BY KELSEY WILLIAMS, MS

Whether you’ve never heard about attachment theory, you can’t seem to stop hearing about it, or you’re somewhere in-between, gaining a basic understanding of the theory can help you better navigate your relationships and life. Our attachment styles can significantly influence how we understand and relate to others and ourselves throughout our lives. Attachment styles often run just below the surface of our most significant relationships, and they impact the way we exist independently as well. This post will help you understand the basics of attachment theory—what attachment is, how it develops, and how it shows up across the lifespan. But even more importantly, it will help you to more deeply understand yourself and the way you interact in your relationships. Self-awareness is the first step on the path to healing, so join us as we dive into exploring yet another essential piece of the puzzle that is our human experience— attachment.

What is attachment theory?

Attachment theory is based upon the foundation that as humans, we have evolved to be socially interdependent beings, and because of this, when we become distressed, we lean on our social connections to help us feel safe and secure. This is especially true when we are young and we are totally dependent upon others for our survival, and it remains true as we grow into adults and we find ourselves seeking out close relationships in which we feel loved and understood. The way we learn to interact and connect with others when we are young creates a mental model of relating that we carry with us throughout our adult lives.

How do our attachment styles develop when we’re young?

Humans evolved as social creatures, so much so that our need for connection to others is hardwired into our bodies and brains. Just like when our bodies need nutritious foods and we then feel hungry and compelled to eat, when our bodies experience distress, we crave connection and safety. We long for a sense of being cared for, loved, and understood. In attachment theory, our attachment system, or our way of connecting with others in order to meet our security needs, is born out of our evolutionary need to be taken care of when we are babies.

When we are babies, we can’t eat, drink, talk, or even sit up on our own, and we must rely wholly on our caregivers to both understand our needs and help us to meet those needs. We are born with an innate psycho-biological system—our attachment system— which, when activated, automatically prompts us to seek physical and emotional proximity, or closeness, with our caregivers in order to survive, be protected, and feel secure enough to go about exploring and developing. Our attachment systems are wired to turn on when we feel fearful, anxious, or otherwise distressed, and to turn off when we feel safe, secure, and soothed. Because of our total dependence on caregivers and their abilities to be physically close and emotionally responsive to our needs, our connection to our caregivers becomes our sense of security in the world. The more we feel we can trust our caregivers to be there for us and to understand and respond to us in ways that make us feel safe and loved, the more secure our attachment to them feels, and the more safe and secure we feel in the world.

As we grow, our basic mental map for understanding human relating is drawn into our childhood brain via implicit memory. As children with limited relationship experiences and understanding, we aren’t yet having the complex relational thoughts that adults have. But even at a subconscious level, our brains and internal systems are paying attention to the people around us and the way they respond to us. Through this subconscious noticing, we begin to pick up on the most effective ways to connect to others and have them help us meet our needs. And out of these subconscious observations, our attachment “styles” are born.

Attachment Styles in Children

Attachment styles and behaviors tend to show up in their most basic and recognizable forms when we are young because we don’t have the many added layers and complexities of adult coping mechanisms and defenses that build up over a lifetime. Because of this, most children can be easily identified as having one of the four attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. Let’s first look at how these attachment styles develop in children.

Secure Attachment:

As a child, secure attachment looks like having a safe base (our caregiver relationship) from which we can explore the world. When we are scared or need something, we cry or scream, and our caregivers respond by soothing us until we feel calm enough to once again go about exploring.

In order to feel secure and maintain a secure attachment style, we need to have at least one person who is dependable, well-attuned, and responsive to us and our needs about 70% of the time. In an ideal world, all caregivers would have the time, energy, support, and ability to consistently be an active and attuned participant in their child’s exploration of the world at least 70% of the time. As we all know, though, life can be less than ideal in countless ways, and so, we learn different ways of adapting to our circumstances. One of the most fundamental aspects of attachment theory is that it is not a a blaming or shaming model. It is adaptive in nature, meaning that we’re capable of change throughout the lifespan, and we can work to change our attachment styles and feel more secure.

Life happens. Jobs, relationship issues, family histories, addictions, disabilities, war, natural disasters, death, depression, poverty, illness, anxiety… these are just a handful of the countless “things” that can get in the way of our ability to be as present and available as we might wish to be in our relationships with others. And so, when life happens we adapt, and our way of relating adapts too. When our caregivers aren’t quite as reliable as we may need, we may start learning to connect or attach to others in “insecure” ways. There are 3 categories of insecure attachments that are developed based on the circumstances of our relationships.

Anxious attachment:

Sometimes, our caregivers are in a place in their lives where they are there for us one minute, but gone the next. Anxious (or preoccupied, ambivalent) attachment begins to occur when our caregivers, for whatever reason(s), respond to us inconsistently. Sometimes we got the nurturing we needed, building up our subconscious hopes that our caregiver would consistently be there for us. But the next time we became distressed, our caregiver wasn’t there for us the way we needed them to be. Our hopes felt shattered and we were overwhelmed with our feelings of disappointment, rejection, or abandonment. We became hyper-attuned to our caregivers, always trying to guess how we might successfully connect with them, and loudly displaying our emotions in attempts to announce our needs of love and security. Our emotional regulation systems became dependent on others, and because of this, we lived in a continuous cycle of hope and disappointment.

Avoidant attachment:

If we began to regularly feel like we couldn’t depend on anyone to understand or meet our needs when we were struggling, we likely became avoidant (or dismissive) in our attachment style. Our bodies and brains, seeking a way to provide us with a sense of safety, subconsciously began to de-activate, and we learned to ignore our distress signals and disconnect from our emotional needs. Often, we learned that rather than expressing our needs and emotions to our caregivers, which might result in more emotional pain (usually from being ignored or rebuked), we should suppress our needs and emotions in order to become closer to our caregiver (by not overwhelming or upsetting them). As a result, we learned to take care of ourselves by eliminating needs and emotions.

Disorganized attachment:

If our caregivers became a source of fear while we were still dependent upon them, there’s a chance that we became disorganized (or fearful) in our attachment style. This fear is often the result of trauma, death, or abuse in any form. As children, we were trapped in a constant and confusing circle, where the source of our comfort was also the source of our pain. Because of this confusion, we weren’t able to find any consistent way of coping and soothing ourselves, and we remained trapped in our distress.

It should also be noted that the attachment styles of our caregivers tend to have a major impact on how they raise and relate to us, and thus, on our attachment styles. An avoidant parent will likely raise an avoidant child and so on. Because our attachment styles are adaptive strategies and often subconscious, without recognition and intervention, we tend to move through life assuming that everyone must relate to others in the same ways we do, teaching those we care for the same lessons that we ourselves were taught. In other words, we can’t know what we haven’t been exposed to, and we are all doing the best with what we’ve got.

If you want to keep learning about attachment, click here to read part two of this series, where we examine some common signs for identifying attachment styles as adults, and some of the ways a person with each style might begin to earn more security in their lives and relationships with others.

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