Your attachment style. Does it matter? January 26, 2019

If you had a secure bonding with your primary caregiver in your childhood, it means that throughout your life, you have that sense of having a secure base, a support, from which to interact with the world. A world that is full of things to explore and people to relate to. You will have that sense of trust to go out there and dive in the experience of it all. By doing this, your worldview gets continually reinforced with optimism. On the other hand, if you had an insecure bonding, the world will look scary and you will lack that sense of having a secure base. You will not fully trust others and you will experience difficulties forming healthy or any relationships at all, depending on the severity of the circumstances that made you feel unsafe to being with.

People with insecure attachment suffer from poor self-image. This is partly due to how those around them reacted to their expressing their needs, as well as lack of accurate mirroring, which is how our identity is formed.  Because of the sense that the world is not a safe place and people are inconsistent and unreliable, insecurely attached children develop specific coping mechanisms, which help them in childhood, but are to their detriment as life progresses. Insecure bonding can give rise to three primary attachment types: anxious, avoidant and disorganized. Each of these can be viewed on a scale of mild to severe. Depending on where on the scale you side, you will react differently in terms of both intensity and strategy in a stressful situation. Both anxious and avoidant have an organized stress reaction, meaning there is predictability in their coping with triggers. The disorganized type lacks this. It is fluctuating between conflicting and contradictory needs and feelings. It is also the more rare of the attachment styles.

If you are anxiously attached, chances are you feel incomplete when you are alone. As you get into a relationship, you heavily rely on the partner and your self esteem is tied to how this person thinks about you. You are living in the fear of abandonment in the backdrop, constantly observing and thinking about the other and your relationship, so you can prevent them from leaving; should there be any danger to that effect. Your need of constant reassurance from your partner is a way to have control back in the situation where you feel out of control. But because you naturally attract emotionally unavailable partners, they are simply not able to give you what you need. The truth is, you have a very good reason why you behave in this clingy and needy manner. The moment your partner is walking away from you, you feel such high levels of anxiety that can make you go in panic. When you were growing up, your caregivers gave you inconsistent nurturance, making you anxious, on the edge and always afraid that you are going to be left. As a baby, being in this kind of dynamic is life threatening, and that is exactly how it felt (!). It was highly taxing on its autonomic nervous system, which developed differently as a result.

If you have avoidant attachment style, your parents were in most part or altogether emotionally unavailable or unresponsive. They disregarded or ignored you when you expressed your needs and most likely also discouraged expressing emotions. In this dynamic, what you could do to cope, was to suppress your natural desire to seek comfort and aid from others when frightened or in pain. You formed an association between rejection on the one hand and displaying or acknowledging distress on the other. From there, it was only natural to step into an illusion of total independence and self-sufficiency, where your motivation for seeking support and help eroded. As this carried over to adult relationships, you may have learned to enjoy relationships and spending time with your partner - however, once things get too close, it becomes uncomfortable. The other party wants too much. Is too clingy. Alternatively, when your partner wants to leave, your attachment needs are activated, and your subconscious response is to suppress any related emotions. You withdraw, deny vulnerability and focus on other goals and issues. But sometimes you do feel like you’d need support. Since you cannot ask for it directly due to the association you made in early life, you go about it in an indirect way via hinting, complaining and sulking. It’s simply how you learned to cope in your specific circumstances when growing up.

Disorganized attachment style has tendencies of both anxious and avoidant. In this case, the behavior of caregivers in the childhood was contradictory and so unpredictable and erratic that there was no coherent strategy that you could form to have your needs met. You felt terrified, confused and frightened when growing up, most commonly due to abuse or trauma; where the person who met your needs, was also the person who hurt you or violated your boundaries. You duplicated the unintegrated communication from your caregiver in your disorganized response. In adult life this makes it difficult to form a coherent narrative about your childhood in general and your relationships tend to fluctuate between push and pull and sometimes also between feelings of helplessness and hostility. You experience confusion about how you feel, what relationships are about and what you or the other person needs and wants. Close connections are followed by withdrawal and feelings of guilt, shame and mental confusion. There can be difficulty in self-expression, namely feeling unsure of how to express what you feel and think. This can in many cases be coupled with long pauses in speech in general and anxiety about what you are going to say. Because of early learning that people are in one moment good and in the next moment bad or even evil, you view relationships as both a source of comfort and as a source of fear.

It’s clear that strategies we use to cope with psychological stress in early life carry over to adult lives via patterns in thoughts, feelings and actions. But all is not lost and it’s entirely possible to shift the attachment style you currently have. Awareness is the first step and reading this article shows that you’re already on your way in helping yourself or perhaps being a support to someone else who struggles with this. I want to also remind you that we are all unique and we don't need to experience all of the symptoms above to know which way we lean. You most likely behave one way in intimate relationship and in a different way in a friendship. The more intimate the relationship, the more it brings out deeper wounding. 

How to go about shifting towards secure attachment is going to be the focus of one of my next posts. Spoiler alert- your needs as an insecurely attached person, will be very different in relationships and this is what cannot change before healing occurs. For now, keep asking yourself, what would make me feel safe right now? What is it that I need in this moment? And take care.