our child, even if we're physically present. As Gabor Maté explains in When the Body Says No, chronic emotional stress has a way of shutting us down or causing us to become reactive. You may find yourself snapping one moment, withdrawing the next, simply because your nervous system is too overloaded to stay grounded.
In these moments, your child may start adapting in subtle, heartbreaking ways. They might stop expressing their own needs because they sense you're already overwhelmed. They might start trying to comfort you, take care of you, or avoid burdening you altogether. They may begin to feel invisible, not because you don’t love them, but because your attention is being pulled in a hundred directions, and your emotional availability is worn thin. Over time, a child in this situation may begin to internalise the message that love must be earned through self-sacrifice, silence, or caretaking, the very blueprint of anxious or disorganised attachment.