What Are Attachment Styles?
Attachment styles are the way we learned to attach to loved ones in childhood, and how that carries forward into our adult lives. They’re not quite a science of love, but they’re one of the closest things we have to it. The theory is based on the idea that we have an attachment system, emotions and behaviours that we have developed that ensure we remain safe and protected by staying close to our loved ones. As children we learn ways to relate to our parents or caregivers, and we we internalise this way of relating to others until it becomes our attachment system. This is natural, as we are biologically designed to be dependent on our partners in this way. Levine say that “when two people form an intimate relationship, they regulate each other’s psychological and emotional well-being”.
A good partner gives us a secure base, which increases our confidence to be independent. A secure base is someone that you can rely on 100 percent in times of need, and finding the right person to be our secure base is key to relationships. Levine defines a secure base as “the knowledge that you are backed by someone who is supportive and whom you can rely on with 100 percent certainty and turn to in times of need”. On the other hand, when we have an insecure base we are unsure if our partner truly supports us and will be there for us when we need them. This makes it harder for us to engage fully in life. Most people are only as needy as their unmet needs, and having a secure base in your relationship allows us to thrive in life thanks to those needs being met.
“If you want to take the road to independence and happiness, find the right person to depend on and travel down it with that person”
I’ve mentioned that our childhood impacts our attachment styles. Now for a little bit about how. Generally speaking, if we were raised with a secure base to lean on when needed, we learn to expect love and kindness from our loved ones. However, if the love we received from our caregivers was inconsistent, overbearing, or abusive, then we develop unhealthy models of attachment. People with healthy models of attachment are securely attached, while those with unhealthy models fall into three separate categories; anxious, avoidant, and disorganised. The disorganised style is rare and the book doesn’t really touch on it. So we will focus on the other two as the main insecure styles.
The Three Main Attachment Styles
-
- Secure – “Feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving”
- Anxious – “Often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partners ability to love them back”
- Avoidant– “Tend to equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimise closeness”
These styles can be summarised by their locations on the two axis of relationships; avoidance and anxiety, pictured below. Anxious individuals are high in anxiety and want to maximise closeness hence are low in avoidance. Avoidant individuals are the polar opposite. While secure individuals are not anxious but also have low avoidance too. They can remain comfortably close with their partner. You might notice which category you naturally fall into, but if you are still struggling you can try out this quiz.
The Anxious Attachment Style
I’ll start with the anxious attachment style, because it’s most likely that people reading this are of that style. Secure people don’t need to heal their attachment style, meanwhile avoidants will dismiss the need to do so as weak.
People with an anxious attachment style crave intimacy. They tend to obsess over their relationships, becoming oversensitive to threats, and often seeing threats where there are none. This is often a result of inconsistent parenting, leading a child to learn that it must cling to love when it is available because it could be gone any minute. As a result they thrive in intimate, supportive relationships. Their high level of anxiety leads them to misinterpret peoples’ emotional state, and jump to conclusions too fast. They believe that any small, inappropriate act on their part has the capacity to ruin the relationship. Generally, the anxiously attached are characterised by worry.
When an anxious person becomes triggered, it is because they have perceived, often wrongly, that there is a threat to the relationship. Through their fear of abandonment or rejection, they act out to try to save the relationship. This is called “protest behaviour“, and it is what happens when an activated attachment system gets the best of someone. Protest behaviour is any action that tries to re-establish contact with your partner and get their attention. This could involved manipulation such as trying to make a partner jealous, or getting angry at them for living their own life, even demanding reassurance from your partner. Protest behaviour is your attachment system saying “I’ve learned how this works, you’re going to abandon me. Please don’t leave”. However it is not the right way to connect with someone. That is via effective communication that we’ll get to later.
So what advice would the authors give to you if you have an anxious style? The first way to improve your anxious attachment style is to find a secure partner. The same goes for any insecure attachment style. Levine tells us how a secure partner will “lift up the insecure partner to their level of security”. Secondly, it is advised to wait a little before reacting and jumping to conclusions. Anxious people tend to see the worst in a situation, and giving themselves time to calm down and look at a situation rationally do a world of good. Thirdly, it is important for you to acknowledge your needs. Often in relationships, and especially when partnered with an avoidant, anxious people devalue their own needs by seeing themselves as too needy and overbearing for their partner. This leads to an internal turmoil that eventually leads to resentment of their partner. Instead, communicate your needs to your partner, and see how they respond. Of course there should still be boundaries in a relationship, but that should not stop you from letting your partner know what is important to you in a relationship. Finally, Levine advises anxious people to learn how to spot avoidant individuals, and steer clear of them. The anxious-avoidant trap, which we will discuss soon, is an emotionally taxing situation. Especially for the anxious partner. You would to better to find someone more secure that has a better in built ability to meet your needs.
The Avoidant Attachment Style
Avoidants are quick to think negatively of their partners, often seeing them as too needy. They still have a need to connect with people, but they have learned to do so while maintaining a high degree of distance, which they often see as an emotional “escape route”. They long for an ideal relationship, but always with a hypothetical person that is out of reach. By demanding perfection in this way, they can rationalise pushing people away. Their partner’s emotional wellbeing does not rank highly on the scale of things they care about, and they tend to ignore the needs of their partner unless convenient for themselves.
When intimacy becomes too high in a relationship, avoidants use “deactivating strategies” to maintain distance and quell that closeness. The main ways they do this is by devaluing their partner, seeing them as too needy, flirting with other people, keeping secrets, and avoiding physical closeness. They often long for an ex-partner, not because that person was great, but because they are no longer scared of the intimacy in that relationship. In this way, they manage to convince themselves that their ex was better than they truly were.
Levine has advice if you are avoidant too. Firstly you should learn to identify your deactivating strategies and see them as a childhood defence mechanism and not an authentic act of connection. Secondly, it is important too, to forget about “the one” that you think is always out of reach. Thirdly, avoidants should focus on mutual support instead of self reliance, recognising the former as a more natural way for humans to live. Finally, and again most importantly, you should try to find a secure partner, as with the anxious style, a secure partner will raise an avoidant person up to their level of security. They can give love and intimacy in a way that an avoidant is comfortable with.
The Anxious-Avoidant Trap
So anxious people want to pull their partner close, while avoidant people want to push their partner away. This doesn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven, and it really isn’t. The push-pull dynamic that occurs often tricks those in the middle of it into thinking that the anxiety and stress relates to love, instead of what is really is; anxiety and stress. It goes something like this:
- The anxious partner gets close
- The avoidant limits this intimacy using deactivating strategies
- The anxious partner tries to pull the avoidant closer using protest behaviour
- This only causes the avoidant to further deactivate any intimacy in the relationship
- Sometimes they reconcile, only to start the cycle again
The hard part about this is that it is highly likely for this kind of relationship to come about. This is because avoidants tend not to date other avoidants, there is no emotional glue to keep them together. But secure individuals are often found already in a healthy relationship, and so are not in the dating pool. That leaves anxious people chasing avoidant people. A sad but common story.
In this scenario, the anxious partner tends to be the one that comes off worse. It is impossible to force somebody to be intimate with you, but it is rather easy to prevent them from doing so. Hence the avoidant partner will usually end up getting their way, while the anxiously attached partner will be left with unmet needs and countless feelings of inferiority and self-doubt.
Once again, the authors give advice on how to escape this trap if you happen to find yourself in it. However, the advice is not what everyone will want to hear. The best, yet often not easiest, approach to being in the trap is to simply find other partners. Given the difference in needs of these two people, it will always be hard to find a happy middle ground when it comes to intimacy. Their needs are just too far apart. That being said, if you are truly committed to making it work, then there are a few things you can do. Firstly, you have to accept your partner’s attachment style. You must be OK with knowing that this person cannot give you everything you need. Attachment styles can change, but that usually comes from being in a relationship with a secure person, which at this point you have already decided against. Along a similar vein, you should know that you are accepting a relationship that will leave you less fulfilled than one with a secure individual would. Finally, it is important to remember that your partner does not want to hurt you. This is a defence mechanism that they needed in childhood, and now the negative side effects are coming off on you. It is entirely possible for them to love you and still not be able to meet your needs, and that is something you must accept too.
The Secure Attachment Style
Finally we have the secure attachment style. Levine defines these people as those that “feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving”. From everything we have gone over so far, you might think that a secure style is like the holy grail of relationships, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong. Luckily this is also the most common attachment style, with around 50 percent of people being secure. Secure people are comfortable with intimacy. They don’t use protest behaviour or deactivating strategies, and they bring insecure people up to their level of security. So much so that a study found that “there was no observed difference between secure couples and mixed couples”. Meaning a secure and anxious couple would have a relationship that is no less secure than one between two secure people.
Secure people tend to see sex and emotional intimacy as one and the same, and they know that if their partner treats them badly, it reflects on their partner and not on themselves. The authors actually outline a set of “secure principles” that these individuals seem to unconsciously live by. Secure people:
- Expect their partners to be loving and responsive, but they dont worry about losing their partners love
- Assume their partners intentions are good
- Communicate their needs effectively
- Don’t play games
- View themselves as responsible for their partners wellbeing
- Wear their heart on their sleeve, after all, they can handle it if it goes wrong
Secure Relationships
So if a secure relationship is so great, what can we do to either find the right person, or make it work with our current partner?
Meeting the One
If you are looking for a partner, and want to start doing so more securely, you can apply the secure principles to your dating life. In fact the authors advise a few extra ideas to think about too.
Reframe what you look for in a partner. You should aim to reframe your dating from “do they like me?”, toward “is this someone I can invest in emotionally? Are they capable of meeting my needs?”. The latter question will take an anxious person out of people pleasing mode, and an avoidant out of validation seeking mode.
An activated attachment system is not love. Often people in the anxious avoidant trap make this mistake, and thats what leads to the re-conciliation that starts the whole cycle again. Love is a feeling of contentment and comfort with somebody. They are your secure base and you are theirs. The anxiety or fear that you feel could be, and often is, just a result of the back and forth with someone whose attachment style doesn’t match yours. Remember too, that dating someone secure can feel uneventful at times because you are not always on edge, but this is actually a good sign for long term chemistry.
Express your needs. The expression of your needs and true feelings can be a good litmus test of the other persons ability to meet those needs. If you tell them you need clear communication and regular quality time, do they respond well or push you away?
Accept not everyone is right for you. Many people have attachment needs that are incompatible with your own, and that is ok. What is not OK is trying to force the relationship to work against these odds.
Effective Communication
Next, what if you are in a relationship and want to feel more secure? This is where using effective communication is key. Effective communication means expressing your needs to your partner in a direct, non-accusatory manner. This is something anxious people struggle to do this because they worry that the relationship is fragile and can collapse at any moment. They are afraid of communicating what they really need. So they resort to protest behaviour instead. The authors outline five key principles for effective communication:
- Wear your heart on your sleeve
- Focus on your needs, think about what you need, feel and want
- Be specific, not general
- Don’t blame – Use “I” language
- Be assertive and non-apologetic – These are your needs!
I could write more about each of these, but the general idea of being direct, honest and non-accusatory is the most important thing to remember when trying to communicate effectively. And as with everything, practise makes perfect.
Dealing with Conflict
Finally, how to we deal with arguments and disagreements in a secure way? Here’s the thing, all couples fight, and thats OK. See it as an opportunity to better understand and grow closer to your partner.
Again, the authors give us a nice list of things to focus on when we find ourselves in conflict.
See other persons wellbeing is as important as your own. This is key. A good relationship involves both partners taking responsibility for the others wellbeing, as well as their own. And when you both approach conflict this way, the solution becomes the goal, not winning the argument.
Stay focused. You are in conflict about something specific, so don’t fight about more general things. Generalising is a nasty strategy that often makes the other person feel bad about themselves. Telling someone “you always hang me out to dry like this” is very different to saying “i didn’t like the way you called me out back there”.
Be willing to engage. Nothing makes a fight harder than one person that doesn’t want to talk. If there is a problem, accept it and try to find a way to work it out. Denial will get you nowhere.
Use effective communication. Don’t beat around the bush, don’t blame, don’t generalise. Just tell your partner what you need from them in a calm, reasonable manner. This goes a long way.
Leave nothing off the table. Deeper conflicts bring us closer together when handled well. So don’t shy away from talking about things like each others parents, the kids, sex, anything. A better relationship is on the other side of those hard conversations.
A single fight does not break a relationship. This is especially important for anxious people to remember. Anxious people often shy away from conflict for fear of losing the love of their partner. But by not standing up for their needs, they are being both inauthentic and unhelpful in improving the relationship.
Assume the best. Trust that your partner will be caring and responsive. They have your best interests at heart as you do theirs. Keeping this in mind reminds both of you that is is the couple against the problem, not me against them.
So there we are, a nice long summary of what attachment styles are and how they work. I hope you’ve learned something and can take that into your current or next relationship, allowing you to live happier and healthier. If you haven’t read the book and want to learn more, reading “Attached –