How understanding the shared root of anxious and avoidant styles—and shifting from self-esteem to self-compassion—heals deep attachment shame.
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Key Takeaways:
- The Core Wound is the Same: Whether you lean anxious or avoidant, almost all attachment insecurity stems from a fear of losing safe emotional connection and acceptance.
- The Trap of Self-Esteem: Self-esteem relies heavily on external success and peer comparison, making it fragile when we inevitably fail.
- Why Self-Compassion Works: Based on Kristin Neff’s framework, self-compassion provides a stable foundation that holds us through failure rather than abandoning us when we mess up.
- Disarming Shame: Self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness dismantle the shame that keeps anxious and avoidant styles stuck in defensive patterns.
The Common Ground Behind Anxious and Avoidant Styles
We think of attachment styles as inherently different—ambivalent/anxious on one end and avoidant on the extreme other. This is true when you talk about their adaptations to not getting their needs met. BUT the wounds are very similar.
In fact, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find that most insecurity comes down to fear of abandonment and/or rejection, and when I say this, I don’t necessarily mean physical abandonment. I mean abandonment in that there is a threat or loss of safe emotional connection and acceptance from an attachment figure. Even fear of engulfment can be broken down to this. Fear of engulfment stems from a prior attachment figure, who was supposed to be their safe harbor, overwhelming the child with emotional demands they didn’t know how to meet. To survive that, the child had to sacrifice their own needs and lost their sense of self in the process.
And if you think about about what fear of rejection/abandonment is and how to alleviate it, the goals are similar, regardless of attachment style—learning to accept ourselves as we are with all of our imperfections, learning how to sit in the discomfort of our feelings and not acting on them, learning effective ways to voice needs clearly, learning to trust ourselves and others, etc.
The Flaw in How We Approach Self-Worth
One of the best ways to help heal attachment wounds is strengthening our sense of self-worth. This is the foundation that keeps us resilient and able to ride the crest and falls of life. With high self-worth, we trust ourselves and our abilities to overcome challenges. Meaning, we don’t need to plan for everything that can go wrong tomorrow—because whatever happens, we know we can take care of it.
It shouldn’t surprise you that a lot of therapy modalities emphasize building self-worth as part of the healing process. The interesting thing is that many therapists emphasize building self-worth through building self-esteem. And recent research tells us that might not be the best way.
Why Self-Esteem Isn’t Enough
According to Kristin Neff, self-worth is affected by two components: self-esteem and self-compassion.
Self-esteem is how we evaluate our worthiness or value as a person based on our perceived competence in what we consider important areas of our lives. In many ways, self-esteem relies largely on external measures—the opinions of others, grades, winning/losing, acceptance among peers, etc.
If you think about it, that actually invites comparison to others, a huge issue today especially on social media, right?
Furthermore, it means that when we achieve things, we get a huge boost to our self-esteem. But if we fail…we take a huge hit to our self-esteem. And we fail a lot in life. It’s how we learn. It’s not particularly stable.
The Participation Trophy Trap
One way to look at it is a real life example. Ever heard a grouchy old person complain, “Everybody gets a trophy now, whether they’ve earned it or not.” Well, it’s not entirely wrong to be concerned about that.
Studies show that these efforts to give positive feedback indiscriminately don’t actually build self-esteem.
Why?
Because self-esteem doesn’t give us better grades. Better grades give us self-esteem.
Meaning: if we give everyone participation trophies, we think we are giving them self-esteem so they will feel good about themselves and perform better. Instead we’re temporarily raising self-esteem without them necessarily developing the skills they need in order to actually do well as they move on. We’re setting them up to fail and take a huge hit to self esteem.
Another way to look at it is many of us learn by failing and trying again. Failure isn’t something to be ashamed of. We all fail sometimes. A lot for some of us. What makes us successful in the long run is getting back up and trying again. If we aren’t allowing children to fail, we’re taking away their ability to withstand inevitable future failure. We’re taking away their ability to weather the storms of life.
The Healing Power of Self-Compassion
All of this to say that self-esteem is not the cure-all psychology used to insist it was. It’s unstable. Because what do we do when we fail? Just find something else to succeed at?
More and more therapists are emphasizing self-compassion instead. Compassion for others is something we are more likely very familiar with. It’s supporting someone when they are suffering. What comes a lot harder to us is self-compassion.
Self-compassion is extending that care and support to ourselves when we suffer, whether it’s our own fault or not. Neff divides self-compassion into 3 areas:
- Self-kindness : to be caring and understanding to ourselves instead of critical or judgmental.
- Common humanity: the shared human condition of imperfection, failure, mistakes, etc. We all make mistakes.
- Mindfulness: being present in the moment and not ignoring nor ruminating on things we dislike about ourselves. Trying to distance ourselves from drowning in the feelings and instead seeing it clearly from above, if that makes sense.
Compassion has what self-esteem lacks—it still holds us when we fail. When we make mistakes. This makes it far more resilient and stable. It’s more reliable to keep our inner strength from failing us.
Dismantling Attachment Shame
I don’t think people spend enough time talking about how deeply shame affects us in attachment dynamics.
- Ambivalents carry shame about “being too emotional,” or misinterpreting things, being wrong, being not good enough.
- Avoidants struggle a lot with shame. It’s actually something that hits deeper for them. Many of them learned to be ashamed basically for existing if they weren’t perfect (especially those who had parents who withdrew love when they made mistakes). So for many of them, their shame is from imperfection (and that should explain why they get so defensive when a flaw is pointed out, no matter how kindly—they are bracing for punishment and are trying to defend themselves from it).
Self-compassion helps us reduce shame considerably. We accept ourselves for our flawed and imperfect nature. We understand why we react the way we do. We forgive ourselves for it. And we work on moving forward.
So hopefully you show yourself more compassion starting now. Comfort yourself as you would a friend. Speak to yourself gently and kindly. Forgive yourself. It takes intentionality, but you build it one step at a time 💜
Further Reading & Resources
If you want to dive deeper into attachment healing, self-compassion, and emotional regulation, here are a few highly recommended books and tools:
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach, Ph.D. — A deep dive into freeing ourselves from the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with us.
Fierce Self-Compassion / Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff, Ph.D. — The foundational science and practical guidance on shifting away from fragile self-esteem toward stable self-compassion.
The Power of Attachment by Diane Poole Heller, Ph.D. — An accessible, compassionate breakdown of how attachment styles form and how we can reparent ourselves into earned secure attachment.
The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff & Christopher Germer — A hands-on, practical guide filled with prompts and exercises to build self-kindness when shame or anxiety spikes.