Are you a Christian and struggling to figure out how to heal anxious attachment? In this blog post, we’ll cover what this looks like and how to go about doing it with God’s help.
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What is Anxious Attachment?
You may have been told by a therapist that you have an anxious attachment style. Or you may simply have seen attachment buzzwords floating around on YouTube and social media, and so you are curious to learn more about your type.
Regardless of why you are here, it’s important to understand the basics of attachment if you are going to put in the hard work of healing yours.
How We Develop Attachment
To learn about this topic, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. Attachment starts to form right from the start of cognizant life. When our caregivers (mainly our parents) meet our needs or don’t, we as babies and children formulate an attachment style. It could be a secure style, we were believe our needs will be met, or it could be an insecure attachment style (There are three.), where we aren’t sure if our needs will be met or not.
Of course, not having your needs met as a baby or child is devastating since you cannot meet your own needs well at that age. So, in an effort to have those needs met, our creative brains come up with all sorts of ways we can fix the problem. These are often maladaptive strategies (since they were conjured up with child logic), and unfortunately, we often take what we’ve learned in childhood about how love works and bring it into our adult relationships, too.
Why is this unfortunate? Because now we are carrying years of old stories and pain around the concepts of love and meeting needs. And when two broken people pour their insecure attachment wounds into their relationships, all sorts of havoc ensues. This happens in our marriages, in our parenting, and in basically all our other relationships, as well.
Additionally, we learn from these primary relationships about how love is supposed to work. We also learn (sometimes maladaptively) as children how we are supposed to act in order to have our needs met.
Types of Attachment Styles
There are three different insecure attachments styles: Dismissive-Avoidant, Anxious, and Fearful-Avoidant. I have separate articles that cover the other attachment styles if you want to dig into those, but this particular article covers the basics of anxious attachment and how to heal it.
The anxious-attachment style tends to form when caregivers are inconsistent with meeting their child’s needs. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and the child isn’t really sure what to expect. Another way that it tends to form is when the parenting style is “authoritarian enough” that the child feels that they must overly assert themselves or perform well in order to receive love. If these patterns are consistently happening in their childhood, he or she will develop a level of anxiety around love.
How Does the Anxious Attachment Style Act?
If you want to learn how to heal anxious attachment, you first have to learn what characteristics this attachment style tends to have. Here is a list of qualities you might find in the anxious attachment style.
But first, a quick caveat… remember that every person is unique and the circumstances (and their interpretations of those circumstances) that brought them here are different. So, there is a sliding scale for insecurity in attachment, and not everyone will show all of the same traits.
People Pleasing
A lot of times, people who have an anxious-attachment style will feel as if they aren’t good enough. This causes them to try to prove themselves worthy of love, attention, and acceptance. You might see this played out as people-pleasing, for example, where being on someone’s good side or “going along to get along” gives the anxiously-attached person a false sense of peace and connection in the relationship.
The problem with this tendency is that real love isn’t based off of performance. Our Lord offers us unconditional love and serves as our example for how to conduct our earthly relationships. While He did design us to compromise sometimes in relationships, and live in peace as much as it depends on us, He did not design us to mistreat ourselves by erasing the beautiful qualities that He gave us, in the name of keeping a relationship alive.
Begging, Clinging, Whining
When someone has an anxious-attachment style, they tend to seek more reassurance in their relationships than other styles do. Whether it’s after a conflict or just after some time of separation, this person will crave to know that their relationship can heal from the rupture. At a deep level, they believe that if their relationship breaks, it may become irreparable, and this causes a lot of anxiety.
Some ways that they seek this reassurance is by begging, clinging, whining, and more. The reason for this is that when so much anxiety builds up within them, they are not sure how to calm themselves without the external help of another person. As a child, it’s possible that they needed to become louder and more vocal in order to gain the attention they craved from their parents. And so, they carried those strategies into adulthood, which now look like helicoptering their relationships in order to feel a sense of peace.
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Control
Just like the other insecure attachment styles, anxious attachment is rooted in the dynamics of control. Usually when we think of control, we think of someone who dominates over another person, forcing them to do whatever they say. And while an anxiously-attached person could do this, it is also common for them to have more covert strategies (that they might not even be aware of!).
Examples of this include people pleasing, begging, clinging, whining, etc. These are simply tactics used to try to get one’s needs met in a relationship when they don’t feel like they have enough freedom to do it in a healthier manner.
The lack of freedom could be coming from the other party in the relationship, such as a spouse or child/parent, or it could be a lack of freedom coming from within the anxiously-attached person. What do I mean by that? I mean that the anxious person might have had years of conditioning stemming back to childhood that has caused them to believe that they do not have a voice unless they fight for it.
The Problem with Control
The problem with control is that it is very corrosive in relationships. Trying to control another person (whether it’s in your marriage or in your parenting) absolutely kills the possibility of acceptance. And where there is no acceptance, there can be no love. (Remember what we said about love being unconditional?)
Now, a quick caveat… Am I saying that acceptance means you let anything go on and you just become a doormat? No, of course not. That is not secure attachment either. Acceptance is allowing the people in your life to be their own people. You can agree with it or not–that is a separate dynamic. Agreement and acceptance are not the same thing. But in order for love to flourish in a relationship, there has to be a general acceptance between the two parties that allows them to grow and develop. Control squelches that possibility.
How to Heal Anxious Attachment with God
In order to heal anxious attachment using a Christian perspective, you’ll have to go deeper than most people go when healing from any other perspective. This is because the healing doesn’t just go into your thoughts and the way your body responds to trauma. It goes deeply into your spirit as well.
As Christians, we know that our battle is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12). This means that while we heal our physical struggles, we also must recognize that there are spiritual struggles too. Satan will use any foothold he can find in order to harm us, so why would our attachment style be saved from that?
Here are four steps to take to heal anxious attachment, even at a deep spiritual level:
Learn to Regulate
When you have an anxious attachment, it means that you struggle to self-soothe and you need someone else in order to calm down. As children, our bodies require a safe adult in order to learn how to regulate, but as we ourselves become adults, we have to know how to do it for ourselves.
The first step toward healing your attachment style is to learn that skill of calming down. You have to discover how to move from pure, raw emotion to the logical part of your brain without shutting off or bottling up those emotions.
How do you learn the skill of calming down? By following these steps:
Notice the Emotions
The key is to learn how to walk all the way through your emotions without judging yourself for them–simply noticing that you have feelings of anxiety, sadness, or anger, etc. and allowing your body to feel them.
We struggle with feeling our emotions sometimes because they seem big and scary. But if we can remember that the emotions won’t kill us–that there is no actual emergency–then we can work our way through the emotions and get to the other side with more confidence.
The process of calming down changes the neural pathways in your brain so that you can change your thinking patterns over time.
Take Deep, Slow Breaths
After you notice your emotions, the next step is to take deep, slow breaths.
Some people use box breathing. This is where you breathe in for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, and hold again for four seconds. Other people simply breathe in and out slowly, focusing on feeling the tension leave their bodies.
Both of these breathing techniques are extremely helpful, and I encourage you to test out several methods. But if you want to go deeper, try something like Breath Prayers.
There is no specific way to do breath prayers, but the simple idea is to take a simple, condensed Bible verse or a biblical truth and say it to yourself as you slowly breathe in and out.
Here is an example: [breathe in] “Be still and know…” [breathe out] “…that I Am God.”
Do it over and over until you find yourself calming and meditating on the Word of God. The more you can focus on Scripture as you breathe deeply, the more you are filling your mind, body, and spirit with eternal Truth and the powerful healing that only Jesus can bring.
Hit Your Knees Before Dialing Friends
When anxiety seizes your chest and all you want to do is pick up your phone to text or call your friends, take a moment to go through the earlier steps, and then spend some serious time in prayer.
There’s no doubt that God gave us community for support and friendship. Ultimately, though, community was created as a secondary support system, after going to God Himself with our worries.
Whenever you feel that desire to call someone with the purpose of relieving your anxiety, try going to God first. We were definitely designed to help each other, but we weren’t designed to carry the entirety of someone else’s fears. In order to learn how to heal anxious attachment, you have to practice taking your worries to the One who is actually strong enough and loving enough to bear it all.
Conclusion to How to Heal Anxious Attachment
Learning how to heal your anxious attachment style can take a lot of diligent work. We know it can feel incredibly hard and confusing, which is why we cover anxious attachment so often here at Build Strong Happy Families.
Definitely try various strategies to calm down, and always reach out to God before you reach out to friends for relief, but in all of this, don’t forget to offer yourself grace. Healing is a process, and there will certainly be times where you will fall short of your goals. It’s important for all of us (and especially the anxiously attached among us) to remember that Jesus is constant and offers us unconditional love, which is the whole reason we can find secure attachment in Him in the first place.
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