Developing Earned Secure Attachment
This blog is the final blog in a four-part series exploring attachment patterns and styles. Through our previous blogs, we’ve been exploring the impact of our early relationships in life and how these can impact our relationships as adults - or the ways in which we attach and move towards others in relationships. We’ve taken a deep dive into the origins of Attachment Theory, and how attachment patterns form and are expressed in childhood and as adults. We’ve seen how – no matter what attachment style we’ve developed through our past lived experience, it is also possible to develop a sense of secure attachment, known as earned secure attachment. This blog picks up ways we can move towards feeling an increased sense of secure attachment in our relationships. It is possible to earn our own sense of feeling safe and secure in relationship to others.
Earning secure attachment
A sense of safe connection and attachment is a huge boost to our wellbeing. In contrast, when we feel disconnected, on the edge or excluded from supportive, safe relationships, our sense of wellbeing takes a sharp nosedive. If you are someone who experienced difficulties in your early relatinships in life, you may not feel that you can easily find a sense of safety and connection with others. You may recognise that you experience anxious, avoidant or diorganised attachment patterns. However, working on personal development can help with connecting the dots and recognising how past relationships, including childhood relationships, have impacted you – and what you can do to find freedom from insecure attachmentpatterns. This self-development work can support a move towards earned secure attachment.
If you don’t feel you have a secure attachment pattern as yet, there is hope. Our brain’s ability to adapt and change means that it is possible to develop earned secure attachment. There are no quick fixes, and it can take time and a lot of self-care and patience along the way. But it is possible. In this blog, we look at practical strategies and tips you can try to support you in developing earned secure attachment. Having a supportive and trusted person to talk with about your journey towards earnt secure attachment can be helpful, as can journalling about your experiences in finding freedom from past insecure attachment patterns.
The importance of self-care
Whilst this blog offers a sense of hope and optimism about the possibility of personal growth and satisfying personal relationships, it is important - as with all our previous blogs to recognise that exploring attachment styles can throw up difficult feelings and painful memories. If you do read on, please take your time, and take care of yourself. Aim to be attentive to what you feel and need as you reflect on the ways you can move towards an earnt secure attachment in relationship with supportive others.
1. Attending to what is
If you’ve experienced painful and difficult relationships as part of your lived experience, you are likely to keenly feel the impact and the ways this has affected your trust in others and trust in yourself. Relationships can feel like being lost in a maze where your past makes it difficult to see an exit into present ease. Yet, if your focus remains on the past, you lose the opportunity to find new relationships and ways of being help you get more of what you want and need from your connections with others.
When you notice you may be being triggered and drawn into past attachment patterns, it can be helpful to remind yourself that “that was then, this is now”. Attend to what is happening in the present moment. To what extent are you accurately and objectively able to describe the present moment, without the distortion of past memories? This is not an easy challenge and is likely to take practice. Sure, you are no longer a child. Yet, your adult relationships can still be impacted by habitual ways of responding, as if you are still a child. It is very easy to be living in the present through the memories and filters of the past. Whenever possible, kindly and compassionately remind yourself of what is happening in the here-and-now. What is it you see and notice in your relationships today? Keep the motto and mantra “attend to what is” as a reminder to return to when you feel drawn into reactive past patterns. You no longer need to be driven by patterns that once helped you to survive, but now interfere with intimacy and connection in your personal relationships. This process is, of course, something that takes time and lots of self-compassion and kindness. Be kind to yourself through the process.
2. It’s the relationship that heals:
Psychotherapist, Irving Yalom, famously wrote: “it’s the relationship that heals”[1]. Whilst insecure attachment emerges in relationships, we can also find healing and wholeness in relationships also. Finding supportive relationships where you can practice the skills of open communication, vulnerability and implementing and respecting boundaries are the foundation stones that earned secure attachment is built on. Such relationships can be with romantic partner(s), close friends, and / or a good therapist. Take your time, and be gentle with yourself in the process as you foster and build healing relationships that allow you to re-write your Attachment history. The poet and psychoanalyst, Dr Estes, puts it like this:
“See to it that you spend less time on what they didn’t give you and more time on finding the people you belong to”[2].
3. Choose role models.
Making a conscious effort to find role models to inspire and support you has been shown to be a helpful step on the pathway to earnt secure attachment[3]. Who do you see around you – or even in the media or from history that you can look to for inspiration and encouragement. Perhaps there is a wise person you know locally who you feel you can trust if you ask for their guidance in some way? Having someone you can hold in mind or speak to as an alternative support figure can help with that transition to a secure attachment style. For some people, a counsellor or psychotherapist can take on this role. Another option is to allow yourself time and space to read the biographies of inspirational figures and ask yourself what it is you want to hold onto and absorb about their example?
4. Connect with the feelings of childhood and past relationships.
Your attachment style or pattern has grown out of the soil of past relationships you’ve experienced, either in childhood – or as an adolescent or adult. You can think of the relationship patterns that you notice today as ways you creatively adapted to what happened to you in the past.
If you’re someone who has had plenty of relationships where you felt seen, heard and understood – you are likely to be able to taste the fruits of this harvest. Children with well-attuned and responsive caregivers, who feel secure in their sense of self, are likely to develop a secure attachment as a natural response. If you did not receive that experience, or have been hurt within other relationships, allow yourself to connect and grieve for any losses you faced. Can you recognise that you did the best you could at the time? Avoiding such pain doesn’t allow you to accept and integrate this emotion and can be a barrier to moving on. Self-care and being gentle, tender and kind to yourself is important in this process of connecting with feelings.
5. Be compassionate to yourself and others.
In an earlier blog, we acknowledged that insecure attachment patterns may be expressed through a negative view of ourselves, or others, or both. If you recognise that you find it hard to hold onto a positive view of yourself and/or others, consider practicing the art of compassion with yourself and with others. How can you frame and think about events in your life with a compassionate lens? This can help you to move to a place of increase trust of yourself and – when appropriate – trust for and in others to do their best.
So, as we conclude this series of blogs centring on attachment styles, what have struck you or impacted you? What discoveries have you made in yourself? And how have you felt as you’ve connected with and reflected upon your own attachment patterns and styles from childhood and in adulthood? Making meaning of attachment styles can be a powerful tool towards self-growth and self-development.
That doesn’t have to be a one-time discovery. Just as attachment styles and patterns take repeated relational encounter to develop, getting to know and understand ourselves and our attachment patterns takes time. Is this a gift you feel able to offer yourself, and receive with interest? If these questions are something you’d like to explore in therapy, I’d be happy to hear from you to begin a conversation of whether working together is something that you’d want to try out.
References:
[1] Yalom, I. D. (1989). Love's executioner: And other tales of psychotherapy. Basic Books.
[2] Estes, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Contacting the power of the wild woman. London: Rider Books.
[3] Rachel Saunders, Deborah Jacobvitz, Maria Zaccagnino, Lauren M. Beverung & Nancy Hazen (2011) Pathways to earned-security: The role of alternative support figures, Attachment & Human Development, 13:4, 403-420