Attachment Styles (Part 1) — How Do You Interact in Your Relationships? 💑

5 min readMay 16, 2022

Ever wonder why some relationships work like a charm and others are painful as heck? Want to have better social bonds with people and groups you care for? Applicable in any type of affiliation, attachment theory is another useful concept to know when dealing with people and handling potential conflicts.

What it is

All of us are biologically driven to form attachment with others (it’s the third lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, after physiology and safety). And we develop styles of attachment through interacting with our caregivers as children, carrying them onto adulthood. Quoting ▶️ SciShow: “according to some studies, there is a modest relationship between childhood and adult attachment. In a longitudinal study published in journal Child Development in 2000, about 70% of the 50 participants had the same attachment style 20 years after infancy.” Our attachment style in any given relationship is shaped not only by past experiences, but also expectations and beliefs for that relation. While it usually stays pretty stable, our attachment style can change depending on recent experience or major (especially negative) life events.

Whereas tribalism divides us into two groups — in-group and out-group — attachment styles come in four flavors: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant, based on how positive or negative we regard ourselves and others in a relation. Below are brief descriptions of four types of attachment style from Wikipedia. Which attachment styles do you apply in your relationships?

1. Secure

“Possessing a positive view of self and a positive view of others;
Report greater satisfaction and adjustment as well as longer relationships than people with other attachment styles;
Feel comfortable both with intimacy and with independence;
With intimacy, secure style shows:
willingness to disclose one’s true thoughts, feelings, wishes, and fears ;
willingness to rely on an attachment for care and emotional support;
willingness to engage in physical intimacy in the case of romantic or potential romantic partners;
Promoted by a caregiver who is emotionally available and appropriately responsive to their child’s attachment behavior, as well as capable of regulating both their positive and negative emotions.”

2. Insecure > Anxious-preoccupied

“Possessing a negative view of self and a positive view of others;
Often find themselves in long-lasting, but unhappy, relationships;
Seek high levels of intimacy, approval, and responsiveness from their attachment figure… to such an extent that they become overly dependent on the attachment figure
Anxious about being abandoned;
Feel a sense of anxiousness that only recedes when in contact with the attachment figure (note: such as a parent, significant other or an authority figure);
Often doubt their worth as a person and blame themselves for the attachment figure’s lack of responsiveness.”

3. Insecure > Dismissive-avoidant

“Possessing a positive view of self and a negative view of others;
Desire a high level of independence and avoid attachment altogether;
View themselves as self-sufficient and invulnerable to feelings associated with being closely attached to others;
Often deny needing close relationships; may even view close relationships as relatively unimportant;
Seek less intimacy with attachments, whom they often view less positively than they view themselves;
Tend to suppress and hide their feelings, and they tend to deal with rejection by distancing themselves from the sources of rejection (e.g. their attachments or relationships).”

4. Insecure > Fearful-avoidant

“Possessing an unstable or fluctuating view of self and others;
Feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness, and the mixed feelings are combined with sometimes unconscious, negative views about themselves and their attachments;
Commonly view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their attachments, and they don’t trust the intentions of their attachments;
Seek less intimacy from attachments and frequently suppress and deny their feelings.”

A summary & a few notes

Without good interactions, we can’t build trust; without building trust, we can’t solve problems together. Learning to have secure interactions is therefore essential when we collaborate with others in any social ties. It teaches us how to reduce conflicts and have healthy interactions and negotiations when people in a group have competing goals.
A lot of times we form bad relations because we’ve unknowingly developed anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, or fearful-avoidant styles of interacting with others and don’t know how to improve — no one taught us better so we never learned. How do we turn our social bonds from insecure to secure becomes the key element for rewarding relationships.
Anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, fearful-avoidant all have experienced negative responses from loved ones, but their coping strategies are different: the anxious-preoccupied becomes “clingy” and over-reliant on others; dismissive-avoidant people avoid closeness and rely on themselves; and the fearful-avoidant oscillates between the over-reliance and withdrawal. Needless to say, all three attachment styles are not desirable.
Negative responses don’t always have to be cold or violent, they may be unhealthy love as well. In The difference between healthy and unhealthy love ▶️, for example, CEO Katie Hood outlines 5 markers of unhealthy love: intensity, isolation, jealousy, belittling, and volatility [3:17].
Anxious-preoccupied and fearful-avoidant are reliant on attachment figure, who can be a parent, a loved one, an authority figure or a role model. At the higher level group associations, such as social status, political systems, economies, humanity, environment and world affairs, our attachment figure might be ideologies, religions, science, and beliefs such as human rights.

Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!