Anxious Attachment and Hypnotherapy, How Healing Attachment Styles Can Transform Your Life with Tushari De Silva
Understanding Anxious Attachment and How Hypnotherapy Can Help
Attachment theory has been around for decades and is backed by extensive research. These days, it is also talked about widely online, sometimes in ways that oversimplify what is actually a very complex human experience. Tushari specialises specifically in anxious attachment, and her work goes far beyond surface level labels.
What Is Anxious Attachment?
Anxious attachment is not a personality flaw. It is a nervous system pattern that often forms very early in life. It can stem from childhood trauma, abandonment, instability, or experiences where safety and consistency were disrupted during formative years.
People with anxious attachment often find themselves constantly worrying about being enough, replaying conversations in their mind, or feeling uneasy in relationships even when things appear fine on the surface. This can show up strongly in dating, friendships, family dynamics, and even in the workplace.
Common experiences include people pleasing, difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries, fear of rejection, rumination, and feeling emotionally exhausted from always trying to keep others happy. Over time, this pattern can seriously impact confidence, self esteem, and overall wellbeing.
A Practitioner With Lived Experience
What makes Tushari’s work especially powerful is that her understanding of anxious attachment is deeply personal.
As a child, she was adopted from the slums of Sri Lanka and raised in New Zealand. While her life after adoption was loving and supportive, those early experiences of separation and abandonment left imprints she did not fully recognise until adulthood.
Like many people with anxious attachment, she found herself constantly searching for connection, approval, and belonging. She was trying to be everyone’s best friend, always looking for the one, and unknowingly placing her sense of worth outside of herself. It was exhausting.
Through years of research, self work, and professional training, Tushari discovered that anxious attachment was at the core of these patterns. More importantly, she learned that it could be healed.
Healing Anxious Attachment With Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool for working with attachment styles because it works at the subconscious level, where these early patterns are stored. Rather than simply talking about behaviours, hypnotherapy helps rewire emotional responses, build internal safety, and create a more secure sense of self.
Tushari has developed an entire framework focused on healing anxious attachment and helping clients move toward secure attachment, stronger boundaries, and healthier relationships. She is also in the process of expanding this work into a dedicated program and future app.
While anxious attachment is one of her specialties, Tushari works across a wide range of areas including habits, addictions, self confidence, motivation, focus, ADHD support, and working with neurodiverse clients. Like most human challenges, these issues are layered and interconnected. There is rarely just one thing going on.
As we joked in our conversation, we are all a bit like Shrek. We have layers.
Integrating Reiki and Energy Healing
Alongside clinical hypnotherapy, Tushari is also a Reiki Master Practitioner. She integrates Reiki energy healing into her sessions where appropriate, creating a deeply calming and supportive therapeutic experience.
Hypnosis and Reiki work beautifully together. Both support nervous system regulation, emotional processing, and a sense of inner safety. For many clients, this combination allows them to relax more deeply and access change in a gentler, more embodied way.
It Is Not About What Is Wrong With You
One of the most important messages from this conversation is that anxious attachment is not about being broken. None of us are born with a manual for life. Experiences like adoption, separation, trauma, or inconsistent caregiving can reasonably shape how we learn to connect with others.
Healing is not about right or wrong. It is about asking better questions, like how can I live with less stress, more confidence, and a stronger sense of self worth?
When people begin to understand their attachment style, many experience a huge sense of relief. Things finally make sense. From there, real change becomes possible.
One Piece of Advice
If Tushari could offer just one piece of advice, it would be this.
“ Give yourself time. Give yourself approval. Learning to love yourself is not easy for everyone, but it is absolutely learnable.”
And helping people reach those moments of insight and self compassion is, as she puts it, the best feeling in the world.
A link to Tushari De Silva’s website and services is available below. Her approach is warm, grounded, and deeply respectful, and she offers a beautifully calming therapeutic space.
👉 Visit https://www.ilumia.com.au/
