Understanding Attachment Styles
What are attachment styles and why are they so important? Before we detail the different attachment styles, let’s get a little scientific and boring–it’s important, I swear. A crucial biological mechanism within the human brain is the attachment system. This system directly influences connections with attachment figures (parents, friends, partners, etc.). It creates and regulates thoughts, emotions, and behaviors associated with attachment styles to ensure safety while maintaining proximity to our loved ones.
Understanding the importance of the attachment system and the attachment styles associated with are important because they are crucial in understanding the shaping of behaviors, patterns, and habits we naturally exhibit when establishing and sustaining relationships, whether platonic or intimate. Insight into the different attachment styles offers a deeper and more profound perception of our own actions, helps us anticipate our behaviors in relationships, and provides context to understanding the behaviors of others. Attachment styles are key in all relationships.
Many connections significantly influence our attachment to others, yet even before birth, an inherent survival instinct compels us to depend on another human. Initially, we enter the world (as a fetus) with a secure attachment style, mainly because we are not aware of an alternative. However, this can change at any point in our lives because it is dependent on the interactions we have with caregivers, siblings, nannies, peers, and anyone closely involved in our daily life. It’s the consistency with sensitivity, availability, and responsiveness that fosters a secure attachment, or the inconsistency that leads to anxious attachment, and the lack of proximity or responsiveness that results in avoidant attachments. The positive or negative interactions within our beginning relationships, as infants, children, or adolescents, are pivotal in shaping how we interact, trust, or form attachments with others.
Although we may “start” with a secure attachment, attachment styles also evolve and can undergo changes as we grow. Attachments can be directly impacted by maturity, encompassing trust building or navigating mistrust, exploring new emotions and environments, developing independence and self-identity, understanding new commitments while integrating and contributing to society, or forming and/or losing friendships. Attachment styles can also change as we understand our emotions or have adverse reactions to trauma. Overall, the dynamics of our relationships and life experiences continually shape and reshape our attachment styles throughout the course of our lives. If you identify with an attachment style that you want to change, it is possible!
Let’s look at the four attachment styles outlined by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller in their book Attached. Which one do you identify with? (You can also find out your attachment style by utilizing the Experience in Close Relationship (ECR) questionnaire developed by Brennan, Clark, and Shaver).
Secure Attachment: low avoidance and low anxiety. These individuals display positive thoughts about themselves and their partners. These individuals are more satisfied with their relationships, are connected, nurturing, and responsive, and display reciprocal dependency and independence within the relationship. They have healthy boundaries with others and exhibit mutual respect, trust, and support. When in conflict, they can communicate feelings and needs effectively while being able to read and respond to their partner’s emotional cues while working towards resolution. Secure attachers are predisposed to expect that their partners love them, can keep emotions steady when facing adversity, and display genuine happiness.
More than half of the U.S. population has secure attachment styles. These individuals are “super mates” because they can recognize their partner’s needs and respond to them, they can ease other’s worries, and they engage in effective communication to get their needs met while meeting the needs of their partner. These individuals are able to bring out the best in their avoidant, anxious, or even secure partners.
Research shows that secure attachment styles are the best predictor of happiness in relationships.
If you have a secure attachment style and are in an unhealthy relationship, that does not mean you are stuck in the relationship. Secure attachers, despite their best efforts, cannot always help transform anxious or avoidant attachers into stable or happy partners, nor are they solely responsible for this.
Anxious attachments: low avoidance and high anxiety. These individuals have positive thoughts about their partner, often idealizing and overestimating their good qualities, but experience negative thoughts and underestimate their own qualities. Anxious attached individuals love to be close to others and have a great capacity for intimacy, but they are preoccupied with solidifying their relationship and live with fear that others do not reciprocate these same feelings. They have highly tuned attachment systems, which make them overly attentive to the emotional states of others. They’re always on guard and when they perceive a threat, they are then flooded with strategies to regain intimacy, bring their partner closer—physically and emotionally, and can engage in protest behaviors or activating strategies to help achieve this. They worry about abandonment and require consistent validation because of the amount of emotional energy relationships require from them. Anxious individuals are easily upset and sensitive to emotional fluctuations, which causes immediate negative emotions, cognitive distortions, acting out, and the need for reassurance. It is not the conscious decision of these individuals to push their partners away, but the subconscious manifestations of fears that cause a less secure bond. When their partner is available, receptive, and reassuring, they are content and can have happy relationships.
Activating strategies refer to the protesting behaviors exhibited by anxious individuals when they feel that their emotional or physical needs are not being met by their partner. These protesting behaviors often manifest as psychological games designed to get attention from their partner, such as calling or texting excessively to get a response, employing manipulative tactics like by ignoring their partner, keeping score, or jealously inducing activities. They want attention.
In a relationship with a secure attacher, an anxious attacher has the potential to thrive and cultivate new habits or overcome old patterns associated with anxious attachments. Secure attachers, if not threatened by anxious behaviors, can mitigate the activation of an anxious attachment system. Although it may not happen immediately, because anxious attachers are accustomed to a love dynamic that is intertwined with drama, over time, with reassurance and stability, their attachment style can evolve for the better.
Individuals who display both anxious and secure characteristics often show a transition towards one. Anxious attachers who are developing a more secure attachment can contribute to this positive, modeled behavior and a healthy relationship. Conversely, a shift from secure attachment to anxious may be a response to an unhealthy, prolonged relationship with failed attempts of remedy.
Anxious attachers and avoidant attachers are not a good combination, often leading to volatile relationships. The inherent longing for reassurance from anxious attachers is not easily met by avoidant attachers. Avoidant attachers, without an understanding of their beliefs, cannot readily give this intimacy, reassurance, or connection to anxious attachers. The emotional distance and disconnect can cause mixed signals, desire overdrive, and immense inadequacy for the anxious attacher. Constant conflict between anxious and avoidant attachers can lead to toxic, destructive, and abusive relationships.
Anxious attachers can take proactive steps to improve their well-being in relationships by reshaping their beliefs and attitudes towards intimacy and relationships. Anxious attachers first must acknowledge and embrace their emotional needs—you are only as “needy” as your unmet needs. Find a partner who can fulfill your needs and provide consistent emotional support and love. Desensitize your attachment system by not letting the initial desire for love and intimacy dictate the pace of how quickly you get attached. Date different people and work to understand personal preferences and needs while avoiding the anxious fixation to find “the one”. Instead of focusing on turnoffs and immediately rejecting someone, recognize your icks (preferences that can change) and red flags (non-negotiable concerns). Icks can change and you can learn to love these things, whereas red flags are things you cannot learn to love (i.e., a potential partner having a Pokémon collection being an ick whereas, smoking while having asthma is a red flag).
Avoidant attachment: low anxiety and high avoidance. These individuals can have positive or negative self-views but have negative views about partners. Avoidant individuals find the utmost importance in their independence and autonomy. These individuals do not feel compelled to become close with partners and thus avoid commitment, can be guarded and closed-off, and often are emotionally distant. Because they are human, their brains are still wired for intimate connection, but because they are highly sensitive to others getting too close, they tend to walk away, engage in protest behaviors, and worry about impingement of territory. These attachers often engage in deactivation strategies like prioritizing alone time or focusing on ick behaviors or flaws to push their partner away.
Approximately 25% of the population has avoidant attachment styles. This attachment style manifests in behaviors that prohibit individuals from finding stable and happy relationships, despite their brains having a desire for human connection. Unless an avoidant attacher directs their efforts towards overcoming the tendencies to push others away and actively works on changing their behaviors, they are likely to persist with sidelining their biological inclination for connection.
Avoidant attachers tend not to date each other because they do not have the emotional need or want to make the relationship work. Avoidant attachers push anxious attachers buttons because they require the commitment, emotional vulnerability, and intimacy avoidant attachers cannot provide.
Are you always maneuvering or negotiating with others to keep themselves at a distance? How do you respond when other individuals “get too close”? Just like anxious attachers who use activating strategies to bring partners closer, avoidant attachers use deactivating strategies to push partners away. These deactivating strategies manifest through cognitive distortions. Avoidant attachers constantly feel lonely even while in a relationship and are always wondering if the grass is greener on the other side. They fantasize about ways to escape relationships and look for any sign to call it quits. They have “high standards” or inflexibilities with partner characteristics and often hyper-focus on flaws. Avoidant attachers also engage in ghost partner traps focusing on their ex-partner contributing to their lack of commitment to “the one that got away”.
Ghost partner traps occur when avoidant attachers romanticize past relationships. Once the relationship has reached a point past its demise, avoidant attachers no longer feel threatened, and they selectively recall the positive characteristics of the relationship and their ex-partner. Sometimes the nostalgic feelings they remember prompt the want for a rekindling relationship. However, this rekindling often leads to a disastrous cycle of distancing as they draw closer, given their ingrained behaviors and their internally unstable emotions of intimacy and connection. If they choose not to reengage in the relationship, they will find themselves in an obsessive loop revisiting what could have been with that person while contemplating new relationships.
Or they will engage in relationships that are destined for failure from the start, such as dating someone who is married or lives in another country. When in a relationship, they will prolong the duration because of their reservations of committing fully. The struggle lies within the inability to recognize that they are responsible for their own self-sabotage. They cannot fulfill their innate desire for a safe and meaningful relationship because they always assume the problem stems from always being with “the wrong partner”.
Most avoidant attachers were raised by caregivers who emphasized the importance of being highly self-reliant. While it is admirable to take care of yourself, the unwavering commitment of relying solely on oneself is directly linked to low levels of comfort with intimacy. Avoidant attachers find it challenging to distinguish the difference between self-reliance and independence, leading them to be less likely to seek support from others or engage in self-disclosure. Because of their self-prioritization, they frequently overlook the needs of others in relationships and believe that their partners should be able to take care of themselves.
Trauma has the potential to redirect their focus inward, increasing self-awareness, and motivating a shift within their belief system. For avoidant attachers wanting to change their approach to intimacy and relationships, it is imperative to acknowledge and discontinue their deactivating strategies, challenge their belief that self-reliance is superior, seek partners with secure attachments to then model similar positive behaviors, practice daily gratitude, avoid daydreaming about an idealized partner, and incorporate mindfulness in daily routines.
4. Anxious-avoidant attachment (also referred to as disorganized): high anxiety and high avoidance. These individuals experience characteristics from both anxious attachment combined with avoidant attachment styles. There is much distrust for others and a large fear of intimacy. They focus energy on the other’s availability with much timidness, high emotions, hesitancy, and avoidance of healthy interactions due to perceived outcomes.
This attachment style is quite rare, with only a small percentage of the population falling into this category. It is strongly hypothesized that this attachment style stems from unprocessed severe abuse or trauma. Individuals who are disorganized attachers have the belief that the figures they learn to love are also those that need to be feared.
These attachers often believe that they are unlovable and struggle to trust others to support or accept them. This mistrust leads them to expect rejection within relationships, which prompts them to withdraw altogether. Their withdrawal behavior and thought patterns become a self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing their detachment from meaningful relationships and connections.
They struggle with self-soothing and engage in severely damaging negative self-talk.
Therapy is vital because it creates a trusting relationship, environment, and connection where habits can be broken, distortions can come to light, and behaviors can be challenged in a healthy space.
Understanding attachment styles is crucial in comprehending how we form and nurture relationships. These styles, deeply rooted in our brain's attachment system, shape our behaviors and habits with our loved ones. From secure attachments fostering satisfaction and reciprocity to anxious and avoidant patterns causing emotional turbulence, these styles play a pivotal role in all relationships.
As we evolve, our attachment styles shift, influenced by our experiences and interactions. But change is possible. Identifying your attachment style and seeking support or therapy can aid in evolving toward healthier patterns. Therapy provides a safe space to challenge behaviors and break damaging habits, offering a path toward more fulfilling and secure relationships.
Reach out to CCC; we’re here when you’re ready.
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