How to Fix Anxious Attachment Style & Build Secure Bonds

You might be broken or damaged, feel unsafe in a relationship, panic when someone doesn’t text back, or feel like you care more than they do.

If you’re experiencing all this, you might have an anxious attachment style.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

Thousands of people worldwide have this insecure attachment style, whether it's known as anxious preoccupied or anxiously attached.

This style is formed in childhood due to inconsistent parenting, where you don't know if your parents cared for you or not. This unmet need created your fear of abandonment and, in adulthood and romantic relationships, the fear of others leaving you.

But you don’t have to worry about this insecure attachment style because you can overcome it.

This article is here to help you understand anxious attachment, where it comes from, and, most importantly, how you can start healing and building more secure, fulfilling bonds with yourself and those around you.

Change is absolutely possible, and it begins with understanding its origins so you can overcome it.

What Is Anxious Attachment?

Your anxious attachment originates from moments where your emotional needs (love, intimacy, validation, certainty, and presence) weren’t met, especially in your childhood, but also later in life.

The lack of emotional needs leads you to develop "wounds" that impact how you connect and form bonds with others.

These wounds aren't necessarily due to some overt or traumatic event (they can be, of course) but more subtle patterns of neglect or emotional absence over the years.

And it trickles through all your relationships.

How It Shows Up in Your Relationships

Whether it's a romantic, friendship, or family relationship, you might notice some distinct ways in which your anxious attachment shows up.

• Romantic Relationships: You may become extra nervous or clingy with a romantic partner if they don’t tell you or reassure you that they love you.
• Friendships: You feel rejected when friends don’t respond quickly to you or hang out with other people.
• Family Relationships: You’re always the one reaching out, wondering if you’re “too much” or not enough.

You may also become jealous, clingy, co-dependent, and have difficulty setting boundaries with your partner due to a fear of rejection.

This, in turn, leads you to develop ingrained patterns and coping habits.

Common Patterns & Coping Habits

• Self-sabotage or struggle to set boundaries in your relationships
• Feel unloved or emotionally abandoned when others put up boundaries
• Clinging to someone to maintain closeness at all times
• Testing your partner’s or friend's devotion
• Trying to provoke an expression of care or attention-seeking behaviors
• Expressing panic, anxiety, or neediness when separated from your partner, friend, or family
• Criticizing or fawning over your partner

Are These Patterns Overwhelming You?
If you recognize this pattern in yourself or someone you love, this guide can help you self-soothe these patterns and habits.

Unrealistic Expectations

More so, your unmet emotional needs can lead to unrealistic expectations in your relationships, including:

• My partner should soothe my emotions and give me certainty at all times
• My partner should know how I feel without me having to explain
• My partner should be available and responsible for meeting all of my needs
• Our romantic relationship should be my partner’s highest priority
• Romantic gestures in a relationship should be frequent

These expectations and coping habits are just part of the narrative that you tell yourself.

What It Feels Like Internally

• “I panic when I don’t hear from someone I love.”
• “I feel like I care more than they do.”
• “I’m always asking myself if I’m good enough.”
• “I panic when I don’t hear from someone I love.”

Remember: your beliefs and feelings are authentic and valid. They come from past experiences where your emotional needs weren’t fully met.

Understanding the origins of your anxious attachment style is the first step to healing it.

What Causes Anxious Attachment?

As a person with an anxiously attached style, you most likely grew up in an inconsistent household with either a lack of emotional connection between you and your parents or caregivers or a lack of their presence often.

There are two types of inconsistent households when it comes to anxiously attached people:

• You lived in a household with two incredibly busy parents, and while your relationship was excellent, you didn’t see them much.
• You have a closer connection with one parent than the other, so you become reliant on one parent.

You might remember feeling unsure if love was reliable or if you had to earn affection. These early experiences leave a deep imprint that shapes how you relate to others now.

So much so that these experiences create deep-seated fears of abandonment, where you unwittingly seek reassurance and love when in a relationship. If you don’t receive this love, it becomes a power trigger for you.

It’s important to know that this wasn’t your fault. It was your brain’s way of trying to keep you safe in an unpredictable world. But it is essential to recognize how your origins trickle out as prominent symptoms.

Signs & Traits of Anxious Attachment

As an anxious preoccupied person, you may notice these signs showing up in everyday life, particularly in how you connect with people you care about:

• Feeling overwhelmed when spending time alone: You struggle to be alone and always want to be with someone at all times. This can be even more difficult if you’re in a long-distance relationship.
• Fear of abandonment: When your partner or friend doesn’t respond to texts or hangs out with others, you feel they’re going to leave you forever.
• Low self-esteem and confidence: You don’t think you’re worthy of love or connection, so you try to earn it. Remember: you are worth love as you are!
• Stuck in a codependent relationship: You find yourself giving up all your needs and desires just to please your partner in a codependent relationship without any interdependency.
• A constant need for reassurance: Whether it’s a partner or a friend, you always need to be reassured that they care for you.
• Struggle to self-soothe: Because you weren’t taught how to manage or calm yourself, you don't know what to do when these moments arrive. In fact, everyone can do it, you just need to be taught it.
• Feeling “too much” emotionally: You find yourself overwhelmed with beliefs that you’re “too much” in a relationship, when in fact, you’re just expressing your love.

In these moments, you might be able to sit back and detect when these signs arise by asking yourself the following.

Patterns to Watch for in Yourself

• Do you find yourself overthinking what someone said?
• Do you feel like you’re always the one chasing connection?
• Are you constantly checking your phone for messages?
• Are you overanalyzing tone or wording in texts?
• Do you get scared of losing people even when there’s no clear threat?

These signs aren’t flaws; they’re clues pointing you toward the healing you deserve.

Knowing when these moments arise is crucial for helping you take the step away from being anxiously attached to becoming securely attached.

Can You Fix Anxious Attachment?

Yes, you certainly can heal your anxious attachment style.

But it is not an overnight process. It takes time and effort, but thousands of people have done it already.

That means you can do it, too.

What does it mean to “fix your anxious attachment”? It means you start moving away from your insecurities and start becoming securely attached.

Being securely attached means you have confidence in yourself, meaning you can handle challenges that are thrown at you in all areas of life.

It also applies to your relationships; you know you can grow and have a loving and harmonious relationship with someone without any anxieties. It’s possible, it’s happened, and you can achieve it.

So, what do you need to get there?

This starts with understanding your core beliefs and understanding the "core wounds" (subconscious beliefs you have and project about yourself, formed through repetitive emotional experiences) that are driving your needs.

For example:

• Many anxiously attached people carry deep beliefs like "I’ll be abandoned" or "I will be alone". These beliefs were formed early and now shape how you see yourself in relationships.
• The same applies to other core wounds, such as “I am not good enough" or "I am excluded”, which arise from the belief that you have to earn your love from someone.
• Or the core wound of “I will be alone” or “I am too much”, where you might avoid expressing yourself because you fear you’re too much.

In fact, I’ve come across many clients who constantly feared being ‘too much’ in relationships. The same with people who believe they’ll be abandoned or alone forever.

The truth is that these are just narratives you tell yourself. When the clients started recognizing this fear as an old wound, not their truth, they made great steps in becoming securely attached.

The next step is turning these core wounds into true beliefs by reprogramming your subconscious mind. That’s the answer to how to overcome an anxious attachment style.

How to Fix Anxious Attachment Style: A Deeper Healing Process

Step 1) Use the BTEA Process to Identify Your Core Wounds & Emotional Triggers

One of the first steps to overcoming an anxious attachment style is identifying your core beliefs and thinking patterns in adult life.

Use the BTEA Process, which focuses on the roadmap of “Beliefs → Thoughts → Emotions → Actions.” By uncovering these, you can work to reprogram any limiting beliefs and behaviors.

Here’s how to do it:

• Identify the triggering event (Example: Your partner didn't go out with you.)
• Recognize your action or coping mechanism (Example: You became clingy and started calling your partner nonstop.)
• Label the emotion you felt when engaged in that event (Example: You feel betrayed and abandoned.)
• Untangle the thoughts (Example: Consider what you thought about yourself during this interaction.)
• Establish your core wounds (Example: Assess your beliefs about yourself at that moment and focus on which one you want to reprogram, such as "I will be abandoned.")

Step 2) Subconscious Reprogramming With Autosuggestion

Reprogramming your subconscious mind is the key step in changing what you believe about yourself and how you respond to moments.

The easiest tool to do that with is Autosuggestion rituals.

Through repetition and emotion, you can rewire your beliefs to change your core wounds. This ritual uses a trance-like state that can help you conduct a body scan, deep meditation, or breathwork to create new subconscious beliefs and patterns.

Here is how to do it:

• Take a few minutes in the first hour after you wake up and the last hour before you go to bed. During these times, our brains can more easily enter this "trance-like state."
• Think of a core wound (Example: "I am disliked".)
• Find 10-15 examples of where, why, and how you are doing enough to change that core wound. (Example: My friends enjoy hanging out with me; my partner is committed to me; my coworkers ask me out for events all the time.)
• Try to feel the emotion in your body and anchor it into the nervous system when thinking of your response. (Example: I feel nervous when worrying that they dislike me, but I also feel relieved when I know they actually like me.)

Step 3) Practice Questioning Your Stories Through Thought Upgrading

The exercise of Thought Upgrading aims to question the stories you tell yourself when you’re triggered so you can recognize and strategize to meet your needs.

Here are the steps:

• Think of an unresolved event with any person or situation, and write your thoughts or beliefs about it. (Example: I think my partner doesn’t really love me.)
• Challenge that story by finding three pieces of proof opposing the original belief. (Example: My partner actually spends a lot of time with me and is committed.)
• Write about what you need in this situation to create relief for yourself. (Example: I need to get reassurance from my partner.)
• Think about a healthy strategy to get this need met. (Example: Explain my concerns to my partner, and let’s work on a solution together)

Step 4) Practice Self-Regulation Tools

Engaging in habits that help you feel truly connected with yourself is an essential exercise for overcoming your anxious attachment style.

Self-regulation and somatic tools can be beneficial in gauging how one is feeling about one’s life and relationships in the present moment.

Here is how you can slowly implement it into your daily life:

• Ask yourself what you’re feeling right now. (Example: Nervous and upset about how the day is turning out.)
• Focus on what your body feels like in that moment. (Example: Tense and tight all over.)
• Write down your autopilot coping mechanism. (Example: You started binge-watching Netflix or eating junk food.)
• Consider what you can do to release the stress. (Example: You get by exercising and then meditating.)
• Go ahead and start applying your new coping mechanism. (Example: Start meditating when you’re feeling triggered so you can self-regulate.)

Step 5) Build Self-Esteem & Healthy Habits for Connection

When you struggle with anxious attachment, you often seek validation outside of yourself.

But the truth is, healing begins within. Building self-esteem and creating daily habits that nurture connection (with yourself and others) lays the groundwork for lasting security.

• Do activities that heighten your self-belief while helping you interact with others.
• Daily self-care, like meditation, exercise, breathwork, or eating healthy, nourishing meals, can reduce overwhelm and bring stability to your inner world.
• Spend time with people who make you feel good about yourself, not with people who make you feel like you “need” them to feel better about yourself.

Step 6) Create Secure Relationships Through Communication & Boundaries

Anxious attachment often shows up as over-giving, people-pleasing, or feeling responsible for others’ emotions.

Helping your partner or friend understand your needs and your anxious attachment style can help them be more patient and understanding with you. Most importantly, it enables you to build secure relationships.

Here are some steps to take now:

• Clearly communicate who you are without fear of rejection or conflict to the people that you love the most.
• Build boundaries that protect your time, energy, and needs, making your relationships feel safer and more predictable. Focus on those you nurture your growth, not deny it.
• Show up honestly and set limits with love. Invite deeper, more balanced connections in your life with authentic connections.

If You Want More Help With Boundaries & Relationships
Consider taking up our Setting Boundaries to End Compulsive People Pleasing course.

FAQs: Fixing Anxious Attachment in Real Life

• Can I become securely attached on my own? Yes, you can! Healing often starts with self-awareness and learning new habits. But if you need support or guidance, our school offers courses, community, and coaching that can help you get there.
• What if I’m in a relationship right now? Whether you’re single or partnered, you can change your anxious attachment style. If you’re in a relationship, open communication and setting boundaries can improve your connection so your partner knows what to expect. If you're single, you can help understand what you want in relationships and love by investing in yourself. The tools we share help you build security, whether you’re single or with someone, with our Stop Abandonment & Rejection in A Relationship (Anxious Attachment Style Re-Programming) course.
• How long does it take to fix anxious attachment? Healing is a process unique to you. Many of our members experience change within a week, but most experience profound transformations after 30 days. You have to acknowledge that patience and consistent practice are key.

Your Journey Toward Secure Love Starts Here

It’s okay to feel overwhelmed or confused when you start becoming securely attached. That’s part of the healing journey.

You’re not alone in feeling this, and your desire to change is the most important first step. You’ve learned about your anxious attachment style and how it shapes your feelings and actions.

Now, the real work begins because the most important thing is that you can heal it by using our advanced tools, including the BTEA Process, Autosuggestion Rituals, and Thought Upgrading.

You don’t have to be stuck with the same patterns, beliefs, and expectations for life. You have the potential to do it.

And We Have the Perfect Starting Point for You:
Sign up for our Stop Abandonment & Rejection in A Relationship (Anxious Attachment Style Re-Programming) course. It offers the guided tools and support that are here to help you every step of the way.

Share this Article