Retrain Your Brain and Attachment System for a Secure Relationship
You might wonder sometimes if you’re cut out for a secure relationship, if you’ll ever let go of enough baggage to be happy.
I used to wonder that too. Satisfying long-term partnership seemed just out of reach, a tantalizing ideal that would seem almost possible for a few months, or until the attachment disruptions began to rock the relationship, and we’d both wonder… where did we go wrong?
Working on attachment trauma and becoming more securely attached can certainly make relationships easier. But if you’re feeling blocked around that and wondering where all the securely attached people are (in dating or in life), you may be surprised to know — You’re not going to find people who are 100% securely attached. Because secure attachment, like the term “good health”, is a spectrum. Our attachment systems are made up of four styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful/disorganized. When someone is considered to have “secure attachment”, they likely don’t have 100% secure attachment. They might have, for example, 60% secure, and smaller percentages of the other styles. It just means they have more secure attachment than any of the other styles.
This is good news, because it’s easier to attain this level of security — and even better, you do not need highly secure attachment to have a secure relationship. But it is much easier to have a secure relationship if you both have a good deal of secure attachment.
So with all that in mind as encouragement, let’s dive into a few ways that you can retrain your attachment system to be more secure.
1. Learn your own attachment style and learn all you can about attachment theory.
Understanding is the first step to change. Begin to notice the ways that your style plays out in different relationships.
2. Practice adding secure behaviors into your relationships.
These include listening with presence, being attuned, recognizing the love that’s there, gratitude and appreciation, self-soothing and co-soothing, practicing compassion, learning repair, and more. You’ve read about some of these if you’ve read my 10 Steps to Secure Attachment.
3. Work on your attachment trauma.
— the incidents involving people over the course of your life that you would feel pain around if you let yourself think about them. Consider working with an attachment or trauma trained practitioner to work through these memories, because releasing trauma makes us a whole lot happier and open to connection.
4. Learn what to focus on for your particular attachment style.
For example, the anxious style can benefit from working with the fear of abandonment trauma and not chasing, the avoidant style can benefit from working on feeling seen and not withdrawing, and the fearful/disorganized style can benefit from self-soothing practices.
5. Learn particular ways to change your attachment through brain re-wiring techniques.
Learn to shift your attention and re-direct to ways of thinking and feeling that are better for your attachment system. Or listen to one of my guided meditations that leads you through some of these processes (Use promo code FEELTHELOVE10 for a special discount).
6. Become more embodied.
The attachment system developed very early — some say in the womb — and typically before we consciously remember. But we do have body-based memories of early attachment interactions. We can access these and also help our attachment system move towards secure with embodiment practices designed specifically for our attachment systems.
Hopefully this is all encouraging for you in your journey back to secure attachment. I wish that I had had these resources when I was first learning about attachment years ago.
Want more detail on putting these into practice? Check out my course, Secure Attachment Rewire: The 5 Key Strategies to Change Your Anxious Attachment in Dating and Relationships. You can get more information about Secure Attachment Rewire here.
Secure Attachment Rewire: The 5 Key Strategies to Change Your Anxious Attachment in Dating and Relationships
Learn how to support your anxious attachment system with an upcoming LIVE visualization workshop created by a somatic attachment practitioner.
