Become “Inner-Focused” First

When their anxiety is triggered, those with anxious attachment often ignore their inner experiences and go straight to reacting, which frequently involves alternating between angrily trying to motivate their partner to do or say something differently, or angrily motivating themselves to be different...the angry or emotionally intense reaction is a way to create change. While there is usually truth in the fact that change needs to be made, there is also wisdom in first sitting with and listening to one’s inner experiences. Why? Because the inner experiences have something important to say and when felt and heard, can help you respond to your triggers in a healthier way.

For example, you might feel a surge of insecurity about your partner and immediately go check your phone to see if your text has been responded to. If there’s no response you get even more anxious and as the anxiety builds you become more pre-occupied and repeatedly check the phone, at the expense of being present with whatever else is going on in your life. The anxious pressure might turn into anger, which then gets acted out toward your partner. The anger is healthy and has something important to say, but in the long run the way it gets communicated probably might not work for you, your partner, and the relationship.

This is an “outer-focused” response because you’re overriding your own internal experience, and blindly trying to regulate yourself by focusing on what is outside of yourself: “if only they would text back, I wouldn’t have to feel this anxiety,” and then, “if my anger can motivate them to hear me, maybe they’ll change.” Again, there is likely truth to the need for your partner to adjust their part, but until the underlying anxiety, other vulnerable feelings, and uncomfortable bodily sensations are addressed, it will block healthy communication and contribute to relationship cycles that reinforce the problem, not fix it.

The solution here is to address the inner pain before acting on it. Everytime you leave your inner pain and go to reactivity, you self-abandon. In the “checking the phone” example, this might look like first directing your awareness to the bodily sensation which happens just before you have the urge to look at your phone. Sit with the sensation, then try to put words to it...what feeling words describe the sensation? Often the answer will be fear. Fear of what? Giving awareness to the impact of the fear (what will happen) will usually tap into the vulnerability underneath, such as a sense of powerlessness or sadness. What does this place need? When you get to know more about this place which gets triggered, and when you can allow yourself to sit with the feelings, it’s easier to show up vulnerably and/or assertively, instead of reactively. This process is shifting from “outer-focus” to “inner-focus.”

Self-Regulation

Anxious attached partners struggle with self-regulation. As I’ve addressed in the other chapters of this series, this is due to not having had the right kind of emotional support in childhood. Children who get enough of the right kind of support (co-regulation) learn to self-regulate. This means that those with anxious attachment will need to learn to self-regulate as adults. Self-regulation means helping yourself relax your nervous system well-enough to be able to manage triggers in new ways. There are many ways to self-regulate and a quick google search can provide you with many ideas. I highly recommend learning to calm your feelings on the bodily level. This is called somatic work (see page 9 for resources). Finding what works is a trial and error process, and different situations might call for different strategies. I recommend that people practice self-regulation throughout the day in “smaller” areas of life, where you experience minor frustrations such as in traffic. This will give you practice for triggers in your relationship, where the emotional stakes are higher and nervous system responses are more intense.

Co-Regulation

Co-regulation happens when partners are able to help each other regulate during triggered moments. Anxious partners, like all partners, thrive in a relationship with co-regulation. Here are some ideas to bring more co-regulation into your relationship:

• Make a plan with your partner. Something like “when one of us feels triggered, before we start talking, let’s just hug each other for 3 minutes.”

• Soothing touch, hugging, holding. Sex and sexual touch are co-regulating when both partners are on the same page with it

• Learn to validate feelings. Both partners need to be good at this for the relationship to be healthy.

• Supportive communication skills, such as listening, reflecting and validating

Work on Timing

Anxious attached partners often struggle with the timing of their concerns because 1) triggers feel so uncomfortable and they want instant relief, 2) their nervous systems say “it’s the end of the world! If I don’t address this now, nothing will ever change and I’ll feel this way forever!”, and 3) they get triggered by what their partner is sharing and then “take the mic” (both partners often do this). They tend to bring up concerns right at the moment when they feel triggered. Sometimes that’s a good idea, but sometimes it’s more effective to address concerns when each partner is relatively relaxed and when the environment is private and not pressed for time.

If you have an anxious attachment, work on your timing. How? Any self-regulation technique that can give you some space between the trigger and the reaction. And remember, even if you don’t like what your partner has to say, it’s important that they have space to voice their experience. They have a responsibility to share in a healthy way, but everyone needs to be heard, so try to resist “taking the mic.”

Make Sense of Your Anger

Many people with anxious attachment carry unresolved anger and tend to do on of three things with it in a given moment: act reactively on it, stuff it down, or alternate between being reactive and stuffing it down. Anger feels bad and nobody wants to feel it. However, honoring it and listening to what it has to say, and what it’s trying to do, is the only healthy way to deal with anger. Anger is a sensation in your body meant to motivate some sort of change. Start exploring your anger by asking it what’s it’s trying to do...is it trying to be heard? Be understood? Be validated? Is it trying to get your partner to change so you can feel close to them? Is your anger at yourself trying to motivate change? When you better understand it, it can be helpful to explain your anger to your partner from a place of non-reactiveness....”My anger exists becasue that’s my body saying ‘this isn’t where I want us to be.’”

There’s a lot of vulnerability underlying anger, and that vulnerability can’t be ignored. Staying stuck in anger isn’t healthy or effective, and honoring anger doesn’t mean blindly following its impulses. However, ignoring anger when it’s big and loud isn’t effective either, or even possible.

Be Patient With Change

Those with anxious attachment often have a sense of urgency when it comes to change. They want to implement new communication strategies and get the desired effect from their partner right away. If this is you, you come by it honestly and it’s rooted in a mistrust of change because you’ve been let down before in life. You’re desperate for change and instant results can give you the hope and relief you need to feel better in the moment. Unfortunately changing your communication and behavior is more about planting seeds of change than it is about getting instant results. Instant results are nice and they do happen. But when they don’t, remind yourself about the bigger picture, and that what you’re doing has meaning even if it isn’t apparent right then and there.

Communicate Outside of Negative Cycles

Here’s a common way in which negative cycles often play out: the anxious partner gets triggered and brings up their concern with heat and protest; the avoidant partner gets triggered and reacts by defending, rationalizing, or changing the subject; the anxious partner feels invalidated and protests more; the avoidant partner tries any other strategy to “turn down the heat;” the anxious partner gets more upset, and back and forth they go until the avoidant partner withdraws and retreats. Negative cycles harm emotional safety and prevent problems from being resolved.

Communicating outside of negative cycles means speaking from self instead of with blame, protest, criticism, etc. For example, instead of saying “You never talk to me about your feelings. You’re emotionally unavailable,” you might say “When I don’t get to see the deeper parts of you, I end up feeling disconnected and alone. I’d like for us to try to work on that together.”

Since negative cycles take two, both partners need to be working on their part. However, even if your partner isn’t giving you the response you’re hoping for, it’s still important to do your part as a means to self-growth and planting relationship seeds of change.

Learn to Trust “Good Enough”

Because of their past relationship experiences, especially during childhood, those with anxious attachment have a hard time trusting that “good things will last.” I discussed this thoroughly in the last chapter of this series. The way around this is to practice trusting “good enough.” Good enough does not mean settling for something unfulfilling. Rather it means being able to hold multiple truths at once (“my partner is good, my partner sometimes messes up...both are true”), to be able to stay in touch with a bigger picture even when triggered (“this moment might not define my partner or relationship”), and to recognize that no partner is perfect, and that no partner will respond perfectly to you, or say things in the most perfect way, every time. Good-enough is sometimes about giving grace.

Seeing your partner, relationship and self through the lens of “good enough” isn’t about accepting poor behaviors. It’s about accepting the person behind the behaviors. Addressing a behavior from the lens of “good enough” sounds like “You are good. What you did impacted me by leaving me feeling like my needs didn’t matter in that moment. It doesn’t define our relationship, but it still hurts and I need you to understand that.”

Recognizing Emotionally Available Relationships

To heal from an anxious attachment it’s vitally important to know how to recognize when a relationship is emotionally available or not. If you have an anxious attachment, the likelihood is high that you aren’t emotionally available to yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t have the symptoms of anxious attachment. This is even true when your partner’s avoidance triggers your anxiety. We learn to be emotionally available to self from growing up in homes with emotionally available parents (or we learn as adults). Without knowing how to be emotionally available to self, you’ll struggle knowing what true emotional availability from others looks like. Emotional closeness and safety is a felt sense of ease in your body. Often people with anxious attachment are existing in relationships where they have a chronic sense of unease in their bodies. They know something is wrong, but question themselves. They know something is wrong and go about trying to fix it with poor communication strategies which are their own version of emotional unavailability. They might do any number of things to manage the felt sense of unease, but without having a clear awareness of the experience on a bodily level, they find themselves stuck. If you are in a relationship where you sense a feeling of unease a lot of the time, it is certain there are problems with emotional safety and closeness. You don’t have to second guess yourself about that. Your body keeps the score. The question then becomes, “what’s blocking the emotional safety and closeness?” It could be any number of things (most of the time both partners are contributing to the blocks), many of which can be addressed and resolved with willingness of each partner. But the first step is developing a clear, felt understanding of what emotional availability actually feels like, on a consistent basis, so you know what you’re looking for to begin with.

For more information on how to heal from an anxious attachment style, or for professional help resources:

• My book “Secure Love” by Julie Menanno provides detailed information on all attachment styles and how to heal insecure attachment in the context of your relationship

• Join on of my online workshops

• Start relationship coaching with someone on my team

• Truamahealing.org for somatic work (learning to manage feelings in the body ...this type of therapy is not just for trauma, it’s for anyone seeking effective self-regulation techniques)