Last year, I wrote a blog post to help everybody build a more secure attachment style. It went over the five most common strategies to feel more secure in intimate relationships, including:
- Being with someone who is securely attached
- Therapy and/or coaching
- Meditation
- Find a supportive community
- Focus on yourself
It was a popular article, and I am glad it resonated with a lot of people. I wanted to write a follow-up and thought about entitling it, “5 MORE ways to build a more secure attachment style.” However, I realized there’s an important truth about attachment theory: what you need to do to build a more secure attachment style is going to change depending on what your current style is. The path forward for an avoidant person is going to look different than someone who is disorganized.
So, for this next post, I wanted to focus specifically on those with an anxious attachment, and sometime in the future cover the other styles as well. But before we get into shifting from anxious attachment, let us first answer the question:
What is anxious attachment?
Sometimes called anxious-ambivalent attachment, someone with this style most often has a strong desire for intimacy, but also has some deep doubts about it and preoccupations around abandonment.
Anxious attachment often results from an inconsistent caregiver who was unpredictable during one’s childhood. The caregiver would be present, attuned, and caring some of the time, but not always. Other times, they perhaps pushed the child away or neglected them. While that is the most common type of upbringing for anxious attachment, there are other ways it develops too. If the childhood environment was chaotic or unpredictable, that would also produce some anxiety.
Other common signs of an anxious attachment style include low self-esteem, jealousy, feeling unworthy, and tolerating unhealthy behaviors. Adults with anxious attachment often want constant reassurance that they are loved and might be intensely jealous or suspicious of their partners.
So now that we know what anxious attachment is and where it comes from, what can we do about it? Fortunately, we already covered step 1: gain awareness.
1. Gain awareness
The first step to moving from anxious to secure is to understand how both styles work. If you have gotten this far in the article, you are already making progress. Gaining awareness is the first step because if you don’t know the symptoms of having an anxious attachment, you will not take the steps to change it. As I wrote last week, in order to attain most things in life, you must figure out what is getting in the way. The first step forward for those who have anxious attachment issues is to fully understand what anxious attachment is and the dynamics at play.
This may mean looking deep into one’s childhood and understanding the interpersonal relationships that were at play. It may mean journaling and self-reflection on how past relationships have gone. It may mean reading many of the books out there on attachment theory. The point is to gain an outer understanding of what the research has found and to combine it with an inner understanding that is relevant to your unique situation. Self-reflection is key.
Another key piece in shifting to a more secure attachment is understanding how those with secure attachment operate. In other words, what is a more reasonable response to a particular situation? Another important reason to understand how those with a secure attachment behave is to avoid (pun intended) those with avoidant attachment. Anxious individuals tend to be drawn to avoidant individuals. This relationship may result in a lot of inner conflict (although that doesn’t mean the relationship is doomed, necessarily).
Once you have gained an awareness of what is going on, you might be able to try step 2: talk to your partner about your needs.
2. Talk to your partner about your needs
One sign of an individual with anxious attachment is that they do not often communicate their needs in relationship. Some of this hesitancy stems from an unconscious desire not to “rock the boat” and say something that might threaten the relationship. There tends to be a tendency to not want to be seen as needy or demanding.
While I realize some readers might not be in a relationship currently, this step is a good thing to keep in mind. It has been shown that if anxious attachment styles learn how to communicate their needs better, they can shift to become more secure.
Fortunately, whether you have a partner or not, you can move onto step 3: practicing self-regulation.
3. Practice self-soothing and self-regulation
Another huge sign of anxious attachment is feeling like you’re on an emotional roller coaster. One day, you are madly in love; the next day, you feel like the relationship is doomed. It’s important to “smooth out” the ups and downs by learning how to notice those emotions without getting so caught up in them, as well as by taking care of yourself when strong emotions come up. That could mean walking in nature, taking a bath, or talking on the phone to a close friend who understands you.
Personally, I am a big fan of the “name it to tame it” approach to emotions. Once we can identify an emotion, it loses its hold on us. “What we resist, persists”, as the saying goes, and “what we can feel, we can heal,” is the solution. I am also a big fan of self-compassion by treating ourselves the way a good friend would.
A key piece of self-compassion is the fourth step to becoming more secure: practice mindfulness.
4. Practice mindfulness and become an observer
Mindfulness, the practice of attending to our present moment experience with nonjudgment and nonreactivity, can be useful in building a secure attachment. This state of mind is helpful when moving through the challenging feelings that an anxious attachment generates.
Mindfulness allows us the opportunity to take a step back from our experience and see it for what it is: a temporary phenomenon we don’t have to get so attached to. This spacious awareness often lets us see our anxious attachment do its thing and choose to respond to the situations in our life with grace and love.
After practicing mindfulness, you might be able to even notice with thoughts like, “Oh, there’s my anxious attachment again, telling me to be worried and suspicious. How silly that is!” Fortunately, the mind is plastic and malleable, so the less we entertain anxious thoughts with the spacious awareness of mindfulness, the less they will occur in the future.
Once you get better at mindfulness, then you can practice of heartfulness with step 5: loving your inner child.
5. Love your inner child
All the insecure attachment styles (i.e., each one that is not secure) result from a misattuned childhood. While it may be easy to blame our primary caregivers for that, we must remember they were imperfect humans just like us, and perhaps had to work three jobs to raise the family, or perhaps we were even an extra demanding and obnoxious child. You never know.
The point is that we can give our own inner child the love that we wanted to receive a long time ago. One way to do that is with a guided meditation that involves visualizing giving your inner child the love that you yourself never received. It often starts with picturing yourself as a child in your mind, often alone and perhaps having a difficult emotional time. Then your adult self walks in the room and offers kind, caring, empathetic comfort.
It is quite incredible that you can fully love your own inner child right now, and this can have positive effects on one’s mental and emotional wellbeing. However, it is not an easy thing to do, and might best be done with a recorded meditation or a therapist, rather than on your own.
Fortunately, one thing you can do on your own is step 6: try affirmations.
6. Try affirmations
One last piece of advice that works for many people are affirmations, and for good reason. A key piece of what builds secure attachment is consistency, so returning to the same few mantras again and again can help build up that inner confidence and emotional resilience.
The website, Abundance No Limits, offers the following sample of affirmations to get you started:
- I am safe and secure.
- I am doing my best.
- I believe that things will turn out fine.
- I am in charge, and I feel calm.
- I deserve to be loved and appreciated.
- My feelings are valid.
- I can clearly communicate my needs.
- I deserve to be respected and my opinions valued.
- It is healthy to depend on each other in a relationship.
- It is okay to be independent in a relationship.
It might be useful to write a few of these down on Post-it notes and put them on your bathroom mirror or repeat them to yourself before going to sleep. You can also come up with your own affirmations about the securely attached person that you want to become.
Of course, some people are not a fan of affirmations, as they find them cheesy and unrealistic. That’s ok if you do too. Not every strategy is going to work for everybody.
So, there you have it: six ways to move from an anxious to a more secure attachment. What do you think? What have you tried that works? Let me know in the comments below.
