Attachment Styles and How They Impact Relationships

Do you avoid closeness and intimacy in relationships, preferring independence and freedom over connection? Do you feel uncomfortable expressing your feelings or letting others get too close? Do you need your partner's validation to feel confident and whole? Do you always find a reason to end a relationship when it becomes too close and intimate?

Do you repeat these patterns in all your relationships, even if you don't know why?

If your unhelpful patterns keep recurring, learning more about attachment styles and how they impact relationships might help.

What Is Attachment and Why Is It Important?

Our relationships mean everything to us. Healthy relationships make us feel safe, giving us a sense of belonging and togetherness. They make us more optimistic and more resilient when going through life's challenges and stress.

Humans are wired to seek close, caring relationships with others and attachment is an emotional bond we form with significant people from our earliest days. The way we connect with our first attachment figures impacts how we attach to adult relationships.

So, what exactly are attachment styles, and how do they affect your adult relationships?

Early Attachment

How your parents (or caregivers) responded to your emotional needs in childhood determines the success of your adult relationships. According to research, warm and responsive parenting with acceptable limits and explanations for behavior norms and rules has been associated with better self-esteem and fewer adverse outcomes such as mental illness and drug use in children and teenagers.

How safe and protected a child feels is directly related to how warm and caring the interactions between the child and their caregivers are. A caring and responsive relationship lays the groundwork for a secure attachment, nurturing your capacity to respond to closeness and intimacy, cope with conflicts, and maintain adult independence.

On the other hand, you are more likely to develop an insecure attachment and suffer in your adult relationships if you grew up in a family with confusing, inconsistent, or threatening dynamics and a caregiver who didn't respond to your needs the way you needed them.

Patterns of caregiver inattention, abuse, or traumatic experiences can result in trauma bonding and insecure attachment. This attachment pattern is then internalized, influencing how you interact with others as an adult.

Bowlby's Attachment Theory

British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst John Bowlby founded the first attachment theory, emphasizing the importance of early bonds with a primary caregiver for a child's healthy and normal development.

Based on his research, Bowlby believed that a child's healthy brain development, mental stability, and overall well-being depend on a warm, responsive interaction with a parent or caregiver.

He examined newborns' distress when removed from their parents or caregivers, arguing that crying and other infant behaviors represent adaptive responses to separation from a primary attachment figure.

His theory proposed that children have an innate need to form relationships. So, attachment behaviors help newborns stay close to their caregivers. In evolution, such behaviors allowed infants to survive.

Four Major Attachment Styles

Bowlby's theory and research led to the identification of four attachment styles:

• Anxious or preoccupied

• Avoidant or dismissive

• Disorganized or fearful-avoidant

• Secure attachment

Anxious, ambivalent, and disorganized attachment styles are known as insecure attachment.

Anxious Attachment

Anxious attachment is an insecure attachment in which bonds between a child and a caregiver are not based on love, trust, and safety but on inconsistency and neglect, with emotionally distant parents who don't always meet the child's needs or show mixed emotions. People who were raised by parents whose behavior was unpredictable never knew what to expect regarding communication, feelings, and behavior.

Because of this, they learned to protect themselves by acting needy.

Anxious Attachment in Adult Relationships

An internalized idea that you are unworthy of love is the root cause of anxious attachment in adult relationships. This belief you internalized in childhood might lead to self-limiting beliefs and behaviors, causing trouble in your adult interactions.

For example, if you were raised in a home with an anxious-preoccupied attachment style, you may develop codependent traits and behaviors, such as poor personal boundaries and a tendency to put your own needs aside in favor of others.

As an adult, you may struggle with self-esteem issues and be too sensitive to rejection. As a result, you might develop into a people-pleaser who needs your partner's approval and constant reassurance to feel loved and important, requiring them to serve any purpose.

If your attachment style is anxious, you may be highly cautious, looking for things that could hurt your relationship. Furthermore, you may be afraid of emotional closeness and intimacy. At the same time, you may fear being alone and feel very hurt when you're turned down.

Also, you may need help establishing and maintaining boundaries and have trust and jealousy issues.

Anxious attachment in adult relationships stems from an internalized belief that you are not good or deserving of love. So, you may not trust your feelings and judgment and became the victim of abuse and manipulation in toxic relationships. You may feel responsible for how your partner feels or behaves and make excuses for your partner's bad behavior because you think it's your fault.

Avoidant Attachment

People with avoidant or dismissive attachment style usually had strict, emotionally distant parents or caregivers who didn't support emotional expression and expected them to be tough.

This lack of support in childhood taught people with anxious-avoidant attachment not to trust others because they learned they couldn't rely on people.

Avoidant Attachment in Adult Relationships

If you grew up in a family with avoidant attachment, you may strongly desire self-sufficiency and independence. Because you might value a sense of independence and freedom more than a relationship, refusing emotional support from your partner or not relying on them in times of stress.

While you may let others be around you, you may have difficulties establishing and maintaining close, intimate relationships. Even though you look confident and put together on the outside, you may fear closeness and have trouble showing your feelings and vulnerability.

In addition, you may have issues with emotional regulation and feel insecure and anxious if you let people get too close.

Disorganized Attachment

People who were neglected or abused as children had no idea what to expect from their caregivers because they were the source of both comfort and fear. A child who grows up in a family with disorganized attachment is never sure how the caregiver will treat them or how to respond to their presence. This can result in a child's confusion, insecurity, and anxiety.

A disorganized attachment style is marked by a lack of stable and healthy strategies to seek comfort and deal with stress. It can make you more likely to repeat these unhealthy behaviors as an adult, having difficulty forming secure attachment in your relationships.

Disorganized Attachment in Adult Relationships

If you grew up in a family where the way people cared about each other wasn't always clear, this could manifest in your adult relationships.

For example, you might be very caring at times but also emotionally distant, careless, or even angry at other times in your adult relationships. You may also have difficulty trusting your partner or experience intense emotions such as fear or anger, which can be difficult for your partner to manage.

In addition, you may engage in self-destructive behaviors, such as substance abuse or risky sexual behavior, to cope with emotional distress.

Or you may have difficulty understanding and regulating your emotions, which can create confusion and conflicts in your relationships.

Secure Attachment

Secure attachment is a healthy attachment where a child feels safe and comforted when a parent or caregiver is around. Children who grow up in families with secure attachment feel protected and can freely explore their environment with their caregiver present.

Secure attachment is essential to healthy development, our health and well-being as it relates to healthy self-esteem, our ability to establish and keep healthy relationships, and our ability to rely on others for support. Research shows that positive social ties reduce stress, increase happiness and optimism, and give us meaning in life.

Secure Attachment in Adult Relationships

People with secure attachment strive for deep emotional contact with another person while maintaining their independence. This capacity is known as differentiation.

If you were raised in a secure attachment home, you have grown into an adult capable of differentiating yourself in a relationship. You foster vulnerability and openness by making your partner feel comfortable and supporting each other when required while maintaining your individuality.

You accept responsibility for your actions and respect the boundaries of others. Still, you have no problem saying "no" when needed. Consequently, instead of avoiding conflicts, you focus on fixing things after a fight.

Adult relationships with secure attachment encourage personal growth, a sense of safety, and self-esteem.

How to Overcome Insecure Attachment Styles

It may be draining and disheartening to live in a constant state of anxiety, concern, and resentment. If you have an anxious attachment style, any gesture or omission by your spouse might set off your anxiety. For example, you may feel concerned if they remark about your looks, fail to text or call you back from work, forget to kiss you goodbye in the morning or fail to arrive home on time after work.

So, learning to detect the triggers that drive you to focus on what your relationship lacks or possible risks to your connection is essential.

Here are other ways to deal with stress and better care for yourself and your relationships.

Get in Touch with Your Inner Child and Its Unmet Needs

Our childhood experiences affect who we become as adults. If our needs for love, affection, and protection were not adequately addressed as children, it might influence our adult relationships.

For example, if you didn't feel safe and secure as a child, you may struggle with self-esteem issues, find it difficult to trust others or be afraid of intimacy.

Psychotherapy can be a safe place to do your inner child's work, get in touch with your unmet needs, and understand how they create difficulties in your adult life.

This can help you clarify your needs, talk more openly with your partner about what you need and expect, and relieve tension. It also teaches you to take care of your emotional needs while allowing your spouse space and not relying on them for affirmation and approval.

Learn How to Detach Yourself

Our level of personal detachment in our relationships reflects the extent to which we:

• Keep emotional control and remain calm in stressful times

• Can self-soothe

• Set boundaries

• Are capable of thinking, feeling, and acting on our own

• Can let go of control

• Are capable of taking a break from vexing arguments

• Can effortlessly calm ourselves and resolve conflicts on our own.

Keeping a journal may assist you in identifying triggers, recognizing your feelings, stopping ruminating, and learning how to focus on yourself.

Prioritize Self-Care

Taking good care of yourself can help you focus on your needs, set boundaries, and self-soothe when upset rather than relying on your partner.

Setting boundaries is essential to self-care because it allows you to differentiate yourself from others, take responsibility for your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, and protect yourself from manipulation and abuse.

Self-care routines can include any action that makes you feel good and improves your well-being, such as the following:

• Mindfulness meditation

• Finding a hobby

• Spending time with positive people

• Journaling

• Physical activity

• Spending time in nature

• Healthy diet

• Getting enough sleep

• Listening to music

• Writing positive affirmations about yourself

• Breathing exercises

Seek Support

Building a strong support system can help you overcome insecure attachments. You can feel more supported, address your anxiety, and develop constructive strategies to release unpleasant emotions by talking about them with a close friend, family member, or counselor.

Working with a therapist can help you heal your inner child and overcome insecure attachments.

Therapy might help you:

• Learn to set boundaries

• Address unmet needs from childhood

• Learn how to differentiate yourself in a relationship

• Express your needs assertively rather than acting needy

• Understand why unfulfilled needs may prevent you from having the connections you desire as an adult.

Individual counseling can be a safe place to work through your past wounds or trauma, understand where your patterns stem from, and learn how to overcome them.