How to Heal Insecure Attachment Without Waiting for Your Partner
QUICK ANSWER
You can heal an insecure attachment without waiting for your partner to change. The most direct path is high-quality therapy with someone who works with attachment issues. If therapy isn't accessible, you can begin by staying out of shaming inner cycles, mapping the messages you got from caregivers, and addressing trauma and developmental trauma in both the brain and the body.
Healing your attachment is your own work, and it doesn't depend on your partner. Here is where to start, whether or not you have access to therapy. You can find more on healing trust and wounds on the blog.
What should you look for in a therapist?
There's no substitute for high-quality therapy. Look for a therapist who provides you with the things you didn't get from your early caregivers, the things that led to your insecurity to begin with: emotional validation, reflective listening, a non-critical and non-judgmental stance, help accessing, naming, and expressing your emotions in a healthy way, and help understanding and calming the physical manifestations of emotional pain.
A good attachment therapist also helps you understand how your past developmental and other impactful life experiences are still showing up in your present, honors and respects your strengths, sets healthy boundaries around scheduling and logistics, is knowledgeable enough about attachment work to help you connect past and present, and helps you recognize when you're speaking to yourself or relating to others in a way that stems from attachment insecurity, guiding you toward new communication and behaviors.
What if you don't have access to therapy?
If therapy isn't available, here's what needs to happen. You need to learn to stay out of negative communication cycles with yourself and others, because they don't work. Approach yourself from a problem-solving, non-shaming place. Here's what that looks like:
"I got upset and yelled at my partner last night and today I don't feel good about it. I'm going to work on this so I feel better, and apologize to my partner. What happened isn't okay, but I'm not bad. I'm a normal human who made a mistake. This is a learning opportunity. What happened just before I yelled? Was I feeling unheard or invalidated? Was I hurt, mad, anxious? How can I manage those feelings better next time?"
This is how loving parents talk to their children. Learn to talk to yourself like this. It also helps to make a list of the messages you got from caregivers which have negatively impacted your life. Write them down, explore how they have hurt you, and explore how they have also helped you. For example, "I have a hard time trusting others can be there for me, but I've also learned how to be a hard worker and get the job done. How can I retain my strengths, but also learn to trust others more?"
How do you address trauma?
Trauma is anything that happened to you at any time in life which exceeded your ability to emotionally cope. It created such an enormous nervous system response that you had to emotionally fall apart, dissociate, go numb, go into shock, or respond in some other extreme way in order to survive the moment. If you have not had the opportunity to talk about it, process the emotions, be comforted, make sense of it, and most importantly address how the nervous system response is still stuck in your body, you are undoubtedly still being affected, whether you're aware of it or not. Trauma happens in our brains and our bodies. Addressing the brain part is not enough. Reading "The Body Keeps the Score" and seeking Somatic Experiencing therapy can help you understand more and heal.
What is developmental trauma?
Developmental trauma is all the little emotional wounds that took place while you were a child. They affect your psyche like a thousand papercuts affect your body. In isolation, emotional wounds aren't a problem, especially when they're repaired. No parents are perfect, and we don't want them to be, because everyone needs to build resiliency to imperfection. But when a thousand emotional wounds build up over the course of childhood, while your brain is developing and you're forming a view of yourself, and when they aren't repaired along the way, they matter a lot. Children in this environment end up getting a global message of shame: "you are flawed, you are bad, you must make up for your shameful self by striving hard to be good enough." Many cope by keeping themselves distracted with activities, substance use, and anything else that keeps their feelings temporarily at bay.
What if your parents were great?
Maybe your parents provided a comfortable environment where you grew up feeling safe, secure, and with opportunity to thrive. That's genuinely great, and you're going to have an easier time healing. The problem in this situation is that sometimes children don't get enough adversity to learn to be resilient to the real world. They go into relationships, school, or jobs with real people who sometimes don't create safety, and they don't know what to do because they haven't yet learned how to deal with adversity. Often they develop anxiety problems. This can be worked on. You'll need to develop skills to survive adversity and difficult people.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I really heal without my partner changing?
Yes. Healing insecure attachment is your own work. High-quality therapy is ideal, but even without it you can stay out of shaming inner cycles, examine your caregiver messages, and address trauma in both brain and body.
Is talk therapy enough for trauma?
Not always. Trauma lives in the body as well as the brain, so addressing only the thinking part is not enough. Somatic Experiencing therapy and resources like "The Body Keeps the Score" help address the stuck nervous system response.
Where can I go deeper?
Julie's anxious attachment self-work course is built to guide this kind of individual healing work.
Not sure where you land? Start with your attachment style.