Is Your Attachment Style Negatively Impacting Your Relationships?

Is Your Attachment Style Negatively Impacting Your Relationships?

By: Jessica Taylor, LPC

What is Adult Attachment?

Since the 1950’s, psychologists have been observing and discussing the impacts of the nature of the attachment between children and their primary caregivers. It was determined that the quality of this attachment significantly impacts the child’s behaviors. Our attachment style in adulthood appears to follow the same logic. Simply put, we can usually identify your attachment style based on how you feel (consciously or unconsciously) about, as well as how you react to, the idea of being rejected or abandoned in relationships. If you intensely fear being rejected or abandoned, and allow this fear to dictate your behaviors, you are going to struggle to maintain healthy relationships. While most researchers believe that our attachment style is inflexible, there are ways to manage the impacts of an unhealthy attachment type. The first step to this is gaining some basic knowledge about your own attachment and the impacts this has had on past and present relationships in your life.

Factors That Impact Attachment

Trauma

- - If you have experienced relational traumas such as neglect and/or physical, mental, or sexual abuse, then this has likely ‘taught’ your brain that other people are unsafe and cannot be trusted. While you most likely still crave closeness with others, you are also going to try to protect yourself–sometimes in unhealthy ways.

Mental health

If you struggle with symptoms of a mental illness such as anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder, you are more likely to be a ‘worrier,’ or struggle with low self-esteem. If we don’t confront the negative impacts that mental health issues have on our daily life, it can be extremely difficult to have a functional love relationship.

Relationship to the primary caregivers.

Primary caregivers don’t need to be perfect; they just need to be good enough. Good enough means feeding their child when they are hungry, hugging them when they cry and changing their diapers when they are dirty. If your primary caregiver neglected any of your basic needs when you were a young child, it is mostly likely going to impact your ability to trust and feel attached to other people throughout your life.

Relationships witnessed during formative years.

What was the nature of the love relationships you witnessed during your childhood and adolescence? Was there cheating, constant fighting or even domestic violence? If so, these experiences have impacted your worldview, at least when it comes to relationships. If the only happy and functional partnerships you witnessed were in movies or TV shows, it’s going to be extremely difficult for you to imagine that that is even possible to achieve in “real life.”

Influential relationships throughout life

If you experienced severe rejection from your peers during childhood and adolescence, this is likely going to have an impact on your attachment style. In addition, if you were in a toxic or abusive relationship, it is possible that you might carry some of the impacts of this union into your subsequent relationships.

What are the Four Different Attachment Styles?

Anxious (Preoccupied): People with an anxious attachment style seek out closeness and require consistent validation to feel as though things are “okay” in the relationship. They don’t like to be away from their partner, which can lead to them sometimes being described as ‘clingy.’ If they feel anxious about the status of a relationship, they will sometimes act out.

Here is an example: Samantha texted her boyfriend Matt asking him if wants to go to dinner tonight, but he hasn’t responded to her for five hours. She starts to wonder if he is not responding because he is cheating on her, so she sends him angry and accusatory texts until he responds to her. It turns out that Matt didn’t respond because he was in an important meeting at work.

1. Avoidant (Dismissive): Those with an avoidant attachment style will often protect their independence at all costs. What this looks like is avoiding closeness, not showing emotion, seeing their partner as clingy when they just want emotional connection, and finding reasons to end the relationship before things get too serious.

For example: Ryan was really enjoying spending his time with Julie until she asked him if he would like to meet her family. This made him feel as though she was trying to rush things between them. When Julie texted him that night to see if he would like to make plans, he said that he needed some space.

Secure: If you have a secure attachment style, you enjoy and thrive in close relationships. You are comfortable sharing your emotions with your partner and having ‘deep’ conversations.
- For example: Dan has a secure attachment style. His partner Sherry came to him and said that she felt hurt when he didn’t reach out to her all day. Dan apologizes for hurting Sherry and explains that he was extremely busy with work. They decide together how to handle situations that are similar to this in the future.
Anxious-Avoidant (Fearful-Avoidant): This style of attachment is sometimes described as ‘disorganized’ as it often looks like mixed-messaging. Individuals with this attachment type deeply crave close connections, but often appear to be indifferent and even sometimes lash out when others try to get close to them.
- Here’s an example: Kate wants to feel loved, but she often times lashes out at her partner for small things. Although she wants to get married, she struggles to ‘settle down’ with one person and feels a lot of dissatisfaction in dating and relationships.

If you still feel unsure of what your attachment style is, you can take a quick assessment created by the authors of the book ‘Attached.’

The Benefits of Understanding Your Own Attachment Style

You will stop repeating negative patterns in relationships.

Does dating sometimes feel like you are in the movie Groundhog’s Day? Maybe you keep getting ghosted only a few dates in with someone. Or you tend do something to sabotage the relationship yourself. If you gain the skills necessary to identify your own attachment style and recognize what these different attachment styles look like in other people, you are less likely to continue dating people who are not a good match for you.

You will stop sabotaging your relationships.

While our attachment style may not change, our ability to manage our own triggers can improve. For example, if you know that not hearing from the person you are dating for multiple hours at a time makes you feel anxious, you can prepare for this and doing something healthy when this potential trigger arises, such as going for a walk or calling a friend.

Gaining insights about ourselves helps us feel empowered.

Sometimes we feel like because we struggle to find healthy and fulfilling relationships, we are broken or something about us makes us unlovable. But that’s just not the case. If you learn about your own attachment and how to manage any unhelpful thoughts and behaviors that are a result of this attachment style, you are going to feel more in control in dating and relationships.

How to Learn More and Develop Skills to Manage Your Attachment Style

If you feel like your attachment style is getting in the way of being in a happy and healthy relationship, reading this blog should be your starting point. There is so much more information to gather and work to do to manage an attachment style that is preventing you from finding success in love relationships. Here are some other options to consider:

See a therapist. If you have the resources, find a therapist that specializes in relationships. They will be able to walk you through the process of fully understanding your own attachment style, and they will be able to give you tangible skills to manage any anxiety and/or avoidance that comes up for you in dating and relationships.

Seek out information from multiple outlets. There are tons of books, articles, and podcasts about adult attachment, and it’s impacts. Look for information in whatever medium matches to your personality and lifestyle.

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