Healing An Anxious Attachment Style A Comprehensive Guide

Although these maladaptive beliefs are coping mechanisms that served a purpose growing up, they can have a negative impact on one’s well-being and ability to form healthy relationships. This way you can identify your patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving when it comes to your relationships with others. They tend to seek constant reassurance and validation from their partners and may become overly dependent on them for their own emotional well-being. Fostering healthier connections with others by recognizing and addressing any underlying insecurities or patterns can be complicated. If you need support navigating this process, our therapists at Connect Couples Therapy would be happy to help you on that journey.

When you trust and rely on yourself for comfort and support, you are no longer dependent on other people. You can ask them how they manage their anxiety and difficult emotions and how they communicate problems to their significant others. There are attachment-specific therapies, such as schema therapy or attachment-based therapy, but any type of therapy or counseling can be helpful. Making time for self-care is an important step in getting to know yourself and enjoying your own company. To avoid this feeling (and actual abandonment), they often go to extreme measures. Anxiously attached individuals have hyperactive attachment systems.

Healthily soothing the anxious attachment style involves taking a breather between a feeling and an action. There are a few techniques that help you focus more on what’s going on inside your mind and body instead of on a trigger and its accompanying thoughts and emotions. If you’re wondering how to heal the anxious attachment style, the following strategies for healthily self-soothing the anxious attachment style can help you in this process. Having a secure attachment doesn’t mean that someone is always in total control of their emotions, but, typically, securely attached people are able to self-soothe and regulate their emotions in healthy ways.

• Our admissions team can help guide you to the right level of care tailored to your unique needs.
• These are behaviors aimed at keeping their partner close but, unfortunately, they often have the opposite effect and push their partner further away.
• Therapy is a great way for you to figure out your unhealthy ways of self soothing the anxious attachment style, as well as why you’re taking these actions.

This often looks like trying extra hard to get their attention or hyper-fixating on the relationship’s status. If this sounds familiar, you might be dealing with anxious attachment, a learned pattern rooted in a deep fear of abandonment. Vowels, L. M., Vowels, M. J., Carnelley, K. B., Millings, A., & Gibson‐Miller, J. Toward a causal link between attachment styles and mental health during the COVID‐19 pandemic. As children, this creates confusion and conflict — the person wants closeness but also feels unsafe.

If you’ve done significant work on yourself and your anxiety persists specifically with this person, consider whether the relationship itself is the issue. Learning to express needs without falling into anxious communication patterns is essential. Phone use is best read as one more everyday cue that can set off a habitual response, not proof that phones damage relationships.

How To Fix Anxious Attachment In Relationships

They put a premium on others’ well-being and contentment over their own, and while they are busy solving others’ problems, their needs are unattended, and they put their own life on hold. Healthy and stable relationships are integral to our well-being and boost our self-esteem and quality of life. This applies not only to relationships with other people, but also to our relationships with ourselves. It means stepping into your power and learning that it’s okay to be alone and that you are capable of being there for yourself. These are behaviors aimed at keeping their partner close but, unfortunately, they often have the opposite effect and push their partner further away.

Fear Mixed With Longing In Relationships

They crave emotional support, closeness, and reassurance from their romantic partners. In adulthood, anxious attachment profoundly influences romantic relationships. Around 20% of people develop an anxious attachment (Hazan & Shaver, 2017), which originates in unpredictable or insensitive parenting in childhood.

All of this behavior makes attaching to an avoider more probable. They hang in and try harder, instead of facing the truth and cutting their losses. In couples, this can create a pursue–withdraw cycle, especially if one partner leans avoidant. The more one person seeks reassurance, the more the other may pull back — leaving both partners feeling misunderstood and alone.

EFT was built directly on attachment science, the same attachment theory that explains anxious attachment in the first place. Instead of teaching communication skills in isolation, EFT works at the level of emotional accessibility and responsiveness, and it’s one of the most research-supported couples models for distressed couples. It treats the relationship pattern, not just one person’s coping skills. It may not always be possible to heal an anxious attachment style, but there are some ways in which it can be managed to help you feel more secure in their relationships.

However, the way someone self soothes an anxious attachment style might look quite different. Your attachment style isn’t permanently affixed to your personality. Think of it as healing a wound rather than correcting a defect. It’s something that gets closer to healthy with consistent, compassionate attention. Healing a fear of abandonment means learning to stay present with discomfort rather than immediately acting on it by seeking reassurance or being clingy. Disorganized attachment, sometimes called unresolved attachment or fearful-avoidant attachment, develops when a caregiver is both a source of comfort and a source of fear.

And remember, your partner’s attachment style isn’t something you are responsible for fixing. Building greater security is something you can work on together. That’s why the later stages of healing move from solo work into shared work, a point we’ll come back to. While the anxieties and intense fears of abandonment can feel painful, this attachment style also has positive qualities. It’s especially helpful to practice being aware of how you interact in relationships to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. Dr. Hayes is a board-certified clinical psychologist with over 14 years of clinical practice in adult psychotherapy, attachment-focused couples counseling, and empirical assessment.

Someone with anxious attachment may crave closeness but worry their partner will leave, leading to clinginess or over-checking. According to John Bowlby’s attachment theory and Mary Ainsworth’s research, the way a child’s needs were met (or not met) creates an internal working model of relationships. Dr. Shannon Franklin is a licensed psychologist specializing in LGBTQ+ concerns, gender identity, multiculturalism/anti-racism, and trauma.

When these early relationships are inconsistent—sometimes attentive and loving, other times distant or unavailable—we can develop an anxious attachment style that follows us into adulthood. Anxious attachment is a pattern that craves closeness and fears losing it. It often shows up as worry, people-pleasing, or reacting quickly to small changes. This attachment style forms when early caregivers were inconsistent or unpredictable, leading to heightened sensitivity in relationships.

For those whose anxious attachment is connected to specific traumatic experiences, EMDR can help process and integrate these memories. This approach can reduce the emotional charge of past experiences that trigger anxious attachment responses. CBT helps identify and challenge the negative thought patterns that fuel anxious attachment. By recognizing distorted thoughts (like catastrophizing or mind-reading) and replacing them with more balanced perspectives, you can reduce the emotional reactivity that drives anxious behaviors. This neurological wiring explains why anxious attachment isn’t simply a choice or personality trait—it’s deeply embedded in our nervous system responses.

To cope with these emotions and to avoid feeling rejected, they subconsciously employ hyperactivating strategies. Because the anxious individual’s self-esteem is dependent on the closeness and approval of significant others, any instability will often lead to an undeveloped sense of self. If you’d like to explore your own attachment style with the help of a therapist, browse our directory to find a licensed provider near you. Relationships automatically become healthier when you’re able to let go of your need to feel in control all the time.

Let them know how you will respond if they do not respect your boundaries and stick to that. When doing these, it’s best to start small and work your way up, as the anxiety might be quite high at first. To change unhelpful beliefs, you need evidence that contradicts them, and this is best done through behavioral experiments. Hyperactivating strategies, like clinging, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/asiatalks controlling, and demanding, will only serve to make your anxiety worse. This will empower you and allow you to communicate more effectively, thus improving the overall quality of your relationships.