Can NLP offer solutions for anxious attachment? For those of you who read this blog regularly, whenever I find there is no perfect NLP Practitioner or NLP Master Practitioner technique available for a presenting problem, I sit behind the design table myself. And within weeks, it usually finds its way to this blog. This time around I will do the same.
Are your parents to blame for everything? It’s complicated. What I do know for sure is that blaming your parents or yourself for your challenging relationships only takes you further away from a solution.
Over the past five years, there has been a lot of buzz around attachment theory and attachment styles. You may have noticed that coaches and people in troubled relationships throw terms around like secure, avoidant, disorganized, and anxious attachment like a boss. Ironically, it was more than ten years after the release of the book “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love” that the popularity of these concepts took flight in the larger community. It may surprise you to learn that attachment theory dates back to the 1950s, and attachment styles to the 1970s.
What Is Anxious Attachment?
You can’t really understand anxious attachment without understanding attachment theory.
What Is Attachment Theory?
Attachment theory is a psychological framework that explores the attachment we form to our parents in childhood and how these learned behaviors shape our future relationships.
Suppose a child grows up feeling secure and supported by their caregivers. In that case, they will likely develop healthy attachment styles and create healthy relationships based on mutual trust, compassion, and understanding.
In a nutshell, if a child grows up with inconsistent or neglectful parenting, it leads to anxiety and avoidance in the relationships they create.
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What Are the Attachment Styles?
There are four attachment styles, each existing on a spectrum. Most of us don’t identify with only one attachment style. We experience different attachment styles across a range. So when someone says their attachment style is “anxious attachment,” they are only partially correct.
Secure Attachment:
Someone feels confident in their relationships, comfortably stepping into a place of mutual connection, trust, and compassion. Each partner healthily depends on the other.
The caregiver: Has a healthy relationship with the child.
Anxious Attachment:
Someone is anxious or worried about their relationships, needs constant reassurance, and has abandonment issues.
The caregiver: Failed to give attention and show affection in predictable and dependable ways.
Avoidant Attachment:
Someone keeps an emotional distance and is dissociated in a relationship, prioritizing independence and avoiding close connection.
The caregiver: Doesn’t show they care and isn’t responsive to the child’s needs beyond offering essentials like food and shelter.
Disorganized Attachment(Anxious-Avoidant):
Someone exhibits inconsistent behaviors, seeking their partner’s love and comfort for one moment but being unable to express their needs, displaying fear and avoidance.
The caregiver: Situations of mental illness, addiction, abuse, and poverty.
Everything You Need to Know About Anxious Attachment
The Cause of Anxious Attachment
There are two leading causes:
Inconsistent parenting: A “hot and cold” style. One moment, the parents support the child’s needs, while other times, they aren’t. It causes a level of confusion in the child, and the parent becomes unpredictable.
Emotional hunger of the parent: Parents seek attachment with the child to fulfill their needs rather than the child’s. A parent becomes overprotective and intrusive. This pattern continues through generations.
If these are your parents, keep in mind that anxious attachment is not a disorder or a mental illness. It is a common behavioral system that impacts many people’s relationships and causes problems.
What Does Anxious Attachment Look Like in an Adult Relationship?
Key indicators are:
- Problems with self-esteem while thinking highly of others
- Sensitivity to their partner’s needs but insecurity about their own worth in relationships
- Needing reassurance of love and their worth
- Fear of abandonment
- Jealousy, suspicion, clinginess
- Preoccupation with relationships
- Wanting intimacy and feeling emotionally dependent on their partners (their presence is calming)
- Relationships are a bit of a roller coaster because of the neediness and fear of rejection. Stress and anxiety are present.
Challenges with Developing NLP Techniques for Anxious Attachment
How do you override years of conditioning in childhood development? A situation of auto-pilot, triggers, and traumas. Anxious attachment is a learned behavior, and in a sense, you could have “mastery” in displaying it.
If you look at the Levels of Change, you start to realize that many different NLP techniques would be needed.
From the most conscious to the most unconscious level:
Environment:
How do you work with your partner and your personal development to resolve these attachment styles practically? Using different NLP techniques when we have difficulties with our partner is the best place to start.
Many profound NLP techniques would work over time. You need the entire arsenal of an NLP Practitioner here. For example, NLP techniques related to changing emotions, behaviors, strategies, submodalities, and fears (think of cooking with the phobia NLP techniques taught) will help a lot.
Behaviors:
How do you change your behavior? How do you behave securely attached?
Learning new behavior may be possible in one-trial learning. What is more likely is that you need to work consistently on more secure behaviors in both the real world and your thinking, reflecting, and visualization. The first NLP technique that comes to mind is the New Behavior Generator. However, strategies/TOTE should also be considered to figure out how your or someone else’s brain works and choose the intervention accordingly.
Skills and abilities:
Can you learn new skills? Through practice, can you create new abilities?
I immediately start thinking about a genuine effort to increase your ability to find a secure partner and your ability to adopt the skills of a securely attached person. A mix of both NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner techniques can be used.
Consider downloading these free products:
- Ready, set, outcome (goal setting and navigating obstacles)
- 7 Easy NLP techniques.
Values:
Our unconscious values are the very foundation we stand on. Our anxious attachment exists because a value is met on some level – each behavior has a positive intent. Think of things like safety, security, and protection. The moment you live a life true to your values is when you start choosing, building, and maintaining relationships according to your values. What are your values? You need an NLP Master Practitioner trained to discover these to help you with or take a class.
Identity:
This is where you start healing those parts of your identity that got fractured when you were younger. The first thing that comes to mind is an NLP technique using timelines. Not the fast-food timeline NLP techniques taught in large seminars, but the ones sometimes taught by very experienced top-tier trainers in small groups. For example, in my NLP Master Practitioner, I teach how to use timelines to do core change work and design custom NLP techniques for yourself or others.
Source:
Ultimately, you cannot heal your fractured identity without connecting to the source. This can be done by making a lot of changes on the environmental, behavioral, and skill levels. It can also be done by really working on values and identity levels.
Where to Start Using NLP to Resolve Anxious Attachment Issues
The most obvious?
- Hire an NLP coach – List of NLP Coaches
- Take an NLP Practitioner training
- Pick one or two behaviors that pop up in your daily life and environment and start working with these.
Resources:
NLP Topics Simply Global NLP
YouTube channel
Next week, another article will follow: “NLP Techniques to Resolve Anxious Attachment Problems.
