“Love in such a way that the person you love feels free.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
I spent many years feeling completely crazy in my relationships. Throughout my relationship/dating life, I craved closeness and intimacy so much, but then would push someone away who was getting too close. I wanted closeness, but it scared me.
Whenever I was single, I felt fine, but lonely. Yet, whenever there was a guy in my life, I felt insane and overwhelmed by my own emotions, which to me was a lot worse than just feeling lonely. I always thought something was wrong with me, but I could never figure out what it was or how to fix it.
It took me a while to discover I have an anxious-avoidant attachment style, also call fearful-avoidant.
Different sources have slight variations on how many attachment styles there are (3 or 4) and what they are named. I’ll stick to what R. Chris Fraley describes in his overview, “Adult Attachment Theory and Research.” There are two ways to measure attachment, which produces four different categories.
Before I get into those categories, it’s important to know that none of these are concrete or permanent. We even feel different kinds of attachment towards different people in our lives, but have a generalized attachment style to those closest to us.
Attachment styles are based on how anxious or avoidant we feel in our closest relationships, which produces either secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, or fearful-avoidant attachments. Here’s a breakdown according to the Youtube video “The Four Attachment Styles of Love”:
- Secure: You feel comfortable going to your partner for support. You allow your partner freedom, and “tend to have an honest, open, and equal relationship where both partners can thrive and grow together at a healthy pace.” Because of your higher emotional intelligence, you can communicate your feelings effectively, and can work to find solutions to problems instead of attacking your partner. You are highly resilient and “understand how to move past obstacles with great care and self-awareness.”Anxious-preoccupied: You tend to over romanticize love, because it’s easier to bond with a fantasy than someone in real life. You are often attracted to those you can save, or who can save you. You “can be demanding, obsessive, and clingy.” You have the tendency to overanalyze situations, have mood swings, and “mistake turbulent relationships for passion.” You can struggle with “insecurities, low self-esteem, and establishing a strong sense of self.”
- Dismissive-avoidant: You are emotionally distant, self-sufficient, independent, and avoid true intimacy. You seek space more frequently than is healthy to push yourself away from being vulnerable with your partner. If your partner threatens to leave, you “have the ability to shut [your] emotions down and pretend like [you] don’t care.” As a result, you have very few close relationships.
- Fearful-avoidant: You fear being too close or too distant from your partner, as well as wanting intimacy and resisting it. You “can be unpredictable and often are overwhelmed by [your] own emotions.” You know you have to seek out love, but when people get too close, they hurt you. You “fear being abandoned, but struggle being confident in [your] partner and relying on them,” which leads to you clinging to your partner when you feel rejected. You probably have very few close relationships.
Now while understanding the different attachment styles is very interesting, I really wanted to understand how we develop these different attachments and how they can change over time.
I had a very unstable life for a very long time, almost half of it. During this time, I unknowingly developed a fearful-avoidant attachment style. I wish I would’ve known then, because it would’ve made me feel so much less crazy and explained a lot. Either way, I knew my life was unstable, and I’ve spent the past three years trying to stabilize myself and become healthier. I’ve been on a good path, but that doesn’t mean my insecurities and unhealthy tendencies have vanished, more like subsided.
Our attachment styles are formed during our first years, and are directly correlated to the emotional and physical bond we had to a primary caregiver. According to John Bowlby’s Theory of Attachment, as infants, we “ask” ourselves if our attachment figure is nearby, accessible, and attentive. If we can answer yes, then we feel loved, secure, confident, and are more likely to play with others and be sociable. We feel safe to explore the world, because we know that we have a safe base to return to anytime. In essence, we develop a secure attachment style.
Conversely, the Youtube video “The Attachment Theory — How Childhood Trauma Affects Your Life” explains how we can develop an insecure attachment. If we have a weak bond with our primary care giver, then we become insecurely attached. We’re afraid to leave or explore the world because it’s a scary place, we don’t have a safe place to return to. We learn to mistrust, lack social skills, and have troubled relationships.
If we have a parent that acts unpredictably, we can become clingy, more emotional, and anxious about our relationship with them, which can lead to an anxious attachment style. If our caregiver is overly strict and reacts with anger every time we show too much emotion, we become fearful of them. We learn that “to avoid fear, we have to avoid showing feelings,” which can lead to an avoidant attachment style. If we have inconsistent caregivers, or a parent who ranges from overly stressed to abusive to loving, we become anxious of “the people [we] seek security from, a conflict which totally disorganizes [our] ideas about love and safety.” This can lead to what the video deems as an anxious disorganized attachment, but it can also be labeled fearful-avoidant.
Mary Ainsworth developed a technique to determine the attachment styles of infants very easily. It’s called the “strange situation,” during which the infant is separated from their mother for a short period of time and then reunited. Sixty percent of infants demonstrated a secure attachment by being easily comforted when their mother returned, because they had a parent who was consistently responsive to their needs. Twenty percent were anxious-resistant and showed extreme distress at being separated. It was difficult for them to be soothed, and when their mother returned, they showed conflicting behaviors of wanting to be comforting, but also wanting to punish their parent for leaving. The other twenty percent were avoidant. They didn’t appear too distressed by the separation, and when their mother returned, they actively avoided seeking eye contact, and sometimes turned their attention back to playing with objects in the room.
Supposedly, if we develop a secure attachment by the age of two, we can easily make friends, have a positive outlook on life, and are optimistic. Fraley explains that “a secure child tends to believe that others will be there for him or her because previous experiences have led him or her to this conclusion.” He or she will seek out relational experiences consistent with these expectations, but if new experiences are inconsistent with their expectations, then they develop new ones, which can change their attachment style.
I think all my healthy qualities come from my early years of secure attachment, and all my unhealthy attachment traits have been learned over time. Fraley says that according to studies, the correlation between child-parent attachment and adult romantic attachment is modest at best. If we are secure as children, we can grow up to have secure relationships, but we can also learn from new either good or bad experiences.
Fraley explores the similarities between child attachment and adult ones. For starters, the same statistics that infants experience in attachment styles is the same for adults — sixty percent secure, twenty percent avoidant, and twenty percent anxious. It honestly baffles me that sixty percent of the people out there are healthy individuals who can attach securely. Maybe that just means I know too many unhealthy people.
Other similarities between child and adult attachments include:
- both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive
- both engage in close, intimate, bodily contact
- both feel insecure when the other is inaccessible
- both share discoveries with one another
- both play with one another’s facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another
Because we seek relationships that meet our expectations, this leads to secure individuals seeking out other secure ones, and for some strange reason avoidant ones seek out anxious ones and vice versa.
In the Youtube video “What is Your Attachment Style?” it’s explained that, “Overall, secure adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than insecure adults. Their relationships are characterized by greater longevity, trust, commitment, and interdependence… and they are more likely to use romantic partners as a secure base from which to explore the world.”
However, when someone with an insecure attachment style falls in love with someone else who is also insecure, our insecurities and defenses rise up. Avoidants who fall for anxious attachments will tend to emotionally check out when things are intense, which creates clinginess in their partner who has the desire to feel close when feeling rejected. Avoidants tend to not understand why their anxious partner is being ill-tempered or upset, and that they are acting that way because they are trying to express their longing. Those who are avoidantly attached prefer sex with strangers, are scared of cuddles and intimacy, and find strategies to remove themselves from people who get too close.
When a person with an anxious attachment falls for an avoidant one, they may feel needy or crazy for wanting more from their partner. Their way of dealing with what they “legitimately need may be aggravating things hugely.” Asking for intimacy too directly can trigger an avoidant partner and cause them to pull away. An anxiously attached person needs to tread lightly when asking for closeness with their avoidant partner. It’s important for the anxiously attached person to know that “things aren’t as bad as they seem,” but instead they are perceiving problems as greater than they are or even when they are nonexistent.
After so many tumultuous years, it took my life finally stabilizing for me to be emotionally ready for a healthy relationship. The healthier I feel, the less appealing those rollercoaster relationships of the past are to me. I romanticize them less and now see them for what they really were.
The most hopeful thing I learned during my research was that having a secure relationship can help in developing a secure attachment style, even as an adult. My life had to stabilize first, but now I’ve been working on having a secure relationship, and the longer I work at it, the healthier I feel emotionally and mentally. My attachment style is still anxious, and the fearful-avoidant style does come out at times, but I hope one day to simply be secure.
Sources:
Adult Attachment Theory and Research
The Attachment Theory — How Childhood Trauma Affects Your Life
The Four Attachment Styles of Love
What Is Your Attachment Style?
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Originally published at http://www.tryingtogainperspective.com.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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