Knowing Your Attachment Style
It Matters if You Want to Keep a Relationship!
When it comes to working on yourself and how you relate to romantic relationships, knowing your attachment style is vital. It might explain a lot about why you think the way you do in your relationship, why you feel anxious when you’re not together, why you get jealous when your partner spends time with friends, why you feel claustrophobic when your partner shows you affection, why you have a could-care-less attitude or why you have a one foot in and one foot out mentality when all you want is true love and intimacy.
According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and John Bowlby, founder of the Attachment Theory, our sense of security is one of the most important and essential part of human survival and psychological well-being. Maslow argued that when the need for security was not met, one can feel anxious, tense, dissatisfied with life, pessimistic, isolate themselves, hostile or show signs of tension and conflict in interpersonal relationships. However, those who are emotionally secure, feel less anxious, have high confidence and trust of others and themselves, are more social and are actively involved with others.
Bowlby suggested those who received consistent bonding experiences as a child with their caregivers developed self-confidence, competence and feelings of worthiness of love and attention. Those who experienced neglect or inconsistent care developed insecurity, feelings of unwantedness, unworthiness or incompetence. In addition, those who lacked a sense of security experienced high stress level that affected all areas of their lives.
Sue Johnson, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver researched Bowlby’s theory in adults in the late 80’s. They found adults in relationships formed the same attachments with one another similar to the child’s and caregiver’s relationship. If as a child, you experienced positive and healthy attachment with your caregiver, this served as a model for you to able to form healthy attachments with your relationships as an adult. If you experienced negative conditions as a child with your caregiver, it becomes a model of your survival instinct as an adult in your relationships.
They identified Four Styles of Attachment in adults: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant.
- Secure: These individuals are self-sufficient emotionally. They have a healthy view of relationships, are comfortable with intimacy and being emotionally close. They tend to develop healthy trust and boundaries, are comfortable depending on others and comfortable being depended on. They do not have a need to people-please and they have low anxiety about relationships in general. They are not anxious about being alone.
- Anxious-Preoccupied: These individuals tend to have high anxiety in relationships. They have low avoidance, meaning, they want to feel close to other people all the time. The worry or anxiety comes from the fear of being abandoned in their relationships. They may see their partner’s relationships with others as a threat to their relationship and will often have feelings of insecurity and jealousy as a result.
- Dismissive-Avoidant: These individuals tend to have low anxiety in their relationships. However, they have very high avoidance because they don’t like to be too close. This helps them to feel like they are in control. They can often be very distant in a relationship, be viewed as detached emotionally and they tend to not worry too much about how their actions may affect the other person. Any signs of avoidance, drama, conflict or intimacy from their partner will add to their dismissive-avoidance style.
- Fearful-Avoidant: These individuals have high anxiety in their relationships. They also tend to be high avoidance. This can often be difficult for this individual because on one hand they want to feel close and desire intimacy with their partner, yet they can feel overwhelmed with conflicting emotions of wanting to avoid this person for fear of being hurt. This generally causes unstable relationships as they often question its legitimacy due to their negative anxious thoughts about their partner and their desire to distance themselves. When they feel rejected, they tend to want closeness, but when they have closeness, they feel claustrophobic and want space. These individuals may have a hard time with boundaries and leaving unhealthy relationships.
Why does this matter? We all want healthy relationships. Knowing your attachment style is important in order to understand yourself and how you view the other person. This may also help explain the thoughts, emotions, behaviors and reality of where you are today. It is especially helpful to understand the attachment style of your partner to reduce assumptions and conflicts.
For example, if your attachment style is anxious-preoccupied and your partner is dismissive-avoidant, it can cause a lot of fear and anxiety in the relationship from you. As an anxious-preoccupied style, you’ll want to spend all of your time with your partner to feel secure. You’ll want to have close intimacy with your partner, be best friends, want a lot of affection given to you, want to cook together, shop together, be in the same room together and do all activities together. You want your partner to act as a security blanket. This will most likely cause your dismissive-avoidant partner to feel claustrophobic in the relationship. You’ll pick up on it in his body language, how he doesn’t like to maybe offer a lot of affection, how the desire for best friend intimacy isn’t there, how he always seems emotionally detached to you, how he can seem to have a great time with friends, but not you. He may even have coping mechanisms that make you feel insecure because of the energy he puts into those instead of you.
All of this is going to make you think he doesn’t love you, you’re going to feel more insecure and more anxious and you’re going to try harder to get closer, but it will have the opposite effect on a dismissive-avoidant partner. You’ll feel like you’re always trying while your partner could seem to care less at times. You think his behavior is showing you he doesn’t care or love you, but, of course that’s not why he is behaving this way. His behavior doesn’t translate to him as lack of love, but fear of intimacy as a defense mechanism.
When a relationship ends for any of the insecure attachment styles, it validates the defense mechanism they are currently operating in. This then continues the pattern of subconscious behavior in the next relationship unless awareness and steps to change are applied.
If you have a secure attachment style, you are with approximately 60 percent of the people. Knowing your partner’s attachment style will offer some explanation in your relationship and can help them in their desire and journey for growth and change in this area. Those that fall into the insecure categories and want to change will have an easier time in a relationship with someone with this attachment style. They are able to have a healthy model to practice their new behavior while learning to accept and reciprocate healthy emotions.
If you find yourself in one of the spectrum of the insecure categories with a partner who also has an insecure attachment style, you can still be successful in creating a proactive approach toward a secure attachment style in your relationship. It’s all about committing yourself to the process of putting in the work to give yourself the security you need internally, rather than draw on external relationships to provide this for you.
3 Helpful Tips to Get You Started:
- Be aware of the defensive measures you’re using in your current relationship. When a thought comes up that is negative or fear-based, don’t just believe it, question whether it is due to your attachment style.
- Know your thoughts create your reality. Work on reframing or changing your internal chatter to a positive and confident view of self. Write a narrative about how you are lovable and worthy of love. Know just by being born into this world, you have worth and value. This is true about you and everyone else. This is something you need to believe for yourself. You don’t need to earn it or find it, you already have it.
- Reframe or change your negative thoughts about your partner to positive. This will help toward changing your mindset to a positive view of your relationship. Your mind is not able to have both positive thought and negative thought at the same time. For every one negative thought that comes up, replace it with five positive, meaningful thoughts. Positive thoughts = positive feelings.
We all have learned behaviors, thoughts and emotions operating on autopilot in our subconscious. We can be a participant in creating new ones if they are not serving us today or who we want to be moving forward into our future. We do not need our past to define who we are in our present or future if they do not prove useful on our behalf.
For those who have looked into your past, you may already understand where your attachment style is coming from. For those that need further understanding, you may need to revisit the past with a therapist to make sense and understand your defense mechanisms in relationships. For those that are ready to move forward and want the accountability to change their mindset, a relationship coach will assist with the tools and action steps to help you toward achieving your goal.
To figure out your Relationship Attachment Style, this free assessment is a great source. It’s great for those that don’t like having to register their information to see their result. https://www.personalityassessor.com/relationshipwants/
