Fixing an anxious attachment style won’t be easy, but it will lead to healthier relationships. To make an anxious attachment style become secure, try the following.
Table of Contents
- 0.1 Become Aware of Patterns
- 0.2 Get Professional Help
- 0.3 Consider Medication
- 0.4 Try Trauma Therapy Like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
- 0.5 Communicate
- 0.6 Develop Social Support
- 0.7 Practice Self-Love and Compassion
- 0.8 Increase Self-Care and Coping Skills
- 1 Anxious Attachment Style – Final Thoughts
Become Aware of Patterns
Self-awareness is key to fixing an anxious attachment style. Understanding one’s style of attachment and how this can impact relationships can help shift our perspective.
For the anxiously attached person, it can be helpful to realize that the insecurity come from early childhood experiences. And not a lack of security within the relationship.
Monitoring thoughts and feelings to see where they originate (in the past or in the present) can help us determine if an attachment issue is present or if there’s real cause for concern.
Get Professional Help
Self-help books can assist you in learning more about attachment and how to correct it. However, it’s important to see a therapist if at all possible.
Therapeutic intervention can help us investigate and heal childhood wounds. It can help learn a new way of relating to others, develop increased coping skills.
And it can help figure out how to be healthier within our relationships.
Cognitive behavioral therapy in particular could be a help.
Consider Medication
For anxiously attached individuals with an anxiety disorder, it could help to consider SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).
Pairing medication with therapy is a best practice when dealing with repairs to an attachment style. While medication may not be the answer for every anxiously attached person, it could help some individuals.
Try Trauma Therapy Like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
Trauma therapies like EMDR could also help address early childhood issues – so that they don’t continue to negatively impact relationships.
The process of EMDR involves going directly to the source of the issues. And it also involves learning to reprocess and integrate these experiences. We cannot change the past, but we can work to heal it.
Communicate
For those who are anxiously attached and in relationships, it’s important to talk it out with partners. Assuming the relationship is healthy, the partner can be a support.
Talking about how we’re feeling and why can also help partners understand why we react the way we do. And it can help the understand the ways in which we’re trying to change those reactions.
Develop Social Support
Learning to develop healthy supportive relationships in general is important — not just romantic ones.
We need to cultivate the kind of social support that allows us to talk out our thoughts and feelings without judgment. Whether that looks like calling on one or more friends or attending a support group.
Even online support can validate our feelings. While helping us recognize that our perception is flawed and in need of healing.
Practice Self-Love and Compassion
An essential part of healing is learning to cultivate self-love, self-worth, and self-compassion. This is a practice, and it won’t be easy.
Part of this process could involve rediscovering who we are and what we like apart from our relationships with others. We begin to truly know ourselves and to love the people we’ve become.
With a heart full of compassion and acceptance, we begin to create a new narrative for our lives.
One where lovers don’t always leave, we can trust others, and happy ever after is not only possible but likely.
Increase Self-Care and Coping Skills
Throughout the healing process, self-care will be essential. We’ll also need an entire arsenal of coping skills.
Triggers will come up that will remind and reinforce early childhood relational patterns, and we’ll need coping strategies to combat them.
Deep breathing, meditation, and thought stopping and replacement can help us deal with the strong feelings that may arise as we start to change our patterns.
Learning to be secure within a relationship isn’t as easy as deciding to trust someone else. If only it were that simple!
It takes time and practice, energy and effort to cultivate new patterns of behavior.
It can also take social support, failing only to try again, and the determination to keep working toward that goal of a healthier, less anxious mindset.
Anxious Attachment Style – Final Thoughts
Fixing an anxious attachment is no guarantee that the current relationship, if applicable, will work out. That will, of course, depend on the health of the partner and the relationship as a whole.
