Can You Change Your Attachment Style? The Neuroscience of Earned Security

The question comes up constantly: Can attachment styles actually change? Or are we stuck with the relational blueprints formed in early childhood, doomed to repeat the same anxious-avoidant dances for the rest of our lives?

The short answer: Yes. Attachment styles can change. But not through willpower, positive thinking, or simply "wanting it enough." The mechanisms are more interesting—and more embodied—than that.

The long answer involves neuroplasticity, polyvagal regulation, and something researchers call earned secure attachment. It turns out that new relational experiences don't just make you feel better. They literally update your nervous system's predictive model of relationships. And that changes everything.

The Plastic Brain: Why Change Is Possible

Neuroplasticity is the nervous system's ability to reorganize itself—forming new neural connections, pruning old ones, and updating the weights of predictions based on experience. This isn't just a feature of early development. It continues throughout life, though the rate and ease of change shift with age.

Your attachment patterns are encoded as synaptic weights—the relative strength of connections between neurons. These weights determine which predictions your brain makes about relationships. When someone gets close, does your nervous system predict safety or threat? When you need support, does your body expect attunement or disappointment?

These predictions aren't fixed. They're statistical summaries of your relational history, constantly updated by new data. Every interaction either confirms or contradicts your existing model. And when contradictions accumulate, the model shifts.

But here's the catch: the nervous system is conservative. It doesn't update easily. A single positive experience won't overwrite years of anxious or avoidant encoding. The brain is optimized for stability, not rapid relearning. Your old predictions have been reinforced thousands of times. They're efficient—even if they're dysfunctional.

So change requires something more than one-off good experiences. It requires sustained, consistent relational input that systematically contradicts the old model.

Earned Secure Attachment: The Research

The concept of earned secure attachment comes from adult attachment research. It describes adults who report insecure childhood attachment (anxious, avoidant, or disorganized) but display secure attachment patterns in adulthood. They've somehow "earned" security despite not receiving it early on.

How common is this? Studies vary, but estimates suggest that 20-30% of adults with insecure early attachment show earned security later in life (Roisman et al., 2002). That's substantial. It means that early attachment isn't destiny.

What predicts earned security? Several factors emerge:

1. Long-term relationships with secure partners. Being in a relationship with someone who is consistently responsive, emotionally available, and non-threatening gradually updates your model. Your nervous system learns that closeness doesn't mean engulfment (if you're avoidant) or abandonment (if you're anxious).

2. Effective psychotherapy. Particularly attachment-focused therapy, where the therapeutic relationship itself serves as a new relational model. The therapist provides consistent attunement, safe rupture-and-repair cycles, and regulated co-presence. Over time, this becomes internalized.

3. Reflective capacity. People who develop earned security often show high levels of metacognitive awareness—the ability to reflect on their own attachment patterns, recognize when they're being triggered, and consciously modulate their responses. This isn't about suppressing emotions. It's about recognizing the predictive model at work and not being enslaved by it.

4. Sustained corrective experiences. One therapist, one relationship, one friend isn't usually enough. Earned security tends to emerge from multiple, overlapping contexts of secure relating: a good partnership, a trusted therapist, a secure friend group, a healthy community. The model updates when evidence accumulates.

The key insight: Your attachment style is a model, not an identity. Models update with data. Give your nervous system enough contradictory evidence, and it will revise its predictions.

Co-Regulation: The Mechanism of Change

Co-regulation is the process by which one nervous system helps regulate another. It's the foundational mechanism of secure attachment—and the mechanism through which insecure attachment can be repaired.

When an infant is distressed, the caregiver's regulated state literally entrains the infant's dysregulated state. The parent's calm breathing, soothing voice, and steady heartbeat act as external regulators. Over time, the infant internalizes these patterns, developing self-regulation capacity.

But this process doesn't stop in childhood. Adult nervous systems remain open to co-regulation throughout life. When you're with someone whose nervous system is regulated, your system begins to synchronize with theirs. Your heart rate variability increases. Your breath deepens. Your polyvagal state shifts from sympathetic (fight/flight) or dorsal vagal (shutdown) toward ventral vagal (social engagement).

This isn't mysticism. It's measurable physiology. Cardiac synchrony, respiratory coupling, and neural entrainment have all been documented in interpersonal contexts (Feldman, 2012). Your body literally tunes to the bodies around you.

For someone with insecure attachment, repeated co-regulation experiences with secure others gradually shift the baseline. Your nervous system learns that regulation is possible—that other people can be sources of safety rather than sources of threat or disappointment. This learning doesn't happen through words or insights. It happens through repeated embodied experiences of safe connection.

The predictive model updates because the body receives new data: "When I reach out, I'm met with attunement. When I'm dysregulated, proximity to this person helps me return to regulation. When I make a bid for connection, it's reciprocated."

Over time, these updated predictions generalize. You begin to expect attunement more broadly. Your threshold for perceived threat lowers. Your capacity for closeness increases. You develop earned security.

Polyvagal Pathways: Why 'Just Calm Down' Doesn't Work

The polyvagal theory (Stephen Porges) offers a neurobiological explanation for why changing attachment patterns is so hard—and why certain interventions work better than others.

The autonomic nervous system has three hierarchical response systems:

1. Ventral vagal (social engagement): The evolutionarily newest system. Supports connection, communication, and co-regulation. Active when you feel safe.

2. Sympathetic (mobilization): Fight-or-flight. Active when you perceive threat but believe you can escape or overcome it.

3. Dorsal vagal (immobilization): Shutdown, freeze, dissociation. Active when threat feels inescapable.

In secure attachment, the ventral vagal system is the baseline. You default to social engagement. When stress arises, you can mobilize (sympathetic) or seek co-regulation (ventral vagal) and return to baseline relatively quickly.

In insecure attachment, the baseline shifts. Anxious attachment often involves chronic sympathetic activation—the nervous system is constantly scanning for threat, hypervigilant to signs of abandonment. Avoidant attachment often involves early sympathetic activation followed by dorsal vagal shutdown—the system learns to preemptively deactivate to avoid the pain of unmet needs. Disorganized attachment involves oscillation between sympathetic hyperarousal and dorsal vagal collapse.

Here's why "just calm down" doesn't work: You can't access the ventral vagal system from a state of sympathetic activation or dorsal vagal shutdown through willpower alone. The pathways don't connect that way.

Polyvagal interventions work differently. They create conditions for the ventral vagal system to come online by:

- Establishing neuroception of safety. This is subconscious detection of safety cues: eye contact, prosodic voice, non-threatening body language. You can't think your way into feeling safe. Your autonomic nervous system detects it through specific sensory inputs.

- Co-regulation. Being in the presence of someone whose ventral vagal system is active allows your system to entrain with theirs.

- Somatic practices. Breathwork, vocalization, movement, and touch can directly activate the ventral vagal system by stimulating the vagus nerve.

- Gradual exposure. Small, manageable doses of connection allow the nervous system to practice ventral vagal engagement without triggering sympathetic defense or dorsal vagal shutdown.

This is why changing attachment patterns requires more than insight. Your autonomic nervous system needs repeated experiences of safety, co-regulation, and successful social engagement to update its model.

Practical Pathways to Earned Security

So how do you actually change your attachment style? Not through a list of tips, but through a sustained commitment to creating the conditions for nervous system updating. Here are the pathways that research and clinical practice suggest work:

1. Long-Term Relational Contexts

Find and maintain relationships with securely attached people. This might be a romantic partner, a close friend, a therapist, or a mentor. The key is consistency over time. Your nervous system needs repeated evidence that this person is reliably safe, attuned, and non-threatening.

If you're anxiously attached, this means learning to tolerate closeness without collapsing into fusion or hypervigilance. If you're avoidantly attached, this means practicing vulnerability and learning that dependency doesn't mean engulfment.

The relationship will trigger your attachment system. That's the point. But in a secure relational context, those triggers become opportunities for updating rather than confirmation of old predictions.

2. Attachment-Informed Therapy

Not all therapy is equally effective for attachment repair. What works:

- Therapists who explicitly work with attachment. They understand that the therapeutic relationship is the primary mechanism of change, not just a context for delivering techniques.

- Somatic and polyvagal-informed approaches. Therapies that work directly with the nervous system: Somatic Experiencing, NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy).

- Rupture and repair. Secure attachment doesn't mean no conflict or disconnection. It means effective repair. A good therapist will navigate ruptures with you—misunderstandings, missed attunements, moments of disconnection—and model how to repair them.

The therapy relationship itself becomes a new relational template. Your nervous system learns: "When I express a need, it's met. When we disconnect, we reconnect. Vulnerability doesn't lead to abandonment or engulfment."

3. Polyvagal Practices

Direct nervous system interventions can support the updating process:

- Breathwork. Slow, diaphragmatic breathing activates the ventral vagal system. Try 4-6 breaths per minute with longer exhales than inhales (e.g., inhale for 4 counts, exhale for 6 counts).

- Vocalization. Humming, chanting, singing. The vagus nerve innervates the vocal cords. Sound vibration stimulates vagal tone.

- Eye contact and facial engagement. Safe eye contact with trusted people activates social engagement circuits. This is why video calls feel more connecting than phone calls.

- Movement. Gentle, embodied movement practices (yoga, dance, tai chi) help integrate the nervous system and shift autonomic states.

- Touch. Safe, consensual touch (from partners, friends, massage therapists, somatic practitioners) activates ventral vagal pathways and supports co-regulation.

4. Metacognitive Awareness

Developing the ability to observe your attachment patterns without being controlled by them. This doesn't mean suppressing your needs or fears. It means recognizing when your predictive model is running and choosing whether to act on it.

Journaling can help. Track your relational patterns:

- What triggers anxious activation or avoidant withdrawal? - What sensations accompany those triggers? - What old predictions are running? (e.g., "If I'm vulnerable, I'll be rejected." "If I get too close, I'll be trapped.") - What evidence contradicts those predictions?

Over time, this creates space between the prediction and the response. You can feel the pull of anxious clinging or avoidant distancing without automatically enacting it.

5. Community and Belonging

Attachment doesn't just happen in dyads. It happens in groups. Being part of a secure community—whether a spiritual community, a tight-knit friend group, a team, or a collective—provides multiple sources of co-regulation and relational updating.

The more contexts you have where connection feels safe, the more your nervous system updates its baseline expectations.

Why It Takes Time (And Why That's Not a Failure)

Here's what's hard: changing attachment patterns is slow. Frustratingly slow. You might understand your patterns intellectually long before your nervous system updates. You might have peak experiences of security—moments where connection feels easy and safe—and then revert to old patterns the next day.

This isn't failure. It's how nervous system learning works.

Remember: your current attachment patterns were built through thousands of relational experiences in early life. They're deeply encoded. The brain doesn't easily overwrite that level of reinforcement. What it can do is gradually shift the weights—making old predictions less dominant and new predictions more likely.

Researchers estimate that significant attachment style shifts take 1-3 years of consistent corrective experience (Davila et al., 2005). Not weeks. Not months. Years. This matches what therapists report: clients often need 2-3 years of therapy (or more) before their baseline attachment security shifts noticeably.

But here's the good news: you don't have to wait years before things feel better. The process isn't binary. You don't stay insecurely attached until some magic threshold when you suddenly become secure. The shift is gradual. After six months of consistent co-regulation, you might notice slightly less reactivity. After a year, you might find yourself reaching out for support more easily. After two years, you might realize that closeness no longer triggers the same level of panic or shutdown.

The model is updating incrementally. Each positive relational experience is data. And the nervous system, conservative as it is, does eventually revise its predictions when the evidence accumulates.

The Reframe: Attachment as Model, Not Identity

The most important shift isn't in your attachment style itself. It's in how you relate to your attachment style.

Stop treating attachment patterns as identity. "I'm anxiously attached" becomes a fixed self-concept, a label that constricts possibility. It's more accurate—and more useful—to say: "My nervous system currently predicts that closeness leads to abandonment, based on early relational data."

That reframe opens the door to change. Models can update. Predictions can revise. New data can shift the weights.

You're not broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: predict based on past patterns to minimize surprise and maximize survival. The problem isn't the mechanism. The problem is that the patterns it learned early on aren't serving you well in adult relationships.

So the question isn't "Am I fundamentally flawed?" The question is: "What relational experiences will give my nervous system the data it needs to update its model?"

And then: "Am I willing to commit to creating those conditions, even though the process is slow and uncomfortable?"

Because that's what it takes. Not a quick fix. Not a technique. A sustained, embodied commitment to new relational patterns—repeated co-regulation, safe vulnerability, reliable attunement—until your nervous system finally accepts the new data and revises its predictions.

That's earned security. And it's available to you.

Further Reading

- Roisman, G. I., Padron, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). "Earned-Secure Attachment Status in Retrospect and Prospect." Child Development, 73(4), 1204-1219.

- Feldman, R. (2012). "Parent-Infant Synchrony: A Biobehavioral Model of Mutual Influences in the Formation of Affiliative Bonds." Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 77(2), 42-51.

- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton.

- Davila, J., Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (2005). "Attachment Change Processes in the Early Years of Marriage." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(5), 783-802.

- Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

- Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. New York: Routledge.

This is Part 10 of the Polyvagal Theory & Attachment series, exploring the neuroscience of relational patterns and nervous system regulation. Next: "Synthesis: Attachment as Coherence—Predictive Models, Markov Blankets, and Relational Geometry."