What’s Your Attachment Style?

Your Attachment Style

Believe it or not, the way your parents interacted with you created your interpersonal style.

In fact, it created your entire way of interacting with the world. As a result, you have an “attachment style” that came directly from your early relationships. And the science is clear, there is no question about it. Personality is primarily shaped by relationship experiences, not genetics.

The single most important factor in the development of your mind and brain, like all mammals, was your relationship with your parents and/or caregivers.

All children need to feel safe, soothed, attuned to, and secure. If this happened, you have an attachment style that is called “secure.”

But if it didn’t happen, you can have one of three other insecure styles of attachment:

  • Anxious/Ambivalent
  • Avoidant
  • Disorganized

Types of Attachment Styles

Secure Attachment Style

When you have a “secure” attachment style, you expect that your needs will be known and met. And that you will be emotionally attuned to. Additionally, you will expect to have help regulating your feelings when you need it. As a result, you do not feel conflicted about your needs or your emotions. You feel happy and satisfied with your life, despite any ups and downs. Likewise, you are flexible, adaptive, energetic, and emotionally stable. Your intimate relationships (including those with your children) are vibrant, interesting, and satisfying. You have this emotional foundation because your caregivers were attuned to you and helped you feel safe, soothed, and secure. 

Anxious/Ambivalent Attachment Style

With an anxious/ambivalent attachment style, you easily get anxious, clingy, and demanding. Even if you’ve learned to hide these traits most of the time. You “over-activate” your attachment behaviors until you collapse. Often seething with anger, from the exhaustion of trying so hard to stay connected. Your overarching experience with your caregiver was that they were inconsistently available. And when they were available, they were preoccupied or unattuned to you. As a result, people you become involved with will feel an urgency for connection from you. This urgency often pushes them away from you, creating the very isolation you fear.

Avoidant Attachment Style

An avoidant style of attachment generally appears as an overall denial of a need for deep connection. As well as a repression of emotions across the board. You are quintessentially “independent.” This is a result of you growing up with caregivers who were emotionally unavailable, imperceptive, unresponsive, and rejecting. You might have had a caregiver who was responsive in many non-emotional interactions. But they were very dismissive and non-responsive when you were emotionally needy, frustrated, or angry. Now, people who are in a relationship with you will likely experience loneliness and emotional distance. Even when they are with you.

Disorganized Attachment Style

When you have a disorganized attachment style, you grew up with caregivers who created alarm and terror for you. They were either psychologically disturbed, substance abusers, and/or they abused you either physically, emotionally or sexually. Consequently, you were afraid of the very people who were supposed to attune to your needs and keep you safe, soothed, and secure. Most of the time, you feel a profound sense of disconnection from others and even from yourself. You are likely to have a sense of being unreal or of being in pieces inside. Your relationships are generally characterized by chaos or a rigid inflexibility.

More Than One Attachment Style

As you read these descriptions, you may have recognized aspects of your own style in more than one type. If that is the case, it is because different caregivers have different styles, and you probably adapted to interacting with more than one caregiver. Your caregivers might also have been dealing with different stresses during various parts of your childhood and provided you with varying feedback.

How it Plays Out

You will engage with people based on these attachment styles, and the styles they present to you. It will happen at an unconscious level based on eye contact, facial expression, posture, gesture, tone of voice, timing of speech, and intensity of emotion.  You have no control over this. It happens in milliseconds,

How to Change Your Attachment Style

What if you want to change your attachment style? Well, you can change your style, but not with willpower. Because your attachment style was created in relationship, it can only be changed in relationship. The therapeutic relationship is designed specifically to help you do this. 

Interested? Call me, we’ll talk.

Leah Benson Therapy icon

Contact me now to set up your free 15-minute phone consultation.

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