What is Attachment & What Is My Attachment Style?
What is attachment?
Attachment isn’t a luxury or a parenting style. It’s a biological need. When we’re born, we have a natural instinct to stay close to our caregivers for security. We need the adults around us to survive.
The quality of these first relationships matter. It builds the foundation for self-worth, communication, safety, and our ability to navigate relationships.
There are a number of factors that influence attachment including our caregivers’ ability to protect, soothe, attune, and delight in us. If any of these factors are compromised, it triggers a baby’s attachment system. The child must then find alternative ways to stay safe.
Attachment is built through attunement and caring—the back-and-forth rhythm between parent and child—the child expresses a need and the parent responds. How these needs were met creates an attachment style or how the child copes in order to stay close to the caregiver. This becomes the characteristics and tendencies in our intimate relationships.
Secure attachment is important as it is the best predictor for emotional and mental health.
Children with secure attachment are more likely to develop:
Higher self-esteem
Better emotion regulation
Increased coping skills to handle stress
Leadership qualities
Self-trust
Greater social skills
Independence and self-agency
Closer friendships
Healthier romantic partnerships
Greater resilience and ability to “bounce back” after stressful events
In other words, your quality of life really depends on having a secure attachment. So, you might be thinking, what are the attachment styles and how do I know which one best describes me?
Great question! Let’s dig in.
First, attachment styles aren’t the end-all-be-all. With work, you can shift to a secure attachment, so don’t panic if you fall into one of the other categories. Second, attachment style refers to your tendencies in relationships. In any given scenario, you may fall in other categories.
Attachment Styles
Avoidant Attachment
You might be avoidant if you:
Emphasize independence and self-sufficiency
Fear losing independence in romantic relationships
Push away partners when they get too close
Vulnerability and intimacy feel uncomfortable
Emotionally distant in relationships
Struggle to trust in relationships—prefer to rely on themselves
Conflict avoidant
Caregivers/parents may have shown these signs:
Uncomfortable with emotion and show less emotion
Hostile toward signs of dependency from the child
Push away the child’s needs for attachment
More aversive to physical contact (cuddling, kissing) or demonstrations of affection
These might be your parents who become frustrated and uncomfortable when a child becomes upset. They feel overwhelmed by their own emotions and therefore try to repress emotion in their child.
These children turn off their “wanting” and learn their needs won’t be met by a caregiver. They deactivate the attachment system and think more than they feel—and stay self-focused to conserve precious resources. They learn to be self-sufficient and often struggle in relationships to connect on a deeper level. They enjoy independence and worry a partner will threaten their independence. They like more space in a relationship and often pull away as their partner tries to draw closer.
Anxious Attachment
Anxious attachment describes those fearful of abandonment and tend to be overly clingy in relationships. In childhood, they are less likely to explore in their caregivers’ presence and more interested in remaining close. This pattern leads to less autonomy and a focus outward on the caregiver’s emotion state rather than the child’s inner feelings. Individuals with this attachment style become preoccupied with how others are feeling and become more disconnected from themselves.
You might be anxiously attached if you are:
Overly occupied with what others think of you
Afraid of being “too much” in relationships
Fear of being alone
Frequent need for reassurance and may be seen as needy or controlling in a relationship
Disconnected from your body and more sensitive to your partner’s mood, actions, or needs
Overlooking “red flags” in relationships
Staying in relationships for too long, because you worry you might not find anyone else
Struggle with low self-esteem and poor sense of self
Having trouble asking for what you want or communicating your needs
Can attempt to connect through conflict
Often the giver or caretaker in the relationship
Children who are anxiously attached become hypervigilant in an effort to keep their attachment figures close at all times. They often have caregivers who are inconsistent in their emotional availability—sometimes present and attuned and other times emotionally or physically absent.
The child loves the feeling of being attached but does not know when it will be taken away or return. They become hypervigilant to their caregivers’ emotional states in an effort to please their caregivers and keep them close. These individuals often shift and change in order to please others in an effort to connect. This often looks like seeking outward validation and soothing from others in order to feel safe in the world.
Parents or caregivers may exhibit these traits or characteristics:
May be inconsistent in their caregiving—sometimes being very attuned and connected and other times emotionally or physically absent and disconnected
May struggle with their own anxiety and create a lot of fear in the child (children are afraid to be away from the caregiver and do not develop confidence in their abilities)
Disorganized Attachment
You might have a disorganized attachment style if you:
Have poor emotion regulation
Fear rejection
Struggle to trust others
Oscillate between being clingy and aloof
Find emotional closeness challenging
Disorganized attachment tends to be the result of a family trauma history and a chaotic and disruptive system for the child. Caregiving may be inconsistent, neglectful, and leaves the child feeling scared, out of touch, and alone. This attachment style oscillates between anxious and avoidant. They desperately want to feel connected in relationships but are also fearful of it. They lean in and then get scared and bail. This results from a caregiver the child depended on for survival but who was also the source of pain, neglect, or abuse. Relationships therefore feel scary and confusing—a source of both pleasure and pain.
Secure Attachment
You might have secure attachment if you:
Can communicate your needs, wants, and opinions to your partner
Create healthy boundaries
Feel comfortable with intimacy but also do not fear being alone
Confident, trusting, and hopeful
Maintain your own interests, friends, and hobbies outside of the relationship
Can both give and receive emotional support
Now What?
Anxious children tend to get rewarded for remaining dependent on others and avoidant children tend to get rewarded for staying separate or acting more independently.
Your attachment style will come up more under stress.
The art is in learning how to negotiate the balance between being in relationship with other people and being comfortable in the relationship with yourself—not isolating or self-abandoning. You must learn to practice tolerance for sitting in discomfort and knowing when to reach out to others.
Healing for both requires stretching into areas of weakness. Those more anxiously attached need to practice sitting in uncomfortable feelings through mindfulness/meditation. Those that lean more avoidant need to lean into vulnerability and feel okay reaching out to others.
Healing involves learning how to emotionally regulate and increase self-awareness around relational patterns. It’s being willing to practice different behaviors, acknowledge harmful patterns, and take ownership and responsibility for the part you’ve played in the dynamic.
Wherever you fall on the spectrum, gaining awareness and learning new tools to help you shift into secure ways of connecting is important for the health and quality of your relationships.