If you’re stuck in cycles of overthinking, people-pleasing, constant reassurance-seeking, or losing yourself in relationships, you’re likely navigating the world through anxious attachment.

You’ve probably already read the books, listened to the podcasts, scrolled through the Instagram posts. You know what anxious attachment is. Maybe you’ve even tried to change, only to find yourself right back where you started, exhausted and disheartened.

So the real question is: how do you move from understanding to actual transformation?

Here are the three foundational pillars of healing anxious attachment. Not as a checklist to complete, but as an ongoing practice of coming back to yourself.

Pillar 1: Nervous System Regulation

The first and most important pillar is learning to regulate your nervous system.

Most anxiously attached people struggle with self-soothing. When something feels off in a relationship, you get completely flooded. A delayed text, a shift in tone, your partner pulling away slightly. Even small things can trigger overwhelming panic or collapse.

This happens because relationships have become your primary source of safety. When your partner is happy, you’re okay. When they’re not, you spiral. Your nervous system has learnt to outsource regulation to another person, which leaves you hypervigilant, controlling, or consumed by anxiety. It’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when you didn’t receive consistent co-regulation as a child.

Nervous system work teaches you how to find safety from within. You learn how your body responds to stress and develop tools to regulate yourself when anxiety hits. This doesn’t mean you’ll never feel anxious again. It means you’ll know how to steady yourself without spiralling or abandoning your needs.

The goal isn’t to become unaffected by the world. It’s to know how to return to centre when you’re knocked off balance.

Pillar 2: Rewiring Core Beliefs

The second pillar is addressing the deep beliefs underneath your anxious patterns.

Anxious attachment isn’t just behaviour. It’s rooted in beliefs you formed early in life, often when your emotional needs weren’t met consistently. Beliefs like:

I’m not enough. I’m too much. People always leave. Love never lasts. I have to earn love.

When these beliefs stay unconscious, they run everything. They shape how you interpret every text, every tone of voice, every unmet need. They drive you to seek constant reassurance, over-give, stay with unavailable people, or contort yourself to be easier to love.

Rewiring these beliefs means slowing down enough to look at them with curiosity and compassion. Where did I learn this? Whose voice is this? What has believing this cost me? Is it actually true, or just familiar?

This work often brings up grief. Grief for what you didn’t get, for all the ways you abandoned yourself to avoid being abandoned, for the years spent trying to prove you were worthy of love. But it also brings freedom. When you stop believing you’re the problem, something softens. You start to access your inherent worth, not because someone finally gives it to you, but because you realise it was always there.

Pillar 3: Learning Secure Relationship Skills

The third pillar is where you start building practical skills for healthier relationships.

Once you’ve begun to feel safer in your own nervous system and challenged your core wounds, you’re actually able to do relationships differently. You can express needs without panicking. You can set boundaries without fearing abandonment. You can navigate conflict without shutting down or launching into protest behaviour.

This includes skills like assertive communication, holding boundaries, owning your needs without shame, recognising red and green flags, and making aligned choices in dating and relationships.

But here’s what’s crucial: these skills only work when they’re rooted in internal safety and self-worth. If you try to set boundaries from a dysregulated, fearful place, they come out as ultimatums. If you express needs from unworthiness, they land as criticism. That’s why the sequence matters. Body, beliefs, behaviour.

Secure relating isn’t just about what you say. It’s about the state you’re in when you say it.

Final Thoughts

This work isn’t about fixing yourself, because believe it or not — you’re not broken. Your anxious attachment patterns aren’t a personal failing. They’re protective strategies you developed in response to inconsistent connection early in life. While they may not serve you anymore, they deserve compassion, not shame.

Healing isn’t linear and there’s no finish line. It’s an ongoing practice of building capacity, returning to centre, and relating to yourself and others with more tenderness and honesty.

You don’t need to wait until you’re ‘fully healed’ to have a healthy relationship. But as you move through these three pillars, you’ll find yourself relating in new ways. Less from fear, more from choice. You’ll stop settling, striving, or shapeshifting to be chosen. Instead, you’ll choose yourself first. And everything changes from there.

Want to learn more about how to develop healthy self-worth and secure relationships? Be sure to check out my free training, How to Heal Anxious Attachment & Finally Feel Secure in Life & Love.