Here's How to Heal an Anxious Attachment Style, According to a Relationship Coach

If you frequently rely on your partner for reassurance and need constant validation in your relationships to feel safe, you might have an anxious attachment style. Your dating life may have been historically marked with anxiety, people-pleasing, clinginess, and fear—but your story doesn’t have to stay that way forever. Gaining insight into your attachment style can be the first step towards creating a new narrative for yourself. 

Read on to learn how you can heal an anxious attachment style, and the steps you can take to have healthier relationships.

Learn Your Behaviors to Choose Differently

What I find intriguing about attachment theory (characterized by four styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant) is how it provides us with a framework to articulate our experiences. To become someone else, we have to understand the box we are in so we can get out of its limiting dimensions. 

The attachment theory offers language about why we play out certain scripts in our relationships, which is often linked to our earliest childhood experiences. According to decades of research, children have an innate desire to look for support when exposed to stress. If caregivers respond with sensitivity, we can move into a secure attachment style where we feel worthy of being cared for. Safety feels continuous and true. Our needs will be believed. 

Someone with an anxious attachment style grew up with inconsistent caregiving which created a hyperfixation and suspicion of their attachment figures. The world did not feel safe to explore, leading to low trust in met needs and high distress about rejection and abandonment. When we can give ourselves the space to explore the past and foster a compassionate perspective over what happened, we realize these vulnerabilities are not inherent to who we are; rather, they are patterns we can change. 

For clients who are struggling with an anxious attachment style, it helps to reframe behaviors with more spaciousness. Your over-sensitivity to mood shifts is simply a hypervigilant mechanism to scan for dangers in the relational environment. Once you know you ask your partner for reassurance because you feel threatened in the relationship, you can choose a different behavior such as self-soothing or speaking to your therapist to choose differently.

Face the Past to Rewrite the Future

I’ve helped many clients with an anxious attachment system "earn" a secure attachment style through comprehensive coaching to move towards an embodied self. An earned attachment style is the ability to overcome early attachment insecurity and develop the capacity for emotional coherence for healthy intimate relationships.

One of the biggest tools? Emotionally corrective experiences, a psychotherapeutic technique that involves revisiting older overwhelming situations to update them with new, positive outcomes to recontextualize the negative association.

For example, if your primary caregiver didn’t make you feel like your needs were valued, you might have thought your needs were “too much” and no one could ever meet them. Repeating the pattern is not sharing your needs and then feeling resentful when people can’t read your mind. A healing corrective experience would look like sharing your needs and allowing the chance for your partner, friend, coach, family member, or coworker to show up.

And if someone in your life isn’t consistently meeting your needs? It’s a good sign to re-evaluate your relationship with them so you can intentionally surround yourself with a safe community. By learning how to build a secure base within and reparenting ourselves with updated experiences, we can honor our deepest needs and feel comfortable knowing the ones we love will support them as well. 

Map Out and Share Your Insecurities

A lot of our thoughts tend to be automatic and reflective. For an anxiously attached person, if you don’t get a text back from someone, your mind might immediately reach for a shortcut response that skews towards catastrophe: They don’t really like me. I knew it, I’m not good enough for them. I saw them look at me weirdly the other day. I wish someone could want me as much as I want them. That’s it! I’m going to get dressed and go out, that’ll make them jealous!

Research notes this type of maladaptive thinking can be seen as a cognitive distortion. When your brain processes too much stimuli, it tends to find a shortcut. If you’ve repeatedly been in adverse situations, the more likely negative mental filters can persist, which harms your self-perception. If you can't manage those negative thoughts, the biases can run wild. 

It’s helpful to pause when your brain starts to repeat old stories that you might re-enact, kicking off self-sabotaging behaviors. For instance, you might believe your partner joining a new activity isn’t just for fun, but because you’re not interesting enough. Or they’re going through a rough time at work and need time alone, but you believe it’s because they’re annoyed at you when they haven’t said anything wrong about the relationship.

Date Someone Comfortable with Intimacy

Anxiously attached people are often attracted to avoidantly attached people who typically are uncomfortable with intimacy and don’t like relying on others. It’s the classic cliche in dating: the pursuer and the pursued.

For an anxiously attached person, it’s a good idea to look for specific qualities in a partner that won’t activate an insecure attachment system with new relationship experiences. Amir Levine, MD, author of "Attached," defines it as CARRP: consistency, availability, reliability, responsiveness, and predictability.

It’s important to find a partner, friends, and a coach/therapist who can dependably offer secure traits to get out of unstable relationships and familiar attachment patterns. Once you’ve experienced this level of safety, it’s hard to accept any less. Here are a few other stabilizing qualities to look for: 

Anchored and Unshakeable

Look for someone who feels grounded even in the face of insecurities and conflict. When you can trust someone to value your needs, thoughts, and your evolving self, it's easier to show the full range of your emotions knowing they will be held and carefully tended to. It can be healing when your partner allows you to say the scary thought in your mind or display an unhealthy behavior so you can explore and grow.

Emotional Warmness

Look for someone who can demonstrate warmth, humor, respect, empathy, and presence during times of insecurity, to help neutralize negative charge of emotions. When you cry, they wipe your tears. When you're scared, they're able to work with your feelings. They encourage and champion you when you share yourself. Turn away from detached behavior and those who can’t be affectionate and forthcoming with their feelings and thoughts.

Clear Communication

Look for someone who can provide balanced reassurance and clarity about needs, wants, and desires to help reduce anxiety. People with an insecure attachment style tend to be muddy and non-direct in their speech and push away emotional responsibility. There isn’t a consistent deepening of conversation before it moves back into topical discussion. 

Commitment to the Relationship

Look for someone who can escalate the relationship and make plans with ease to provide a sense of security in the relationship’s future. If someone is constantly canceling plans, too busy to meet, taking a long time to get back, pulling back from the relationship, future faking, and displaying hot/cold behaviors, pay attention to that behavior instead of the few times they were able to show up for you the way you've wanted.

Clarified Boundaries

Look for safety in sharing acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a relationship. For instance, they accept your exploration of a relationship, but they don't tolerate being a punching bag. When someone is disengaging from the relationship in tumultuous ways, it’s harder to feel safe and rely on them. You may feel like the connection could dissolve at any point.

This may lead to obsessive behaviors, like checking your phone constantly, not stating your needs, hiding your true thoughts, and playing games to test the connection. 

As much as possible, mimic having a secure attachment style over a lengthy period so it becomes a habit. Remember, the point is to find community with people who can reciprocate and function as your “secure base,” an experience you may not have received as a child.

Keep in Mind

Healing an anxious attachment style is a lifelong process as our attachment to the people we love exists on a continuum. Some days, it will be easy, and other days, it will require deliberate effort.

By pushing past discomfort and believing in our capacity to have secure and safe relationships, we can transform our outlook and present experiences.