How to heal anxious attachment (and its triggers)
Alright, my friends, we are back with the next article in this series on anxious attachment. I know how potent it is for many of you (as I can tell in my comments anytime I make a video about it) so I’m excited to dive back in.
A couple quick notes before we get into the heat of the content:
If you missed the first article in this series, definitely go check that out first as it will give you a ton of useful background on what attachment styles (including anxious attachment is) and where it comes from
If you are interested in going deeper to heal your anxious attachment, I urge you to check out Exclusive. Inside the course there is a whole module on anxious attachment where I’m able to go in even more depth since it’s a paid product. While I love creating this free content for you all, I’m able to support in even more significant ways inside my official programs!
Okay, let’s get into it.
What triggers anxious attachment, how do you heal it (and can it actually be completely healed)
Alright, let’s jump in here.
A recap on what is anxious attachment
At the simplest level - our attachment style is built on the unmet needs from our childhood.
Now this can sound kinda depressing and a little harsh on our parents but it’s not intended to be. Regardless of whether you had the most present parents in the world or grew up in a deeply chaotic household, the reality is that our parents are human so it’s impossible for them to have been exactly what we needed for emotional stability at every moment of every day.
Every single person on this planet had certain needs left unmet in childhood which at some level informs the person they are today.
Our attachment style is a part of the fingerprint of who we are and they’re not inherently a problem UNLESS they’re affecting your ability to grow, relate and thrive as an adult (which is the case for many of the people who seek out resources to change their attachment style).
I think this is important to remind ourselves - some level of desiring closeness or distance (as we know are the core presentations of anxious attachment and avoidant attachment respectively) is totally normal. And it’s normal for these things to ebb and flow depending on the situation.
When we need to take action and focus on healing is when these patterns are driving us to behaviors that we consciously know are getting in the way of healthy connection because we’re being too driven by fear and survival instincts.
Now let’s answer an important question…
Is it possible to completely heal your anxious attachment?
Yes, but most of us won’t.
Now this isn’t any cause for alarm, because remember the observation from above - some amount of desiring closeness and distance is normal and can absolutely be a part of healthy relationships. Which is why there are millions of people walking around right now in happy, healthy relationships even though they’re slightly anxiously attached or their partner has avoidant tendencies.
Being anxiously attached doesn’t mean you can’t be in a healthy relationship.
But because we know that attachment styles, when triggered, often send us into a fight or flight response (or sometimes freeze) and when in these states our brains are wired to scan for potential for loss in far greater intensity than opportunities for gain, these patterns are going to make it harder for us to stay open and vulnerable to the degree that’s required to relate in a healthy way.
It is possible to completely heal your anxious attachment, if you were to do the degree of both conscious and subconscious healing work such that when there are moments of conflict or rupture in your relationship, you are able to see that this is a natural part of relationships and in the moment, bring yourself back to calm in order to act in a way that reflects what you want most (rather than what you’re scared might happen).
But for most people, they don’t need to get to that level of healed to create the relationships that they want in life.
For most people, the goal is much closer to them - when you notice your anxiety kick up in a relationship situation, are you able to catch it? When you catch it, do you know what the best thing you can do for yourself to calm down? (There’s a whole lesson on this in Exclusive!) When you’re in a slightly anxious state, do you know enough about these patterns to resist your first impulse to shut down, to try to clutch the person closer or to push them away and wait for your body to calm down enough to make a better decision?
The person described above still has some anxious attachment but they’re working with it, rather than being controlled by it.
That’s our goal.
Okay, let’s back track for a moment and discuss when it is that our anxious attachment gets triggered…
What triggers anxious attachment
Think back to the descriptions of the babies we discussed in the previous article and the when they felt the pain that informed anxious attachment. This visual is often the best way to understand what set of things triggers anxious attachment:
Feeling alone
If for a baby, the moments when they were scared and left alone where the most perilous.
Then in adulthood, moments when you feel like you are going to have to handle life alone and this feels unconquerable are going to be a natural trigger for the survival instincts of anxious attachment
Distance
Babies are used to closeness with their mother (they were literally inside her for 9 months!) so the unexpected transition to feeling distance can be scary for the baby.
In adulthood, when you have had a period of closeness with somebody and it transitions to distance (for example, hanging out with somebody regularly and then one of you is on vacation and the pattern can’t be maintained), this shift in pattern likely registers as danger
Unpredictability
Babies love a routine and they grow accustomed to certain music, food, sounds, etc. so when environments seem to be unpredictable it can make them feel unsafe.
This pattern can then amplify into adulthood and situations where the outcome can’t be predicted (like not knowing whether he will reach out or not) can create an instinctual response to try to bring things back to predictable (this is where a lot of control instincts kick in and the desire to understand or “make it make sense” because it helps us feel a semblance of predictability)
Unknown
Relatedly, new situations are full of potential dangers to a baby and if they didn’t learn through parents signaling that this can be fun (in addition to being a reason for some trepidation), then new scenarios or the unknown can be very scary!
In adulthood, you might be triggered in situations where you’re put out of your comfort zone or asked to sit with not knowing the outcome of a situation and this feels difficult because your immediate instinct is to assume it won’t work out (rather than remembering there’s the possibility it will!)
Calm
This is often the most surprising of triggers for anxious attachment! Think about it this way, if babies learn a pattern that when they cry, they get attention from mom but if they play quietly in the corner then she’s more likely to redirect her focus to her book or the other child, then a pattern can develop where baby will actually learn to create/be the drama in order to keep mom close.
As adults with anxious attachment, being in scenarios where you’re used to the anxiety around the unpredictability or unknown and instead feeling calm can lead to thoughts like “whens the other shoe going to drop?” The constant scanning for danger has become so habitual that actually not having eyes on a potential threat (see previous description of the unknown) can actually lead us to create one for ourselves in our own thoughts!
This is really important.
Anxiously attached people misinterpret calm in relationships as lack of attraction because it does not feel like what they learned love feels like.
Common examples of anxious attachment triggers:
Not hearing from a guy you’ve been talking to
Coming home from a date and not knowing whether he’ll text you
Sitting on a date and not being sure whether or not he’s looking for something serious
Your close friend stops responding to your texts as quickly as usual
A guy is comfortable expressing his interest in you and you wonder why he feels so sure
You’re on vacation and not able to see the guy you’ve been seeing as frequently
He asks if he can go spend a day with the guys
Regular check-ins from your boss about your performance randomly stop
You’re nearing the end of grad school and not sure where you’re going to end up after
You move to a new city
And know that certain people will deeply struggle with some but not others on this list. It’s important to note that there are lots of examples (including some above) that are not dating related! Attachment is connected to all our relationships, even at work so you may actually be seeing this in lots of areas of your life.
How to heal anxious attachment
So you’re nodding your head at how some or all of the above sound difficult for you. So what do you do about it?
Here are the three core pillars of healing anxious attachment…
Stop trying to think your way out of it
Our attachment style is first and foremost housed in our body - specifically our nervous system. If you experience the anxiety, spinning thoughts, chest tightness, raised heartbeat, restless energy in any moment, it is important to understand from the moment that these physical triggers start your view of the world is no longer anywhere close to biased or rational.
In these moments, because your body has sensed danger somewhere in the world around you, your body is acting in survival mode - avoid the saber tooth tiger (a.k.a. emotional pain). And in this mode, you will always be far more on edge, attuned to negative stimuli, defensive, pessimistic etc. All the the opposite of what we want in terms of creating healthy connection.
So the first thing to do to both manage and heal your anxious attachment is to stop trying to think your way out of it because even the thoughts you could tell yourself in that moment are already biased.
The more you focus on calming your body down, the more naturally your thoughts will return to a more stable state (we’re never completely unbiased but we will come out of the super survival-biased thought process). Somatic tools are great for this like breathing exercises, calming repetitive movements, noticing different parts of your body - anything you can do to show your body that you’re safe and it doesn’t need to be so on edge.
Over time as you address your body first when triggered, your body will learn (much like, I hate to say it, training an animal!) that actually the thing that triggered the reaction must not be as dangerous because you’re consistently showing it, “yes, I noticed that thing too but we’re actually okay.”
Identify the roots of your attachment and create a new story
This is a deeply individual process and often involves deep, deep healing work (when you hear people refer to inner child healing, this is one of the most potent areas of our lives where it can be used). In order to unlearn the survival response you picked up when you were so young, you often need to allow yourself to go back to the space you were in when the original set of triggers occurred and using your rational brain, help the younger you see that she actually was more safe than she thought she was in the moment.
This work is often done best with the support of a third party, especially if you’ve never done it before. I do this inside of my Private Coaching container but there are also many, many coaches, therapists and healers who can be great support for this process as well.
Remember this part takes time - you are not going to unwind a lifelong pattern in a few days or weeks. It’s okay to allow your body and subconscious mind the time it takes to heal. Usually you’ll notice that you’ll go through a wave of getting triggered a lot by something (this is usually a signal that your body is ready to show you the root of this pattern to be healed) and then some calm before another wave comes up - this doesn’t mean you haven’t healed, just that your body is now ready to heal another angle or go a level deeper.
Learn to create your own safety
When we think back to the baby who learned they were unsafe when left alone or feeling distance, they felt reliant on mom’s return to feel safe (which makes sense for their level of development - they actually DID rely on mom for survival). But today as an adult, you actually do not need the boyfriend, friend or parent in your life in order to physiologically survive.
When anxious attachment is triggered, it’s like your body is saying to you “act fast, make sure they don’t leave so we don’t die.” So the path to healing that pattern is kindly, lovingly, finding a way to show our body, “hey, I don’t want them to leave either but I won’t die if they do. We’ll be okay either way.”
Through conscious, self-reflection practices like journaling, therapy or coaching and through somatic practices as described above, the more we strengthen our own toolkit to help our body come back to safety regardless of the triggers around us, the more that our body will begin to understand we are safer than our childhood body thought and the triggers will become more rare and less severe every time.
Your anxious attachment is trying to keep you safe. Acknowledge it like you would a 5 year old child who’s scared of the monster under the bed. You don’t need to share the belief that there’s the monster and you can help her to get back to bed with love and support.
I hope this overview on healing anxious attachment was helpful.
If you’re interested to questions like…
Can an anxious and avoidant be in a happy relationship?
Can anxiously attached turn into avoidant?
What do I do when I feel like he’s pulling away and I feel my attachment kick up?
How do actually use the somatic practices to calm my body?
I’d definitely encourage you to come join me in Exclusive where I have a whole module on anxious attachment, not to mention teaching the Exclusive Framework, a simple, three-pillar framework that will help you identify in any given situation which area of how you feel about yourself might need attention so you feel empowered to focus on what you can control in your dating life.