Knowing about attachment and your attachment style can help you to recognise why the same patterns continue in your relationships.
Recognising your attachment style can help you to understand and address why you might always fall for the same kind of toxic relationships. Or even why you seem to choose emotionally unavailable partners.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES
Everything all comes down to relationships. Our earliest relationships lay the foundation to how we relate to ourselves and others.
Our relationship with our parents and extended family is our first experience of social contact and human interaction.
This is why childhood experiences are so pivotal to childhood development.
Our first relational encounter sets the president for all the other relationships you experience. Including your relationships well into adulthood.
We all have our own attachment style in relationships. Having a basic understanding of attachment is a really helpful tool to negotiate the intricacies of intimate relationships.
Knowing your attachment style helps you to identify your own role within relationships. It helps you to identify what your needs are and recognise your emotional wounds.
This means developing your self awareness, and understanding what some of your triggers in relationships might be.
This knowledge helps you to improve your emotional intelligence, establish what it is that you need from your relationships and how you can get those needs responsively met.
SELF AWARENESS
Developing your self awareness and emotional intelligence helps your relationships to feel fulfilling and enriching, rather than confusing and emotionally draining.
Relationships can be difficult to navigate and sometimes it can be difficult to fully understand your reactions.
For example, not communicating effectively with your partner what it is that you need.
Avoiding feelings, or emotionally distancing yourself during times of conflict.
Learning your attachment style and the attachment style of a potential partner can open up a deeper understanding for both you and your spouse for a stronger relationship.
Even if you are single out of choice or you are looking for a meaningful relationship, knowing more about attachment styles can help you to get the type of relationship that you want.
It can also warn you of possible red flags from a potential love interest.
They recognised link between the needs of children and how they responded to their caregiver.
They found that emotional and physical contact had a direct influence on the emotions of the infant and their behavioural responses.
It furthered the biological perspective that we are relational in our existence. We need an emotional bond in order to survive and healthily function in the world.
It was an important insight into human behaviour and set the foundations of further discovery into how we relate as adults within our relationships.
There are 4 main attachment styles:
Anxious Attachment
When you have an anxious attachment you can feel very uncertain about your relationships.
You probably have difficulties with self esteem and self worth.
You often worry that your partner is going to leave you, or replace you with somebody better.
As you are often anxious about the security of your relationship, you will also experience difficulty with trusting your partner.
Your uncertainty means that you are constantly looking for reassurance and seeking validation in your relationship.
This is likely to filter into many of your other experiences.
Not having your needs adequately met in childhood and an unpredictable environment can be an indicator of an anxious attachment style.
Caregivers may have been distracted or not always available.
They might not have recognised when you needed emotional support or physical comfort.
If they were emotionally attuned, it was likely to be inconsistent.
In childhood you may have experienced a form of relational trauma, such as being separated from a parent due to divorce, or the death of a family member.
Without the correct emotional support from a nurturing adult, this loss may have felt that relationships are temporary and lack stability.
In more extreme cases you may have experienced a traumatic childhood where you were raised in a household that felt emotionally unstable or unsafe.
For example, being witness to emotional or physical abuse, alcohol dependency or parents with severe mental health issues.
Avoidant Attachment
An avoidant attachment style similarly occurs when your needs are consistently unmet.
The environment may have similarities, such as unpredictable caregiving, or often feeling emotionally or physically neglected.
Although the situation which causes the avoidant attachment style can have many similarities to an anxious attachment, the behavioural response is different.
An avoidant attachment style is very sensitive to rejection.
As a result of the inconsistency in parenting, you may have used a self sufficient coping strategy.
When there is no reliable adult to lean on, you would have learnt from a very early age that the only person you can rely on is yourself.
Therefore, feeling emotionally close to anyone can feel very overwhelming. It can trigger your fight/flight response to get as far away from confrontation or connection, because that is what you know.
That is what feels safe.
The avoidant behaviour can then take on many forms.
It can be difficult to have challenging conversations, you might belittle or minimise the emotional needs of others.
Have a preference for isolation and you can have a fear of intimate relationships.
The need for your independence hinders your ability to form close relational bonds.
Secure Attachment
A secure attachment style means that your needs were adequately met in childhood.
When you were sad, or unhappy, you were consoled sufficiently and comforted. You were able to learn how to regulate your emotions from an early age.
Your early caregivers would have been responsive, available and highly attuned in helping you to feel secure and safe.
When you have a secure attachment style, relationships and navigating relationship challenges feel easier. As early as childhood, you have been taught how to express what you need and have those needs understood.
It doesn’t make you perfect, as of course, nobody is.
Your parents also could have made some mistakes along the way, but their care was consistent enough to not have a detrimental effect to your sense of self.
When you have a secure attachment style you are still able to make mistakes in the relationship, you can also be anxious or avoidant at times. However, your resilience in navigating relationships means that you are able to cope with and negotiate challenge.
Therefore, in relationships you can deal with maintaining healthy boundaries. Learn quickly from your mistakes, and offer security to your spouse without generally feeling overwhelmed, anxious or avoidant.
Disorganised Attachment
Those with a disorganised attachment may have experienced significant distress in childhood. Such as emotional neglect, or the threat of physical violence or actual physical harm.
At times, a parent could have represented times of safety and security, and at other times be unpredictable or volatile.
This lack of stability can lead to difficulty in regulating emotions, or feeling unable to cope in stressful situations.
Due to unresolved relational trauma, a disorganised attachment can cause bouts of anger, antisocial behaviour and other behavioural problems.
In adulthood it might mean acting disproportionately to conflict, low confidence, poor self esteem and a difficulty in problem solving or making decisions.
It can be difficult to self regulate or self soothe when feeling upset of anxious. Coping strategies can result in maladaptive behaviours, such as excessive drinking or substance abuse.
This attachment style can offer challenges with trust and feeling frightened of connection within a relationship.
OPPOSITES ATTRACT
As a strange pull, it’s often the anxious and avoidant attachment styles that end up in a relationship together.
Due to the differing forms of anxiety, the nature of always wanting to feel reassured gets met with the need to avoid. This is the dynamic that just doesn’t work!
It activates your threat system, reinforcing your attachment style in a way that negatively impacts being connected in your relationship.
If you find you are in relationship with somebody who is in an opposing attachment style, there are ways that you can work towards secure attachment behaviours.
Attachment styles are not set in stone.
The relational dynamic can change, depending on who you are in a relationship with and your own self awareness.
There is always the capacity to change.
When you are aware that your partner has a different attachment style, you can use this information to help recognise your own feelings and recognise what it is that your partner might need and why.
It can be as simple as giving them some space, or showing them that you still care, even during conflict.
There are other attachment styles and this blog only just scratches the surface, but it can really help you in your relationships to have healthier communication and connection.
To find out your own attachment style you can take the quiz
FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS
If you would like to know more about attachment styles and how you can use it in your own relationships I highly recommend Attached by Dr Amir Levine & Rachel Heller.
It’s accessible and easy to follow. There are further relationship tips and an attachment questionnaire that offers further insight on the results.
If you have read this book, leave me a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’m Lizandra Leigertwood and I’m a counsellor and psychotherapist Online and in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
I help both individuals and couples to improve their relationships with themselves and others, by letting go of unhelpful negative patterns and to live a happier and more authentic life.
You can find out more about me here.
