How to Let Go of Someone You Love (For Anxious Attachers)

For those with anxious attachment patterns, letting go of someone you love may be one of the hardest things you’ll ever face. It contradicts every instinct your nervous system has developed — every protective strategy that tells you to hold on tightly to the people you love, regardless of dysfunction, pain, or clear evidence that the relationship isn’t working.

The drive to hold on, keep trying, keep pushing, keep fighting to make things okay runs deep. Letting go feels intolerable — often worse than staying in pain within a broken connection. This struggle is one of the most common challenges in healing anxious attachment, and it deserves both deep validation and hard truths.

If you’re currently struggling to release someone — navigating a recent breakup, or staying in a relationship you know needs to end — you’re not alone. What you’re experiencing goes against everything you’ve learned about keeping yourself safe: maintaining attachment to the people you love. The fear you feel around letting go is real and understandable.

What follows is designed to offer both compassion and clarity. It’s here to help you trust yourself and your capacity to do difficult things, even when they’re not what you want. Consider this a reminder that you are capable of choosing what’s good for you, even when every instinct screams otherwise.

Why Letting Go Feels So Impossible

Understanding why letting go feels so unbearable can help you approach this process with self-compassion rather than self-judgement. For anxiously attached people, several powerful forces collide.

At its core, your attachment blueprint operates on a simple but profound belief: other people hold the key to your safety. The people you’re attached to — regardless of how healthy or unhealthy the relationship is — are registered by your nervous system as sources of security. Connection equals safety. Disconnection equals threat.

This wiring shapes many familiar patterns: people-pleasing, over-giving, suppressing needs, performing for love, trying to earn affection, and walking on eggshells to avoid conflict or abandonment.

When rupture occurs, your system goes into overdrive to restore connection. Everything feels manageable when you’re connected; everything feels catastrophic when you’re not. Against this backdrop, being the one to close the door, make the decision, and walk away directly contradicts your deepest programming.

This is why anxiously attached people often stay far longer than they should. A relationship typically has to become deeply damaging before leaving feels justified. Second chances turn into sixth, seventh, eighth chances. The hope that things will improve, combined with the terror of separation, creates an extraordinary tolerance for dysfunction. Leaving feels more threatening than staying — even when staying hurts.

The Trap of Following Your Feelings

Anxiously attached people tend to give feelings enormous authority. There’s often an unexamined belief that emotions must be acted on — that they provide both justification and direction for our choices.

This shows up in familiar ways: If I love them, I must be with them. Love conquers everything. If my anxiety feels unbearable, I have to do something right now. The intensity of the feeling itself seems to validate the action. In this framework, feelings are treated as truth rather than information.

But healing anxious attachment requires learning to separate feelings from choices and behaviour. This is especially important when it comes to letting go. It asks you to hold two truths at the same time:

Yes, I still love them.
Yes, I want this to work.
And — what does reality actually show me? What is this relationship costing me? What am I sacrificing by staying attached to someone who cannot meet me in a healthy way

Letting go is not something you wait to feel ready for. You don’t wait until you stop loving them, stop missing them, or feel calm and resolved. You make choices based on what you know serves your wellbeing — even while the feelings remain.

Following familiar feelings leads to familiar outcomes. If your history includes unhealthy relationships, what feels familiar is unlikely to be what’s actually good for you. Familiar is not the same as safe.

Letting Go Is a Choice, Not a Feeling

This is the essential truth: letting go is not a feeling — it’s a choice. And it’s not a choice you make once. It’s a choice you make again and again.

You make it through your behaviour: not continuing to engage, not keeping the door open, not opening it when they knock, holding boundaries, and continuing to move forward despite how hard it feels.

Your body will protest. Every part of you may scream to reach out, respond, check, clarify, fix. These impulses feel urgent and convincing, especially when you’re hurting. The work is choosing to let go repeatedly — choosing to move towards what serves you, even when the pull back towards someone you love feels overwhelming.

This is one of the bravest acts someone with anxious attachment can undertake: recognising that you can love someone and still not be meant to be in a relationship with them. You can miss someone without that meaning the breakup was a mistake. You can feel anxious, lost, and untethered — and still not need them to be okay.

Your attachment system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: maintaining bonds with people associated with safety and connection, even when the relationship causes harm. The feelings are real. They’re also not instructions.

Unravelling the Stories We Tell About Love

Part of letting go involves questioning long-held stories about love — particularly the belief that love alone is enough to sustain a relationship. Because love is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Loving someone doesn’t obligate you to stay. Continuing to feel attachment doesn’t mean the relationship is right. Discomfort during separation is not evidence that you should go back.

You can pivot away, refocus on yourself, and trust that the pain of doing so is part of the process — not a sign you’re making the wrong choice. Letting go isn’t about forcing yourself to stop loving someone. It’s about acknowledging that love can exist alongside the truth that the relationship isn’t healthy or aligned with the life you want.

You deserve more than intense attachment. You deserve a relationship that feels genuinely safe, not just familiar.

Grief is Inevitable

Letting go is an act of grief. You’re not just grieving the person, but the future you imagined, the hopes you held, and perhaps the parts of yourself you set aside trying to make it work.

This work asks you to stay present with what’s actually here, rather than getting lost in rumination, analysis, or monitoring what they’re doing. There is important inner work calling for your attention — work that requires gentleness, patience, and care.

If you’ve been stuck for a long time, judging yourself for still feeling attached, remember this: feelings are not the problem. Fighting them or shaming yourself only creates more suffering. Even when emotions are loud, your capacity to make grounded choices remains intact.

Moving Forward With Courage and Self-Compassion

Letting go of someone you love while navigating anxious attachment is a profound act of self-respect. It’s choosing wellbeing over familiar pain, again and again.

Healing is not linear. You’ll make this choice in small moments — when you don’t text, when you hold a boundary, when you gently bring your attention back to yourself. Each time, you’re teaching your nervous system that you can tolerate discomfort, that feelings don’t have to run the show, and that you are capable of choosing what truly serves you.

You deserve a love that doesn’t require self-abandonment. You deserve safety. And sometimes, the most loving thing you can do — for yourself and for them — is to let go.