How To Change Your Attachment Style And Your Relationships

Anxiously attached individuals tend to be triggered by anything that hints at rejection or loss. For example, if the anxious partner senses the avoidant partner becoming distant, they might try calling or texting repeatedly for reassurance. This push-and-pull can perpetuate insecurity for both individuals unless they consciously work to change these patterns.

With the intention to change and support from loved ones, communities, and professionals, a person can go from having an anxious attachment style to forming healthy, secure attachments with others. From childhood to adulthood, experiences can shape a person and ultimately define how they form healthy and loving attachments and relationships with others. This anxiousness is often rooted in early childhood and an inconsistent or inadequate attachment connection with primary caregivers, like mom or dad. A child who did not receive consistent or persistent love or attention from a parent often finds it difficult to find secure and trusting adult attachments.

You don’t need to know your attachment style for this research to be useful to you. In any given moment, if you’re feeling closer to your partner than you want to feel, but taking space from them isn’t an option, maybe you can find a way to do something novel together. It could be anything from trying a new recipe to planning a trip to an unfamiliar place. At the same time, for a person who is more anxiously attached, doing familiar things together sends the signal that the relationship has a reassuring routine and consistency to it. 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. The attachment style we form in our early years influences this process of self-regulation and self-soothing of emotions. Therefore, it’s important to understand how dysregulation of emotions affects how we cope with the anxious attachment style in day-to-day life. Ready to take control of your attachment style and enhance your relationships? Please book an appointment with one of the high-quality, experienced therapists in the PsychPlus network to explore tailored strategies and support for your unique needs.

Their behavior is driven by fears of engulfment or losing independence. People with anxious attachment often misinterpret normal situations as signs of abandonment. People with an anxious attachment style often get stuck in specific thought traps. These include mind-reading (“They must think I’m too needy”) and catastrophizing (“If they don’t text back, they’re leaving me”).

Discomfort With Closeness

When caregivers are unpredictable or anxious, children constantly monitor their closeness and behavior, preventing them from feeling safe to explore the world. Through therapy, you can learn to recognize your attachment patterns, examine your feelings about yourself and learn to approach relationships with others healthily. Having an anxious attachment style doesn’t mean you can’t have healthy, thriving relationships. Anxious attachment, sometimes called anxious-preoccupied or anxious-ambivalent, is marked by a strong need for closeness and reassurance, mixed with constant worry about a partner’s love and commitment.

Therapists provide guidance, validation, and tools for lasting change. When anxiety rises, a person can refer to a list of self-soothing activities instead of reaching out to others. Join a support group to connect with others who share similar experiences. Strong friendships and family bonds create a diverse network of emotional support. People should schedule regular coffee dates, phone calls, or activities with friends to maintain these connections.

This can create a cycle of tension and conflict, as their emotional needs can feel overwhelming to partners, sometimes resulting in the very rejection their inner child fears most. Therapy plays a crucial role in helping individuals with anxious attachment style address the underlying issues that contribute to their relationship struggles. Anxious attachment is often rooted in early childhood experiences, where inconsistent caregiving led to insecurity and fear of abandonment. Through attachment style therapy, individuals can begin to explore these early experiences and understand how they influence current behaviors and emotional responses in relationships. Healing from anxious attachment is a transformative journey that can significantly improve your relationships and overall well-being. Anxious attachment often stems from inconsistent caregiving in childhood, leading to a pervasive fear of abandonment and a constant need for reassurance.

Assertive communication means expressing thoughts and feelings with respect and confidence. A person can stand up for their needs while still considering their partner’s perspective. People with anxious attachments often find themselves in trauma bonds.

• For all of us, how much closeness we want shifts somewhat from hour to hour, or day to day.
• They may be prone to tears and emotional outbursts directed inward or outward, or they may choose flight as the to-go response to stress.
• Healthy dependence means trusting partners while maintaining separate identities.
• Recognizing this pattern helps you start building trust and self-soothing skills that support long-term connection.

When you value yourself, you become less dependent on others for validation and reassurance, reducing attachment anxiety. Although they enjoy helping others, they do so primarily because they fear that if they don’t, people will abandon and reject them. Hypersensitivity to cues of rebuff or disinterest by others lead these worried warriors (my term for the anxiously attached) to become the quintessential people pleasers.

You crave emotional support yet fear rejection or being “too much.” This creates mixed signals—closeness followed by worry or withdrawal. People with this pattern may feel anxious when relationships change or when communication slows. Recognizing this pattern helps you start building trust and self-soothing skills that support long-term connection. If this resonates with you, know that these patterns developed as survival strategies in childhood.

Blackston is a licensed therapist who offers clinical insights that help make this episode very normalizing and insightful. This book is most helpful for someone with an anxious attachment who feels they have lost themselves in the relationship or cannot express needs without fearing their relationship will end. Attachment styles help explain the way people feel and act in relationships. Learn more about how early childhood caregiving impacts the rest of our lives.

Step 5 Therapy

The anxious individual may struggle with trusting others and may be overly sensitive to perceived slights or criticisms. They might have difficulty maintaining a secure relationship with healthy boundaries, often oscillating between intense emotional closeness and withdrawal when they feel their needs are not being met. This can result in feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction in their social interactions, as their adult relationships may lack the stability and security their inner child craves. The basics of self-soothing the anxious attachment style – like many other developmental skills – is formed in an attuned relationship with caregivers during early childhood. In a healthy dynamic, the caregiver(s) and child are attentive to each other’s cues and responses and engage in sensitive reactions.

Doing so strengthens the neural pathways in our brains that promote acting this way in future situations. Self-soothing the anxious attachment style is the ability to manage emotions and subsequent actions in response to situations that trigger upset or distress. The ability to healthily self-soothe is essential for successfully maintaining healthy relationships, problem-solving during conflict, and establishing a stable sense of self-confidence. If you find that anxious attachment is significantly impacting your relationships, professional support may be a valuable step toward healing. Therapy can help address the root causes of attachment anxiety and provide tools for managing it effectively.

Following his research, therapists now know that the attachment styles formed in childhood sometimes extend to adult relationships as well, although they’re not set in stone. You can assess your partner’s style by their behavior and by their reaction to a direct request for more closeness. Does he or she try to meet your needs or become defensive and uncomfortable or accommodate you once and then return to distancing behavior? Someone who is secure won’t play games, communicates well, and can compromise. A person with an anxious attachment style would welcome more closeness, but still need assurance and worry about the relationship.

This is often an effect of long periods of jealousy or clinginess that feel to their partner as a smothering loss of self and independence. Also known as cognitive reframing, this technique helps you self-soothe the anxious attachment style by challenging and changing how you think. You could do this by anticipating your typical negative thoughts and emotions in response to triggers and writing them down. Fortunately, with time, effort, and practice, it’s possible to gain control over your emotions if you have the anxious attachment style. 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.

When both partners understand the anxious/avoidant dynamic, blame decreases and empathy increases. For couples doing attachment work together, our broader couples therapy resource roundup includes additional therapist-recommended tools across books, podcasts, and more. Below are several therapist-recommended books and podcasts we often suggest to couples navigating anxious attachment. Each resource offers a slightly different lens — from understanding attachment theory to exploring codependency, nervous system regulation, and the pursue–withdraw cycle. View and download this anxious attachment infographic to learn more about identifying anxious attachment and moving toward healthier relationships. This means learning not to “fuss over” a partner’s low energy or withdrawal, even when it triggers your own fears, by having enough self-control and self-awareness not to feed the pattern.

People with an avoidant attachment style deactivate their need for intimacy and comfort, while people with an anxious attachment rely on the reassurance, approval, and validation of others. Situations and behaviors like these trigger intense and overwhelming emotions in anxious individuals because, in their eyes, they are signs of rejection and abandonment – their greatest fear. Early experiences and circumstances have a significant impact on the development of an anxious attachment style. People with anxious styles tend to be very caring, empathetic partners who desire closeness and intimacy. Their heightened sensitivity helps them tune into others’ feelings and needs. If you need extra support with your anxious attachment style, you can seek help from a therapist.

Every text or missed call from her partner sent her spiraling into anxiety, and she often found herself overthinking their every move. Despite her partner reassuring her time and time again, my client still felt uncertain and insecure, unable to break free from her anxious attachment style. The body and mind are inseparable, and being healthy involves maintaining solid boundaries, processing our emotions within secure relationships, and taking steps to resolve past trauma.

Such caregiving patterns can leave a lasting impression, making the child overly dependent on external validation for their sense of security. 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. As a result of such responses from their caregiver, the child starts to feel anxious and distressed.

Schrage et al. (2026) compiled data from three different daily diary studies – a common research method where participants provide data each day for at least a week. In this case, participants reported on the kinds of activities they did with their partners every day for three weeks. Then, the researchers looked at whether people’s attachment styles – how anxious or avoidant they are – influenced how the activities they did together made them feel about their relationships.

Each time you express a need calmly and receive Asiatalks care in return, your brain learns that closeness can be safe. Over time, you can move toward a more secure attachment style through therapy, mindfulness, and consistent support. An anxious attachment style in relationships can be challenging to manage. Whereas anxious attachers are sensitive and attuned to their partners’ needs, they also typically require constant reassurance and affection to feel safe as part of a romantic couple. If validation isn’t provided in the way an anxious attacher requires, they may feel worried and stressed about their relationships.