Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how your attachment style can manifest and affect you and your relationships, what is it? Our attachment styles, or our sense of security in relationships with others, are based on attachment theory which was developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s. They identified four types of attachment styles displayed in children which then went on to impact them as adults. These four attachment styles are secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful avoidant.
“Attachment styles set the rules for how we relate to others, what situations are most threatening, and our most fundamental way to establish safety,” says Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, a clinical psychologist. Understanding this psychology is crucial, especially when it comes to dating, where it tends to be activated most often. Once you realize and understand how you relate or ‘attach’ to others, it will provide a tremendous advantage to picking the right partner, setting healthy boundaries for yourself and the relationship, and preventing arguments over unnecessary suspicions or insecurities that don’t exist, because you will feel emotionally safe and secure with your partner.
Those of us who experienced consistent, unconditional love from our parents tend to have a secure attachment style and therefore an advantage to experiencing healthy attachment with friends and intimate partners. This means we have a general sense of emotional safety in our relationships and feel intimately connected to our partners. However, even if we have this advantage, we can still develop any combination of the other three attachment styles if we experience adversity with intimate partners in our adulthood (e.g., infidelity, deceitful behaviors, backstabbing, chronic lying, psychological and emotional trauma/abuse, etc.).
If we have parents who are emotionally disengaged, it develops a hunger for connection but with the apprehension of its reliability which leads to ineffective or unhelpful behaviors that manifest in a variety of ways. Maybe you’re texting a crush several times a day hoping for validation that they like you as much as you like them, or you expect your partner to “complete” you. Your desire to feel secure can overwhelm your partner, and consequently, they may pull away which only confirms your anxiously attached feelings of insecurity, so the cycle continues.
Avoidant attachment style develops when parents are neglectful, inconsistent, and unresponsive to a child’s emotional needs, causing the child to lose trust in them and completely detach. This manifests into adulthood as generally disliking when others depend on you, and you don’t like to depend on others. Your quest for independence can often be construed as an attempt to avoid attachment altogether and often means you’re uncomfortable with intimacy and displays of affection. If your partner is frequently complaining about a lack of intimacy and close connection, you may have an avoidant attachment style.
Lastly, children develop a fearful avoidant attachment style through parenting that involves shaming when emotional needs are expressed. This attachment style encourages kids to display a developmentally inappropriate level of independence and a high degree of internal anxiety and distress while appearing calm on the surface. In adulthood, the behaviors associated with this style manifest as someone who is a chronic caretaker or who seems cool, calm, and collected until they become extremely emotionally dysregulated or overwhelmed and avoid reaching out for help due to their distrust of others. Intimacy is avoided because they are afraid others will only hurt them.
We can also display different expressions of attachment, meaning, most people display characteristics of all of the different attachment styles depending on where they are in their lives and who they are dating. If you want to start by self-educating, I recommend the book “The Attachment Theory Workbook” by Annie Chen, LMFT. This workbook provides quizzes to help you determine your attachment style as well as how different attachment styles and their behaviors interact with one another in case, for example, you have an anxious attachment, and your partner has an avoidant attachment. The only requirement for starting down the path to a healthy, secure attachment style is your willingness to look honestly at your own behavior and believe you can change. You can work on it through self-awareness, education, and therapy (meet our therapists here), and by doing so, you will be working toward having more close, meaningful relationships which studies have shown lead to better health, greater resilience, and more overall life satisfaction.