attachment styles

This fall/winter has been a crash course in attachment styles for me. Attachment styles or bonding styles are the ways in which we learn to bond with others at a very early age. They can change over the course of our lives and we can learn to work with them, but we generally have a somewhat ingrained way of bonding with other people that we learned in childhood. There is an extensive amount of information about attachment theory out there so if you’re interested just go snatch it up, there are even simple short clips on youtube explaining the basics of it. Shorty though, there are said to be four main styles of attachment: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Secure is when our needs are fairly reliably met, and as a result we develop a secure relationship with our caregivers and later friends and partners. Needless to say this is not me - I belong to the second category here - anxious. If your needs are not being reliably met, you develop one of the other three styles. The anxious style is afraid of abandonment and usually tends to grab or act out to remain connected, they usually feel starved for closeness and connection and do anything to try and get it. People often accuse them of being “needy” in relationships. The third style, which also is a result of needs not being reliably met, is avoidant. This style of bonding is, like the name explicitly says, avoidant in nature. These individuals cope mainly not by acting out like the anxious ones, but by shutting down and pulling away to protect themselves. This tactic develops when we get hurt in our early relationships, and therefor closeness is perceived as a threat. These individuals tend to be very drawn to the concept of being independent, and in relationships people can accuse them of being “distant”.

The anxious ones suffer from trauma of having been abandoned, and the avoidant ones suffer from trauma of having been enmeshed. Enmeshed is when our caregivers are too involved, demanding, controlling or even violent towards us. We are not allowed to have ourselves and we are simply seen as an extension of the parent and their will. Naturally, we then withdraw to self preserve.

The fourth category, disorganized, is complex and I’m not going to get into it here, but this style often develops in very dysfunctional and harmful environments. I’m sure there’s a lot of information out there about it.
Most often though when we talk about attachment styles, we talk about avoidant and anxious styles, because, unfortunately (not really but I will get to that), they tend to attract each other. People with secure attachment styles tend to have mostly well functioning relationships where they can share their feelings without being aggressive or taking things too personally. They are able to communicate and compromise with their partners in healthy ways and meet each others needs (I mean, moreso than the other styles at least, all relationships can be challenging at times). An individual with a secure attachment style tends to attract another secure one, while people with avoidant style tends to attract a person with an anxious attachment style, and vice versa. Why is this? Because it is familiar. We tend to try and recreate our early relationships because that’s what we subconsciously believe to be love. Therefor, you often find yourself (if you are anxious or avoidant) in a relationship with a person of the opposite style of bonding. Naturally, this makes for some challenges, especially when one or both people are triggered, because they will seek resolution in one of two ways; to withdraw, or to grab. And this will only trigger their partners to go deeper into their own wounds of either abandonment or enmeshment. One will feel abandoned and one will feel suffocated, the anxious will try to come closer and the avoidant will try to regain their space, and the spiral is in full effect from here.

So that’s the gist of the dynamic, and like I said we tend to find ourselves with people who have the opposite style form us. Most of the time, it seems like a curse, for both people, because they are not able to accommodate each other and each others needs in that moment. But there is another reason for finding each other, other than the fact that it feels familiar, which is: to heal. Subconsciously we are trying to heal our original wounds by replaying the same dynamic in our adult lives. This is why it doesn’t have to be a curse, but something we can grow and learn from, if we become conscious of our intentions and if we learn to work with the root of the problem, which is our original traumas from childhood. Now, having said that, it is a lot easier said than done. I am currently in the middle of this crash course myself. I’ve gone about several ways to cope with this. First I tried to “learn to give the other person space” at the expense of myself, when that didn’t work I tried rejecting avoidants altogether, thinking I should only look for people with other attachment styles. That didn’t really pan out either, so, in an attempt to get to the root of the problem I started working with the part of me that feels abandoned. The part that feels like when it really needs people, no one will be there, because there is something fundamentally wrong about me. I was convinced that this was the root of the problem, this part of me I cannot love, that I feel ashamed about.

It was a big step to open myself up to this part, seeing and owning that I do have a tendency to be controlling sometimes. I do grab, and sometimes scare people off. I haven’t wanted to admit to this because it makes me feel so ashamed. Probably the same overwhelming shame I felt as a baby, reaching for an embrace and being ignored or abandoned. I have written before that our consciousness splits itself when we encounter trauma we cannot resolve, and so this part in me that feels so much shame for needing people, is a very real one, that I have split off from. One that developed very early. I always feel this shame, but I try to escape it by blaming the people around me for not being there for me. This is what I am working on. Re-owning and integrating this part that feels such a lack of connection, a baby desperately reaching it’s arms out wanting to be close and loved. Even though I have suppressed the shame of this part a little bit, I was always aware of it on some level. What shocked me though, and the reason for writing this entire blog post, is that when I started working with this anxious part, another part of me emerged. The part I had really been suppressing, my own avoidance.

I was confused. When attempting to comfort my inner screaming anxious baby, I was now faced with this part of me that was avoidant. It didn’t know how to be close to anyone, it didn’t feel capable of soothing a screaming baby, and it felt like it was drowning. As this part, I felt this huge resistance to getting close to the baby, not because I didn’t love it but because I felt like I was literally going to drown. Like I wasn’t strong enough. Like I was going to go under, literally. I felt like I didn’t have what the baby was screaming for. I felt hollow and incapable. I felt frozen and I felt - shame. This was actually the part I was the most ashamed about. This was the part I had suppressed the most. The avoidant one. And this is the reason I am a match to it in external individuals. They are merely a reflection of my own avoidant part, that I have suppressed and denied, and that’s also why I get so incredibly angry with them. Because I am ultimately this angry with myself.

It has been way easier for me in my life to be angry with the people who avoid me, the people who I feel can’t handle all of me, the people who pull back. I have called them cowards, weak, cold, shut off - the list goes on. And don’t get me wrong, this anger is valid. If you have felt abandoned it is completely natural to feel angry, it’s a crucial step even. And I am still angry I’m not going to lie, but, what I failed to see was that while I may be angry at other people, I am also angry with myself. The reason I dislike it so much in others, is because I dislike it in me. I could suddenly see just how much of an avoidant person I can be at times. I withdraw from others, I can’t handle their emotions, but mostly, I withdraw from myself. I can’t handle my own emotions. I feel like I’m drowning. I had always been so angry outwards because I just saw people pulling back as a statement of rejection. Them rejecting me. I took it personally. In these moments, I have failed to see that it is not about me. It’s not about me being wrong or unlovable, it is about them feeling like they’re drowning. They feel just like I feel, being faced with my inner baby. Overwhelmed, pressured, scared. Scared, we are all scared. We just show it in different ways. Cope with it in different ways. It is hard to imagine as a baby that your parent, your god basically, is scared or overwhelmed. You can’t conceptualize of something like that when you are a baby, but that is the reality of the situation. And just like our parents learned from their parents, we learn from ours how to cope with emotions. So I have an inner parent to my inner screaming child, that feels completely overwhelmed, and copes by avoiding it. That’s why it hurts so much when people do it to me in my external world, because I am doing it to myself, and I am reminded of that. It’s tugging at me. Tugging at me to heal my inner relationship with myself. One half of me screaming, the other running. And I thought I would heal it by understanding and accepting my anxious screaming part, which is a great first step. But what I really need to do is to accept, explore, and truly understand, my own avoidance. I need to integrate them both if I want to reach harmony within myself and within my external relationships. So whatever your attachment style is, I invite you to befriend it, get to know it, understand it. And maybe when you do that you’ll come to realize that this so called “opposite attachment style”, whether it’s anxious or avoidant, isn’t in fact opposite at all. Rather, it’s an external reflection of your own relationship with yourself.