The “Love Quiz”: A Glimpse at Your Attachment Style

What is your love style? How do you reach for closeness, connect with others during pain, and handle conflict when problems arise? Are you able to be intimate with others, both at the emotional and sexual level? All of these abilities are linked to your love style, your attachment style.

Attachment is the bonding process that God ordained for us to connect with others, from the time that we are infants and throughout our lives (Bowlby, 1969). It begins with our very first cry and the way that someone picked us up to hold us.

If someone took the time to hold us, show us affection, and also track with our emotional signals then we have a much more connected approach towards relationships. These kind of bonding experiences make a lasting imprint on your mind, showing that you can count on others to comfort you and be available in times of need. As a result you reach out to others, especially in times of need. Finding the support you need in moments of distress instills a settled confidence that whatever happens, “I am not alone.” This is called Secure Attachment (Ainsworth et al, 1978).

Our entire nervous system gets calibrated and wired up during infancy. If we receive physical affection, the tender gaze of our parents, and consistent emotional responses, then our nervous system is bolstered to be less reactive during the ebb and flow of daily life.

Conversely, children who had inconsistent emotional responses or who were really left to their own devices will not have that settled confidence. Children who experienced physical or emotional abandonment will struggle to trust in the promise of closeness and safety in relationships. We would describe their love styles as insecurely attached, and these effects linger throughout the lifespan.

We don’t remember the thousands of interactions that go into shaping the bond we had with our parent which helped to produce our attachment style. These interactions took place before we had sufficient language to even begin to describe what was happening to us.

Life experiences activate the brain at the structural and chemical level. The brain is responding to these attachment experiences with excitement, confusion, peace, or anxiety. Early attachment experiences actually help to determine which parts of our brains get utilized and strengthened, and which parts will be underdeveloped.

Have you heard the phrase “use it or lose it”? This is literally taking place in the child’s brain in the first three years of life. Portions of the brain that are not activated or utilized are actually pruned away so that the active areas of the brain will receive the most resources. The result of this process is that only the most useful brain structures and communication pathways will endure. The remaining structures of the brain, once formed and locked in place, will determine a person’s potential to analyze and respond to relationship situations in the future.

An infant’s early life attachment experiences will also influence which brain chemicals get released in the context of human interactions, and in what quantities. The chemical regulation system of the brain, which forms during the child’s early months and years, will also influence the way the child responds to attachment situations. If a child learned that attachment relationships are secure, then her brain will release peaceful and mellowing agents into her brain when she gets close to others.

Another child who was abandoned or abused by a parent will have a brain flooded with fear and hypervigilance brain chemicals during times when he tries to get close to others. As a result, it may be very physically overwhelming for this child to get close to others. His brain is literally trying to signal him to be hypervigilant for the prospect of danger right in the moment when he tries to draw close to someone else. It is a similar pattern for emotional neglect, for these children have become so accustomed to self reliance that it becomes very stressful to consider the option of depending on others once again.

Physically and emotionally you can’t help but have certain responses in attachment situations, because many of your brain’s structures and chemical response systems were actually put together in the context of your earliest attachment experiences. Your love style for relationships was created at the very time that your brain was developing.

You can’t help the way you think and feel about close relationships!

I do not want to sound fatalistic or to convey a sense of doom over the life of one who has experienced trauma or confusion during the early experiences of attachment. Modern research shows that God made our brains in wonderful and resilient ways. Our brains can recover from trauma, rebuild new brain tissue, and compensate for areas of damage and underdevelopment.

We may also have new experiences in later childhood or even as adults that help to reprogram our brain and teach us healthier ways to connect. This includes new experiences of receiving the perfect love of our Heavenly Father here on earth.

Even if my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will hold me close… I am confident I will see the Lord’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living. (Psalm 27:10, 13; NLT).

We can appreciate that our love style, our attachment style, becomes firmly ingrained in our minds and bodies. Research shows that our attachment styles remain with us from infancy, through later years of childhood, and into adulthood. Understanding your approach towards intimate relationships can shed light on areas where you are excelling or areas where you need to grow.

The Love Quiz

The following questionnaire is based on Hazan and Shaver’s (1987) three sets of statements describing an attachment style. Please take a moment to honestly rate yourself.

1. Secure — I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don’t often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me.
2. Ambivalent Protesters — I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to get extremely close to another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.
3. Detached Avoiders — I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being.

Do you lean toward the Ambivalent Protester side of interactions in your close relationships? Do you find yourself too often in the Detached Avoider side of things? Can you see how the fear of abandonment or experiences of neglect might impact your love style?

If you want to learn more about what secure attachment looks like in loving relationships please check out the book, “Face to Face: Seven Keys to a Secure Marriage” (Gill, 2015) at www.facetofaceliving.com. If you want to learn how to grow towards greater places of security or to apply attachment strategies to marriage, this is also a great place to start.

References:

Ainsworth, M.D., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: Assessed in the Strange Situation and at home. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss (Vol I). London: Hogarth.

Gill, J. (2015). Face to face: Seven keys to a secure marriage. Bloomington, IN: Westbow Press, a Division of Thomas Nelson and Zondervan.

Hazan, C. and Shaver, P. (1987). “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process”; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 511–524.