“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
What are relationship issues?
Maybe you feel like no one gets you. Maybe you can’t fathom why your partner tunes into the television instead of talking to you. Maybe you feel overwhelmed by the questions and the constant asks of your partner. Maybe you feel like you can’t afford to trust anyone. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re connecting with your own children. Or, maybe you’ve got everyone else figured out, but you still don’t understand yourself. There are many different types of relationship dynamics - they can be romantic, platonic, or even professional. If you’ve ever felt any of these ways, then you’ve been in the midst of relationship issues.
How do relationship issues happen?
Relationship issues happen when we feel unsafe or disconnected in our relationships and we aren’t able to be vulnerable and honest about our needs and emotions with others and/or with ourselves. Although our attachment styles develop to protect us and keep us feeling safe in the world, as we grow into adults and we enter into new relationships, the mental maps of human connection that we grew up with may not be applicable to our current relationships, and our old ways of relating can get in the way of our current ability to connect.
Relationship issues arise when we feel misunderstood, hurt, and confused in our relationships with others (or with ourselves). When our feelings of uncertainty and disconnection in our relationship (feeling unnoticed, unappreciated, rejected, overwhelmed, criticized, disappointed, or even threatened) outweigh our feelings of safety and connection (feeling loved, seen, understood, respected, appreciated, and supported) then fear, pain, and loneliness can begin to overtake us and our relationships. Relationship issues can push us into places we never thought we would be, into being people we never imagined ourselves being, and almost always have an immense impact on our lives and wellbeing overall.
If you feel ready to dive into figuring out how your attachment style shows up and how it might be affecting your relationships, click the link below to schedule a consultation with a therapist, or if you want more details on the different attachment styles, keep reading on.
Understanding Relationships from an Attachment Theory Perspective
In order to understand what relationship issues are, it’s useful to first think about relationships from the perspective of attachment theory. The theory is useful to better observe and understand our relationships and the functions they serve in our lives. In attachment theory, we hold the truth that as humans, when we experience fear, anxiety, or other kinds of distress, our bodies and brains intensely and often subconsciously seek to feel safe and secure in the world. The main way we find this sense of safety and security is through our loving relationships and close connections to others.
Attachment theory holds a strong emphasis on the connections we created in our youngest years, on the people we depended on to survive, and on how attuned (or aware and attentive) those people were to our needs. These factors work together to create our “attachment style,” which can be thought of as the ways we relate to others and to ourselves when we seek to feel safe and secure. Our attachment styles show up across our lifespan in the ways that we connect to other humans.
Although each human and their experiences are unique, the ways that humans learn to connect to others tend to be remarkably similar. So similar, in fact, that attachment can be broken down into four main attachment styles, which we describe further below. The first category of attachment is called “secure attachment” and the remaining three categories of attachment are different types of “insecure attachment.” As you likely guessed, secure attachment— feeling like we are safe, loved, understood, and supported— is what we are all aiming for in our relationships, whether we are conscious of this drive or not.
Attachment Styles
As you read, consider which style of attachment you feel you lean towards most or most often. It’s important to note that attachment styles should be thought of as being on a spectrum rather than clear-cut categories— we likely all relate to several of the attachment styles, though we may relate most strongly to one. You might ask yourself, “Do I feel as though I connect more strongly to one style or another? Do I naturally come up with several examples of my behavior while reading about one category, more so than another? Do I feel as though those who raised me interacted with me in any of these ways?”
Secure attachment
The first category, which is also the category that about 50% of us fall into, is called secure attachment. In secure relationships, there is a solid foundation of love, respect, care, and understanding. We are able to openly ask for and receive the love we need to feel safe and cared for, without falling into unintentional emotional struggles. We can be vulnerable and earnestly share our feelings, needs, fears, and insecurities, without our partner perceiving criticism at every turn. We are free to be independent in ways that feel safe to us, and we know that our safe relationship will be there to support us when we feel uncertain.
Anxious attachment
Anxious (or preoccupied, ambivalent) attachment began to occur when we experienced our caregivers, for whatever reason(s), as responding to us inconsistently. In childhood, our emotional regulation systems are dependent on others, and because of this, as adults, we frequently fall into the trap of seeking external proof of love and stability to feel okay. We often find ourselves questioning and information seeking— What are you doing? Why are you doing that? What do you mean? — testing the waters to know if we can really feel secure and trusting of our partner and the relationship. When even one thing feels unsafe, we react strongly, often becoming a wave of emotion and hidden fears, needing desperately to be soothed but being hyper-vigilant for any signs of disconnection.
Avoidant attachment
In childhood, if we feel regularly ignored or rejected in seeking love and affection, we can begin to lose hope, and become avoidant (or dismissive) in our attachment style. From a young age, we learn that we must take care of ourselves, and our bodies and brains learn to ignore our distress signals and disconnect from our emotional needs. We are strongly independent, and we are master self-soothers. We become irritable when we feel our partners ask too much of us, are trying to control us, or get too close to disrupting our emotional containment. We lose ourselves in distractions rather than really getting to know our emotional needs— playing video games, getting lost in social media, working long hours, using substances— these things take the place of our unmet needs.
Disorganized attachment
The final attachment style is an especially painful category, and often happens to those of us who have unresolved or unprocessed trauma and/or loss in our young lives. When those we love are also a source of fear, we can become disorganized (or fearful) in our attachment style. As we grow into adults, we learn to build ourselves around our unprocessed pain. We walk through our lives trying to find stability, but if something triggers us, we can sink suddenly into a hole of all of our unprocessed traumas, fears, and losses, and be overwhelmed by the emotions and confusion that come with them. Processing these traumas, losses, and pain requires specialized knowledge, care, and support from mental health professionals.
“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.”
How does therapy help with relationship issues?
An essential tenet of attachment theory is that no matter what has happened in your life and which attachment style you feel you are, we are all capable of building up security and creating more secure attachments and relationships, with ourselves and with others. We all have secure parts of ourselves upon which we can expand and grow. This ability is called “earned security,” which means that humans have the capacity to heal in relationships. No matter how shaky our foundations may have felt, when we are in relationships that feel reliable and consistent, and when we are able to connect with others in ways that make us feel safe, loved, and understood, we begin to draw a new mental map of the how’s of human connection.
The therapeutic relationship offers the opportunity of creating a secure relationship, where you are able to practice being vulnerable and sharing your fears, doubts, and insecurities in a safe and supportive space. Therapy helps us to see and understand ourselves from the inside out, and through this we become aware of our patterns, feelings, and needs - and how to communicate those effectively to the important people in our lives.
If you’re ready to stop falling back into the same cycles of relationship issues, if you’re ready to begin building up the love and trust in yourself and in your relationships, please click below to schedule a consultation with us.