How Can I Become More Secure?
How can I become more secure?
5 Things You Need to Do to Earn Attachment Security
Full article published in 2019 in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, winner of the 2020 Outstanding Research Publication Award from the AAMFT Research and Education Foundation.
If you’ve read or heard anything about attachment styles, taken any quizzes or questionnaires, or somehow come to the conclusion that you might not have a secure attachment style, you might be wondering, “Well, how DO I become more secure?”
In a recent, award-winning study on this very topic (Dansby Olufowote et al., 2019), I and my colleagues found some answers that I want to share with you today. Our in-depth study with 20 people (15 women and 5 men) helped us develop a theory of how people earn secure attachment. “Earned secure” is the term for those that had insecure (anxious or avoidant) bonds with their caregivers in childhood but are now securely attached in their primary relationships (partner/spouse, friends, family, etc).
Overall, how we become more secure involves 5 components: Intrapsychic (internal/mental) changes, Interpersonal changes, and adopting meta-characteristics and practices that tie together the internal and interpersonal changes — more on that below.
Figure 1. Process Model of Earning Secure Attachment
Copyright belongs to the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
Meta-Conditions of Earning Attachment Security
There are several conditions that I mentioned in the top of this post that facilitate the overall change process and are necessary for ongoing progress. The most important of these conditions are (1) being intentional about attachment-focused change and (2) having secure surrogate attachment figures to connect with and learn from. Other, less important conditions that may aid you in your journey to becoming more secure include overcoming setbacks and barriers to growth and using therapy, education, and self-help resources.
1. Being intentional about attachment-focused change
Being intentional was the most crucial condition that ensured our participants successfully earned attachment security. They had to realize that change does not happen accidentally. Being intentional involved being deliberate in their efforts and showing initiative and diligence.
The process of becoming more securely attached is hard and often grueling, and if you undertake this journey, you will need to be deliberate and intentional throughout several junctions of the process, especially in overcoming setback and barriers to your growth.
From stubbornness to resolve. The biggest part about being intentional about our positive attachment change is shifting from stubborn to resolved. Ultimately, to become more secure, we must shift away from stubbornness, which keeps us clenching tightly to our old ways, and move toward resolve for a new way of life. Resolving that we will be secure is an important commitment that helps us stick with the process when it gets tough.
2. Having Surrogate Attachment Figures
Most people need to observe what a new way of life looks like before they can successfully adopt it, and that was true for our participants. They needed to observe people who were living securely attached lives, and they often did so from within surrogate attachment relationships. Surrogate attachment figures might be early parent figures (safe adults who take a kid under their wing and model secure behaviors), God and faith communities, or spouses, mentors, or friends. Whoever the figure is, surrogate attachment relationships stand in the gap where a person’s own primary caregivers were not secure, and they model what secure attachment looks and feels like.
Intrapsychic Changes
3.Redefinging your identity and worth
Intrapsychic changes refer to internal, mental/cognitive shifts you make. The main intrapsychic change that needs to happen for you to become more secure is “redefining your identity and worth,” and this was true for all of our participants. There comes a point where, if you want to become more secure than you are right now, you have to be able to look at yourself and say, “This isn’t who I want to be.”
*If you have experienced trauma and still see yourself as a victim, you need to first relinquish your victim mentality and shift into a resilient mindset of being a survivor as part of your process of redefining your identity and worth.
Interpersonal Changes
The other major category of changes one must make to earn attachment security is to make significant interpersonal changes. Specifically, these changes need to occur along two distinct paths: “Family of Origin Work” and what we identified as “Reaching Outward”.
4. Family of Origin Work
When you start to tackle the family of origin work, it is important to start by making peace with the past. This means you work to change your views, expectations, and feelings toward your caregivers. This might look like you stop striving for your parents’ approval, and realizing there are more to family relationships than what you might’ve grown up seeing. Then, you find a way to forgive your caregivers for being unsafe, absent, abusive, or anything else that kept you from having a secure relationship with them. After that, you “revisit” your caregivers from a new lens and see them with more clarity, more truth, and more grace and mercy, as most of our parents/primary caregivers did the best they could with what they had or knew at the time.
An important note here: This might mean that you finally admit to yourself that they hurt you, or abandoned you, or were unreliable. This does not necessarily mean that you have to reunite with them or that a repaired relationship with them is even possible. Especially if they abused you, forgiving them is not the same thing as being in relationship with them again or putting yourself back into unsafe situations.
Doing family of origin work is often best done within the safety of a therapeutic relationship with a licensed therapist. If you are ready to start your own journey toward attachment security, start looking for a good fit in a therapist you can trust and open up to who has expertise in some of the obstacles you need to overcome (e.g. specializing in trauma recovery).
5. Reaching Outward
After doing some family of origin work, it is also important to reach outward. “Reaching Outward” refers to paying forward the security you have earned and becoming a secure figure in someone else’s life. This might look like getting more involved in your community by becoming a big brother or big sister to a school-aged child, becoming a foster parent, or adopting a child. If you have children of your own, it definitely looks like re-examining your own parenting practices and, where necessary, making your interactions with your children more secure (i.e. more available, responsive).
The Relationship Between Intrapsychic and Interpersonal Changes
Now, intrapsychic and interpersonal change influence one another in the process to become more secure, though the relationship is not equal. Based on our participants’ experiences, you can make intrapsychic changes before interpersonal changes and experience some positive change. However, you will likely not be able to make interpersonal change without also making internal changes. That said, once you start making both kinds of changes (internal and external) the process snowballs and is ongoing.
Gender Differences in Becoming More Securely Attached
If you’re male, there may be a few additional things you will need to be aware of and address in your journey toward earning security. Our male participants talked about needing to question and re-examine cultural expectations related to being male and then choose behaviors not always associated with masculinity (like showing a “softer side” or being vulnerable with others). Connecting with a male mentor who is secure/has earned his security may help support you (this would also be an example of a substitute attachment figure mentioned above!).
Keep the Conversation Going
Tried any of these strategies already? If so, how is it going? Is your experience different from our participants? Leave a comment or send us a message, and let’s keep the conversation going. Helping people become more secure is so important, and our research was by no means exhaustive. On the contrary, our research resulted in a theory of how the process of earning security works, and future research will expand this theory to include more diverse populations, ages, genders, singles, and people who are not professional therapists. If you have a story to share, we would love to hear it!
Want a copy of the study? Send me an email, and I’ll get it in your hands!
Reference
Dansby Olufowote, R. A., Fife, S. T., Schleiden, C., Whiting, J. B. (2019). How can I become more secure?: A grounded theory of earning secure attachment. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 46(3). doi: 10.1111/jmft.12409
2020 AAMFT Foundation Outstanding Research Publication Award, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Research & Education Foundation, Alexandria, Virginia.
