RELATIONAL TRAUMA
Growing More Securely Attached (Part 2)
Do you ever feel like you sabotage your relationships? SUMMARY Secure attachment isn’t a personality trait you’re born with — it’s a skill set your nervous system can learn at any age.
- What contributes to our various attachment styles?
- A sense of shame and defeat when we realize that we aren’t securely attached.
- You start to wonder if something else could be different.
- You have just had a reparative relational experience.
- You can seek out reparative relationship experiences from a wide variety of people.
- References
- Frequently Asked Questions
Do you ever feel like you sabotage your relationships?
SUMMARY
Secure attachment isn’t a personality trait you’re born with — it’s a skill set your nervous system can learn at any age. If your childhood relationships were unpredictable or unsafe, your brain adapted with anxious or avoidant patterns that once protected you. The good news: with consistent relational experiences and the right support, those patterns genuinely shift. This post walks through the concrete practices that help driven, ambitious women build the secure attachment they never had.
Definition: Earned Secure Attachment
Earned secure attachment refers to the state of developing a secure relational style in adulthood — despite having an insecure attachment history in childhood. Research shows that therapy, self-reflection, and corrective relational experiences can rewire the nervous system’s default responses, allowing adults to form stable, trusting connections even when early life didn’t provide that foundation.
Do you struggle with feeling close and connected in your intimate relationships?
Or do you avoid seeking out relationships because you just don’t think they’re safe or reliable?
Do you pride yourself on being independent and not needing anyone?
Do you long to have more functional, stable, warm and connected relationships in your life?
Today’s post is just for you.
So, in my last blog post two weeks ago I introduced the ideas of attachment theory and attachment styles and provided snapshots for you of the four primary styles: secure, anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and disorganized.
In today’s post, I answer the question that is probably top of mind for anyone with other than a secure attachment type: so how do I become more securely attached?
To learn how, keep reading.
What contributes to our various attachment styles?
ATTACHMENT STYLE
Attachment style refers to the characteristic pattern of relating to others that develops in early childhood based on the quality of care received from primary caregivers. These deeply ingrained relational blueprints, whether secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized, shape how we experience intimacy, trust, and emotional connection throughout adulthood.
To answer this question, it’s important to recall from the last blog post that our attachment styles largely form in relationship to our early caregivers – our parents or other guardians – who were the primary individuals we turned to for caretaking and attunement.
It’s worth noting, too, that our attachment style can be also influenced later in life. Through circumstances or personality changes. Like being in a toxic or abusive romantic relationship. Or how teenagers largely push away from their attachment figures during adolescence.
However, for most of us, the dominant force in shaping our attachment style as adults will be our early childhood experiences.
What this means is that if you had good enough parents who largely made efforts to try and attune, respond, and appropriately react to you and who also tried to mend the relational ruptures between you two when they happened, you may form what’s known as secure attachment: a relative ease, capacity for, and positive view of relational intimacy.
If you did not have this kind of parenting, if your parents were preoccupied with circumstances (such as poverty, environmental traumas, job changes, ill health) or their own internal limitations (mental illness, addiction, personality disorders), you as a child may have “coped” and “managed” this probably lack of consistent, good enough attunement by developing beliefs and behaviors that fit into one of the other attachment styles: anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, or disorganized.
A sense of shame and defeat when we realize that we aren’t securely attached.
TAKE THE QUIZ
What’s driving your relational patterns?
A 3-minute assessment to identify the core wound beneath your relationship struggles.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
RUMI
But please hear me: your attachment style is not your “fault”!
You come by it very honestly. And it’s more than likely that your attachment style kept you safe. Through times when it may not have been very safe to closely attach.
It was actually very clever of you as a child to view and manage relationships the way you did.
It’s just that now, as an adult, that same attachment style may no longer be working quite so well for you and you may be sitting with the questions:
So is this it? Or can I become more securely attached? And how does that happen?
Becoming more securely attached.
I personally and professionally believe that attachment styles are not fixed.
They are not rigid, they are not set in stone, they are malleable.
Just because you have anything less than a secure attachment style now does not mean that secure attachment can’t and won’t be possible for you.
But how do we become more securely attached?
I believe that secure attachment can be learned and earned through self-reflection as well as consistent, more functional and reparative relational experiences.
What do I mean by this exactly?
Well, for example, let’s imagine that, growing up, you had a caregiver who shamed you, blamed you, or who never or inconsistently took responsibility for their actions or impact on you.
Because of this, you may have developed an anxious-avoidant attachment style where you learned it wasn’t emotionally safe to be close to others.
After all (you may think), what’s the point of being close to someone who can’t and won’t be consistently relational and empathetic with you?
You grow up into an adult and have a hard time allowing others into your life and for those you do let in, when they slight you or rupture with you, you may emotionally cut them off and withdraw from the relationship as an anxious-avoidant response to now no longer trusting their capacity to be someone safe you can connect with.
You have developed an anxious-avoidant attachment style and response system.
But let’s also imagine that, somewhere in your adulthood, you start to become curious and even uncomfortable about how you relate to others.
You notice that the relationships in your life don’t last very long and that they are pretty fragile and “brittle” and that you’re always “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
You start to wonder if something else could be different.
A Reason to Keep Going
25 pages of what I actually say to clients when they are in the dark. Somatic tools, cognitive anchors, and 40 grounded, honest reasons to stay. No platitudes.
