SELF-CARE: Can You Change Your Attachment Style As An Adult? + FREE My Personal Compass Worksheet
Do you have an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style? If you do, how does your attachment style make you feel?
(If you’re not sure what kind of attachment style you have, you can learn more about the 4 main attachment styles right here.)
Your attachment style influences how you approach and navigate relationships, especially in terms of emotional bonding, intimacy, and conflict.
This means that it can shape the type of romantic partner, family member, friend, and parent you are to those you love.
So if you know that you have an insecure attachment style, you might think that you’re doomed to have unhealthy relationships and continuously struggle to feel safe, satisfied, and happy in them.
But do you know what, my dear?
Just because you developed an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style as a kid doesn’t mean that you have to have this attachment style forever.
Because there are steps that you can take to develop a more secure attachment style and enjoy healthier, happier, and more stress-free relationships.
And in this blog post, I’m going to share the top 5 strategies that I teach my clients.
Let’s get to it!
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1. Understand Your Current Attachment Style
One of the best first steps to take if you want to develop a more secure attachment style is to gain a better understanding of your current attachment style.
If you’re trying to develop a more secure attachment style, it might seem unimportant and even counterintuitive to focus on your current attachment style.
But the truth is that understanding your current attachment style is actually very critical to changing it. Because it’s by understanding your current approach to relationships and what about it isn’t working that you’ll be able to break free of it and develop healthier relationship habits.
In particular, when you’re learning more about your current attachment style, you want to identify and understand the thoughts, fears, and emotions that you have that stem from your attachment style. For example, if you have an anxious attachment style, it’s helpful to understand that you may have a fear of being rejected and abandoned in relationships and recognize how this fear plays a role in your relationships. Similarly, if you have an avoidant attachment style, it’s helpful to understand that you may be uncomfortable getting close to people emotionally and that this affects the intimacy that you can experience in relationships.
Understanding your current attachment style also helps you see the differences between the thoughts, emotions, and behavioral patterns that you experience in relationships and the thoughts, emotions, and behavioral patterns that define a secure attachment style. This allows you to understand the differences between where you are now and where you ultimately want to be.
When you explore your current attachment style, it’s also helpful to dig into the early childhood experiences that it’s rooted in, especially your early relationship with the main person who raised you. This will help you identify WHERE your beliefs, emotions, and behavioral patterns related to relationships come from. And when you know the root cause of a belief, emotion, or behavioral pattern, it becomes easier to address it and break free of it.
2. Challenge False Relationship Beliefs
If you have an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style, you likely have negative beliefs about relationships that you developed based on your early relationship with your primary caregiver (e.g., “Everyone will leave me eventually,” “It’s useless to rely on other people emotionally,” or “Relationships are scary and can even be dangerous”).
These negative beliefs may have described what was true in your relationship with your primary caregiver. But they don’t necessarily apply to every relationship you’ve had since then. For example, if your primary caregiver wasn’t consistently there for you when you needed them, it doesn’t mean that your current romantic partner or your new friend will be the same way.
In this way, your belief that “everyone will leave me eventually” isn’t an accurate reflection of reality. Instead, it’s a false belief that leads you to think, feel, and act in ways that don’t serve your current relationships or your ability to be happy in them. Specifically, if you believe that your current partner is always on the verge of breaking up with you (even if they’ve never done anything to suggest that they will), you might cling to them and constantly seek reassurance about their love for you. This might make them question how much you trust them, wear them down emotionally and, ultimately, drive them away.
Because false beliefs aren’t accurate and negatively affect your ability to form and maintain healthy relationships, it’s important to challenge and transform them. You can do this by first keeping a record of the negative beliefs that you have in a particular relationship. For example, you might find that in your relationship with your partner, you often think, “I’m not good enough for him,” “I don’t deserve to be loved,” and “He’s going to leave me once he finds out that I’m nothing special.”
Once you’ve identified the negative beliefs that you have, look for clear evidence that they’re true. Is there any concrete evidence that you’re not good enough for your partner, that you don’t deserve to be loved, or that he’s going to leave you?
You can also consider evidence that your beliefs are NOT true. For example, you might consider that your partner is consistently loving and supportive, that your friends always remind you that any guy would be lucky to have you, and that you’re a caring and driven person who would make a great partner.
In most cases, you’ll realize that there’s little evidence to support the idea that your negative beliefs are true and more evidence to support the idea that they are NOT true. This will help you understand that your negative relationship beliefs are false. And once you realize that these beliefs are false, you can replace them with beliefs that are accurate and more consistent with a secure attachment style (e.g., “I’m a great catch for my partner,” “I deserve to be loved,” and “My partner loves me and wants to be with me.”).
3. Learn From Securely Attached Loved Ones
If you have an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style, you likely had a primary caregiver who didn’t model healthy relationship behaviors. This would have made it harder for you to learn about healthy relationship habits as a kid.
The good news is that you can learn the healthy relationship habits that characterize a secure attachment style by forming romantic or non-romantic relationships with adults who have a secure attachment style. These trusted loved ones can model healthy relationship habits, including the ability to trust others, put healthy boundaries in place, and achieve a healthy balance between emotional intimacy and independence. This gives you a chance to learn what healthy relationship behaviors look like.
Having a relationship with someone who has a secure attachment style can also give you a healthy space for practicing healthier relationship behaviors yourself (which is something I delve into in more detail in the next step). Practicing healthier relationship behaviors can be tricky in relationships with people who also have an insecure attachment style (because they might unintentionally undermine your efforts or simply make it more challenging to attempt them). So having a safe “testing ground” in a supportive relationship can be helpful.
Furthermore, having a positive relationship with someone who is securely attached can also further demonstrate that your false relationship beliefs aren’t true and that relationships can, in fact, be safe, loving, and supportive.
4. Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone
An important part of developing a more secure attachment style is to step outside of your comfort zone and practice healthier relationship behaviors. This will probably feel awkward or uncomfortable at first because you’ll be engaging in behaviors that you aren’t used to performing in relationships. But as with any kind of change, the only way to get comfortable and skilled at taking a new approach is to start actually doing it—even in just small ways.
For example, if you have an anxious attachment style, you might cling to your partner, try to spend as much time with them as possible, and even try to prevent them from spending time alone or with others. So if you’re looking to cultivate healthier relationship habits, you might try to practice being independent, giving your partner space to spend time alone or with others, and respecting your partner’s boundaries concerning time and space.
Similarly, if you have a disorganized attachment style, you might be emotionally reactive and swing back and forth between clinging to your partner and pushing them away. To cultivate healthier relationship habits, you might try to respond instead of react during times of relationship conflict and establish a healthier balance between getting close to your partner and giving both of you independent space.
5. Work with A Therapist
If you’re looking for more guidance on your journey toward secure attachment or have been struggling to make progress on your own, you might benefit from working with a therapist.
A skilled therapist with expertise in attachment theory can help you understand your current attachment style, uncover the early childhood experiences it’s rooted in, recognize how it’s affecting your current relationships, break free of limiting beliefs and behavioral patterns, and develop a more secure attachment style.
They can also act as a temporary secure base for you. In other words, they can provide a safe, secure space for you as you confront and rework your existing relationship “templates” and transform them into ones that more accurately reflect reality and allow you to pursue healthier bonds with loved ones.
Didn’t Grow Up with A Secure Attachment Style? You Can Still Develop One.
Some people develop a secure attachment style in early childhood because they have a caregiver who responds to their needs consistently and accurately. You might even know people in your life who are securely attached and notice that they tend to have healthy relationships.
But if you didn’t develop a secure attachment style as a kid, you aren’t doomed to have an insecure attachment style and struggle in your relationships forever. Instead, you can take intentional steps to break free of your limiting relationship beliefs and behavioral patterns and begin approaching relationships in healthier ways. And above, I share some of my favorite ways to do this.
As I mentioned toward the end of the post, when you’re working on developing a more secure attachment style, it can be helpful to work with a trained therapist who can guide you on your journey.
If you’d like to learn more about how I can personally support you on your journey toward healthier and more fulfilling relationships with one-on-one guidance, I invite you to schedule a FREE strategy session with me.
Whenever you’re looking to make any kind of change to your life—whether it’s to how you approach relationships, the people or commitments that you prioritize, or the type of lifestyle you lead, it’s helpful to get crystal clear about who you truly are and what’s most important to you.
To help you do this, I’ve created a free worksheet for you called My Personal Compass.
It’ll help you gain clarity on your needs, goals, and priorities related to relationships and life in general so that you know exactly what you want to achieve on your journey.
And if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.
Until next time!
Vera
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