What Anxious Attachment Is Really About (And Why Fighting It Makes It Worse)

The Self Trust Solution Podcast · Episode 107

You can be confident, capable, successful in your career, clear on your worth in almost every area of your life — and still completely lose your mind the moment you catch feelings for someone.

That contradiction is one of the most disorienting experiences anxiously attached people describe. It doesn't feel like insecurity. It doesn't look like low self-worth from the outside. But when a text goes unanswered for four hours, something shifts — and suddenly you can't focus, can't settle, can't stop the spiral.

Sheila Nova, known as the Anxious Attachment Coach, joined me for what became one of our most downloaded episodes to talk about exactly this. Not as a problem to fix or a pattern to overcome through willpower — but as a part of yourself that is asking, very loudly, to be met.

You don't have to identify with low self-worth to have it show up

One of the most clarifying things Sheila said early in the conversation is worth naming directly: you don't have to feel generally insecure to experience anxious attachment.

Many of the women she works with — and she noted this was her own experience too — are accomplished, confident, self-assured in their professional lives and social lives. The anxious attachment doesn't live in every room. It lives specifically in the room where they've caught feelings and now have something to lose.

The core belief underneath it, she says, sounds something like: I'm not truly worthy until I'm chosen. Or: once they really know me, they'll leave.

It doesn't have to be a conscious belief. It often isn't. It shows up as behavior — the constant checking, the reassurance-seeking, the obsessing over what a silence means — before it ever surfaces as a thought you'd actually say out loud.

And the response most people bring to it makes it worse.

Why fighting anxiety intensifies it

Our cultural relationship with anxiety is almost entirely adversarial. We battle it, fight it, try to get rid of it. We medicate it, manage it, push it away. We call the anxious part of ourselves names — the inner critic, the saboteur, the part that always ruins things.

Sheila's work is built on a completely different premise: the anxious part of you isn't the enemy. It's a part of you that is asking — desperately, loudly, sometimes in ways that look irrational — to be met with compassion by you.

When you dismiss it, it gets louder. When you shame it, it intensifies. When you tell it to shut up, you're doing the same thing you'd never do to a child in distress — and getting the same result.

"The minute I befriended her, the minute I started to love her — that was when things started to actually change."

Becoming best friends with your anxiety

The practice Sheila teaches is one of the most concrete applications of what I would call the Unified Front — the idea that self-trust isn't the absence of hard thoughts or difficult feelings, but the capacity to be in genuine relationship with all of them from a grounded place.

Here's how she describes the first step: separate yourself from the anxiety. Not to distance yourself from it or deny it — but to recognize that you are not your thoughts and feelings. You are the one who can observe them. You are the awareness, not the swirl.

Once you've created that separation, you can relate to the anxious part of you the way you'd relate to someone you care about who is in distress. Not by agreeing with everything it says. Not by acting on every fear it generates. But by making it feel seen, heard, and safe with you.

She calls her anxious part babe. As in: Oh my God, babe. Tell me everything. What's going on? I got you.

Not: this again. Why are we here again. I thought we were past this.

That distinction — the tone of how you meet the part of yourself that is afraid — is everything.

What this looks like in a real moment

Sheila shared something from her own life that I've thought about many times since we recorded this episode.

She went viral on Instagram. Something she'd wanted, worked toward, hoped for. And instead of feeling triumphant, she had one of the worst anxiety weeks she'd experienced in years. Paranoid thoughts. Everyone hates me. My clients definitely hate me. I'm going to be canceled.

She knew the thoughts weren't rational. She could observe that she was seeing the world through a distorted lens. But it felt very real.

When she finally stopped trying to logic her way out of it and just turned toward that part of herself with genuine compassion — hey babe, what is this actually about? — the answer came immediately.

I'm so afraid.

That was it. She put her hand over her heart and cried with her. And that part of her, once it felt seen and safe, settled.

Not because the fear was proven wrong. Because it was met.

The connection to self-trust

What Sheila is describing from the lens of anxious attachment maps directly onto something I come back to again and again in this work: the relationship you have with yourself when things feel uncertain is the foundation everything else is built on.

Outsourcing your safety — needing someone else to confirm your worth before you can settle — isn't a relationship problem. It's a self-trust problem. The reassurance you're seeking from the other person is something you can learn to provide internally, not by performing positivity or repeating affirmations you don't believe, but by actually showing up for yourself the way Sheila describes.

You don't have to agree with the fear to show up for it. You don't have to believe the anxious thought to meet the feeling underneath it with compassion. You just have to be willing to turn toward it instead of away.

That's the work. And the result, as Sheila's clients describe it, is not the absence of anxiety — it's a different relationship to it. The guy doesn't text back and you go a whole day without noticing. You swipe right and feel curious rather than desperate. You ask the hard questions on dates because you're not afraid of what the answers will cost you.

You become someone who is genuinely safe to come home to.

Listen to the full episode

Sheila goes much deeper in the full episode — including her step-by-step process for objectifying and personifying anxiety, how to get the anxious part of you to consent to a new belief, and what flow dating looks like when you've done this work.

Listen on Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube

Connect with Sheila Nova: Instagram: @sheilanova Free resource — Unlock Emotional Security (step-by-step video): superpoweryourmind.com/unlock

If this episode is landing — if the idea of finally being a safe space for yourself feels like something you're ready to build — the Self-Trust Identity Map is a good place to start. It's a short reflective experience that shows you where you are right now and what your next level is asking of you. Free, about three minutes.

Ready to go deeper? Here's your next step.