One of my friends recently shared an Instagram story about secure love, and it instantly brought back memories of a book I read few years ago titled “Secure Love” by Julie Menanno. Let me tell you, that book was a game-changer for me. It really opened my eyes, especially in understanding my own attachment style. At the time, I had a habit of running away from issues, sweeping things under the rug, and hoping that things would work out great so long as I didn’t bring it up – classic avoidant attachment, isn’t it? The book gave me a lot of tools to work on myself, and ever since then, it has changed a big part of how I relate to both myself and other people.
In the book “Secure Love”, the author dive deeper into the science of attachment theory, explaining how our early experiences influence our adult relationships. Like Google Maps, but instead of assisting us in finding locations, it enables us to understand the ways in which those formative experiences impact our adult relationships.
Julie Menanno is a relationship coach and licensed marriage and family therapist. Her specialty is in helping couples with attachment issues using Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Menanno believes that the first step to building strong, lasting, and healthy relationships is understanding our attachment styles. These include secure, anxious, avoidant, and the less talked about disorganized style.
In this article, let’s explore the different attachment styles and see how knowing our own can help us not only to create healthier romantic relationships, but also improve our relationships with our family, colleagues and friends.
Understanding Attachment Theory
Attachment theory was developed by psychiatrist John Bowlby and examines how our early experiences shape our relationships as adults. According to his study, one thing that troubled teenage boys at a Boys’ Home had in common was that they had either lost their mothers, been separated from them several times, or spent their childhood in foster care. His research on children’s reactions to this separation from their primary care-giver, usually their mother, indicates that there is a strong correlation between the patterns in adult relationships and the way children behaved in their early interactions.
The importance of children receiving consistent care from their primary caregiver – typically their mother during the first two years of their life – the critical period as he calls it – is one of the highlights of Bowlby’s research. He views this period as crucial because any disruptions can have long-term effects on the child, a phenomenon he refers to as “maternal deprivation.” It may result in reduced IQ, increased aggression, or depressive or anxious feelings, among other things. In rare cases, it can even result in “affectionless psychopathy,” a condition in which the person struggles to form meaningful or profound connections with others.
Expanding upon Bowlby’s insights, psychologist Mary Ainsworth highlighted in the 1970s that despite our individual differences, we all share a fundamental need for nurturing, dependable, and empathetic care. Through her research, Ainsworth delineated four distinct attachment styles—disorganized, anxious, avoidant, and secure—that profoundly shape how we approach emotional closeness, interact with others, and perceive ourselves.
Knowing why we relate the way we do in relationships – basically our own attachment style – allows us to manage them better as adults. The more we understand and learn about how we behaved and was cared for as children, the more we realize its affects on us as adults. This knowledge allows us to better navigate our relationships. It’s like having a map showing how we have been interacting with others throughout our life. And with this knowledge, we can form deeper connections with everyone, including our partners, family, friends, and coworkers.
Identifying Your Attachment Style
As we saw earlier, understanding how we interact with others can offer valuable insights into our behavior and emotions in relationships. Menanno emphasizes the importance of looking inward to better understand our approach to intimacy, communication, and emotions. By reflecting on these aspects, we can identify our attachment style, giving us a lot of insights into how and why we behave the way we behave with our partner or family or friends, for example.
Although our attachment style is largely shaped by our childhood experiences, it’s important not to cast blame on our caregivers, as it doesn’t help us grow and move forward. They could only give us what they had and what they knew. It is very likely that they too had similar childhood, and they too were deprived for nurturing care and love as kids. We all carry generational trauma, including our parents and caregivers, but understanding how our past affects our present and future relationships equips us with tools to navigate life and build healthier relationships.
It’s essential to treat ourselves with kindness as we examine our attachment style and acknowledge that it may evolve over time. Everyone has a different attachment style, and they vary widely. Individuals who share the same attachment style are not exactly the same. Our goal is to develop a more secure attachment with ourselves first and cultivate more self-acceptance than we currently have. This is crucial for enhancing our self-awareness and sense of safety within.
The four main attachment styles identified by attachment theory are avoidant, disorganised, anxious, and secure. Every relationship we enter into has its own distinct behavioural patterns and emotional reactions associated with each style. Later on in this post, we’ll look deeper into these styles. Identifying your attachment style gives you insight into your preferences, needs, and challenges in romantic, platonic, and familial relationships. It also allows you to recognise and address unhealthy patterns while cultivating healthier relationships.
Understanding your attachment style can enhance communication and conflict resolution in all your relationships. As we gain a better understanding of our own attachment styles, we develop greater empathy and understanding for our partners and everyone in our lives. As we become more aware of our own and others’ emotional responses, we are able to form deeper connections. Building secure attachments in romantic and family relationships also improves our relationships with friends and colleagues, giving us the confidence to face challenges.
Anxious Attachment
The cause of anxious attachment is pretty simple: it develops when a child’s emotional needs aren’t regularly met during their childhood. When a child expresses anger, for instance, and their parents merely tell them to stop acting out – something so common that many of us may have experienced it – the child might feel misunderstood and neglected. Their belief that expressing particular emotions makes them flawed or unlovable can be sparked by this lack of emotional validation, which can lead to a vicious cycle of insecurity and doubt.
In some cases, children may receive sporadic attention from their parents, but not enough to build a lasting sense of trust, where they can rely on their parents for emotional support. As they grow up, they may struggle with regulating their emotions, finding it difficult to trust their partner’s love, and tend to interpret situations negatively in their relationships, resulting in heightened emotional reactions and a constant need for reassurance.
Signs of Anxious Attachment in Relationships with Adults
In adulthood, this never-ending desire for approval in relationships can manifest itself in a variety of ways. People who suffer from anxious attachment, for example, might constantly ask their partner for confirmation, questioning their love and commitment even in situations where there isn’t a good reason to.They become extremely needy or clinging out of fear of their partners leaving them, and they start looking for solace to calm their nerves. This behaviour can lead to a recurring cycle of tension and insecurity by making their partner feel smothered. People with anxious attachment often have low self-esteem and rely on others’ approval to feel worthy and lovable.
This continual dependence on other people, usually their partner, is called “other-focused” behaviour because it involves giving others too much control over one’s sense of self and identity and gives them an excessive amount of control over how one perceives the world. Anxiously attached partners, for instance, are more likely to focus on what their partner should do differently to make them feel safe and okay during a challenge than they are to reflect and ask themselves, “What do I need from myself right now?” “What is going on within me?” This over-reliance on their partner to make them feel good about themselves can cause unnecessary stress in the relationship and ultimately lead to conflict.
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Secure Love: Create a Relationship That Lasts a Lifetime
What does a healthy relationship look like?
A good question, in theory, but expert couple’s therapist Julie Menanno wants you to consider: what does a securely attached relationship feel like?
The answer to this question is the ultimate goal in Secure Love, a groundbreaking guide to understanding secure attachment in adult relationships. While attachment theory has grown in popularity to explain the relationship between children and their caregivers, it’s also the closest science has come to making sense of our adult romantic connections.
Difficulty Setting Boundaries
People with anxious attachment styles often struggle to establish and maintain boundaries in their relationships. They may tolerate harmful or inappropriate behaviour because they fear that expressing their needs will result in abandonment. As a result, their needs are frequently overlooked, creating a pattern that exacerbates their fears and perpetuates the cycle of anxious attachment.
This pattern is something I can totally relate to from the examples from my younger days. However, we can definitely start addressing and overcome the effects of anxious attachment on our relationships and emotional health by being aware of the underlying causes and symptoms of the condition.
Do I have Anxious Attachment?
Menanno suggests the following ways to figure out if you have an anxious attachment style, which I personally feel is a great way to start your introspection:
- Fear of Abandonment: When things get shaky in your relationship, do you often worry about being left behind?
- Desire for Closeness: Do you often wish to spend more time together and be closer to your partner than they seem to desire?
- Starting Concerns: Are you usually the one who brings up problems or concerns in your relationship?
- Belief About Needs: Do you feel you would be less critical or assertive if your partner understood and met your needs better?
- Distress Without Validation: Do you find yourself feeling more upset when you don’t receive the emotional support or validation you’re seeking?
- Immediate Conflict Resolution: Do you often feel the need to resolve every disagreement as soon as it arises?
- Prolonging Arguments: Or do you tend to prolong or delay addressing your differences until you’re feeling emotionally stable?
- Behavioral Patterns: During arguments with your partner, do you find yourself expressing concerns, protesting, criticizing, becoming emotionally intense, crying, or feeling intense anger, all in the hope of quickly resolving the issue?
Avoidant Attachment
Experiences in childhood where your emotional needs were frequently disregarded lay the foundation for an avoidant attachment style. As a result, you, as a child, begin to excessively rely on yourself, keeping all your emotions bottled up even when you know you need support. While your physical needs may have been tended to, your primary caregivers were emotionally unavailable when you needed them most.
Eventually, you learn to suppress your emotions—feelings of sadness or anger—convincing yourself that they don’t matter, internalizing the belief that ignoring your emotions is in your best interest. This coping mechanism emerges as a way to evade the harsh reality of emotional neglect experienced in childhood. You develop the habit of denying your own feelings as a means of coping with the emotional neglect endured during your childhood.
Oftentimes, people with avoidant attachment may not consciously perceive their upbringing as stressful, oftentimes even viewing it as normal or ideal. A person who don’t feel emotionally connected to their primary caregivers as children may internalise the idea that they should always hide their feelings, burying all of their feelings deep inside them. As a result, when they get older, they find it difficult to express themselves honestly because they are used to burying their emotions. In adult relationships, this tendency to suppress emotions can lead to a preference for logic over feelings, which may not be acceptable to partners seeking emotional closeness and connection.
Signs of Avoidant Attachment: Internal Disconnection and Relationship Dynamics
Childhood emotional neglect can have a significant impact on adult relationships by creating a pattern of internal disconnection that shapes adult relationship dynamics. A person with avoidant attachment tendencies may struggle to acknowledge and process their own emotional experiences, which often leads to the suppression or minimization of even strong emotions. It can be challenging for people with avoidant attachment styles to communicate their feelings and emotions to their partners, leading to constant misunderstandings and emotional distancing. Instead of actively engaging in an honest and mutually respectful conversation with their partner to resolve problems, they often retreat or shut down during arguments, eventually causing emotional dissatisfaction in their partnership.
Do I have Avoidant Attachment?
Here are some indicators that could suggest that you may have an avoidant attachment style:
- Are you more worried about being perceived as a failure in your relationship than about being emotionally or physically abandoned?
- Does your partner seem to want more intimacy and time together than you do?
- Do you feel a sense of uneasiness or discomfort when your relationship becomes too close or intimate?
- Do you avoid discussing concerns or issues in your relationship because you are afraid they will upset your partner, you do not believe you have any concerns, or you simply do not want to address them?
- Do you constantly feel undervalued or like you’re constantly falling short of your partner’s expectations?
- Do you find yourself suppressing your frustrations in your relationship in an attempt to keep the peace, only to eventually reach a breaking point and lose your temper over unrelated issues?
- Do you withdraw or shut down when you and your partner argue?
- Or do you frequently use defensive responses, blame-shifting, attempting to please, or withdrawing entirely when conflicts arise in your relationship?
Recognising these behaviours can provide valuable information about your attachment style and its impact on your relationships.
Disorganized Attachment
Children with anxious, avoidant, and even secure attachment styles use a variety of strategies to meet their needs, such as crying, protesting, or attempting to please others. However, people who has a disorganised attachment style do not fit into any of these categories, instead, they frequently feel overwhelmed by their inner turmoil, dealing with intense inner conflicts, exhibiting unpredictable behaviour when triggered.
Disorganised attachment is caused by inconsistent and unpredictable behaviours of the caregivers during the person’s childhood, resulting in insecurity and inner conflict in the child. These children frequently experience fear and mistrust of their primary caregivers, who may have posed threats through punishment, abuse, or neglect. This chaotic environment causes deep inner turmoil in the child, known as “approach/fear distress,” in which they struggle to find emotional comfort while feeling hopeless about it. As a result, their nervous system frequently goes into overdrive, and they struggle to regulate their intense emotions, resulting in erratic and exaggerated behaviour. To cope, disorganised person may dissociate or suppress their emotions, exacerbating their internal conflict.
Disorganised Attachment Style in Adult Relationships:
Adults with disorganised attachment style frequently experience heightened distress, and are emotionally easily triggered, employing extreme coping strategies in their relationships. This attachment style is more intense and unpredictable than simply having anxious or avoidant characteristics. Adults with disorganised attachment, particularly those with the disorganized-oscillating subtype, experience fear of abandonment, a strong desire for closeness, and ongoing unhappiness in their relationships. They may demand attention one moment and then push their partners away the next, alternating between needing closeness and seeking distance, completely destabilising their relationships.
Different Types of Disorganized Attachment:
While most people with disorganized attachment fall into the disorganized-oscillating category, there’s another type called disorganized-impoverished attachment, which is less common. In this subtype, a person shows little emotion and tends to avoid new experiences, preferring to stick to familiar routines and their rigid beliefs. They work hard to avoid stress and control their emotions, but they may not be as aware of their inner struggles as those with the more common type of disorganised attachment. Both types of disorganised attachment make it difficult to form and maintain relationships while also dealing with strong emotions and behaviours.
Understanding the various types allows us to see how disorganised attachment influences people’s relationships and emotions in complex ways.
Do I have Disorganized Attachment Style?
Here are some ways to determine whether you have a disorganised attachment style:
Signs of Disorganised, Oscillating Attachment
- Do you frequently have intense fears about being abandoned, both physically and emotionally, in your relationships?
- Do you find it difficult to manage your emotions when something triggers you, or do you feel overwhelmed by them?
- Do you react strongly to disagreements by fighting back, breaking down emotionally, or shutting down completely?
- Do you feel more hurt or offended than others?
- Do you find losing yourself in anger, which eventually turns into rage?
- Are your reactions to difficult situations unpredictable, varying from strong outbursts to no reaction at all?
- Do you have frequent mood swings that make your life seem unstable?
- Do your feelings for your partner fluctuate quickly from positive to negative and back again?
- Do you find it difficult to trust your partner’s love and loyalty, even when there is plenty of evidence that they care?
Signs of Disorganized-Impoverished Attachment?
- Do you think making sacrifices in a relationship is a sign of weakness or losing your sense of self?
- Does the concept of self-reflection seem foreign to you?
- Are you uninterested in discovering other people’s inner worlds?
- Do you have trouble expressing your feelings to your partner, even when you’re aware of them?
- Do you find it easier to focus on work or hobbies rather than forming new relationships, using them as an escape strategy?
- Do you have anxiety about accepting too many responsibilities because you think you won’t be able to fulfil them all in the end?
If you believe you have a disorganized attachment style, it’s important to recognize that it often stems from intense neglect during your childhood. Please know that seeking professional help can provide valuable support and guidance on your healing journey.
Secure Attachment
In attachment theory, secure attachment is considered the ideal approach, something we should all strive for. It’s the type of attachment that children develop when their caregivers consistently meet their emotional needs with comfort, attention, and cooperation. This doesn’t imply that securely attached children come from perfect environments with flawless primary caregivers; rather, they come from good-enough environments with good-enough caregivers. This instills in them a strong sense of confidence in seeking comfort and connection from their caregivers, fostering feelings of safety and security. These children understand that their emotions matter and that they can rely on support. Even when faced with challenges, securely attached children have a solid foundation from which to explore the world, confront difficulties, and manage their emotions in a healthy way.
Thriving as Securely Attached Adults
As they grow older, children who have experienced secure attachments usually exhibit strong relational and emotional intelligence (EQ). They don’t mind being vulnerable or being honest in expressing their feelings because they know that their partners will support them emotionally. These individuals place a high importance on self-care, mutual respect, and effective communication in their relationships. They understand that relationships can be challenging at times, and they know how to handle these challenges in a strong and caring manner. Furthermore, they recognise the importance of meeting their partner’s needs as they strive for mutual fulfilment. They also respect healthy boundaries and acknowledge that no one partner can meet all of their needs. When needed, they have no fear or shame in seeking support from other relationships.
Evaluating the Secure Attachment Style
There are numerous methods to determine whether you have a secure attachment style, including:
- Is it easy for you to maintain your space from people while still feeling close to them? A person who is securely attached is happy being close to their partners and also know when to take space for themselves to enjoy their own company.
- In a relationship, are you able to be open and honest about your wants and feelings? A securely attached person is comfortable expressing their needs, emotions, and vulnerability.
- Have you thought about how your early experiences might have influenced the way you see relationships?
- Are you able to tolerate conflict, disagreement, rejection, and discomfort in your relationships? In order to have a secure attachment, a person must be able to control their emotions, remain rational under pressure, and treat others with respect.
- Do you respect and own a healthy
Attachment with Self
A secure attachment to ourselves lays the groundwork for developing self-assurance, practicing self-compassion, and effectively handling life’s stressful situations. This confidence helps us set healthy boundaries in our relationships and work, manage our emotions, and create healthy connections with everyone in our lives, not just in romantic relationships. That is why it is crucial to have healthy relationships with oneself, to have a lot of self-compassion, self-love and self-care, in order for us to create a stable and loving relationship with others.
The Importance of Reparenting
Attachment styles, as we’ve learned, are greatly influenced by our experiences in childhood and often require healing through a process known as “reparenting.” This crucial journey focuses on self-care and self-validation, essential for addressing insecure attachment patterns. By tending to our own emotional needs with care, comfort, and establishing healthy boundaries, we lay the groundwork for cultivating secure relationships with ourselves, our partners and in all our other relationships.
Exploring the Role of Reparenting
Attachment styles, as we’ve learned, are greatly influenced by our experiences in childhood and often require healing through a process known as “reparenting.” This important journey centres on self-validation and self-care, which are critical in addressing patterns of insecure attachment. We build stable relationships with ourselves, our partners, and all of our other relationships by providing for our own emotional needs with kindness, comfort, and the establishment of sound boundaries.
Reparenting is all about understanding and introspecting our attachment history without shame or guilt, being compassionate towards ourselves, and managing our expectations. Blaming our primary carergivers is counterproductive; they did their best with what they knew. Instead, prioritise our physical and emotional well-being in order to manage relationship stress and promote personal development. Nurturing all aspects of our humanity, including romantic relationships, is critical for overall well-being.
Every small act of self-care helps us improve our relationships with ourselves and others. This link between self-nurturing and relationship dynamics demonstrates how, by focusing on nurturing ourselves, we can improve our relationships with others and and our overall well-being.
I plan to write a follow-up post on this topic, but for now, I want to emphasize how using attachment theory to examine our attachment styles can help us understand our relationships and why we or our partners react in certain ways. It allows us to show compassion for ourselves and those who have cared for us, which can lead to personal growth and healing—sometimes with the help of mental health professionals.
I invite you to reflect on your own attachment experiences and relationships. Please share your thoughts and insights in the comments below.
