On Attachment Styles & Building Earned Secure Attachment
Raise your hand if you’ve taken one of those online quizzes telling you what your attachment style is. Raise your hand if you’ve procrastinated writing this blog post by taking one such quiz and getting irrationally angry at the results and how creepily accurate they were.
*crickets*
Just me for that one?
*backs away awkwardly*
As a therapist, I have a lot of clients come into therapy and tell me their attachment style, sure that they’ll never be able to maintain a secure attachment because of things that happened in their childhood that were out of their control. Some folx even tell me that their attachment style is why things are the way that they are, “Well, I’m an avoidant, so I do [insert behavior here].” Y’all. You are not an attachment style. And, more importantly, you’re not stuck in one pattern or way of interacting with others and existing in relationships because of things that have happened to you. Is it easy to heal attachment wounds? Hell no! Is it worth the work to do so? Definitely.
what is attachment theory?
Before we dig into what earned secure attachment is, let’s do a quick (and very basic) review of what attachment theory is (for those of you who haven’t spent far too much time googling your attachment style and taking quizzes to figure out which fictional characters share your attachment style so that you feel ~seen~).
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby in the late ’50s, posits that we learn how we form and maintain relationships through the relationship we had with our caregivers as children (he usually pointed to one primary attachment figure for each child, often the mother because it was the ‘50s and, well, my feminist rant is probably better suited for another blog post. Anyhoo...). He described attachment as the “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings” (1969).
Bowlby believed that because our survival was dependent upon our caregivers’ ability to meet our needs, figuring out how to get our needs met was what created safety in our childhood. The methods of connecting with others we developed to get our needs met stick with us into adulthood and carry over into our beliefs about others’ ability to meet our needs in our adult relationships.
When we learn that our caregivers/loved ones will be able to see us, hear us, and respond to us and meet our needs the vast majority of the time, we develop a secure attachment. If our attachment figures are unresponsive to us or are even entirely absent, we develop various ways to cope and create safety for ourselves, which have been labeled as insecure attachment styles. Insecure attachment patterns might look like increased anxiety and excessive bids for closeness and connection (anxiously attached) or staying more distant and detached from our attachment figure (avoidantly attached). Avoidant attachment might look like a tendency to stay more distant, detached, or dismissive, often finding ways to meet our own needs instead of reaching for others to meet our needs. Anxious attachment may look like frequently seeking closeness to partners, which has sometimes been described as “clinginess” or “neediness,” and/or seeking more validation and reassurance from partners that they are there and they are faithful. Some attachment researchers portray adult attachment with various dimensions ranging in avoidance and anxiety, offering a broader spectrum than merely “anxious” to “avoidant.”
earned secure attachment—it’s possible to build a new attachment style
Okay, now we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about how we can repair wounds that happened in our childhood so we can build more secure attachments in our adult relationships. This is what we like to call an earned secure attachment. Folx with an earned secure attachment can acknowledge that their childhood attachment wasn’t necessarily ideal, but they’ve been able to work through and process their past experiences, and can reconceptualize what it means for them to be in a relationship. An important part of this process means exploring your childhood and building a cohesive narrative about your past, gaining a deeper understanding of what happened, and having clarity on how it has impacted you throughout your life (#therapy).
One of the most important parts of healing attachment wounds is having experiences that offer the opportunity to repair and correct what happened in your past.
For example, if your primary caregiver wasn’t able to respond to your needs, you likely learned that you have to meet your own needs and can’t trust anyone to be there for you. A reparative experience might look like having someone be there for you and care for you, meeting your—spoken or unspoken—needs, even if you’re trying to distance yourself and shell up (again, #therapy).
Another example would be someone whose primary caregiver was inconsistent and thus, they often had to make themselves very apparent (crying, screaming, etc.) to remind their caregiver that they were there and they had needs to be met. For this person, a healing experience could be having a partner who checks in with them and reminds them that they are there for them, they see their needs, and they will come back for them (even if they need space at that moment).
We can learn that we are able to care for our partners when they’re in distress, and they’ll do the same for us. By the way, these corrective emotional experiences don’t have to occur in the context of romantic relationships. In fact, they’ll probably occur in many different contexts if we give them the chance to. I mean, you’re talking to a girl who once spent an entire meeting with her boss sobbing because she made an oops and it somehow translated into her brain that she was going to have to run away from/be abandoned by the wonderful place she works (Sorry I cried for an hour in your office and used up all of your tissues, Paul, it was really just so I could write this blog post, obviously).
The crux of this work is building a secure base from which you can explore the world and a safe haven that you can come back to. We can heal from past hurts and go on to build healthy relationships with mutual respect, support, care, and love. We can build a new attachment style to help us feel less anxious, more secure in our relationships, and get more of what we’re needing. And that is definitely worth it.
Courtney Rago is an empath, a critical thinker, a creative, and a questioner. She helps creative individuals to get to know and celebrate all parts of themselves and their talents. She is passionate about supporting families and partners to build healthy relationships and feel more nourished by their intimate connections. She firmly believes that we have the power to rewrite who society tells us we “should” be, challenging the status quo, and radically celebrating ourselves as an act of resistance. At heart, Courtney is a Jersey girl who talks fast, walks fast, drinks too much coffee, and reallyyyy misses Yankee games and NY bagels.
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