How to Calm Your Anxious Attachment Style

How to Calm Your Anxious Attachment Style

An anxious attachment style is a state of insecurity that affects relationships dramatically. Adults with this attachment style fear separation and loneliness.

The good news is that you can still soothe an anxious attachment style. Are you wondering how to calm your anxious attachment style?

Read on for ways to self-soothe your anxious attachment style. This article also gives you tactics to help you deal with avoidant attachment, abandonment issues, regret, and disappointment.

How to Deal With Anxious Attachment?

Although anxious attachment starts in childhood, there are ways to heal it, or, at least, calm it down.

Reaching a more secure attachment style can help you live more happily and calmly. However, to find the best ways to deal with anxious attachment, let's define it first.

What Is Anxious Attachment?

Anxious attachment is one of four attachment styles that develop during early childhood. It’s characterized by a severe fear of loneliness, leading to clinginess in a relationship.

Anxious attachment usually develops as a result of parenting style. For instance, a child may suffer from anxious attachment because of:

• Early separation from parents
• Inexperienced parenting
• Inconsistent parenting
• Neglect
• Childhood trauma
• Long hospitalization periods

6 Habits of Adults With Anxious Attachment

Recognizing an anxious attachment is easy. Simply, keep an eye out for these symptoms:

1. Codependency
2. Inability to set boundaries
3. Fear of abandonment
4. Feeling unworthy of love
5. A tendency to please others
6. Accepting unhealthy behavior in a relationship

4 Ways to Soothe Your Anxious Attachment

So, what if you suffer from an anxious attachment style? Don’t worry, there’s still a chance to heal. Follow these techniques to soothe your anxious attachment style:

1. Find Ways to Relax

The first step to healing is to relax. For instance, you can practice breathing. Take deep breaths and find what exactly hurts in your body. In other words, try to find how your body manifests its anger.

You can also relax by practicing mindfulness to get in touch with your inner feelings. That way, you can change your habits and way of thinking. In addition, you may go for long walks or watch a new movie.

These exercises can also help you change your thoughts. Try not to find the negative thoughts that roam into your head. The more you let them go freely, the faster you can get rid of them. Instead, think of a positive event you’ve wanted to do, like a vacation or a concert.

2. Take Control of Your Life

Your life should revolve around you. If you think about it, your partner has taken a great deal of your time and effort. Thus, now is the time to take things into your own hands. Don’t sit and observe your life passing by.

The bottom line is that you should transform your pain into something useful for you and others. Learn something new, start a business, or take an initiative. In short, do that thing you’ve been putting on hold for so long.

You may also try to conquer this insecure attachment style by fulfilling your own emotional needs. Don’t rely on your partner for your emotional desires. Find a way to love and rely on yourself. That’s how you truly take matters into your own hands.‍

3. Don’t Try to Please Others

If you have an anxious attachment, you most probably strive to please others even at your own expense. However, this habit of being a “yes” person is unhealthy. No one can ever please people all the time.

One of the main steps toward healing is to stop seeking the approval of others. In fact, being a people pleaser usually grants negative outcomes. Generally, people tend not to appreciate a people-pleaser.

To heal your anxious attachment, you should say “no” from time to time. Prioritize yourself and your needs. That way, you may gradually get rid of codependency and adopt a more secure attachment style.

‍4. Seek Help

Remember, you’re not alone. You can always reach out to trusted family and friends for support. People are there for you; life doesn’t revolve around your partner.

If your close circle can’t give you the support you need, perhaps it’s time to seek professional help. A therapist can help you adopt a more secure behavior. They can also help you identify your emotional needs and fulfill them.

That being said, you still need to work your way through the problem. Therapy isn’t the golden key to solving the problem entirely. It’s rather a step to be combined with self-soothing techniques.

How to Deal With Avoidant Attachment?

This is another insecure attachment style. In fact, it's almost the opposite of anxious attachment.

An adult with an avoidant attachment style prefers loneliness and belittles his/her own feelings of distress.

An avoidant attachment style develops in childhood due to the emotional neglect of parents.

Among its main causes are:

• Strongly discouraging crying
• Neglecting the crying of a baby
• Mocking of showing annoyance toward a problem faced by a child
• Not showing emotions to the child
• Avoiding physically touching a child

8 Signs You Have Avoidant Attachment

An avoidant attachment style can manifest in several ways, including:

1. Avoiding physical closeness
2. Inability to rely on others
3. Emotional eating
4. Showing calmness in highly emotional situations
5. Inability to express feelings
6. Avoiding eye contact or direct address
7. Highly valuing independence and personal freedom
8. Inability to seek help or support

3 Tactics to Deal With Avoidant Attachment

Here are three bulletproof tactics that help you cope with your avoidant attachment style and transform it into a more secure attachment style:

1. Communicate

Perhaps, one of the most characteristic features of the avoidant attachment style is the need for personal space. That need peaks during stressful times. While it’s OK to take a step back from time to time, you shouldn’t give in to the urge of being alone.

Communication is one of the key tactics that help you move to a more secure place. By definition, an adult with an avoidant style is generally incapable of expressing emotions and talking openly about problems.

Therefore, if you force yourself to communicate with your partner, you’re starting to heal.

You might not be able to do it perfectly at first but take your time. With time and practice, you can find a way to express your inner feelings and communicate healthily with your partner.

2. Stop Overthinking

Usually, fear of rejection is what causes your inability to communicate emotions. Thus, you need to stop overthinking and stifle your inner critic. That way, you can curb your fear of expressing emotions.

To regulate your thoughts, you need to identify and control your automatic negative thoughts.

Once you put your finger on these thoughts, try defying them. Simply, think of times when these thoughts have been proven wrong. Remind yourself that they’re only in your head without any real proof.

Simply, accept the risk. For instance, you should open up to your partner or friends to work on your relationship. Bottling up your emotions will only make things harder. Leap into a relationship that you know might not end well but is still worth trying.

3. Reach Out for Help

If nothing works, you should seek support. You can always reach out to your family and friends.

However, as an adult with an avoidant attachment style, it can be really hard to do that. Therefore, we recommend that you seek professional help.

A therapist can help you identify your patterns of avoidant behavior. They can also give you alternative behaviors to follow. Those can help you adopt a more secure attachment style.

How to Deal With Abandonment Issues?

We all suffer from loss in one way or the other. However, some people develop abandonment issues that affect their future relationships. That’s especially true if you have an anxious attachment style.

Abandonment issues can show in different ways, such as:

• Clinginess in relationships
• Dependency on a partner
• Attention seeking
• Insecurity

3 Ways to Deal With Abandonment Issues

The good news is there are ways to self-soothe your abandonment issues. Here are several tactics to try:

1. Choose Healthy Relationships

You might be clinging to an unhealthy relationship. However, one way to heal is to get into a healthy relationship. That way, your partner can help you feel more secure.

Having someone to love and support you can make a difference in your healing process.

2. Boost Your Confidence

Abandonment can lead you to a feeling of inadequacy. Don’t let that feeling impact your self-esteem.

Healing your abandonment issues requires boosting your confidence by participating in sports or group hobbies as well.

It’s crucial to learn your self-worth too. Appreciating yourself can be one of the first steps to soothe your abandonment issues and stop being dependent on others.

3. Communicate Your Fears

Don't try to face these issues alone. The best thing to do is communicate your fears to your partner, friends, or family. You may even see a therapist for better results.

Remind yourself that no matter who has abandoned you, you’re worthy of the love and care of those around you.

How to Deal With Regret?

Regret is a negative emotion that focuses on a past event that could have been changed or avoided. The most consistent cause of regret is the person’s inability to accept a past situation.

3 Techniques to Cope With Regret

Although regret isn’t easily avoidable, you can get over it. Here are some of the techniques that may help you overcome regret:

1. Embrace It

When you feel regret, don’t fight it. It’s OK to have this feeling. Simply, remind yourself that it’s normal to feel so, but the past doesn’t define you.

Embracing your feeling enables you to deal with it. You should know that you’re capable of making better decisions in the future.

2. Forgive Yourself

To overcome regret, you should learn to forgive yourself. You should know that you’re worth loving despite your mistakes. That way, you’ll accept the past and find some peace of mind.

Indeed, you can’t control or change the past. However, you can still forgive yourself and try to improve the situation in the future.

3. Own Up to Your Mistakes

If you made a mistake, apologize. Mending things and gaining people’s forgiveness can help you accept yourself and the situation.

Perhaps, when the people you wronged forgive you, you can find a way to forgive yourself and get over your regret.

In case you can’t gain forgiveness from others, you can use your regret as fuel to do something for the benefit of people in general. For instance, you can start a charity or volunteer for a cause.

How to Deal With Disappointment?

Disappointment is that feeling of frustration and sadness you get when reality doesn’t match your expectations. It’s a normal and unescapable sentiment. Yet, you can still soothe it.

3 Ways to Overcome Disappointment

Here are three ways to help you deal with disappointment:

1. Venting Out

When you face disappointment, don’t let it bottle up. Let it out or you’ll keep blaming yourself for everything. Reach out to someone you trust, and they can help you find a way out.

Emotional suppression can prevent your personal growth. Therefore, you should vent out either by talking or writing in a journal.

2. Revisit Your Expectations

If the results don’t come as you expected, try reconsidering your expectations. Sometimes, it’s not a matter of failure as much as unrealistic expectations.

Give yourself some time to reflect on the situation. Identifying the root cause can help you prevent the problem from reoccurring. Your attempt to avoid the problem in the future might reduce your feeling of disappointment.

3. Cut It Short

Don’t live with your disappointment for long. You should do your best to get out of this mindset because that would have a negative impact on your health.

Focus all your efforts on strategies to heal and prevent future disappointments. The key is to realize that it’s not the end of the world and that you can still have some success in your journey.

Conclusion  

So, how to calm your anxious attachment style?

Fortunately, there are ways to heal your anxious attachment style. Try to relax, take control of your life, and get help.

In addition, you can calm your avoidant attachment style, soothe your feelings of regret and disappointment, and heal your abandonment issues.

Regardless of the problem, you can always find ways to heal once you acknowledge the issue and take serious measures toward solving it.

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