Different Attachment Styles and How They Impact Your Relationships

One of the great things about good stories is how they can surprise you. You may have thought that a story was going to go one way, and then things take a surprising turn into new territory, sweeping you along with it. Our lives are often like that – where your story is now and has been in the past doesn’t mean there aren’t still surprises ahead. It means that when all is said and done, our story may look vastly different than it does now.

This can be incredible news, especially if your story up till now isn’t what you want or wanted for yourself. If you’re struggling in your relationships with others and find yourself falling into the same unhealthy patterns of relating to them, that doesn’t have to be a permanent situation. By learning your own patterns, where they come from, and how they affect you, you can begin growing and developing new ways of doing things.

Attachment Styles – What Are Those?

You may or may not have encountered the term ‘attachment style’ before. It refers to how we form and maintain our relationships with other people. Each person has a distinct and predominant style regarding how they relate to others. That’s one reason you can often see patterns across different relationships – one of the common denominators in those scenarios is you and how you do things.

A person’s attachment style is usually based on or develops according to the pattern of our earliest interactions with the people in our lives. These people include parents or caregivers, who have the most to do with a child and their well-being in their early years. How you and your caregiver interact can influence you immensely because that is where you first learn how things work, and that’s how your expectations are built.

Having said that a person’s attachment style is usually developed through those early interactions, it’s important to note that changes can occur later in life. A significant event in a relationship can trigger the development of an attachment style that wasn’t there before. An experience of abandonment and neglect in a romantic relationship, for instance, can shift the landscape significantly.

There are several main adult attachment styles, and these include secure attachment, and four types of insecure attachment: namely, anxious-preoccupied attachment, dismissive-avoidant attachment, fearful-avoidant attachment, and disorganized-disoriented attachment.

How Attachment Styles Develop

How you form and maintain relationships is something you probably don’t consciously think about. You learn these patterns when you’re young, and sometimes they’re relearned and refined in later life. Your attachment style or pattern is usually shaped by the quality of the interactions you have with your parents or caregivers. Generally speaking, the sorts of interactions you have produce a corresponding attachment style.

Secure attachments Caregivers provide them with a nurturing and safe environment in which their needs are met consistently, and the caregiver is responsive and sensitive to the child’s needs. When this happens, the child feels secure and can develop trust; they know they can share their needs, and those needs will be met.

Anxious-preoccupied attachment what often happens is that when a caregiver is unpredictable, inconsistent, or overly critical toward the child, the child doesn’t know when or if their needs will be met. The situation is unpredictable and feels unsafe, causing the child to become fearful and anxious, constantly seeking reassurance that they and everything will be alright.

Dismissive-avoidant attachment style This can be the result of having caregivers or parents that reject the child, are distant, or otherwise emotionally unavailable. In other words, the child might open up and share a need, like the need for comfort or playful interaction, and their overture is rebuffed. One result is that the child learns to suppress their emotions and avoid intimacy with others.

Fearful-avoidant attachment This could result from having abusive, neglectful, or inconsistent parents or caregivers. Intimacy becomes something the child is afraid of, and they may struggle to trust others and be vulnerable with them.

Disorganized-disoriented attachment This attachment style could result from experiences of severe abuse, neglect, or experiences of trauma. The child develops a disorganized pattern of forming and maintaining relationships, and they may have deep struggles with regulating their emotions and being intimate with others. If you’re constantly on guard or feel unlovable, it can affect how you form relationships with others.

Their Impact on Relationships

As you can already imagine, your attachment style shapes the expectations you carry into relationships and largely determines the way you act in those relationships. Each attachment style brings certain challenges with it into relationships. The way each attachment style affects a relationship is detailed below:

Secure attachment A person with a secure attachment can trust others, they can be emotionally intimate, have healthy independence, and effectively communicate their needs and expectations. In relationships, this can tend toward fulfilling, resilient, and healthy connections with others in which conflict can be navigated effectively.

Anxious-preoccupied attachment This form of attachment is marked by a fear of abandonment, and this can result in being clingy, constantly needing reassurance, and intense emotional highs and lows because of not regulating their emotions well. This can result in being overly dependent on a partner, possibly leading to feelings of suffocation and resentment in one’s partner.

Dismissive-avoidant attachment With this form of insecure attachment, one will often avoid intimacy with others, being independent in such a way as to be emotionally unavailable. The result in relationships is that it makes it challenging to feel close or connected to someone with this attachment style. They may come across as aloof, and this may result in feeling hurt, isolated, and frustrated attempts at connection.

Fearful-avoidant attachment This form of insecure attachment is characterized by being emotionally unavailable, being afraid of intimacy, and having difficulty trusting others. The impact on relationships is that it’s hard to be close to others and to form meaningful relationships. Without emotional closeness, a relationship will struggle.

Disorganized-disoriented attachment This attachment style is marked by an inability to regulate emotions, which is often the result of experiencing and not processing traumatic experiences. There is sometimes also a lack of coherence in how one approaches relationships, and trouble responding appropriately to emotional cues. These can make maintaining a relationship difficult.

If you’re in a relationship with someone, understanding your own and each other’s attachment styles can be a huge help for you both. It will allow you to become more aware of the context in which your communication is taking place, helping you to communicate more effectively and resolve conflict more definitively. Recognizing the patterns in the relationship and understanding them, allows for deeper empathy and a stronger bond.

Overcoming Insecure Attachment Styles

A person’s attachment style isn’t set in stone. A person with a secure attachment can encounter difficult circumstances that make it harder for them to trust or remain open in the same way as before. Apart from that, a person’s attachment style won’t always fit neatly into one box. Rather, the categories are broad descriptions that are helpful to get the gist of patterns that may characterize your relationships.

To overcome insecure attachment styles, there are several steps you can take, including taking time to consider your life and the patterns in it. This may help you to recognize your style. Surrounding yourself with healthy, nurturing, supportive relationships can help set up different patterns that may filter to other relationships in your life.

You can also commit yourself to growth, and that includes learning new skills like communication, emotional regulation techniques, or setting boundaries. Personal growth may also include nurturing your self-esteem, as well as taking on self-care practices that help to provide you with a sense of safety and security.

Overcoming attachment issues may also involve seeking help from a professional such as an attachment-based therapist, or a therapist with training in trauma-informed care to help you process your trauma. Your therapist can help you by exploring your life story to understand your attachment history, work through challenging areas, and nurture healthier attachment patterns.

A famous quote from the movie The Shawshank Redemption goes, “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”. Your life experiences may have shaped how you relate to others up to this point. Perhaps how you relate to others isn’t healthy, but things can get turned around.

Seek help today from a therapist or counselor in Texas who can help you start to turn your life and relationships around. Contact our office at Texas Christian Counseling to learn more.