The Path to Healing Anxious Attachment
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in a loop of overthinking, people-pleasing, needing reassurance, or losing yourself in relationships, you may be navigating the world through the lens of anxious attachment.
You might have already devoured all the Instagram posts, listened to every podcast (hi!), and read the books. You know what anxious attachment is, and maybe you’ve even tried to change your patterns—only to find yourself back in the same place, exhausted and disheartened.
So the question becomes: how do you actually heal anxious attachment?
In this post, I want to walk you through the three foundational pillars that form the heart of the healing journey—not as a set of rules or tasks to “complete,” but as an ongoing, compassionate practice of returning to yourself.
Let’s dive in.
Pillar 1: Nervous System Regulation
The first and most important pillar of healing anxious attachment is nervous system regulation.
Most anxiously attached people struggle to self-soothe. We tend to feel completely flooded by emotion when something feels off in our relationships—whether it’s a partner pulling away, a delayed text, or a subtle change in tone. Even small disruptions can trigger a disproportionate sense of panic, urgency, or collapse.
Why? Because, for many of us, relationships have become our primary source of emotional safety. If our partner is happy, we’re okay. But if they’re not, we spiral.
And when our sense of safety is entirely dependent on someone else’s behaviour, we’re left feeling hypervigilant, controlling, or consumed by anxiety. It’s not that we want to micromanage or obsess—we just don’t know how to ground ourselves in any other way.
This is where nervous system work becomes life-changing.
By understanding how your body responds to stress, and learning to regulate your emotional state from within, you build the foundation for true resilience. You stop outsourcing safety. You stop reacting from fear. And you start responding with calm, clarity, and confidence.
This doesn’t mean you won’t ever feel anxious again. It means you’ll have the tools to support yourself when anxiety arises—without spiralling or self-abandoning.
Nervous system regulation isn’t about becoming unshakeable—it’s about knowing how to return to centre when you’re shaken.
Pillar 2: Rewiring Negative Core Beliefs
The second pillar of healing is rewiring the deep, painful beliefs that sit beneath the anxious patterns. Anxious attachment is not just about behaviour—it’s rooted in core wounds like:
I’m not enough.
I’m too much.
People always leave.
Love never lasts.
I have to earn love or prove my worth.
These beliefs are often formed in childhood, during moments when our emotional needs weren’t met consistently or reliably. Over time, we internalised the idea that love is conditional, fragile, or unpredictable—and that we’re somehow to blame for that.
When these beliefs remain unexamined, they continue to run the show. They colour how we interpret every text message, every tone of voice, every unmet need. And they drive us to seek constant reassurance, over-give, stay in unavailable relationships, or contort ourselves to be “easier to love.”
Rewiring these beliefs means slowing down enough to meet them with compassion and curiosity.
Where did I learn this?
Whose voice is this, really?
What has it cost me to live from this story?
Is this belief actually true—or just familiar?
This pillar involves deep inner work. It often brings up grief—grief for what we didn’t get, for the ways we’ve abandoned ourselves to avoid being abandoned by others, and for all the years spent trying to prove we were loveable.
But it also brings liberation. Because when you stop believing you are the problem, everything softens. You begin to access your inherent worth—not because someone finally gives it to you, but because you come home to it yourself.
Self-worth isn’t about feeling amazing all the time—it’s about no longer questioning whether you’re fundamentally worthy of love and respect.
Pillar 3: Learning Secure Relationship Skills
The final pillar is where we start to layer in the practical tools for building secure, connected, emotionally healthy relationships.
Here’s the truth: once we’ve begun to feel safe in our own system and have challenged our core wounds, we’re in a much better position to actually do relationships differently.
We can express needs without panicking. We can set boundaries without fearing we’ll be punished or left. We can approach conflict without shutting down or launching into protest behaviour.
This is where we build skills like:
Assertive, respectful communication
Navigating conflict without spiralling
Setting and holding boundaries
Owning our needs without shame
Recognising red flags and green flags
Making aligned choices in dating and relationships
But it’s crucial to understand: these relational skills only work when they’re rooted in internal safety and self-worth.
If we try to set boundaries from a dysregulated, fear-based place, they come out sounding like ultimatums or desperate pleas. If we express needs from a place of unworthiness, they can land as criticism or pressure. So we have to do this in order—body, beliefs, behaviour.
Secure relating isn’t just what you say—it’s the energy you bring to the relationship.
Closing Thoughts
This work is not about “fixing” yourself. You are not broken. Your anxious attachment patterns are not a personal flaw—they are protective strategies you learned in response to inconsistent emotional safety. And while those strategies may no longer serve you, they deserve compassion, not shame.
Healing isn’t a linear journey with a neat finish line. It’s a lifelong unfolding—a practice of building capacity, returning to centre, and relating to yourself and others with more tenderness and truth.
You don’t need to wait to be “fully healed” to have a healthy relationship. But as you move through these three pillars, you’ll find yourself relating in new ways—less from fear and more from choice. You’ll stop settling, striving, or shape-shifting to be chosen.
Instead, you’ll choose yourself first. And everything changes from there.