If You're Anxiously Attached, Here's How to Start Healing From Your Ex (According to a Breakup Coach)
Brought to you by The anxiously-attached girl’s guide to getting over a breakup 16-day series. Full details here.
Women with anxious attachments have a unique way of navigating their relationships and breakups.
They’re not like avoidantly-attached people who can just compartmentalize and not think much about their breakups. (That’s borderline impossible for us.)
They’re also not secure where they do some quality self-reflection but not dwell. We dwell…until the cows come home.
Anxiously attached women dwell, ruminate and ride the emotional rollercoaster of emotions. We want to get off the damn ride but we aren’t 100% sure how!
So today, as your conscious breakup coach who’s also anxiously-attached (and married), here’s a little roadmap to help you build awareness around what you can start doing to support yourself. PS. My 16-day Getting Through This Email Series takes you through every single one of these in more in-depth and in a way that feels motivating and natural for you as an anxiously attached woman. Details here.
Anxiously attached women need to work on:
Trusting their guts. Because we have a strong desire for connection and intimacy, we sometimes can override the “reality” of a relationship out of fear of losing that relationship, even if it’s not the healthiest for us. But we can stay so long that we lose trust in our own perception and end up crushing our souls as a result. And then we second-guess ourselves in new relationships because we haven’t seen the reasons that keep us to long in our relationships when there were some or many red flags.
The real reason we stay longer than we should in relationships. Those of us anxiously-attached, we have an undercurrent fear of abandonment, which is why we stay longer than we do, and settle for less than we deserve in a lot of cases. We can get easily breadcrumbed while dating, because any attention is good attention to us as a result of being emotionally starved as children. We can make a simple text from our ex mean that he wants us back and that we consider any small gesture he does as something meaningful because we are starved of what healthy and proper work actually looks like.
Getting extra support through the emotional rollercoasters. Avoidantly-attached and securely-attached people often don’t need much support while going through a breakup, but us anxiously-attached ladies—we need it. That’s why I started my breakup coaching business because we need a judgment-free space to talk about sometimes the exact same thing 48 different times to 10 different people….all in the same day sometimes. It’s funny, but it’s true. It’s also part of us learning to trust our guts. The more we talk to people who are willing to listen from a place of love, the more we feel safe trusting ourselves.
Finding validation and support from people who have been in their shoes who might have an anxious attachment style too. There’s a little piece of us that dies every time someone in our life (who doesn’t get our situation or isn’t anxiously-attached) says “GET OVER IT ALREADY!!!!” Right? Like that’s going to help us heal…not. You need someone who really honours and respects where you’re at in your journey and that can be any professional or specifically someone who has been working through their anxious attachment and come out the other side, in a relationship that mirrors what you want or in general he or she is someone you aspire to be like.
Putting their important time and energy into themselves now since that is not first nature to them. Because you were so “partner focused” in your last relationship, quite literally building up your ex and creating a life for them with you just in it, you essentially let yourself be the last person you thought of. We anxiously-attached ladies need to learn to love ourselves whole-heartedly, and start from scratch. You could be 40 or 50 reading this with 3.3 kids, and have lived your whole life for others. But it’s never too late to start uncovering what fills your cup and in so doing—you build a beautiful relationship with yourself. Why wouldn’t you want to—after all, you’re absolutely fabulous. About time you see that.
These really are just five of the most important things for you to start thinking about as you work through your breakup. Your attachment style creates a roadmap into how you can start to heal, and if you need my support, you can always book a session or enroll in my 16-day email series here.
