The Path to Healing Anxious Attachment
Are you constantly seeking reassurance and security from your partner? You're not alone. Many of us who experience anxious attachment find it challenging to self-regulate and often lean on our partners for a sense of safety. This episode is all about helping you understand and navigate this complex, emotional landscape. We'll discuss the importance of self-regulation and explore the fear of destabilisation and the need to control what is happening outside of us to feel safe. You'll learn how the process of co-regulation can help build your capacity to self-regulate and why it's crucial to trust yourself above all.
But, there's more to it than learning self-regulation skills. We'll also delve deep into the core beliefs that drive anxious attachment. We'll discuss how addressing these stories and wounds can liberate us from the fear of abandonment and feelings of unworthiness. You'll discover how to separate your worth from the behaviour of others and break free from these old stories. We'll also focus on building self-worth and enhancing internal security - two crucial pillars in this healing journey.
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Join My Signature Program, Healing Anxious Attachment
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
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You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship Coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about the path to healing anxious attachment.
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So this is partly in celebration of the fact that my signature course, Healing Anxious Attachment, is reopening for enrollment tomorrow for the fifth time, but also because I know that a big chunk of my listeners are anxiously attached folks, and I know that many people are on some form of healing journey, whatever that looks like. And wherever you might be in that process, I've actually done a couple of episodes. Previously on a similar topic to today. One of them was the three stages of healing anxious attachment, and another how to heal your anxious attachment. And those two are by far and away the most ever downloaded episodes of the podcast, so clearly there is a demand for this conversation.
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With that being said, I think it's been maybe seven or eight months since I've last broached this topic, so I thought that it was high time I revisited it. Particularly, as I said, in advance of tomorrow's programme launch, but also because, to be very frank, my own thoughts, feelings, opinions, perspectives on this are always growing and evolving. And so today I wanted to talk to you about what the different pillars of that healing journey involve, at least insofar as my experience goes personally, and also the methodology that I teach to my clients and students, and also offering some mindset shifts on this whole idea of healing that we can get really lost in. I think that it's such a beautiful thing to be on a healing journey and to gift ourselves that desire and that process of tending to our wounded parts and unburdening ourselves and growing and evolving and finding a more peaceful and easeful way of being within ourselves and in our relationships. And at the same time, I am acutely aware of the proliferation of products and commercialization and all of that around this healing industry in a way that I think can lead us to feel like we always have to.
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Be doing more and more and that we're never far along enough and that it's meant to be linear and neat and achievement driven and on some sort of defined timeline. And so I suppose I want to offer some thoughts on that with a view to ensuring that anyone who does consider themselves to be on some sort of journey of healing and growth, that we're doing that in a way that feels genuinely loving towards ourselves and caring and kind and self compassionate rather than coming from a place of shame and rigidity and perfectionism and needing ourselves to be other than as we are and where we are. Which I think can certainly be the tendency to see ourselves as something broken that needs fixing, as a problem to be solved, as not enough, as inadequate, as unworthy. And I think that the more we are approaching our growth from that place of self rejection and shame and wrongness, there's a really good chance that we are going to stay exactly where we are, if not to regress or to find ourselves even further entrenched in whatever patterns we find ourselves in. Because shame tends not to be very fertile in terms of what we need in order to really grow.
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I think that curiosity, self compassion, having a really inquisitive mindset towards ourselves, making space for all of our parts and all of our fears and emotions, pulling up a seat at the table and welcoming all of those parts. And seeking to understand and trusting that from that space we can really find a level of wholeness and integration that is very liberating. Rather than needing to exile parts of us or shut down parts of us that we consider to be wrong or unacceptable or inconvenient. So that's what I'm going to be talking about today. Before I dive into that, a couple of quick announcements.
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As I flagged, and as you will have heard me speak about recently, my signature programme, Healing Anxious Attachment, is reopening tomorrow for enrollment. It will be the fifth cohort over a thousand students have been through this programme in the last year and a bit since I launched it. It is my pride and joy and I am really, really looking forward to welcoming the next cohort of students. You may have also heard me announce last week that for the first time ever, I'm running a live group coaching programme as an optional upgrade to the course. So the course in its classic version is largely self paced, so you're getting eight modules of video lessons, workbooks journal prompts, guided meditations, and it really is very comprehensive.
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I have delivered it in that way because I think that it's hard to coordinate time zones, frankly, when you've got people all over the world joining. That's a logistical reason. But also I think the nature of the content is such that everyone will go through it at a different pace and in their own time might revisit it. And so I think delivering the whole course via live calls is typically not the best thing for the majority. But with that being said, I'm also very aware that some people do desire and value that live component and the ability to get direct feedback and coaching and advice from me as they work through the programme, and also a community component.
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So that's what's available in this live experience. Group coaching upgrade to the course that you'll get 690 minutes calls with me over an eight week period, as well as an online community group for you to connect with the other people, and that will be capped at 30 places to keep it nice and intimate. So if you're interested in either of those two options the Course in its classic iteration, or the live group coaching upgrade, which also includes the Course materials jump on the waitlist via the link in the show notes, or you can head directly to my website. And doors will open tomorrow, so you'll get an email when it's time. Second quick announcements just to share the featured review, which is Stephanie's podcast has been a huge help to me in understanding myself and how I show up in relationships.
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I appreciate her compassion and unflagging reminders to stay curious and have made some real internal shifts after implementing her advice over the last few months. Thank you for your work. We're all lucky to have found you. Thank you for that beautiful review. I really appreciate the kind words and I'm glad to hear that you've made some shifts as a result of listening to the podcasts and reflecting and implementing some of those things.
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So I'm glad to hear that. If that was your review, please send an email to podcast@stephanierigg.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my masterclasses. Okay, let's talk about the path to healing anxious attachment. So the first key pillar on this journey learning to self regulate. You will have heard me speak previously on the podcast, if you're a longtime listener, about the fact that for most anxiously attached people, it is very, very hard to self soothe, to self regulate, to self source a sense of safety.
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We tend to derive our sense of being okay in the world from our partner and from whatever is going on in our relationship. So if we're okay, I'm okay. If you are happy, I am happy. But if you're not, and if we're not okay, I'm not okay, right? And while it is totally normal and natural to be affected by whatever's going on in your relationship, it's not to say that secure people have this impenetrable armour whereby they're completely fine no matter whatever's going on in their relationship.
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The anxious person, it does tend to be taken to extremes whereby we can go into this state of absolute panic and meltdown for something that is really disproportionate, to be frank, right? So your partner might be slightly irritable and snap at you when you're in the car driving somewhere, and rather than going, oh, okay, they're in a bad mood, we might internalise that and go, Why would they be angry at me? I didn't do anything wrong. Why are they upset? Are they always going to be like this?
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When are they going to apologise? Are they going to apologise? Do they think they can just treat me like this? Spiralling into all of these very anxious thoughts which can then feed on themselves, and you can find yourself in this place of urgent panic, needing to fix it and feeling really dysregulated and thrown off centre in a way that just doesn't really match what's going on. So I think that from that place we can find ourselves very much at the mercy of whatever is going on outside of us in determining our well being in a way that is quite destabilising and quite vulnerable and not necessarily in a good way.
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Right. It means that we are not able to provide ourselves with a strong foundation of resilience and being able to trust that I will be okay. Whatever happens, I'll be okay. I can support myself through it and I can hold myself through it because our experience is I won't be okay. And so instead of learning to build that capacity within ourselves, what most of us have done is learn how to try and control what is going on outside of us, right?
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Because if what's going on outside of me is determinant of whether or not I feel okay inside of me, the answer is to try and control all of that stuff to make sure that I'm okay. And so that's where our behaviours like hyper vigilance and monitoring everything very closely and controlling and testing and tiptoeing and micromanaging and people pleasing, we can see that those are all expressions of this fundamental fear of I need. To make sure that everything around me is such that I don't feel destabilised, that I don't feel unsafe because I am like a sponge for everything else. And I don't have this internal ability to self regulate and to be my own power source such that I've got some backup. If my partner's in a bad mood, I can turn inwards or I can turn elsewhere rather than orbiting around that and urgently needing to fix it.
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And really it's important to understand that your maybe underdeveloped capacity to self regulate is a good way to put it, is not because you are defective or broken or less evolved. It is simply because that's something that when we're all born, no one has the ability to self regulate. Babies are utterly dependent on caregivers to help them via this process of co regulation to develop that capacity, because babies are very much vulnerable and at the mercy of what's going on around them. But for the anxiously attached person, typically that wasn't nurtured enough, consistently enough for that ability to self regulate to properly develop. And so we have this response of hyperactivating in the event that there's any threat to the relationship, because we've learned to derive our safety from the other person exclusively.
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And so to the extent that we feel them pulling away or we feel any threat to that tether between us, our response is going to be very hyperactivated, mobilised, intense. I've got to do whatever I can to restore the connection rather than finding it within ourselves to go, okay, that's not going to work. As my current source of safety, I'll go to one of my other sources. So a really big part of this process of healing anxious attachment is learning to find that backup power source. And if anything, letting that be a primary source of safety for you, so that you can then go to relationships from a really balanced, grounded, self assured place of I am choosing this because I love you and I care about you and I'm investing in this relationship.
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But it is not me coming to the relationship treating you. As a lifeline and desperately needing you to rescue me because I am so terrified of being disconnected from you or being on my own. And that is even if it's not literal and conscious and front of mind, often that is the energy that we are coming to relationships with when we don't have that capacity to self soothe and self regulate. So a big part of that is understanding how your nervous system works. And again, you will have heard me speak about this on the podcast before I had a guest interview with Sarah Baldwin who is an expert in this.
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Also teach a whole module on it in healing anxious attachment. It's consistently everyone's favourite because I think it's the thing that everyone comes to and goes wow, I never knew any of this, right? You might have heard some other stuff about communication or boundaries or healing our core wounds but really the nervous system stuff is like brand new information for a lot of people and it is absolutely a paradigm shift and incredibly, I hesitate to say life changing but I think it really is. It certainly has been for me and that's how a lot of other people describe it because it's like oh all of a sudden I empower myself with tools to be okay no matter what happens, right? All of a sudden we don't have to move through life trying to avoid triggers or trying to avoid challenge or upset or conflict or rejection or abandonment or any of these other experiences that of course are painful and we don't want to go and seek them out.
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But we also don't have to shape our whole lives around trying to avoid them because we do not believe in our capacity to navigate them if they were to arise. So learning to self regulate, learning to be your own sense of safety first and foremost is such an important skill and such an important piece in the puzzle if you really want to shift these patterns. So the next pillar that I want to speak to is self worth and healing of those core wounds of unworthiness and inadequacy and that fear of abandonment that runs so deep for anxiously attached people. So if we could think of the self regulation piece as being the body and the nervous system, this is where we start to look at the attachment wounds and this is really where some of those beliefs of I'm not good enough no one will ever love me as much as I will love them. People are always going to leave me.
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I can never trust in love, I can never trust that people will stay. I'm always waiting for something bad to happen. All of this more cerebral stuff that again might not be front of mind, it might not be the script that you're running in a very conscious way. But oftentimes when we trace down through our fears and the stories that we tell ourselves, eventually we wind up at these beliefs. I have to make sure that everyone's happy with me.
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I can't possibly put anyone out because then they won't like me and if they don't like me, then I'll be alone. Or as soon as we work our way down the chain, we start to see that these beliefs run fairly rampant and tend to be baked in with a lot of shame and a lot of fear and tending to these and really reprogramming some of these old beliefs that are no longer helping us, that were probably never ours to begin with and most likely took root at a time in our lives when we didn't have enough context and understanding for what was going on around us. And we internalised whatever environment we were in as being our fault or a comment on us and our worth tending to. These wounds grieving all of the emotion that's there and what it's cost us to live from this wounded place. That's a very very important piece of the puzzle as well.
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And you can think of that as being almost like as we start to decouple these core beliefs from our emotional experience and we start to go, oh, okay, someone else's behaviour doesn't have to mean this about me. We sort of slowly break that automatic story and tether that we've created in our minds again, most of the time subconsciously. But once we can sever that and infuse or inject all of these other possibilities of okay, that's one possibility. What are the 500 other possibilities for why this person didn't call me back or why this person isn't available to be in the relationship with me or doesn't have the capacity or whatever, right? There are a million different ways that this can show up.
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But having that distance and having enough self worth that we can go I don't need to strive to try and convince someone to show up for me. I don't need to convince people, I don't need to tiptoe around someone else. I don't need to shrink and become very very small and easy and low maintenance in order to be lovable. I don't need to micromanage everyone around me and their emotions to make sure that everything's okay and that they're happy with me because I get my worth from being helpful, right? All of these things are various expressions of these wounded parts and these core beliefs so tending to those and that is a longer term process, right, of understanding those links and connecting those dots and turning towards those stories and seeking to understand again, where did this come from?
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Where did I learn this? And really being with those? And as I said, there's a lot of grief in that. But it's also very liberating to uncover this process that's been happening at a very subconscious level and how that's been perpetuating our hurt and pain and shame and emotional responses. Because when we make things mean stuff about ourselves, when we have these stories and everything that happens around us, we take as evidence in support of these very painful stories.
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Then once again, we're very, very susceptible to significant distress and taking things personally and being very fragile in a way that tends not to be supportive of healthy, secure, grounded, balanced relationships. So that unburdening, that process of healing our core wounds, of building up our self worth, of building up our self trust and our self respect, all of that is very, very important in the healing anxious attachment path. I want to pause there and just point something out which is these two most important pillars are about the self, okay? And that might feel kind of counterintuitive because for anxiously attached people, the impulse, the default is always to focus on the relational piece or on the other person. Whenever I have clients or students or anyone I'm interacting with, when it's about relationship stuff and they're anxiously attached, all they want to do is tell me about the other person and what they did and what they said and what their emotional struggles are and what their challenges are.
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And then my assessment of what they're thinking and feeling, it's always about the other. And that is very much part and parcel. Anxious attachment, as I spoke to earlier, is if I can control other people and gather information about other people, then I can control the environment and the conditions. And in so doing I can ensure my own sense of safety and stability, right? But to continue to do that is to continue to participate in the pattern that is keeping you in this place, right, in this way of being.
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And so it is no accident that the overwhelming focus of my work in helping people with anxious attachment is on the self. It has to be because if you keep focusing on the other and on the relationship, it's actually feeding into this belief of I need to make sure that we are okay so that I'll be okay. Whereas what I want to teach you is I will be okay because I am going to build myself up so that I am okay no matter what's going on out there, right? That's really where that capacity comes from and that self trust and that resilience when we have those two pillars of self regulation and internal security and safety, along with tending to those core wounds and building up that self worth. That's the point at which we can really start to usefully layer in relational skills, right?
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This is where stuff like how do I communicate more effectively, how do I have conflict in a way that is constructive and productive, how do I advocate for myself through boundaries? How do I get very clear on my values and what I'm looking for in relationship in a way that allows me to really back myself and feel comfortable saying no to things that don't work and seeing an incompatibility for what it is rather than seeing it as an invitation to strive and change someone and backflip and change ourselves and do whatever we'd need to do to make it work right. We become so much clearer in who we are and what we're looking for that we can confidently start to apply these skills. Because I think that when we don't have those strong foundations of self and we go straight to setting boundaries and voicing needs, we're doing it from this place of I'm voicing a need. But also, if you don't think that that's a reasonable need, then don't worry about it.
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Or we voice a boundary, but it's so fear fueled and fear driven that it comes out as really us being a tyrant and a dictator and telling someone, how dare you treat me like this? And you better not do that or else. Right. Which is a lot of charge behind that and typically doesn't work very well, right? So I think that having this internal piece and again it's not like an endpoint where you have to get to healed as a destination before you can take these steps but having at least some foundation of internal security in order to then go to the relational piece and be able to calmly advocate for yourself and really be comfortable in what you are expressing and what you are needing and have enough capacity to also have space for the other person's experience.
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Right? When we're in a lot of fear there's just no space for the other person because our whole view becomes very tunnel visioned and very self interested and that's just true for everyone. When you're in fear, you are selfish. Of course evolutionarily makes sense if I think that I'm under threat, I'm going to be watching out for me first and foremost and so I've got to be able to deal with the things that lead me to feel threatened all the time in relationships and a lot of that starts with me. So once I've built up my capacity to come to my relationship without feeling like I'm on the brink all the time, feeling like everything is a minefield and that I'm tiptoeing around, that when there's just a bit more space and ease.
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Then we start being able to layer on these secure communication, secure functioning, secure relationship skills that allow us to really cement everything that we're doing within ourselves and build up a relationship that is different. We get to create new possibilities from all of the work that we're doing because in the absence of that, obviously we just do a rinse and repeat on the things that we've always done. But when we start to have this increased capacity, then we get to forge these new experiences and these new memories. And it's incredible, the ripple effect of one person doing their work on the people around them and the people that they might be in relationship with. So while you can't guarantee that you're doing your work is going to change your partner and to be very clear, that should never be your motive. Please. Again, that is a great example of anxious detachers being other focused. It's like, what can I do to change them? How can I change myself so that they change? No.
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How can I change myself so that I experience more peace and stability and freedom, okay? And trust that from that place I will know what to do and I will know what I need and I will have the capacity to make better decisions for myself, whatever that looks like. It is not how can I change so that I can elicit change in them. But with that being said, oftentimes one person's change will trigger changes in the other because these things are cocreated and they're relational and they're dynamic. And so if you start dancing a different dance, you might notice that your partner shows up very differently because you might not be pushing their buttons in the way that you were before without even realising it.
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Because again, all of this stuff happens very subconsciously. So I did promise that I was going to give some mindset tips as a little wrap up on this. And so I suppose the main thing that I want to say is healing is not a journey with a start and a finish. It's not a destination that you're going to reach. Sometimes I get emails and messages from people asking me if the expected outcome of a course or a programme of mine is that they will be healed.
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And I would never ever represent that to anyone. And maybe the course is inaccurately titled by being called Healing Anxious Attachment. But unfortunately it's hard to add too much nuance into a short and sweet title for a programme. Evolving into a place where I no longer feel at the mercy of my anxious attachment is not a very catchy title, but that's really the essence of it, right? It's growing beyond it's.
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Can I build up my capacity so that my anxious parts are not driving the bus and speaking to my own experience? It's not like I never experience those anxious thoughts, feelings, sensations anymore. It's not that I don't think the catastrophic thoughts or have those insecurities pop up, but it's just I put so much effort and energy and time into building up my other parts and creating more space and really nurturing. Those other parts that are more secure and more grounded in self worth and self respect and self trust, such that the anxious part is much quieter and doesn't have to work so hard because I've tended to a lot of the fear and a lot of the wounding that that anxious part was trying to protect. And so while it's not totally gone, it's not in control of me anymore and it's not something that I feel threatened by or overwhelmed by, it's just something that I can notice and go, oh okay, if I notice myself feeling anxious, what is that telling me and what might I need to do, right?
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It's just asking for my attention and that's okay, I've got enough capacity that I can go okay, I'm feeling anxious, what might I need, right? Rather than going, oh my God, I feel anxious, I've got to do something that means something's wrong, urgent, overwhelming, and then being driven to behave in a certain way based on that feeling. So it's really not about reaching some endpoint, unfortunately. There is no endpoint, there is no healed, there is no clock off work because we're all done and dusted. It's not like that, unfortunately.
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It's a journey. And I think the more that we can yield to that while also not feeling like we have to be fixing ourselves all the time, it's really gifting ourselves a lifelong process of growing and evolving and being with whatever arises and expanding our capacity for peace and freedom and really open hearted love rather than love that is infused with fear and control and insecurity. So lifelong and hard at times. And it takes time. But it's also absolutely possible to grow to a place where anxious attachment is not the overwhelming experience of your relationships, where you have relationships that feel safe and grounded and mutually supportive and reciprocal and where you really can.
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Take in someone's love and trust it rather than constantly anticipating something bad happening or that they're going to leave you or find someone better. All of that is possible and I really, if nothing else, please believe that that is available to you. And as I said, it's not always easy but it is worth it and it is possible. So this has been a long episode. If you've made it this far, thanks for sticking with me.
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I hope it's been helpful and it's given you a bit of insight into what's involved in this journey to healing anxious attachment and developing a more secure way of being. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave a rating or a review. It's hugely helpful. And if you are keen to say yes to this work to dive in deeper. Tomorrow is the day for healing anxious attachment 5.0 you can join the waitlist via the link in the show notes or by heading straight to my website and I would love to see you in there if. You are ready to do this work and ready to make a change. Thank you all so much for being with me. I will see you later in the week. Thanks guys.
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Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again sooner.