Tips to Heal From an Insecure Attachment
QUICK ANSWER
Healing an insecure attachment starts with high-quality therapy from someone who works with attachment issues, ideally providing the validation and reflective listening you didn't get early on. If therapy isn't accessible, you can begin by staying out of shaming inner cycles, mapping the messages you got from caregivers, and addressing both trauma and developmental trauma in the brain and body.
An insecure attachment can heal, and much of the work is yours to do. Here are the most important places to start. You can find more on 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 skilled 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 to help you connect past and present, and helps you recognize when you're speaking to yourself or relating to others 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. That sounds 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. 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 write down the messages you got from caregivers that have negatively impacted your life, exploring how they hurt you and also how they 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, creating such an enormous nervous system response that you had to fall apart, dissociate, go numb, go into shock, or respond in some other extreme way to survive the moment. If you haven't 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 or not. Trauma happens in our brains and our bodies, and addressing the brain part is not enough. Reading "The Body Keeps the Score" and seeking Somatic Experiencing therapy can help.
What about 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, and especially when repaired, emotional wounds aren't a problem. No parents are perfect, and we don't want them to be, because everyone needs to build resiliency to imperfection. But when a thousand wounds build up while your brain is developing and you're forming a view of yourself, and 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 at bay.
What if your parents were great?
Maybe your parents gave you a comfortable environment where you felt safe, secure, and able to thrive. That's genuinely great, and you'll have an easier time healing. The catch is that sometimes children don't get enough adversity to learn resilience for the real world. They go into relationships, school, or jobs with people who sometimes don't create safety, and they don't know what to do because they haven't learned 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
What makes a therapist a good fit for attachment work?
Look for someone who offers what you missed early on, validation, reflective listening, and a non-judgmental stance, and who is knowledgeable enough to help you connect your past to your present and guide new behaviors.
Can I heal without therapy?
Yes, you can begin on your own by staying out of shaming inner cycles, examining your caregiver messages, and addressing trauma in both brain and body. Therapy simply accelerates and deepens the work.
Where can I get structured guidance?
Julie's anxious attachment self-work course is designed to guide this healing step by step.
Not sure where you land? Start with your attachment style.