How to Change Your Attachment Style: What the Evidence Shows

About this tool

How to change your attachment style is a fair question with a yes attached, as long as the yes comes with its conditions. Adult attachment is measured as two continuous dimensions, attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance (Brennan, Clark and Shaver 1998), so change is a matter of degree rather than a switch between four boxes. In practice that means scoring lower on one dimension over months, not waking up as a different person. It moves for many people, it moves slowly, it tends to move further with help, and it does not move because you decided it should.

The mechanism is worth stating plainly, because it tells you where the lever is. An attachment pattern is a set of expectations about what happens when you need someone, built from a long run of experiences. Expectations like that update the same way any learned prediction updates: through repeated experience in which the expected thing does not happen, noticed at the time. Both halves matter. A partner who stays through a difficult week changes nothing if the week gets filed as luck. So the lever is a relationship, or a therapy, where the feared thing fails to arrive, plus enough attention to register that it failed to arrive.

Start with the stability research, because it sets the timescale. Fraley's meta-analysis of attachment stability from infancy to adulthood found modest to moderate stability across long developmental stretches. That result cuts both ways and it is usually quoted in only one direction. It means attachment patterns persist rather than resetting with each new relationship, so expecting a transformation in a month is unrealistic. It also means they are not fixed, since a correlation well short of one leaves considerable room for movement. Patterns that persist and still change are exactly what you would expect from learned expectations under slow revision.

Change in ordinary life is real, and it is not always improvement. Davila, Burge and Hammen followed 155 women from just after high school across the next two years and asked why attachment style changes. Their results favored an account in which fluctuation reflects individual vulnerability rather than circumstance alone: the women whose attachment shifted looked, on several measures, more like those who were consistently insecure than like the stably secure. Read that as a caution against counting every shift as progress. A style that moves around with each relationship may be unstable rather than improving, which is a different thing from the slow, durable change this page is about.

Earned security is the idea at the center of most articles on this topic, and the honest version is more interesting than the usual one. Roisman, Padron, Sroufe and Egeland examined adults who looked earned-secure by the usual retrospective route, meaning they described a difficult early life coherently and scored as secure now. Compared with continuously secure adults, these adults were not more likely to have been insecurely attached as infants, and they reported more depressive symptoms. The authors argued that the term should be reserved for people whose early adversity can be identified prospectively, ideally with observational data showing the change.

That finding does not mean nobody repairs anything. It means a retrospective story about a hard start plus a secure present is not proof of a repaired history, and it should not be sold as a certificate. Pathways do exist: Saunders and colleagues found that alternative support figures, meaning someone other than a primary caregiver who was reliably there in childhood, were associated with earned security. The practical reading is modest and useful. Other relationships count, support from someone who was not a primary caregiver still counts, and the measure of progress is how you behave when closeness is at stake, not how well you can narrate your upbringing.

The best evidenced route is therapy. Taylor and colleagues reviewed studies of attachment representations before and after psychological therapy in 2015, across interview and self-report measures, and found that security tended to increase and attachment anxiety to decrease, with findings on avoidance less clear and a call for controlled trials. The size of the change is not settled and the review is not a guarantee. But the structure of therapy happens to match the mechanism exactly: a regular relationship with someone who does not withdraw when you get demanding and does not disappear when you get distant, over enough weeks for the exception to stop being an exception.

Be careful with the shortcuts, especially the ones that look like evidence. Carnelley and Rowe primed people with a sense of a supportive figure on three occasions across three days in 2007, and found more positive views of self and relationships, and lower attachment anxiety, two days after the last prime, while a neutral group did not change. The authors point out that those effects lasted longer than priming effects usually do, which makes it a real finding about mechanism and still not a program you can run on yourself for a month. Treat guided visualizations and affirmations the same way: potentially pleasant, possibly useful as a way into practice, and not the thing that moves a dimension.

Three things reliably do not work. Deciding to be secure does not work, because a decision is not an experience. Reading about attachment styles does not work on its own; Levine and Heller's Attached is a popular introduction that explains the map well, and explaining a map is not the same as walking anywhere. And choosing a partner to fix it does not work, partly because it hands your pattern to someone else to manage and partly because the pattern will act on them too. A secure partner helps, and a partner is not a treatment plan. Nothing here is a diagnosis; insecure attachment is a common variation, not an illness.

The worksheet below is built around testing one expectation rather than improving in general. You write the expectation as a prediction specific enough to be wrong, name what would count as disconfirming, decide where such an experience could come from, and plan in advance for the most likely failure point: the moment it gets disconfirmed and you do not believe it. If you want the deeper version of the same exercise, a core-belief worksheet works on the belief underneath. For the style-specific plans, How to Heal Anxious Attachment and How to Heal Avoidant Attachment take the dimension that runs high for you and turn it into a month of practice.

If you are not sure which dimension is yours, measure before planning. Attachment Style Quiz gives a self-report read on both anxiety and avoidance, which is the information the worksheet asks for in its first section. The Four Attachment Styles page sets out the four patterns and how the two dimensions combine into them, which is the clearest way to see why the plans differ: the anxious and avoidant plans ask for opposite moves, so running the wrong one is wasted effort rather than a head start.

Two more pages are worth knowing about. The Secure Attachment Style page describes what the low-anxiety, low-avoidance end of both dimensions actually looks like day to day, which is a more useful target than the word secure on its own. And if you recognize both dimensions running high, the approach and withdraw cycle rather than a steady setting, How to Heal Fearful-Avoidant Attachment is the plan written for that combination, and it is the one most worth doing alongside a therapist rather than alone.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked that the page answers the change question with the stability and earned-security evidence stated at its real strength, including the limits of retrospectively defined earned security.

References

1. Brennan KA, Clark CL, Shaver PR. Self-report measurement of adult attachment: an integrative overview. In: Simpson JA, Rholes WS, eds. Attachment Theory and Close Relationships. Guilford Press; 1998:46-76.
2. Fraley RC. Attachment stability from infancy to adulthood: meta-analysis and dynamic modeling of developmental mechanisms. Personality and Social Psychology Review. 2002;6(2):123-151. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0602_03
3. Davila J, Burge D, Hammen C. Why does attachment style change? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1997;73(4):826-838. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.73.4.826
4. Roisman GI, Padron E, Sroufe LA, Egeland B. Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development. 2002;73(4):1204-1219. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00467
5. Saunders R, Jacobvitz D, Zaccagnino M, Beverung LM, Hazen N. Pathways to earned-security: the role of alternative support figures. Attachment & Human Development. 2011;13(4):403-420. doi:10.1080/14616734.2011.584405
6. Taylor P, Rietzschel J, Danquah A, Berry K. Changes in attachment representations during psychological therapy. Psychotherapy Research. 2015;25(2):222-238. doi:10.1080/10503307.2014.886791
7. Carnelley KB, Rowe AC. Repeated priming of attachment security influences later views of self and relationships. Personal Relationships. 2007;14(2):307-320. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6811.2007.00156.x

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