Our understanding of attachment patterns and development is ever-evolving, but many clinicians and researchers note a link between attachment patterns and developmental experiences. For example, when children experience absent or inconsistent responsivity, access to caregiving, and attunement,they can develop a nervous system that internalizes a resounding message:

Love is not reliable. 

You have to monitor it. 

Stay close to it. 

Because the moment you stop paying attention, it might disappear.

What emerges is a hypervigilant attachment system— one that scans the relational environment constantly for signs of threat. A slow text response. A subtle shift in tone. A partner who goes quiet on the couch. For the more anxiously attached, these signals can register as evidence:

“Something is wrong. I am not safe. I might be losing them.”

The prefrontal cortex— the logical, wise adult part of the brain— may know perfectly well that your partner is just tired or distracted. But in these moments, that’s not who’s running the show.

This is where a parts work framework becomes so illuminating. Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, the Structural Dissociation Model and other parts-based therapy approaches invite us to understand that we are not monolithic. We contain multitudes— and those ‘parts’ don’t always agree with each other.

When abandonment fear gets activated in an anxiously attached person, something like this is often happening internally:

One part— the wise, adaptive adult— knows the truth: “Your partner isn’t leaving. This is an old feeling. You’re safe right now.”

Another part— often experienced as a younger, more visceral inner child— is terrified. This part lives in the body. It’s the racing heart, the tight chest, the desperate urge to reach out and secure reassurance. This part doesn’t operate on logic. It operates on memory— specifically, on implicit emotional memories formed long before language existed to make sense of them.

These two parts are not in conflict because one is right and the other is wrong. They’re in conflict because they’re operating on different timelines. The wise adult is living in the present. The inner child is still back there— in the moment where love felt unsafe, inconsistent, or conditional.

Healing requires speaking to both.

Anxious attachment isn’t just psychological— it’s neurological. These patterns are encoded in the brain as neural networks: constellations of memory, emotion, bodily sensation, and meaning that fire together when activated by the right cue.

When the nervous system detects something that resembles early relational threat— even something very subtle— those networks light up. And in that moment, past and present collide into one another. You’re not just responding to what’s happening right now but rather, everything that has ever felt like this before.

This is why insight alone so often isn’t enough. You can know, intellectually, that your partner loves you. You can have journaled about it, talked about it in therapy, reassured yourself a hundred times. And still: the moment that old cue or trigger shows up, the network activates, and you’re back inside the feeling.

What actually creates lasting change at this level is a process called memory reconsolidation. When an old emotional memory is brought into conscious awareness within a new relational context— one that genuinely contradicts the original experience — the brain has the opportunity to update it. To rewrite the implicit conclusion from “Love is unsafe” to “This is different. I am safe here.”

This is one of the core mechanisms behind trauma-informed, Emotionally Focused Therapy. And it is precisely why this work often goes deeper than cognitive reframing or talk therapy alone.

Anxious attachment doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the context of a particular relationship— and here’s the truth:

The attachment patterns of your partner matter enormously.

In EFT, we speak a great deal about the pursuer-withdrawer cycle. It tends to unfold like this:

The anxiously attached partner, ‘the pursuer’ in EFT, detects disconnection, feels the spike of fear, and reaches. There are thousands of ways that people reach. They’re seeking reassurance and closeness.

The more avoidantly attached partner, referred to simply as ‘the withdrawer’ in EFT, experiences that reaching as overwhelming. Perhaps as an implicit accusation of their inadequacy. They pull back. Go quiet. Manage their own discomfort by creating distance.

Which, of course, then confirms the pursuer’s deepest fear: “I knew they were pulling away!”

This is the dance. And it isn’t about blame as both partners are doing exactly what their nervous systems learned to do in order to feel safe. But when these two attachment patterns meet, they amplify each other in painful ways. The more the pursuer reaches, the more the withdrawer retreats. The more they retreat, the more urgently the pursuer pursues.

Without intervention, this cycle doesn’t resolve on its own. It deepens. And over time, it can erode the very foundation of safety that anxious attachment is so desperately seeking.

Individual therapy is invaluable. It can build insight, help you understand your attachment history, develop tools for emotional regulation, and begin to update early neural networks. I recommend it often and believe deeply in its power.

And— it has real limits when it comes to attachment.

Here’s what I know from both clinical work and personal experience: attachment is an interpersonal phenomenon. It doesn’t just live inside you. It lives between you and the people you love. And many of the deepest activations— the ones that hijack the nervous system and pull you back into old patterns— happen specifically within the context of your closest relationships.

You can do years of individual work. You can develop genuine insight into where your anxious attachment came from. You can meditate, journal, and regulate beautifully in your therapist’s office. And then your partner goes quiet on the couch for twenty minutes, and suddenly you’re back in it.

This is not a failure of individual therapy. This is the nature of attachment. The nervous system learns in relationship and it often heals most deeply within the relationship, too.

This is why addressing attachment dynamics within the context of the actual relationship is so essential. When both partners are in the room— and both nervous systems are present— something different becomes possible. The cycle can be named. The underlying fears can be made visible to each other. And the relationship itself can become the source of new, corrective relational experience.

This is the heart of Emotionally Focused Therapy!

Something I think gets underplayed in the attachment literature: attachment styles are not static. They are not a diagnosis. They are not destiny.

I know this from my own lived experience as a polyamorous clinician.

My almost two-decade relationship with my nesting partner began with a recognizable dynamic: I leaned anxiously attached, he leaned avoidant. I pursued. He withdrew. We danced the dance. Then, about ten years in, we flipped entirely— he was presenting as more anxious, and I felt quite avoidant. Over time, through intentional relational work, honest conversations, and our own evolving self-awareness, something shifted again. What had once been a significant source of pain became a relationship I now experience as genuinely, deeply secure.

Convinced we had done the work, we opened our relationship. I was completely unprepared for my (relatively) calm and grounded system to be shaken up like a can of soda. The moment I began dating my now-partner of ten years, my anxious attachment blew up overnight. I remember thinking, “But I thought I already healed this!” 

That moment taught me something important: attachment is not only an intrapersonal experience— it is profoundly interpersonal. When I survey my relationships across the board, I can see how I present as secure in some contexts and highly anxious in others. We are relational creatures after all, constantly reading the data around us. Different cues, different partners, different relational histories— they can draw out very different versions of us.

None of us has a static attachment style. Our patterns shift depending on our own internal work and on the relational environments we inhabit. The goal isn’t to label yourself and call it done. The goal is to grow.

Real change in anxious attachment— the kind that reaches the body, not just the mind — requires a multi-layered approach.

For the Anxiously Attached Individual:

Developing a compassionate, curious relationship with the part of you that carries the fear— not to silence it, but to understand what it needs and what it’s been protecting you from. Experiential and relational therapies that incorporate parts work, somatic therapy, and EMDR can be especially powerful here, as they work at the level of implicit memory rather than just narrative understanding.

Exploring how early relational experiences shaped your nervous system’s expectations of love. Trauma-informed individual therapy can help begin to update those neural networks in a way that insight alone cannot.

Building distress tolerance and self-soothing capacity— not to suppress your feelings, but to create more choice in how you respond when activation happens. The goal is a wider window of tolerance, not emotional shutdown.

For the Relationship:

It is vital that both partners learn to name the cycle, moving away from “you’re too needy” and “you’re emotionally unavailable”, and toward: “we get caught in this pattern together, and it frightens us both.”

Creating new relational experiences that directly contradict the old neural narrative are also important for updating attachment systems. This is where EFT does its deepest work— in the room, in real time, with both nervous systems present and both partners given the chance to be truly seen.

Sometimes people are able to shift anxious attachment patterns through self-awareness, good reading, and supportive relationships. But often outside support makes the difference, particularly when these patterns are long-standing and deeply rooted in early relational trauma.

This is where working with a therapist trained in attachment and trauma becomes particularly valuable.

In my practice in Pasadena, I offer therapy for anxious attachment through an emotionally focused, trauma-informed lens. Whether you’re exploring this individually or hoping to address these patterns within your relationship, the work I do includes:

• Understanding how your early attachment history is shaping your current relational experience
• Working with the inner child and younger parts that carry fear and unmet longing
• Addressing the pursuer-withdrawer cycle and what it’s protecting each partner from
• Using memory reconsolidation and corrective emotional experiences to create lasting neurological change
• Building a more secure relational foundation— together

I also work with individuals and couples across California via telehealth.

If you’ve been told or have told yourself that you’re too sensitive, too needy, or too much, I’d offer this reframe: you’re not too much. 

You’re a person whose nervous system learned, in a very formative context, that love was unpredictable. That is a completely understandable adaptation— one that made sense then, even if it’s costing you now.

The goal of this work isn’t to become someone who doesn’t feel deeply. The goal is to help the part of you that carries the fear learn something new: that you are here, in a different story, and that this time, it really can be different.

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to keep navigating it alone. Reach out to schedule a consultation as I’d be honored to be part of that journey.

I work with couples in Pasadena and throughout California who are navigating relationship crossroads, high conflict, and questions about whether their partnership can be repaired.