Building A Secure Attachment With Yourself

After a vast review of research and literature by attachment experts, psychotherapist Jessica Fern, indicates in her book Polysecure, 5 ways we can cultivate a secure attachment within Ourselves. When we experience attachment ruptures in our life (either by our caregivers when we were young or in adulthood with our romantic partners) our connection within ourselves can also be disrupted. Our sense of self and wellbeing can be negatively impacted by tumultuous interpersonal experiences. By building a secure attachment within ourselves, we can regain inner peace and confidence that will support us in living our best life in our most important relationships, as well as in the world around us. Fern uses the acronym HEART to list the specific ways to create a safe haven and a secure base within ourselves: 

H: Being HERE and Present with Myself 

E: Expressed Delight for Myself 

A: Attuning to Yourself 

R: Rituals & Routines for Self-Care 

T: Turning Towards Yourself After Inner Conflict and Trigger Management 

HERE. To create a sense of being here and present with ourselves we need to inhabit our own being. We need to fully occupy our bodies which is the container of our needs, desires, longings, pains, and feelings. For those of us who have experienced attachment disruptions, occupying our bodies may not feel safe and we might resort to defensiveness, distortions or dissociation. When disconnected from ourselves we may jump too far into others around us abandoning our internal states and internal resources. Being our own safe haven and secure base means we need to occupy our own bodies. 

Tips for Being HERE Within Ourselves: 

1. Mindfulness techniques and meditation practices. My favorite way to cultivate mindfulness is through the Headspace app. 

2. Body awareness activities: yoga, dancing, walking meditation, body scans and breath work. 

3. Working with a somatic experiencing therapist or NeuroAective Relational Model therapist. 

4. Sitting with yourself quietly and being with whatever arises. Going for a walk or a drive without music or podcasts. 

EXPRESSED DELIGHT. When expressing delight for ourselves we are experiencing a sense of joy, delight and pleasure in our own being and existence. As children we get this from our caregivers when they take pride in us. When our adult relationships are at their best we experience expressed delight from our partners, friends and family. However, our positive sense of self cannot solely come from those around us. We need to establish a healthy level of expressed delight in ourselves to maintain a positive sense of self worth. Imagine making a mistake and your inner response being one of acceptance and self compassion. Imagine looking forward to time alone doing something you enjoy. Even a small shift in how we talk to ourselves can have significant impacts on our mental health. 

Tips for Expressed Delight in Ourselves: 

1. Watch Kristen Ne’s Ted Talk on Self-Compassion. 

2. Write yourself a letter of appreciation for all the things you enjoy about yourself. 

3. Take yourself out for a date and engage in things that bring you joy. 

4. Work to heal your inner critic through therapy especially with an Internal Family Systems therapist. 

ATTUNING. Attunement is at the center of secure attachment. When our needs go unmet as children we do not have attunement access to our needs as adults. Attuning to our needs can become incredibly difficult because it was safer to not have needs when they went unmet in childhood. We can struggle with identifying our inner states in order to make sense of them and soothe inevitable distress. When our caregivers did not meet our attunement needs, as adults we might look to other adults to fill in those gaps. However, relationships often suer when all our attachment needs are focused on one partner. Being detached from ourselves and our true needs will inhibit us from having an overall sense of well-being from within. Attuning to ourselves is an inner inquiry to what we are feeling, thinking, experiencing and needing. When we practice self-attunement we are able to make sense of our various emotional states, physiologically self-soothe and better respond to our environment. 

Tips for Self-Attunement: 

1. Consider reading Self-Compassion by Kristen Ne. 

2. Learn self-empathy techniques that help you identify your feelings and needs and as best you can meet those needs. 

3. Discover what activities, scents, and stimuli you most enjoy and engage with those things. For example: scents/sights/sounds, hobbies, and pass times. 

4. Develop a relationship with your inner nurturer and if needed work with a therapist to help you find it. 

RITUALS & ROUTINES. Develop rituals and routines for self-care. Children thrive in a structure and routine that gives them a sense of knowing what is ahead and what to expect. To an extent, adults also need similar routines to feel settled in their lives. We naturally have rhythms for sleep, eating, resting and sexual intimacy that when ignored leave us feeling unsettled and frustrated.

Understanding and honoring our natural rhythms and needs is essential for a secure attachment with ourselves. Routinely engaging in self-care can help us feel more centered and congruent with our values and actively commit to living them in our daily lives. 

Tips for Rituals & Routines for Self-Care: 

1. Consider what your ideal rhythms of the week might look like based on your specific needs for sleep, eating, rest and sex. Try altering your schedule to better fit these ideal rhythms and see how that feels. 

2. After discovering what activities, scents, and stimuli you most enjoy (from the self-attunement tips), regularly prioritize these things in your day and/or week. 

3. Determine any rites of passages or celebrations yet done in your life. Whether it be celebrating a job well-done, or a completion of a professional venture, or accomplishing a personal goal… set aside time to honor these events with people you love. 

4. Define what your secure self looks like? What values and principles underline this? What does this secure self look like/how do they behave? Explore what techniques and interventions best help you be congruent with your most secure self. 

TURNING TOWARDS. Turn towards ourselves after inner conflict. Treating ourselves with kindness and compassion when we make a mistake is imperative for a secure attachment within ourselves. When we fall short of our own standards, expectations or ethics a common response is to beat ourselves up. However, a persistent inner critic will get in the way of us becoming our best selves and correcting a mistake. Persistent internal criticism takes up cognitive bandwidth, adding stress to an already difficult situation and causing us to be less likely to respond in a productive way that matches our values and goals. One way to calm our inner critic is to understand its persistence. Many times a tenacious inner critic is trying to protect us from something. For example, our inner critic might want to protect us from embarrassment, harm, being disliked or failure. The irony is that although the intent is to protect, its strategy (shaming, shoulding, self-scolding) is incredibly counterproductive to it’s cause. Understanding our inner critic’s best intentions, not believing them but translating it’s intent to protect us, can alleviate the distress it’s causing. 

Tips for Turning Towards Yourself: 

1. Consider reading Freedom from your Inner Critic by Earley and Weiss. 
2. When your inner critic speaks up, try to dialogue with it instead of believing it and dwelling in it.
3. Activate your inner nurturer. When feeling internally criticized think of what your closest friend might say to you in that moment and provide that comfort to yourself. 
4. Consider using Dr. Dan Seigel’s wheel of awareness guided meditations to better understand ourselves especially when feeling distressed and criticized. 

Christy Lanterman, LPC