The post is developed in partnership with BetterHelp.
How you approach relationships as an adult is influenced by how you interacted with your parents or key caregivers as a youngster. Secure attachment is the healthiest of the four attachment styles. People who have a secure attachment style are more likely to have successful, happy relationships.
In order to have a healthy social and emotional development, young children normally need to have a secure attachment pattern with at least one major caregiver. It’s still possible to establish a secure attachment style as an adult if you didn’t have a secure attachment style as a child and instead had an anxious or avoidant attachment style.
Developing a stable attachment with intention begins with emotional awareness of how you feel about yourself, your ability to love, and your ability to be safe.
Examine how your present attachment type is affecting your relationships. It’s likely that the people with whom you have strong ties share your attachment type. Because it’s familiar, we tend to attract folks with similar attachment styles.
What Is Secure Attachment?
Those who are stably attached as adults are more likely to have trust, long-term relationships. High self-esteem, appreciating close connections, seeking out social support, and the ability to express feelings with others are all significant traits of securely connected people. Learn more about the importance of attachment styles here.
Adults who are secure tend to:
- Self-regulate emotions, such as through self-talk or coping techniques
- Deal with feeling alone or being alone sometimes.
- When help is needed or an emotional connection is desired, they communicate and express it.
- Work through difficult periods in a relationship in a proactive manner
- When people they care about are emotionally unavailable, they need to know when to quit a relationship or create boundaries
How To Develop A Secure Attachment During Adulthood
- Continue to improve the things you’re currently good at and enjoy so you can spend more time in flow, or immersed in your passions, living passionately. Finding the things you love and the zone where you’re amazing, where time slips away into happiness, can take patience. We don’t usually discover our passions until we’re doing them and realize we’re completely at ease.
- Take some calculated chances (nothing harmful), but push yourself out of your comfort zone. Building self-esteem involves courage as well as patience. When you push yourself and discover that you are stronger and braver than you previously believed, you will be proud of your bravery.
- Develop physical strength since it will strengthen your mind as well. Physical well-being, wellbeing, and self-care promote emotional strength and stability in ways you may not understand.
- Developing self-esteem and self-compassion necessitates more substantial adjustments. If your self-talk, or the way you speak to yourself in your thoughts, is harsh and critical, it’s crucial to recognize this and begin instilling new approaches. If you’re being harsh with yourself, consider whether you’d say anything similar to someone else. Would speaking to a child in the same way you speak to yourself in your brain help them develop self-esteem? If you haven’t already, consider treating yourself with the same love and compassion you’d show someone else.
- Acceptance is generated through insight, understanding, and awareness, which fuels your road to emotional freedom. Understanding why things turned out the way they did, why you are who you are, and why things were the way they were is insight. It isn’t about making excuses for other people. It’s about determining the depths and locations of scars in your inner landscape so that you don’t repeat the same patterns for the rest of your life.
