Practical tips to develop secure attachment

How to initiate the development of a secure attachment. Secure attachment has four distinctive features according to Bowlby:

1. Maintaining Proximity - The desire to be close to the people with whom we are connected.

2. Safe Haven - Returning to the attachment figure for comfort and safety in the face of fear or threat.

3. Safe Base - The attached figure acts as a safe base from which your child can explore the surrounding environment.

4. Separation Disorder - Anxiety that occurs in the absence of the attachment figure.

In order for you to develop a secure attachment you need to address these features within yourself.

A secure attachment also provides the following

• Provides a sense of safety and security.

• Regulates emotions, by soothing distress, creating joy, and supporting calm.

• Offers a secure base from which to explore.

• Trust that these will be available and provided.

In order to meet this requirements, self-parenting is required. Learn emotional intelligence and get to know yourself and understand why you do what you do. Love yourself with five love languages and five senses. Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness, self-management, motivation, empathy and social skills.

Learn virtue and be the person you want to meet in the world daily. Create a home in yourself for your inner child.

Five love languages

Quality time

In order to improve your emotional baseline or work towards creating secure base for your self-relationship, spend quality time with yourself. Maintain Proximity with yourself creating, playing, meditating and exercising.

When you have been out in the world with others, even a lover, come back home to yourself for comfort and safety. When you are triggered or have a life question, come home to SIFTSEM and address your trigger, and soothe , parent and release your trigger and create solutions.

Be the safe base from which you explore the world. As you go to work, rendezvous with a lover or friends and family or public, remember to go back home to you after all that at the end of each day. Make sure you take some time to yourself to meet your needs, hug, yourself, do something special daily for yourself and practice your self-care routine which is all about you. When you feel safe within , you also recognise unsafe surroundings and circles.

When you feel disconnected, triggered or a sense of rejection which leads to distress, which is typical of life experiences, learn to manage yourself with objective evaluation SIFTSEM and creating solutions.

Acts of service

Apply acts of service and sooth yourself with calming smells, sounds, drinks such as chamomile teas, meditation, reframes and gratitude. As you pay bills and do what you need to do to prevent distress, you feel safe in the world and in your body. Acts of self-care are also important to maintain your emotional baseline for safety.

Practice physical touch.

Regulatory hugs, rocking, self-massages and rubbing your hands together is soothing. Also, you may put your palm on your chest and move your hand up and down. Just as you feel supported and heard when someone hugs you, self-touch will also improve your self-relationship.

Words of affirmations

Words of affirmations repeated daily can make you feel heard. Write yourself little love notes. Use a vision board to visualise the state you wish to work towards. Just as you feel soothed, heard and acknowledged when someone else speaks words of affirmations to you, you will get the same feeling when you practice positive and reassuring self-talk.

Gifts

Getting yourself meaningful gifts especially the ones that are significant for your inner child or for your healing or when distressed, can help you feel connected. Make a habit of getting something for yourself when you "go away" in nature, or on holiday. Ensure you either wrap this up or put your name on it, or let yourself know that this is for you.

Explore things that matter to you and that are in your best interest. Create boundaries. Listen to, and pay attention to yourself, especially to your emotions and thoughts.

Get into the habit of practicing the pause and deep breathing, throughout your day. Dichotomy of control and freedom of choice. Learn to access a feeling word for a sensation or feeling in your body.

Develop a daily routine that starts from morning to night. When you get up, learn to imagine what a mother or lover would do to support a child, and do that for yourself. Get up with gratitude for life, health, food, shelter etc. Start from the inside-out.

Meditate to the cosmos.

Hug yourself and repeat affirmations.

Deep breathing exercises.

Catharsis.

Set an intention that your day is going to be bright, shiny and fun. " Today is going to be a good day!"

Segment intending throughout the day.

SIFTSEM for emotional regulation. Journal.

Love on the Second and Third Levels. You live in community. You have friends, or you can learn to make friends, have family, colleagues, and neighbours. Reach out to the immediate circle. Reach out also, to the greater public in need.

Notice kindness.

Say no to yourself if something is not in your best interest.

Eat healthy and exercise.

Bed time reflection.

Praise yourself for going through the day.

Count backwards from 100 to 0 in meditation.

Hug and soothe your inner child good night.

Set an intention for tomorrow.

Note that all these things are acts a mother would normally do for a child. However, as a grown adult, nobody has the capacity to do these for themselves as well as for you. It therefore falls on you to learn to create a secure relationship with yourself.

Create a safe Haven for you to go back to when feeling unsafe, to be your safe base from which to explore the world, and to minimise anxiety and distress and focus inwards to self-regulate. Prevent self-separating or disconnecting with yourself by looking outwards for validation and soothing.

You have the resources. With love on three levels, you can learn resourcefulness.