The way you bond, communicate, share intimacy, connect with, and separate from others is referred to as your attachment style. Your bonding pattern begins in utero and continues to develop throughout childhood.

You’re more likely to have a secure attachment style if you had a positive, stable bonding experience with your primary caregivers as a child. This means you’ll often feel safe and stable in your relationships, with little distress or separation anxiety. If you were abandoned, neglected, or abused as a child, or if you dealt with any type of trauma or instability as a child, you may have an anxious, fearful, or avoidant attachment style as an adult.

• Remove your identification to it – Many people are aware of their attachment style, yet are not doing anything to heal it. When you ask them, the general answer is: “well this is who I am and people have to accept me for it”. Well, yes and no. When you enter any kind of relationship, you are fully responsible for the impact of your attachment style on your partner, your children, your friends. As an adult, it is your responsibility to heal yourself further than just with the awareness of your limiting behaviour.
• Finding the programmings behind the behaviours – The anxious attachment style is an adaptation to deeper fears and abuses. This is where the work is. When you understand how your programmings, hidden in the blind spot of your subconscious mind, have been created and how they have been working; by making different choices than the abusive or limiting ones you use to do, you start to diffuse the essence of the WHY you have an anxious attachment. Here, awareness and action are keys.
• Your inner child is trapped in the emotions of the past, and fear YOUR abandonment – When our anxious attachment is triggered, we fear to lose what we feel is the source of the love we feel, because in the past, we felt abandoned, rejected, not safe. Today, if we don’t do the work and connect to these parts of ourselves, our inner child keeps feeling anxious as we unconsciously keep abandoning him/her the way we felt abandoned in the past.
• Identify where you still abuse yourself in the present. Where do you lie to yourself and others? Where do you procrastinate? Where do you still people please? Where do you abandon yourself? Where don’t you have healthy boundaries? Where do you see unhealthy pleasures as an escape to avoid the work? The more you remove that and replace them with healthy boundaries, the more you trust that you can have your OWN BACK. This trust will also diffuse the ANXIETY of losing someone, as you can realise you are ok and you can bounce back no matter what happens in your life.
• Spend time alone and away from your partner. You can do that by sleeping in different beds once in a while, going for a road trip, have a day away from home. This may be the hardest thing to do for someone with an anxious attachment style. “What will happen when I’m not here?” This is where you continue to build trust. Because what ever your partner does in your absence, you will never have control over it. If they cheat on you or leave you, this is the best thing that can happen for your wounds to be revealed so you can heal. BUT, if they are dedicated to your relationship, spending time away from them will actually reinforce the bond you have.
• Healthy and mature communication – Once we have done enough work so the intensity of our anxious attachment is low enough which shift our energy into one that feels safer for ourselves and for our partner as well, we can then demonstrate enthusiasm when our partner need space to process their emotions in case of a disagreement, instead of being clingy, intense and controlling. This is the byproduct of you and your inner child having a strong and healthy bond of trust, as well as the results of the shifts in your energetic presence from the release of your trapped emotions and the focus on soothing your nervous system in the process.

The real inner child work is the wounded inner child work. Because if you don”t give your younger self the space to yell, to cry, to unleash the anger, to free themselves from all the emotion they were told shamed for and forced to repress, so they can feel understood by you and feel safe in your presence, no amount of fun, colouring exercises and visualisation will truly sooth them and therefore yourself, long term. Release what’s in the way for the joy to naturally flow.