It is possible to heal your attachment style.
Absolutely! Attachment is the emotional bond you form in your earliest stages of development. This bond is the map our body uses to identify safety, love, and connection. Attachment can be viewed as the way we connect to others in relationships and includes the ways we give and receive comfort, consideration, care, and most importantly love.
Understanding your attachment style can be a great start to measuring how close or far you are to creating secure relationships in your life.
Secure attachment styles are categorized by the way our nervous system organizes itself around safety. Secure attachment occurs when the person feels safe, can rely on the outside world as predictable, and can verbalize their internal world to others freely. Securely attached people have healthier relationships because of their foundational trust and belief in others, and in themselves. This is what makes for healthier relationships.
Avoidant attachment and Anxious attachment are categorized as insecure attachment styles. What that means is the initial bond in childhood was disrupted in some way the person was unable to organize their nervous system around safety. Perhaps there were times they felt safe and others that were unpredictable. Perhaps their caregivers were distant or cold. Perhaps their caregivers were overbearing and "too much." Insecure attachment styles developed different skill sets to create safety. As one example, an anxiously attached person may have had to scan their environment constantly for danger when they were young and found safety when they got feedback from their external environment all was well. Another example is an avoidantly attached person who may have felt overwhelmed at times and found safety in retracting from their caregiver or their environment, this felt safe to them.
Think of attachment styles as being on a spectrum. This can be useful because many people see attachment styles as a fixed definition to explain who they are. Attachment styles can be healed and brought back into balance through education, therapy, coaching, and personal development work. It is possible for an anxiously or avoidant attached person become more securely attached in relationships and build a healthy relationship that supports their nervous system.
On one end of the spectrum is anxious attachment and avoidant attachment is on the other. The above diagram displays both the polarity and the distance between attachment styles. I created this visual to show that when we heal our attachment wounds we can move away from the extreme or polarity of our current attachment style and move toward the middle, edging closer to secure and healthy relationships. The middle is Secure Attachment, it's found there because there is more balance and equilibrium in the securely attached person's behaviors in relationships.
Think about attachment styles like this, some people display extreme versions of these attachment styles. Examples include; constantly pulling away, shutting down, or needing reassurance and validation daily to feel safe. Other people fall closer to the middle but still have an insecure attachment style. These people will wonder if their partner still cares when they don’t respond to their text right away but won’t share this with their partner. Others will become quiet and stoic and take time away from the relationship in a subtle way. These are just a few examples of anxious and avoidant behaviors in relationships from the extreme to the subtle.
Coaching, therapy, and personal development work can assist in healing attachment styles. In doing the work, you will develop a secure attachment to yourself, others, and your environment. You will develop new behaviors such as learning to check in with your partner, generating internal reassurance, and staying connected to your partner while asking for space when you need it. These are just a few examples of what's possible when you work on your attachment wounds. You may even learn to listen to the alerts from your body and respond to those alerts in a different more connected way.
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