7 Ways to Heal the Anxious Attachment Style
“You’re a great guy but there’s something I need to tell you,” he said despondently, eyes pointed toward the table between us, his warm hands resting atop mine. He looked me in the eyes before continuing on. “I don’t see this going any further. I really wanted to get there, but it’s just not there for me. I truly wish you nothing but the best, but I can’t keep seeing you.”
We shared a somber walk to the subway where he dropped me off. Then the dam broke.
All of my insecurities were made manifest: The doubts that told me my interest wasn’t reciprocated. The second-guessing where I stood. The fear that, yet again, it wouldn't work out.
Even after 10 dates, endless kisses, and deep discussions about the future.
My eyes began burning as the frustration, confusion, and shame dripped down in tiny, sad droplets.
I really felt like this time would be different, I lamented. When will I get to meet my person?
For years, this dialogue played out in my head. For years, I didn’t know where to turn or what to do or how to behave. For years, I suffered in silence, not knowing what was wrong with me.
Dating was the worst. Or at least it felt that way.
Even though I had plenty of prospects to explore, I felt lonely, unworthy, and inadequate. I struggled to sleep or eat. Consumed by my thoughts of a potential romantic partner and locking down a relationship, I spent countless hours stalking my dating prospects on Google and across social media. I couldn’t focus. I was constantly on alert, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was exhausting.
Eventually, I put my foot down. I decided that enough was enough. Something had to give.
I turned to therapy, where I discovered that I have an anxious attachment style. I started taking better care of myself. I learned to focus on things I can control. I did the work in order to heal my relationship not just with others, but also with myself.
After nearly two decades of working on myself and growing more secure, now I’m passing along what I’ve learned on my own healing journey to my coaching clients.
Grab a copy of my new book, Needy No More: The Journey From Anxious to Secure Attachment.
And I’m doing the same to you now, too.
Below, you’ll find seven steps for healing anxious attachment. Based on my own healing journey and the thousands of hours I’ve spent coaching anxious attachers across five continents, these tried-and-true techniques will help inspire you and give you tangible steps to follow as you step forward in your healing.
It’s my greatest wish that they’ll save you from the suffering I knew all too well.
7 Ways to Heal the Anxious Attachment Style
1. Regulate your nervous system.
The first and most important aspect of healing anxious attachment—of growing more secure in yourself and your relationships—is to learn to regulate your nervous system.
Traumatic experiences are stored in the body through impressions left in the nervous system. Trauma researcher and bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, addressed this when he wrote: “Trauma comes back as a reaction, not a memory.” When you’re triggered you feel a visceral reaction that ripples out, causing an uncontrolled and automatic physiological response.
These visceral reactions can be experienced in one of three ways:
You overreact
You underreact
You overreact in some ways and underreact in others
When you’re overreacting, you’re in a fight or flight response. You get sweaty palms. You experience racing thoughts. You can’t sleep or eat. Your heart feels like it’ll beat out of your chest. Your mouth gets dry and your chest tightens. You feel like you have a lump in your throat. You criticize. You storm out. You lash out in protest behavior.
When you’re underreacting, you’re experiencing a freeze response. You shut down and clam up. You don’t know what to say or what to do. You’re like a deer caught in headlights. You’re trapped in a state of fear.
When you’re underreacting and overreacting simultaneously, you’re in a fawn response. You subvert your own needs. You people please. While you’re an anxious mess inside, you’re the epitome of cool, calm, and collected on the outside.
But no matter which version of dysregulation you experience, it’s always your body remembering traumatic events from the past and reacting to a stimulus in the present.
In order to heal the anxious attachment style, we have to heal our relationship with our body. We have to go beyond symptom management to address the core issues. And, firstly, that means learning to regulate our nervous system.
To achieve this, we must improve in two ways:
Presence: We have to increase our ability to be present with uncertainty, discomfort, and stress in the body when it arises—and also present in our connection with self and others.
Tolerance: We have to expand our capacity for and tolerance of uncertainty, discomfort, and stress in the future.
The first way we can learn to regulate our nervous system is to practice becoming more present in the body and with our feelings. There are a variety of methods that can help, including:
Meditation: A simple yet effective way to build present moment awareness as well as awareness of your body, meditation is a powerful practice for changing the relationship you have with yourself.
Yoga and Stretching: As we’ve established, trauma is stored in the body. Body movement can help your deeply-rooted trauma to surface in order to be released. It can also help to combat your natural inclination to dissociate, and thus can help you reassociate with your body.
5-4-3-2-1 Method: This technique uses the power of the five senses to bring you back into your body. Here’s how it works: Find five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste, spending a few moments with what you notice with each of your five senses.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT): Also known as tapping, EFT stimulates pressure points on the body while acknowledging and relieving challenging or heavy emotions.
Another way you can learn to regulate your nervous system is to build more tolerance for stress in the future. Some techniques that can assist with this include:
Cold exposure: Whether through a cold plunge, a partial or completely cold shower, or dunking your hands or face in a bucket of ice water, cold exposure has the power to help you build stress tolerance in your body by exposing the body to a threat in a controlled environment. This allows you to practice breathing through the stress response that naturally results from prolonged exposure to the cold. Since you have the same response when you’re triggered, this can help you better manage triggers in the future, and be much less inclined to act out in protest behavior.
Weight training: Lifting weights quite literally breaks down your muscle fibers in order for them to grow back stronger. It’s no wonder, then, that consistently challenging your body in this way can help you build more tolerance, not only from a strength standpoint but for stress as well. The endorphins certainly don’t hurt, either!
Breathwork: When you get triggered and enter a trauma, survival, or stress response, your breathing is one of the first bodily processes that’s impacted. When employed consistently, breathing techniques can help you to proactively become more aware of your breathing during moments of stress, and even expand lung capacity over time. Here are a couple of breathing techniques to try:
Physiological sigh: To employ this approach, start by closing your eyes and taking a deep breath in. When you’ve finished your inhale, huff a little bit of extra breath for an additional, short inhale. Hold your breath for a moment. Then, exhale all of the breath out of your lungs all the way down to your diaphragm. Repeat five times in a row.
Box breathing: A method with equal counts dedicated to breathing in, holding the breath, breathing out, and holding the breath, practicing breathwork in this way is like drawing a metaphorical square with your breath. Start with three seconds dedicated to each step and see how that feels.
2. Address and integrate your trauma.
Another core component of healing anxious attachment is confronting the cause of our nervous system dysregulation—of our over- or underreaction to the past in the present. And that means addressing and integrating our trauma.
While trauma is as nuanced and complex as the events that caused it, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Trauma can be defined as any moment of disconnection that overwhelms your ability to cope
Trauma isn’t just what happened to you; it’s sometimes equally or more importantly about what didn’t
Not all trauma comes in the form of big, wounding events; trauma can also be the accumulation of many smaller experiences over time
Trauma doesn’t just happen during childhood; it can happen at any point in your life
That said, trauma is more common during childhood because that’s when your need for connection is much greater and your ability to cope is much lower
Two pathways that I’ve found incredibly effective for integrating trauma are forgiveness and inner child work.
The first technique for helping to heal trauma is practicing forgiveness. Here are some reminders when it comes to forgiveness:
Forgiveness is for you, not for someone else.
Forgiveness is a form of acceptance, not approval. It doesn’t mean you condone what happened or that it’s permission for it to happen again.
Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting; in fact, it’s the opposite. Forgiveness means choosing to remember what happened while also actively working to release the energetic ties we have to these hurtful experiences and events.
Forgiveness is a technique. You will likely have to forgive many times for the most painful memories when the energy from the past resurfaces once again.
One four-step framework that can be helpful to follow for forgiveness is the ancient Hawaiian practice of ho’oponopono, which roughly means to make things right. The steps are as follows:
I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
I love you
With or without the framework of ho’oponopono, forgiveness can be practiced by writing a letter, sitting face to face and having a raw and vulnerable discussion, or even using the power of visualization to imagine having a conversation with someone. (The latter can be incredibly powerful with an ex or with someone who’s passed away.) Forgiveness can and should be practiced regularly and in conjunction with others as well as the self. In other words, it’s crucial that you regularly release energetic ties to others as well as any regret or remorse when it comes to yourself. We’ve all been hurt. We’ve all hurt others. We’ve all hurt ourselves. It’s crucial that the salve offered by forgiveness should be used for release and redemption in all of these instances.
Inner child work is also impactful when it comes to addressing trauma. Here are some reasons why:
It can help you release deep-seated feelings and pent-up energies associated with painful events from your past.
It can foster a greater sense of self-compassion and self-acceptance, and even change the way you speak to yourself.
It can provide a sense of closure by helping to acknowledge and validate your experiences.
I have my coaching clients practice inner child work using a guided visualization in order to have a conversation with their younger self, but this can also be practiced by writing out the conversation or role-playing with another person such as a therapist or a friend. Also, be sure to keep in mind that, while some of us were wounded as children, that doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. In that case, if it’s helpful, you can look at inner child work as previous self work. Either way, it’s incredibly impactful.
3. Honor who you are and what you need.
Another essential step in healing anxious attachment is learning to embrace and accept the person you’ve become as a result of your trauma. And that means honoring the needs, values, love languages, and other preferences that resulted from your experiences.
The first step is to identify what these preferences are. While determining your needs and values can be confusing for some, there are two simple and straightforward ways to get to the root of what you most deeply desire in relationships. The first is to analyze your criticism of your closest connections—in other words, to examine when you felt most disconnected from others, as we tend to be most vocal or critical where our needs are greatest and our values most deeply held. The second method by which we can identify needs and values is by reflecting on experiences that made us feel cared for, appreciated, and safe—in other words, when we felt most connected.
Whether by reflecting on when you felt most disconnected from or most connected to the people you care about, both are avenues for identifying what makes you, specifically, feel seen, supported, and understood by others.
Having been through the healing process with countless anxious attachers around the world as their coach, here are the needs and values that tend to rise to the surface.
Top needs for someone with an anxious attachment style:
To feel prioritized and/or chosen
To be included
Clarity about where you stand
Consistent communication with someone, especially when it comes to texting
Regular reassurance that you are appreciated
Lots of physical affection
Someone who generally displays a vested interest in how you feel and who you are
Top values for someone with an anxious attachment style:
Honesty
Communication
Loyalty
Integrity
Trust
Connection
Learning
Growth
Personal development
Top love languages for someone with an anxious attachment style:
Words of affirmation
Quality time
Physical touch
Even though your specific needs, values, and love languages might not precisely match the lists above, these are the answers that tend to float to the top in my work with coaching clients. And that’s because, as anxious attachers, we crave connection.
It’s about time we learned to accept and honor that fact.
4. Learn and hone relational skills.
While your trauma isn’t your fault, your healing is your responsibility. That means seeking out the information, accountability, and support you need to grow. It also means working to improve in areas where you’re atrophied or lack relational skills.
If you didn’t grow up in a stable, loving environment and you didn’t have consistent, safe romantic partnerships as an adult, you likely haven’t had healthy relationship skills modeled for you. When those experiences are lacking, we don’t have the opportunity to learn from others who are more secure.
But fret not. That’s where you come in. If you truly want to have healthier relationships, it’s never too late to take responsibility for learning and growing in ways that help to solidify your relationship skillset.
Since you struggle with an anxious attachment style, that means learning to:
Be an active listener
Communicate effectively, clearly, and compassionately
Set and keep boundaries with yourself and others
Slow down and take your time getting to know someone in the early stages of dating
Refrain from physical intimacy before you can trust someone
Take breaks from heavy or deep conversations in order to come back and have a more productive discussion
Take stock of what’s good or working in a relationship versus just what you perceive to be lacking or in need of fixing
It might also mean reading books to help you heal, listening to podcasts to learn from the experiences of others, journaling to self-reflect, or working with a therapist or coach.
The world of skills development is your oyster. Determine the areas in which you need to improve, then get to work.
5. Grow more independent.
As I wrote in my blog post on How to Make an Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Work, a big part of growing more secure for someone with an anxious attachment style is learning to grow more independent.
One principle I discuss at length with my coaching clients is the idea of emotional diversification. Borrowed from the world of finance, diversification is a strategy whereby, in order to mitigate risk and have a healthy mix of assets, we invest in a wide variety of sectors. Emotional diversification is the same. When we diversify emotionally, we invest in many different kinds of relationships, such as those with:
Friends
Family
Colleagues
Our interests, passions, and hobbies
Our mind, body, and spirit
A Higher Power
Romantic partner
A loving relationship with a partner can be a source of great joy and focus in your life. It just can’t be the only one. Never forget to tend to your other relationships. Not only will this guard against codependency, self-abandonment, and the buildup of resentment, it will also give you and your partner a chance to miss each other and will actually help to shore up your relationship.
And that certainly isn’t bad thing!
6. Give up your identity as a victim.
One of the most challenging aspects of healing anxious attachment is letting go of your identity as a victim.
Truth is, many people don’t know who they are without their pain. They might express a desire to heal, but their beliefs and behaviors tell quite a different story. They’re stuck in a loop of complaining, venting, and seeking perspective from others. They’re so identified with their own suffering and addicted to their own stress responses that they can’t fathom what it’d be like to have a calm and peaceful existence or relationship. They’ve been dysregulated for so long that they’re scared of letting go of their suffering because they don’t know who they are without it. They’re blinded to the role they play in perpetuating their own pain.
Here’s a harsh truth: In order to progress on your healing journey, you must be willing to let go of your victimhood. You must realize that your experiences are not who you are. You must unbecome who you thought you wore in order to become who you were all along. You must be willing to unlearn your unhealthy coping strategies and learn healthier ones instead. You must do what I did above: Put your foot down and say enough is enough.
It will take hard work, but trust me when I say that this is the ingredient many people are missing: They simply aren’t tired of their own behavior and cycles. They aren’t finished living out their pain. They’re addicted to their own stress.
Begin by acknowledging that something needs to change. Then go from there. I’ve seen that energy help countless anxious attachers across the globe ditch their old ways.
And finally grow more secure.
7. Prioritize safe, consistent relationships.
When it comes to healing from anxious attachment, one of the best things you can do is to find and nurture safe connections with others. That’s because safe relationships help us accomplish everything we’ve discussed so far when it comes to healing anxious attachment. They help us to regulate our nervous system through co-regulation with others who truly understand us. They help us write over the pain of the past and integrate our trauma by showing us that we won’t always be wounded or abandoned by others. [Read my blog post, 5 Ways to Heal a Fear of Abandonment] They show us that our needs aren’t too much—and they never were. They demonstrate to us what healthy relationships actually look and feel like so we can learn and adapt. They help us diversify our sources of connection—and to grow more independent. (This is done through what’s called the Dependency Paradox: The safer and more connected we feel, the more independent and self-reliant we become.) They help us see that we no longer have to remain stuck in victimhood.
Here’s the thing: As human beings, we’re social creatures. We’re neurologically hardwired for connection. We need others. Some might even venture to say that relationships and experiences with others are the whole point of life.
Here are a few reminders I share with my coaching clients all the time:
Safety simply means that you feel able to be your full, authentic self—that you feel heard and seen and understood for who you truly are, that you feel held and cared for.
Like all things, relationships do not exist in some dichotomy of safe or unsafe—they have degrees of both.
Healing is safety dependent, not time dependent; the safer you feel, the more quickly you’ll heal.
We’re wounded in unsafe and unstable relationships and we are healed in safe and stable ones.
Even if you feel like you don’t have any safe relationships in your life right now, you can always start with a therapist or a coach like me. We’re honored to help!
While I wasn’t always this way, when given the choice now, I’d choose safety and consistency over excitement and instability every time.
And so should you.
At least if you’re serious about healing.
How to Heal Your Relationship Anxiety Once and For All
Are you thriving in every area of your life except romantically? Do you have a pattern of dating the same type of person over and over who’s seemingly incapable of meeting—or unwilling to meet—your emotional needs? Do you have a history of trauma growing up or as an adult—or both? Do you always seem to give more than you get in relationships? Are your days consumed—and your energy depleted—by thoughts of a romantic partner or other relationship where there’s instability, inconsistency, and uncertainty?
If so, you’re not alone. As you read above, for many years I struggled as an anxious attacher. I felt lost and alone. I didn’t know where to turn.
That’s why, when I became a coach for people with an anxious attachment style, I vowed to do everything in my power to stop folks just like you from suffering like I did for so many years.
The first of two options that have the power to complete transform your life and the trajectory of your healing journey is my self-guided Anxious Attachment Style Healing Toolkit. Packed with over three and a half hours of audio and video content as well as over 85 pages of educational material, journaling prompts, and exercises to help you grow more secure, the toolkit is the companion I wish I would’ve had when I first discovered my own attachment style. It expands on everything I’ve written in this blog post, arming you with a daily practice to help you regulate your nervous system, activities to help you learn to be a more effective communicator, and strategies for coming to terms with your trauma.
If you’re looking for more support as you work to grow more secure, the second option is for you. And that’s to explore my 12-week coaching program specifically for anxious attachers. You’ll see a module below where you can set up a free consultation with me to do just that. I’d be honored to cheer you on and help you hold yourself accountable as you work to heal.
It’s time to end the cycle. It’s time to get off the roller coaster. It’s time to heal your anxious attachment style.
For good.
