Attachment Styles and You
Libby explains the theory of attachment styles and what they might mean for your relationships. (All of this stuff is Googleable, y'all, if you want to know more. )
Transcript
Back in my first episode of this podcast, I talk some about attachment theory. There's a layer to attachment theory that I didn't discuss in that episode though, which is something called your attachment style. Now, some people think your attachment style can explain a lot about your relationships. So that's the topic for today.
I went back to the drawing board and I thought about what I wanna do, because that's like the second time that I haven't gotten a second episode out in a week. And what I've decided is that Fridays are gonna be bonus episode days. So some days there will be a Friday episode. Some days there will not be, and Fridays are going to be if there's something extra that I wanna add to the podcast that I episode that I did earlier in the week, or if I get a listener question. So if you want a Friday episode, then send me a listener question and I would love to answer your questions. Or if I have a practice that I wanna give you, so something concrete or I might even occasionally do a conversation with someone, not really an interview, but more a conversation, like something that comes up with one of my partners or friends that I wanna record and share with you. So that's what Fridays are gonna look like. So Tuesdays always, there will be an episode Fridays. There may an episode, maybe not. So that's how things are gonna go moving forward. So now let's dive into attachment styles.
If you listen to the first episode of this podcast, you've already heard me talk about John Bowlby. I talk about how he studied babies and developed a theory that babies form attachments with caregivers based on whether they are attuned, responsive and available, and that we are wired to do this from birth. And I also talked about how the theory expands that we are wired to recreate a secure attachment in our adult relationships and that having that security helps us thrive in other aspects in our life. What I didn't talk about in that episode is what happens when we didn't have a consistently attuned, responsive and available caregiver in childhood because you know, roughly half of us didn't according to current research. Well, so after John Bowlby conducted his initial search that developed his theory of attachment Mary Ainsworth, another psychologist was interested in answering the question of how babies responded to different kinds of caregiver relationships. Ainsworth conducted a famous experiment where a baby and a caregiver, usually a parent, usually the mother would be brought into an unfamiliar playroom. The parent and the baby would play together a bit. And then a stranger would enter the room and then the parent would be called away. And then the stranger would maybe try to play with the baby. And then the parent would return and then the stranger would leave. And then the parent would get called away again, leaving the baby alone in the room, him, then the stranger would return. And then the parent would return. Ainsworth was trying to get an idea of how babies would respond to these different scenarios. And Ainsworth found that if a parent demonstrated to the researchers that they were responsive, attuned and accessible, that the babies were willing to do things like explore the unfamiliar playroom and use the parent as a secure base to explore from they would interact with the stranger when the caregiver was there, but avoided the stranger went alone with them.
And when the parent went away, the baby might protest and cry for a little bit, but then is able to calm down and be soothed. And when the caregiver returned the baby reunited happily and then returned to playing. Now, if the babies had parents who seemed unresponsive or not properly attuned or inconsistent or distracted, they would respond quite differently in this experiment. Some babies would panic and be inconsolable when the parent left and they would remain distressed. When the parents returned either acting clingy or pushing the parent away. These babies were also less willing to explore the playroom and they avoided the stranger. Even when the parent was in the room, other babies would show no distress at all. When the caregiver went away and acted uninterested when the caregiver returned, they were willing to engage with the stranger, whether the parent was present or not, and the stranger was able to comfort the baby, just as well as the parent could.
What developed out of these experiments is this theory, how your parents interacted with you as a child, created your mental model for your intimate relationships as an adult. So if you had an inconsistent or unresponsive or intrusive parental figure growing up, you're more likely to exhibit, the adult version of the baby behaviors when your intimate relationships are stressed, like when you're separated or feeling insecure. So you might freak out and scream and cry, or do the adult version of that. Or you might just not care and be just as easily interested in a stranger as your partner. And by the way, you get wired up this way as a baby. And by the time you're five, your attachment behaviors are set. I just have to say here attachment theory sort of sent me into a panic. When I first became a parent, I thought that it meant that I should never let my babies be upset for even a minute or else I would be like damaging them for life. The way attachment theory is presented is that if you drop the ball even a little as a parent, even just misreading a baby's cues, then the baby is gonna think that they can't count on you. And you're setting your kid up for one of these insecure attachment styles as an adult, I ultimately had to let go of this. And I let go of it pretty quick because the reality of being a parent of a baby is that sometimes babies get upset in ways that their adults just can't or shouldn't fix. And also babies can't speak English. And when you're a new mom, you also can't speak baby yet. So I don't know any parent who is perfectly attuned and never gets anything wrong with their baby. And also, I just don't think our brains or our children are that fragile.
If you believe what Bowlby thought about attachment theory and what Ainsworth followed up with, what they seem to be saying was that babies need uninterrupted, perfectly attuned connection to their mothers during the first five years of life, or else they'll become juvenile delinquents or emotionally detached, which has led a lot of modern-day moms to make the choice to like wear their babies all the time, by strapping them to their bodies and co-sleep with them at night so that they don't ever feel that insecurity or any detachment. And all of this seems to be conveniently constructed to keep mothers from doing things like, ah, having a career, having their own interests or a sense of self outside motherhood, or just getting some sleep. It is also worth pointing out that Ainsworth's experiments were done with exclusively middle class white families and in the 1960s.
There's no accounting for economic, cultural and racial differences in Ainsworth's research. Moreover, when I looked into attachment theory more, I found that a meta analysis of attachment research showed only a weak correlation between parental and I mean, in this case, we're talking maternal sensitivity and the child's attachment style. And some researchers think that it's highly likely that kids are also just born with so certain temperaments that lead them to behave in certain ways, in response to their caregivers. And then their caregivers might respond differently based on how the kid is behaving. I mean, most parents know that babies are very, very different from each other. From the minute they're born. They're not a blank slate by any stretch. So it's likely that the attachment style that shows up once a child reaches adulthood is likely a combination of a lot of factors, including their inborn temperament, parental attunement, responsiveness, and accessibility, and probably also other things like family structure, socioeconomic status, cultural upbringing, past history of trauma, as well as community and social interactions that they've had growing up.
In other words, it really does take a village. Y'all what can be somewhat documented though, is that adults do tend to have four or five different attachment styles for their adult intimate relationships, where they come from isn't necessarily super relevant, but I think they can be useful to think about. So I'm gonna go over them. It's worth saying that. I question though, whether these attachment styles are even really like styles, like there's some kind of personality trait, and I encourage you to consider them. Instead as more of a pattern of behaviors, it's been my experience that our attachment behaviors can often change a lot, depending on the person we're interacting with the time they show up in our life and a whole host of other factors. But as I go through these, you might be able to pick one that might sound more like you right now, or maybe how you've been consistently in your relationships.
And after that, I'm gonna share some ways in which that information might be useful to you and what you might do with it. So the first attachment style is just secure. If you're secure, you are comfortable with intimacy. You let people easily get close to you, when you and your partner separate. You're also able to cope and self soothe because you feel confident that your partner will come back and you feel confident about confronting difficulty with your partner and you believe your partner will work hard things out with you because that's what you've come to expect from the people that you love. The second attachment style is one of three insecure attachment styles. And this one is known as anxious or anxious preoccupied. If you're anxious preoccupied, you tend to have fears of being left and you struggle with being separate from your partner. You may cope with this fear by becoming hypervigilant, overly, emotionally, expressive, seeking intimacy and approval, engaging in behavior in order to get a response from your partner, you worry that your partner secretly doesn't like you.
And when you get scared, you can act clingy and impulsive. If you're anxious, you may be afraid though, to be difficult or needy, and you might actually avoid conflict and not express your needs in a relationship for fear that if you do that, you'll lose your partner. You'll be too difficult. The partner will abandon you, or you might go the opposite direction and get demanding and intrusive. So as to gain control of your partner so that you can feel secure, that they won't leave you while all attachment styles, including secure, are likely to experience and struggle with jealousy. I think this attachment style might have the hardest time because if you throw this fear of being left into the mix with jealousy, it can amplify everything. Times a thousand. The third attachment style is known as dismissive-avoidant. If you tend to struggle with allowing intimacy and closeness with a partner and are instead very independent with a tendency to be closed off and want to hold people at arm’s length, then you might have more dismissive-avoidant attachment behaviors.
And often the fear here isn't abandonment, but rather a fear of engulfment dismissive avoidance don't want to be completely subsumed by their relationships. And they're kind of allergic to anything that looks like dependency or codependency. The fourth attachment style is known as fearful-avoidant, fearful avoidance exhibits, some of the same behaviors as dismissive avoidance. They wanna be independent. They tend to be closed off uncomfortable with closeness, but their motivation is different. They actually wanna get close, but they are afraid of being hurt. So, you know, again, there's this fear of being left. And so they put up walls to protect themselves. If you're a fearful-avoidant, you may ultimately view yourself as unworthy of being loved. And so you don't wanna really be seen. And so when you start to feel scared or upset, your go-to strategy will be to withdraw and shut down someone who's fearful-avoidant may also be sort of like hot and cold. You may be eager to connect at first and be all warm and open, but then again, kind of shut down and withdraw as soon as you feel the relationship is threatened. And the last attachment style is just called disorganized, which basically means that when you're stressed and feeling insecure in your relationship, your behaviors are a little bit anxious, a little bit avoidant, a little bit fearful-avoidant. And this kind of attachment style tends to show up if you've had a lot of trauma in your childhood or in your past at some point because you know, your survival instincts are coming out a lot more strongly. And if you haven't processed this trauma, then it can just kind of your reaction when you are stressed and worrying about your relationship can just be all over the place.
Understanding your attachment behaviors can be useful in explaining your current relationship patterns. It can be especially valuable if you're polyamorous because, in polyamory, there's inevitably going to be more separation between partners, more potential points of conflict, more overall relationships. And so just more opportunities for stress and ultimately attachment behaviors show up when there's stress in the relationship. So it's useful to know where you tend to land when you're under stress. As I said before, though, there are all kinds of reasons why these behaviors can show up. You may have had an insecurely attached caregiver relationship, but you also may have grown up with a secure attachment to a parental figure, but then experienced some other relational trauma as an older child, or even as an adult, or you might otherwise tend towards secure attachment, but are, or have been partnered with someone who tends to be more avoidant, which leads you to be more anxious or who tends to be more anxious, which leads you to be more avoidant.
But while I do think that how we develop our adult relational behaviors is complex. It has been my experience that we do get imprinted with some strong mental models of how relating works based on how we interacted with our parents during childhood. So if you have an attachment style that isn't working for you or your relationships, it might be worth taking a look at where that might have come from. Sometimes your attachment behaviors are something you developed in response to a parent or other caregivers behavior towards you. If dismissive avoidant, you might have developed that because one of your parents was intrusive and smothering, which is where you got your fear of engulfment. But sometimes also your attachment behavior might be something you learned through modeling. So you might have seen them behave that way. And then you learned it and you know, began practicing it yourself.
Either way because it's what you grew up with. It may feel comfortable and familiar to you, even if it's not functional. And thus, you might realize that you tend to be drawn to people who recreate the same conditions of relating you experienced in childhood. This is why say anxious, preoccupied attachers often pair up with an avoidant attacher it gives them the perfect opportunity to reenact their fears of abandonment with someone who will in fact regularly, at least emotionally abandon them and conveniently, if you're a dismissive-avoidant and you're in a relationship with an anxious preoccupied, you get to experience someone who is likely to be overly intrusive and clinging, giving you a chance to experience on the regular, your fear of engulfment. It's so fun. You each get to trigger each other's worst attachment fears all the time leaving you caught in a perpetual cycle of difficulty where no one is satisfied or feeling like their needs are getting met.
And yet the stress and then repair can also be so intense that it can be hard to figure out how to exit the cycle. If this sounds like what's going on in your life, though, all is not lost. The science of neuroplasticity shows us that we can just change our behavior. And I mean, it, it really is that simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. And having new experiences with attachment figures that counter what we experienced in childhood can actually permanently rewire how we relate to others. So you're not to have insecure attachments as an adult, just because you didn't have them as a child, or you just somewhere along the way, picked up an insecure attachment style as children. We are wide open systems, easily molded by our external world, without any ability to really create and shape our own reality. As adults, we have have a greater capacity to mold who we are and make intentional and choices about who and how we want to be.
But we do have to be aware of what's happening and apply some relational mindfulness, understanding your attachment style or your attachment behaviors can be a really good compass. While it's true that especially when we're stressed, our child self can hijack our brain and cause us to act in accordance with how we were wired to relate from childhood. We also have the capacity to pause and breathe and make a different choice about how we behave. And often the goal is to go in the opposite direction of our current attachment style. Changing your behavior may feel uncomfortable, especially when you're stepping outside, what is familiar to you, but those choices can rapidly and permanently change your patterns of relating, especially because when you change, how you relate, the other person in the relationship will change too. So if you tend to be anxious, you can teach yourself to self-soothe and practice being securely alone.
If you tend to be avoidant, you can teach yourself to allow intimacy and closeness without closing off. And you can do this without spending years in therapy, examining your childhood wound. You can just practice doing something different, which will lead you and your partner to both have a different experience in your relationship. And that will actually completely change how the attachment feels and it'll change how your brain interacts in that relationship and wire it to attach more securely in the future. I think it's so good to do this work of making your attachment behaviors more secure, whether you're monogamous or non-monogamous, but developing secure attachments is probably like, even more important, really if you're practicing polyamory or some other form of non-monogamy. Because as I have said before, security is necessary to have autonomy and autonomy is necessary to make polyamory work. I just don't think you can make polyamory work without autonomy, without comfort being separate.
But that means that by practicing polyamory, you also are creating for yourself a tremendous opportunity to change your attachment behaviors if they are insecure right now, and that can make all of your relationships more secure, more functional and more loving. So to recap up I think attachment theory can be useful in describing behavior in adult relationships. But I think the way we develop that behavior is complex and I don't think it's fixed. I think we can change and heal. Attachment styles can help us understand where we currently are and perhaps explain some of the relationship patterns that we tend to get caught in. And that can help give us a clear direction to move if we want to change them. And if we want our relationships to be healthy and sustainable, it helps a lot to do the work, to move toward a more securely attached relationship. And that work starts with us and changing our behavior.
