Breaking the Cycle of Insecure Attachment as a Parent
The cycle of insecure attachment is the repeated pattern through which attachment insecurity is passed from one generation to the next.
For instance, if a parent is often emotionally distant, a child can develop avoidant attachment and learn to suppress their emotions to attain proximity and avoid disappointment. Similarly, if a parent is inconsistently responsive, a child could develop anxious attachment and become overly focused on seeking reassurance. Disorganized attachment can result from a chaotic parenting style, leaving a child unsure whether their needs will be met.
Without healing, a child could grow up and carry the same patterns into their own parenting style, continuing the cycle.
Research on attachment recovery shows that with self-awareness and healing from past experience, it is possible to break the cycle of insecure attachment.1 Mental health professionals can guide you in this process.
On this page, you’ll learn:
- The steps to recognize your attachment patterns
- How past experiences can influence parenting
- How to prevent passing trauma to children
- Steps to actively building a more secure, connected relationship with your child
How Can Parents Break the Cycle of Insecure Attachment?
The cycle of insecure attachment can be broken when parents gain insight into their attachment history, work through unresolved trauma, and learn to respond sensitively to their children. This process is called “earned security.” It creates a new relational blueprint for the next generation to grow up with a secure base.2
The following sections cover ways of breaking the cycle of insecure attachment.
Recognize Your Own Attachment Style
Attachment styles are deeply rooted patterns of how we relate to others, and they often form during early childhood based on the care we received.
There are four main attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized.3 A secure attachment develops when a child consistently experiences a caregiver who is responsive, attuned, and emotionally available.
Insecure attachment styles, which include anxious, avoidant, or disorganized, form when caregiving is inconsistent, neglectful, overly intrusive, or frightening.
Research shows that adults often carry the same attachment patterns into their parenting unless they engage in self-awareness and intentional healing.4 Understanding your own attachment style means acknowledging the emotional templates you’ve inherited and how they influence your parenting.
Several validated tools for identifying someone’s attachment style have been developed through psychological research. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), for example, explores your early relationships with caregivers and how you narrate those experiences. The AAI is considered the “gold standard” in attachment research.5
Accept the Impact of Your Childhood Trauma
When children’s emotional needs aren’t met, their stress response systems are affected and their brains may adapt in ways that prioritize survival over secure connection.
Acknowledging your trauma does not mean blaming your parents. Instead, it means understanding how your early environment shaped your nervous system, emotional responses, and relationship patterns. For instance, if you were punished for showing emotion as a child, you may now struggle to tolerate your child’s distress.
Your reactions as a parent in moments of anger, fear, and so on, can often be traced back to unresolved emotional pain, even if you’re not consciously aware of it.
Making peace with your childhood trauma requires compassion and courage. You have to allow yourself to feel grief for what you didn’t receive and recognize how that unmet need still echoes in your life today.
Parents who can construct a coherent and reflective narrative of their own childhood are significantly more likely to form secure attachments with their children.6
Build Emotional Awareness and Regulation Skills
Emotional awareness means being able to recognize and name your feelings as they arise. Regulation refers to the ability to manage these feelings so they don’t harm your relationship with your child. Both are core components of what psychologists call “emotional attunement,” a skill that securely attached parents show.7
To build emotional awareness:
- Notice physical changes in your body when you feel triggered by your child’s actions, such as a tight chest, clenched jaw, racing heart, or shallow breathing
- Label your emotions, for example, “I feel anxious,” or “I feel overwhelmed, ” to improve self-control
- Pay attention to what situations or behaviors from your child bring up intense emotional responses in you
Once you recognize triggers and how your body responds to them, you can learn how to regulate your responses. The following are ways of doing this:
- Practice grounding techniques like deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and mindfulness
- Walk away briefly during high-stress moments to prevent reactive outbursts
- Use journaling or voice notes to process overwhelming emotions privately
- Seek help. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), emotion-focused therapy (EFT), and somatic therapies can all help you regulate intense emotions
Seek Professional Help for Attachment Trauma
The most effective path to breaking the cycle of insecure attachment involves working with a therapist who is trained in trauma-informed or attachment-based approaches. These professionals can help you process past pain, recognize the protective patterns you’ve developed, and learn better ways to connect.
Several treatments have been shown to be effective for overcoming childhood trauma as a parent:8
- Emotion-focused therapy helps individuals and couples understand and heal their relational patterns
- Internal family systems (IFS) supports you in identifying the younger, wounded parts of yourself that still influence your reactions today
- Somatic therapies, such as somatic experiencing or sensorimotor psychotherapy, work with the body to release stored trauma and calm the nervous system
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is another evidence-based therapy that helps reprocess distressing memories in a safe and structured way
If you’re interested in finding the right therapist for your needs, connect with us at Mission Connection for online, custom therapy solutions.
Practice Attachment-Based Parenting
Attachment-based parenting asks you to understand your child’s behavior as communication.9 Instead of seeing tantrums, clinginess, or defiance as bad behavior, it’s helpful to see them as signals of unmet needs or overwhelming emotions.
If you were raised in a dismissive environment, it could feel unfamiliar or even uncomfortable to respond to your child’s distress with gentleness. But, with practice, it can become more natural, so your child can grow up with a secure internal model of relationships.
Some practical ways to practice attachment-based parenting include:
- Responding promptly and consistently to your child’s needs
- Using eye contact, physical touch, and a warm tone of voice to connect with your child
- Labeling and validating their emotions
- Staying calm and present when your child is upset
- Playing together regularly. Child-led, unstructured play fosters connection and builds your child’s confidence in your availability
- Noticing when they need space, closeness, comfort, or stimulation, and responding with sensitivity rather than control
- Using gentle discipline that teaches, not punishes, your child
- Making time to check in emotionally with your child
- Working on your own healing. The more you understand and regulate your own emotions, the more emotionally available you can be for your child
How Are Intergenerational Trauma and Parenting Related?
Neuroscience research states that early relational trauma can alter the functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which controls the release of stress hormones.10
Therefore, parents with unprocessed trauma tend to have a heightened stress response that is easily triggered by their child’s emotional expressions. For instance, a crying infant could evoke feelings of helplessness, shame, or danger in the parent’s nervous system, leading to one of the following responses:
- Emotional withdrawal caregiving (avoidant patterns)
- Intrusive, anxiety-driven caregiving (anxious patterns)
Such adaptations may have once been protective in unsafe environments, but in everyday parenting, they create difficulty in tolerating a child’s distress.
That said, the biological changes associated with intergenerational trauma are not fixed. Supportive relationships, trauma-focused therapy, mindfulness practices, and emotionally attuned caregiving can recalibrate the stress response.
Therapeutic Support for Healing Attachment and Family Trauma
Healing attachment wounds and family trauma is often most effective when it happens in a guided space. You can either get one-on-one therapy or a family therapy program.
Intergenerational Trauma Therapy Programs
Intergenerational trauma therapy works at the individual level by helping a parent understand and transform the patterns inherited from previous generations.
Different evidence-based approaches can be used for insecure attachment stemming from intergenerational trauma. Regardless of the approach, a therapist aims to explore the parents’ personal history and map out a genogram (a family tree) to identify emotional themes or relational ruptures across the family line.
They also put emphasis on developing reflective capacity, or, in other words, the ability to observe your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors without immediately reacting to them.11 This skill creates a pause between a child’s triggering behavior and the parent’s response.
Healing attachment wounds and family trauma is often most effective when it happens in a guided space. You can either get one-on-one therapy or a family therapy program.
Family Therapy for Attachment Healing
Family therapy addresses not just personal history, but also how patterns play out in real time within the family system. The therapist’s role here is to observe the family’s communication patterns and emotional responses, then guide the members toward more supportive exchanges.12
Family therapy for attachment healing also brings to light misunderstandings that fuel disconnection. For example, a parent’s silence may be perceived by the child as disinterest, when in reality it could be the parent’s attempt to avoid conflict due to their own upbringing.
By bringing these misunderstandings into awareness, family therapy allows parents and children to practice new relational skills together, such as emotional validation, boundary setting with warmth, and repairing after conflict.
Raising Children With Attachment Awareness
Attachment awareness begins with recognizing that your child’s behavior is a form of communication. Crying, clinging, tantrums, or withdrawal are all signals of underlying emotional needs.
Responding sensitively to these cues teaches your child that the world is safe and that their emotions are valid. Over time, consistent responsiveness develops a secure base for them. They trust that you will be there for them, which allows them to explore, take risks, and engage confidently with the world.
Being attachment-aware also means paying attention to your own emotional state. If you are stressed, distracted, or emotionally unavailable, your child will notice, and it will influence their sense of security.
Repair is also a central part of attachment-aware parenting. No parent is perfectly attuned all the time; moments of misunderstanding, impatience, or emotional disconnection are inevitable. However, you must return to your child afterward to restore the connection. Research shows that repairs actually strengthen the attachment bond because they teach children that relationships can withstand conflict without losing safety.13
It’s also helpful to balance responsiveness with boundaries. You should not be giving in to every demand your child makes, but you can provide a predictable structure and deliver it with empathy. When limits are set with warmth, children learn self-control without feeling rejected.
Get Support for Insecure Attachment at Mission Connection
If you recognize patterns of insecure attachment in your life, Mission Connection can help.
Our team offers comprehensive outpatient mental healthcare for people who need more than traditional once-a-week therapy. With our licensed therapists specializing in attachment and trauma, you can work through the emotional wounds that fuel insecure attachment patterns.
What sets Mission Connection apart is our integrated approach combining individual therapy, experiential work, and group sessions that lead to healing through connection. You’ll have access to evidence-based treatments and a compassionate care team that adapts to your schedule and life circumstances. If you’re ready to take the next step, call us today or get started online.
References
- Filosa, M., Sharp, C., Gori, A., & Musetti, A. (2024, August 29). A comprehensive scoping review of empirical studies on earned secure attachment. Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941241277495
- Phelps, J. L., Belsky, J., & Crnic, K. (1998). Earned security, daily stress, and parenting: A comparison of five alternative models. Development and Psychopathology, 10(1), 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954579498001515
- Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Paediatrics & Child Health, 9(8), 541–545. https://doi.org/10.1093/pch/9.8.541
- Hong, Y. R., & Park, J. S. (2012). Impact of attachment, temperament and parenting on human development. Korean Journal of Pediatrics, 55(12), 449–454. https://doi.org/10.3345/kjp.2012.55.12.449
- Wampler, K. S., Shi, L., Nelson, B. S., & Kimball, T. G. (2003). The adult attachment interview and observed couple interaction: Implications for an intergenerational perspective on couple therapy. Family Process, 42(4), 497–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2003.00497.x
- Stacks, A. M., Muzik, M., Wong, K., Beeghly, M., Huth-Bocks, A., Irwin, J. L., & Rosenblum, K. L. (2014). Maternal reflective functioning among mothers with childhood maltreatment histories: Links to sensitive parenting and infant attachment security. Attachment & Human Development, 16(5), 515–533. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.935452
- Waters, S. F., Virmani, E. A., Thompson, R. A., Meyer, S., Raikes, H. A., & Jochem, R. (2009). Emotion regulation and attachment: Unpacking two constructs and their association. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 32(1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9163-z
- Talia, A., Taubner, S., & Miller-Bottome, M. (2019). Advances in research on attachment-related psychotherapy processes: Seven teaching points for trainees and supervisors. Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 22(3), 405. https://doi.org/10.4081/ripppo.2019.405
- Kohlhoff, J., Lieneman, C., Cibralic, S., Traynor, N., & McNeil, C. B. (2022). Attachment-based parenting interventions and evidence of changes in toddler attachment patterns: An overview. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 25(4), 643–660. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-022-00405-4
- Pietromonaco, P. R., & Powers, S. I. (2015). Attachment and health-related physiological stress processes. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1(1), 34–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2014.12.001
- Huynh, T., Kerr, M. L., Kim, C. N., Fourianalistyawati, E., Chang, V. Y.-R., & Duncan, L. G. (2024, June 18). Parental reflective capacities: A scoping review of mindful parenting and parental reflective functioning. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-024-02379-6
- Diamond, G., Diamond, G. M., & Levy, S. (2021). Attachment-based family therapy: Theory, clinical model, outcomes, and process research. Journal of Affective Disorders, 294(1), 286–295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.07.005
- Kemp, C. J., Lunkenheimer, E., Albrecht, E. C., & Chen, D. (2016). Can we fix this? Parent-child repair processes and preschoolers’ regulatory skills. Family Relations, 65(4), 576–590. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12213
