3 Steps Toward A Healthier Attachment Style

Your attachment style isn't your identity; it's a response to pain. And with the right tools, it can change.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | June 19, 2025

Your attachment style is the emotional blueprint your nervous system drew in response to how safe, seen, soothed and supported you felt in your formative relationships. It's the pattern your body and brain adopted to survive connection, or the lack thereof. For instance:

• Anxious attachment often stems from inconsistent caregiving. Love felt unreliable, so you learned to cling.
• Avoidant attachment often arises from emotional neglect. Love felt overwhelming or unavailable, so you learned to retreat.
• Disorganized attachment often results from trauma or fear in the caregiving relationship. Love and safety became entangled with chaos or threat.
• Secure attachment, the healthiest blueprint, grows from caregivers who attune and repair consistently. Love feels safe, and so relationships feel safe.

These patterns aren't your fault, but they become your responsibility once you recognize them. Here's why it's dangerous to confuse your attachment style with your personality:

• You begin to over-identify with a wound. ("I'm just the jealous type.)
• You stop believing change is possible. ("I'll always push people away.")
• You sabotage relationships by preemptively reacting from old fear maps, not present reality.

But what if these patterns are learned responses to feeling unsafe? What if these are parts of you that have been looking for a safe space but have been unable to find it?

That's why it's so important not to reduce yourself to your attachment style. When you turn a pattern into a label, you risk silencing what it's trying to tell you, and what it might need from you in order to heal and move forward.

Instead of staying stuck in judgment or shame, try creating space for these patterns to be seen. That simple shift invites a more compassionate lens, one where you're not blaming yourself, but listening to what parts of you are trying to tell you — one where you can respond from who you are now, not who you had to be back then.

Here are three steps you can take toward healing your attachment style.

1. Name The Pattern, But Don't Become It

A 2022 study published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy suggests that when people openly label their relational patterns, it increases intimacy, acceptance and relationship satisfaction. In essence, labeling patterns helps people find their language for relationship repair.

The first step in healing, then, is gently allowing yourself to notice your patterns without turning them into your core identity. Know that certain patterns, such as the feeling of anxiety when someone does not respond to you right away or you closing off the moment someone starts to get intimate with you, are survival strategies your nervous system learned early on.

What's important here is to not over-identify with the label. Saying things like, "I'm anxious so you have to accommodate me," or "He's avoidant so he's toxic," might feel validating, sure. But then you risk using the label as armor, something that keeps the wound protected rather than healed.

So, change the mindset that you use to recognize your pattern. Affirm to yourself, "This is something I learned in response to pain. This is not who I am. I can tend to it, work with it and grow beyond it. This is just a part of me. Not me as a whole."

Use labeling for what it is meant to be used for — a bridge to understanding rather than a wall of defense. In short, a tool for connection.

2. Build Safety Through Regulation, Not Just Reflection

Understanding your attachment style can bring powerful insight but insight alone doesn't rewire your patterns. This is because attachment isn't just a cognitive concept. It's more of a felt experience that lives in your nervous system.

You might know why you get triggered. But unless your body learns that closeness, conflict or vulnerability is safe, those same reactions will keep looping.

This is where self-regulation becomes essential.

When you feel anxious or shut down, try grounding techniques like:

• Deep belly breathing. This involves slow, intentional breaths that expand your belly and help calm the nervous system, anchoring you in the present. It signals safety to your body and reduces fight-or-flight activation.
• EFT (tapping). This is a technique where you gently tap on acupressure points while focusing on emotional distress. It helps release stuck emotions and soothe anxiety in real time.
• Somatic tracking. This refers to mindfully observing a physical sensation in your body without trying to change it. This builds tolerance for discomfort and leads to a deeper connection with your internal experience.
• Self-soothing touch. This can involve placing your hand on your chest, cheek or belly to offer gentle, comforting contact. It mimics the calming presence of another person and regulates stress through safe, nurturing touch.

However, self-regulation is only one side of the coin. Your nervous system also needs co-regulation. We are social beings, and learning safety in relationships is just as important as learning to soothe ourselves.

While earlier research emphasized caregiver–child interactions, newer studies show that emotion regulation develops across the entire family system. Children don't just learn regulation from one caregiver; they internalize it through a network of emotionally attuned relationships. These experiences become the blueprint for how we manage emotions in adulthood.

This means that just as we learned dysregulation in relationships, we can also relearn safety in relationships not through reflection alone, but through repetition.

It can even come from a therapist who doesn't flinch when you're overwhelmed, a friend who holds space without rushing to fix things for you or a partner who offers calm when you feel unsure.

As the research suggests, emotional safety isn't learned through logic, it's absorbed through experience. The more your body hears, "It's OK to have needs," or "It's safe to be seen," the more your attachment patterns begin to soften.

And safety is something you practice, until your body starts to believe it.

3. Turn Toward, Not Away From, The Vulnerable Part Of You

At the core of every attachment style is a younger version of you — a tender, emotionally frozen part shaped by moments when your needs went unmet. This part might show up as the panic when someone pulls away, the urge to shut down when things get too close or as the voice that whispers, "You're not enough."

What most people get wrong about healing is that it doesn't happen by silencing or suppressing these parts. It happens when you turn toward them with compassion.

A review of 35 studies found that higher self-compassion is consistently associated with fewer PTSD symptoms, even across different trauma types and populations. Notably, people who were less afraid of being kind to themselves also experienced reduced emotional distress. This suggests that meeting your pain with gentleness rather than judgment or avoidance, can be deeply protective.

So, instead of ignoring or fighting your emotional reactions, try getting curious:

• What was this part of me trying to protect me from?
• What did it need that it didn't get?
• How can I offer that now? Can I make it possible through my choices, my boundaries and my self-talk?

In essence, this might look like grounding yourself instead of spiraling when you feel rejected. Or letting someone love you, even when you want to run. Or saying no with clarity, even when guilt tries to pull you back.

And remember, the goal isn't to fix these parts. You are simply trying to reparent them, and offer them the steadiness and care they didn't have before. As the research shows, self-compassion is a powerful tool for healing emotional wounds.

When you stop abandoning the part of you that was once abandoned, you automatically begin to feel safe inside yourself. And that's where real change begins.

Attachment styles are your protective patterns. Which means that with awareness and the right support, they can shift and soften.

The goal ultimately is to meet your wounds with more regulation, more compassion and less judgment.

Wondering what your attachment patterns are trying to tell you? Take the science-backed Anxious Attachment Scale and Avoidant Attachment Scale to find out.

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.