If you’re wondering how to heal anxious attachment style, you might relate to some of these experiences:
- Constantly seeking reassurance from partners
- Feeling anxiety or panic, even more than the intensity of the situation warrants
- Experiencing intense worry when a partner is distant or unreachable
- Difficulty trusting that relationships are stable and secure
- Feeling unworthy of love, no matter how much you crave connection
Attachment theory provides us a way to understand how we deal with stress or fear in relationships with the people who matter the most to us. Specifically, attachment styles can profoundly shape how we connect with others.
These attachment styles, also known as strategies, are all about how we respond to a perceived threat to the health of our relationships. The truth is, there are only so many ways the human brain and body have adapted to deal with such threats.
One common style that often presents challenges in relationships and individual mental health is the anxious attachment style. Rooted in the fear of not being able to reach the people who are important to them, and the limited trust in oneself, anxious attachment can create patterns that strain relationships.
If you identify with any of the experiences I’ve described so far, don’t worry. We all have attachment styles and we all, as humans, have ways that we have learned to deal with threats, whether or not they work in your present-day life. Yet, understanding yourself is the first step toward healing and transforming these patterns into more effective, secure responses and secure relationships.
How To Heal Anxious Attachment Style
To talk about how to heal anxious attachment style, we first must define anxious attachment. While attachment styles present in adult relationships, they were typically formed much earlier in life.
Attachment styles are not personality traits. If you identify with the experiences described in this post, know that there is nothing wrong with you- these patterns came from somewhere, and with attention you can modify them.
If you aren’t sure whether you fit the mold for anxious attachment, check out this attachment style assessment for further descriptions and journal prompts.
What is Anxious Attachment?
Anxious attachment is one of the insecure attachment styles. It typically develops in early childhood when caregivers are inconsistent in their availability or responsiveness. Children who grow up in environments where their emotional needs are unpredictably met may develop a heightened sensitivity to rejection or fear of abandonment.
For example, children who live with parents whose moods vary, and accordingly, the support and care provided, learn that they cannot rely on those caregivers whenever they are needed.
They might learn to hyper-activate in an effort to find that sense of a secure, reliable base that all humans need in ways like:
- Clinging to their caregiver
- Separation anxiety, crying when they have to go to school or leave their parent
- Hyper-vigilance of the caregiver’s mood and behavior
- Expressions of anxiety and resistance to efforts to soothe
- Seeking validation of love from caregivers
These children also may learn that the problem is not their parents’ ability to regulate but instead something about themself. Therefore, they also learn not to trust in themself or their own ability to keep themself safe and secure.
As adults, these patterns often manifest as a strong fear of being unloved or left behind, leading to tendencies like:
- Constantly seeking reassurance from partners
- Feeling a real threat in response to a slight miscommunication
- Experiencing intense worry when a partner is distant or unavailable
- Difficulty trusting that relationships are stable and secure
These patterns can strain relationships and reinforce the very fears they’re trying to avoid. However, healing these patterns is possible. Let’s talk about how to develop a secure attachment and how to heal anxious attachment style.
Healing Attachment Styles
Identify Patterns
Labeling a behavior and understanding its function are the first required steps to create any sense of change.
If you identify with any of the anxious attachment style descriptions, start by engaging in some emotional and thought exploration:
- When do I notice my emotions the most intensely? Are there particular moments that left me feeling triggered?
- How did I unconsciously interpret the situation that triggered me?
- How do I make sense of myself and other people in situations where I feel left abandoned and alone?
- How was I shown love and support as a child? Was this support reliable enough for me to depend on?
- How to I respond to others when I feel intense emotions or sense that they might leave me?
Name Your Fears
We all have existential fears when it comes to intimate relationships. However, we do not all deal with and manage these fears in the same ways. While some of us display avoidant attachments and suppress fear, others become anxious and seek reassurance for those fears.
Romantic relationships activate our core fears because they stir up old wounds from childhood and expose us to the vulnerability of loss. Often these existential questions include the fear of rejection and fear of abandonment. Naming these fears will help you become more connected to your own experience within anxious patterns.
Practice Self-Compassion
Attachment styles are learned behaviors. Plus, they are behaviors that were adaptive and effective at one point in your life- that’s why you’re still using them.
The problems come when we continue employing these attachment styles as adults when we have the agency to regulate and keep ourselves safe and engage in mature relationships. Yet, we must have compassion and understanding for the way these problems developed in order to release them.
Self-love improves your relationships because you tune into your inherent sense of self worth. When you know your own worth, you are less likely to need someone else to prove it to you by choosing you in a relationship.
Embodiment
Attachment styles are ways that we avoid feeling the most intense pain we could experience as a human in this life. They are ways we seek to bypass pain and fears by pulling people closer to us (anxious) or keeping others at a safe distance (avoidant).
In order to heal attachment styles and reduce anxiety, we must break some of these patterns. These means that we must take an inventory of the ways we escape pain and instead, practice mindful presence in our emotional truths and in our bodies.
Here are some common ways that people avoid emotions and pain:
- Substances (alcohol, prescription / recreational drugs, caffeine, etc.)
- Sex
- Distractions (day dreaming, doom scrolling, “vegging” out in front of the television)
- Excessive exercise
- Compulsive eating or food restriction
- Shopping
- Working
None of these behaviors are inherently good or bad. Rather, the work is to explore the ways you use these behaviors (i.e. the function the action) and if they are in some way allowing you to avoid your emotions.
When we avoid our own experiences, we use attachment strategies to keep ourselves feeling safe in the world.
Emotional Grounding Exercises
Stay in the present moment through emotional grounding. Attachment styles are our body’s way of keeping us safe based on information we learned in the past. However, that information may not apply to the present.
To alleviate anxiety, build trust and reduce misunderstandings, work to stay grounded in the present moment. From there, consider whether the intensity you feel in the present matches the intensity of the current situation in front of you. If not, you may be responding from an attachment strategy.
Try deep breathing, butterfly tapping, and 5 senses exercises to ground your body and soothe attachment anxiety.
Challenge Unhelpful Thoughts
Dr. Sue Johnson, the founder of emotionally focused therapy, has been quoted stating that while there are no illogical emotions, there are plenty of illogical thoughts. A sensation of fear or discomfort if you are struggling with an anxious attachment could lead to unhelpful thought patterns in moments of stress.
For example, you might notice that if a friend or partner does not answer messages immediately, you start to think or believe thoughts like: “they must be mad at me” or “he must be losing interest in me, this is all going to end soon”. While we always want to honor our emotions, these types of thoughts do not tend to be helpful in discerning the health of the relationship. Rather, they can actually increase the fear and anxiety instead of reducing them in the moment.
Try replacing those thoughts with: “it has been a while since he answered my message. I’m feeling anxious about that. This anxiety is okay, it is trying to keep me safe and aware. There are lots of reasons he might not be answering right now, and until I find out, I am okay and safe waiting“. Reframing these negative thoughts will change how you interpret the situation without denying your instincts or emotions.
Set Boundaries
Relationships are a two-way street. While we always want to take responsibility for regulating ourselves, there are also boundaries we all need in relationships to foster a sense of safety and comfort.
In a healthy relationship, setting boundaries can help you to clearly identify your levels of comfort. Boundary setting is also a chance to communicate clearly and maturely in a relationship about your history and the ways you need to feel safe and respected in your relationships.
Maybe regular check-ins will make you feel more assured in moments when you aren’t connected. Perhaps time outs in tense moments feel like an important tool to stay regulated. Learn to set the healthy boundaries that work for you.
Remember, boundaries are about what you need to feel safe, not about controlling another person’s behavior. Further, when we ask for our own boundaries to be respected, we need to be ready to honor and respect theirs in return.
Attend Therapy
Therapy is the most effective place to begin this work. An attachment and relational therapist can help you achieve two crucial steps of this work:
- Help guide you to understanding about your attachment style
- Serve as a secure attachment figure so that you can feel what it’s like to experience a safe connection
Specifically, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a powerful approach to help individuals heal no-longer-useful attachment styles. In EFT, we focus on exploring the underlying emotions driving the behaviors at play in relationships.
These emotions, often buried beneath layers of fear and defensive behavior, are key to understanding and shifting attachment patterns. Through this process, individuals begin to recognize and reprocess their core fears, developing a greater sense of emotional closeness.
Parts Work
Internal Family Systems, or IFS, can offer additional depth and clarity to the work of healing protective attachment behavior patterns.
IFS views the mind as made up of different “parts,” each with its own role in our emotional landscape. For individuals with anxious attachment, there may be parts that feel anxious, abandoned, or needy, while other parts may be critical or defensive in response to those feelings.
You might notice that in a fight with your partner, you primarily feel rage that they are shutting down and avoiding communication. You may also terrified that their shutting down means that you will be left alone. Even more, you might feel intense pain at the idea that you are unworthy of partnership.
Through parts work, you can get in touch with each of these parts, some of which hold your attachment tendencies. This work will create a holistic understanding of your own psyche and allow for a compassionate relationship with the whole of you.
Communicate Vulnerably
If you have safe relationships with friends, partners, or parents, consider bringing your vulnerable emotions out of yourself and into those dynamics.
As unnatural as it feels to share our deepest, darkest pain and fears, Brene Brown has shown the world that the antidote to our shame is bringing it into the light so we can connect with others.
The more you can honor and reclaim the parts of yourself that scare you, the less you need to protect yourself with attachment strategies. Instead, you can build a secure attachment style.
Secure attachments (I.e., trust in the ability to give and receive comfort in a close relationship) are formed through vulnerability.
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