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May 9, 2024 · A dating coach shares how to heal an anxious attachment style and find healthier and secure relationships. Learn more about anxious attachment and her tips for healing.
- Overview
- How to fix an anxious attachment style
- Step 1. Recognizing the signs and understanding attachment theory
- Step 2. Practice learning from others with a secure attachment
- Step 3. Build your self-esteem and, in turn, how to express your needs and emotions authentically
- Step 4. Learn to not react by using self-regulation and mindfulness
- Step 5. Therapy
- What happens when you change your attachment style?
- Summary
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It is possible for a person to overcome an anxious attachment style. Options may include therapy, emotional self-regulation, and recognizing anxious attachment signs before they escalate.
From childhood to adulthood, experiences can shape a person and ultimately define how they form healthy and loving attachments and relationships with others. Attachment theory stems from the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, in which the different attachment styles are the result of how an emotional bond, or lack of one, is formed during the early years of childhood.
If a child experiences issues with emotional bonding, mainly with the mother, it may result in overall feelings of insecurity and distrust. As the child grows up, this insecurity may pervade relationships they encounter, with them needing constant reassurance.
It is possible, however, to change an attachment style from anxious to secure. Corrective emotional experiences can ensure a person builds healthy, secure relationships with others who are also healthy and secure.
Attachment theory or style centers on how a person forms emotional bonds with their parent or primary caregiver during childhood. Initial interactions and experiences that are had early will shape how a person learns to form relationships.
Negative experiences during childhood that resulted in feelings of insecurity, distrust, and abandonment can later manifest as insecure attachment. Examples include doing everything a person thinks their partner wants without considering their own needs out of fear their partner may leave them.
Some people may want to heal unresolved childhood traumas to overcome their anxious attachments in relationships.
The first step to fixing an anxious attachment style is recognizing the signs.
Although sources can vary, it is widely recognized that Bowlby put forward three attachment styles. These include:
•Secure: People with secure attachments can navigate relationships confidently and easily without fear of abandonment.
•Anxious: People with anxious attachments tend to sacrifice their happiness for their partners, need constant reassurance, and have an overall fear of abandonment.
•Avoidant: People with avoidant attachments overly advocate for independence, declining emotional or intimate relationships with an emotional distance between partners.
The attachment styles depend on a person’s interactions and experiences with their primary caregiver in their childhood. Understanding attachment theory and recognizing the signs can help a person begin to turn negative experiences in relationships into positive, secure ones.
Signs of an anxious attachment style may include:
Forming relationships with others who have a secure attachment style can help a person to see that it is important both needs are met for both partners.
Ways a person can learn from others with a secure attachment include:
•understanding how important it is to have emotional closeness, calmness, and stability in a relationship
•understanding that a person may not be able to change past experiences, but they can change present experiences
•understanding that it is important to voice emotional needs and wants, even over fears of disappointing others
This can also involve setting boundaries and learning to say “no.”
Those with an anxious attachment style may have various negative worries that link to low self-esteem. This can include:
•being overly worried that their partner may leave them
•fears of not being able to contact them at all times
•having a deep fear of rejection, which may validate feelings of unworthiness
•needing constant reassurance that they are good enough, attractive enough, or worthy overall
Being open with emotions and needs authentically and accepting that some partners may not be able to meet these needs is a good step for building self-esteem.
Mindfulness is a practice that involves being aware of the present moment and noticing what is happening at that particular moment. Being mindful of potential triggers is the first step to not reacting.
Being mindful of how some situations are simply triggers and are actually not big threats can help overcome an anxious attachment style. Attachment style directly influences how a person responds to emotions, and controlling these emotions, also known as self-regulation, alongside being mindful of them, is a good step to overcoming an anxious attachment.
Self-regulation practice includes:
•controlling emotions and actions in response to them
•learning to calm oneself down
•resisting big emotional outbursts and reactions in situations
Therapy can be an important step if a person feels their anxious attachment style is affecting their relationships. It can help:
•show what a secure, healthy relationship looks like
•help recognize anxious attachment behavior patterns
•help recognize signs of anxious attachment styles
•explore ways to form healthy and secure bonds with others
Psychotherapy could help people understand what past issues influence or dictate their current emotions and attachment style.
Those with anxious attachment styles may have experienced:
•being seen as clingy
•having more arguments with more partners
•mental health issues such as depression and anxiety
Those with secure attachment styles can benefit from various positive changes to their relationships. These may include:
•being less likely to experience depression or anxiety
An anxious attachment style is usually the result of feelings of insecurity and abandonment during childhood. It may manifest in interpersonal relationships, such as feeling unworthy of being loved or forgetting personal needs in favor of a partner’s needs.
With help and support, it is possible to overcome an anxious attachment style. Tips and techniques may include therapy, self-regulating emotions, and recognizing the signs of anxious attachment before they manifest into bigger conflicts.
Learn how to overcome an anxious attachment style by recognizing the signs, learning from others, building self-esteem, practicing self-regulation, and seeking therapy. Find out what attachment theory is and how it shapes emotional bonds.
- Cecilia Effa
Mar 6, 2024 · Anxious attachment is a fear of abandonment and a need for reassurance in relationships. Learn how it develops from childhood, what it looks like in adults, and how to manage it with self-awareness and effort.
Jun 22, 2022 · Anxious attachment style is one of four types of insecure attachment that may affect your relationships. Learn the signs, causes, and how to shift from anxious to secure attachment with therapy, mindfulness, and corrective emotional experiences.
Jul 23, 2021 · Learn how to regulate your emotions and respond to situations that trigger your anxious attachment style in healthy ways. Find out how self-soothing emotions is related to your attachment style and how to develop this skill through co-regulation and practice.
Apr 1, 2021 · Do you and your partner have a secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment style? Change your style to have healthier, secure relationships.
Apr 27, 2023 · People with anxious preoccupied attachment are typically people-pleasers and may constantly seek validation. Learn about anxious attachment and how to cope.
