How Does Your Attachment Style Affect Your Relationships?
Every person has an attachment style that they first began to develop in their infancy. It is a style of relating to others that is shaped by the way in which our caregivers interacted with us and responded to our needs.
By nature, humans evolved as social creatures that depended on each other for survival, found safety in numbers, and built trust in themselves to survive when temporarily separated from the group. That worked well for the most part, but when there were unexpected and unfortunate circumstances that caused deaths, the surviving members needed to be able to recover and adapt in order to survive. This fundamental ability to feel secure when physically disconnected from others, allowed us to persevere in the face of challenges.
Today, things aren’t so cut and dry. There are many more moving parts to raising a well-adjusted and secure child and so many factors that can negatively affect how a person parents, like falling victim to substance abuse or addiction or trying to parent with a mental health disorder.
Regardless of your attachment style outcome, it will ultimately have a large impact on how you form relationships, behave in relationships, and maintain relationships. In this article we will explore the different types of attachment styles, how they can affect your relationships and how knowing your attachment style can help you have healthy relationships.
THE FOUR TYPES OF ATTACHMENT STYLES
Each of us falls into one of four main attachment styles which include: secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and anxious-avoidant attachment (also known as fearful-avoidant attachment).
Securely attached individuals are able to trust others and be trusted in relationships, depend on others without becoming completely dependent on them, and are able to regulate their emotions well. They usually have effective communication skills, are able to seek emotional support when they need it, are comfortable being alone, are comfortable in close relationships, are able to self-reflect in partnerships, and are easy to connect with.
Anxious attachment individuals need constant contact and support from others, have a constant need for reassurance that they are good enough, experience hypersensitivity to rejection and abandonment, have negative self-view or self-worth, are overly sensitive to other’s actions and moods, crave intimacy, have difficulty setting and respecting boundaries and are often thought of as “clingy” or “needy” in relationships. This attachment style is based on a deep fear of abandonment which causes the individual to constantly fear that their partner will leave them.
Avoidant attachment individuals tend to have fears of getting close to others, or trusting others and often feel suffocated in relationships. They tend to require distance in relationships and are often emotionally unavailable, preferring to be independent and rely on themselves. They may avoid making friends, have a hard time taking criticism or disapproval, dislike or feel uncomfortable being touched or physically close to anyone, do not open up or show their emotions easily and fear that being in a relationship will cause them harm.
Anxious-avoidant attachment is just as the name implies; a combination of both anxious and avoidant attachment style. Those with this attachment style typically crave affection but also avoid it. They are reluctant to develop close relationships because they fear trusting others, yet at the same time they have a dire need to feel loved by others. They fear intimacy or relationships in general, they will often avoid commitment in relationships, experience elevated anxiety, have a negative view of themselves, feel undeserving of healthy relationships, and have severe difficulty regulating emotions in relationships.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…
HOW DOES YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE AFFECT YOUR RELATIONSHIPS?
Let me first say this: attachment style is EVERYTHING. How you relate to others includes how you communicate your thoughts and your feelings, how you perceive others and how you experience the world. If you are a securely attached person you are likely entering interactions with an optimistic attitude and living by the mindset that it’s safe to trust others until they give you a reason not to. While if you have an anxious attachment style or are an anxious-avoidant style, you likely fear people will hurt you or betray before you even know much about them.
If you didn’t already guess, securely attached people mesh best with other securely attached people. The most difficult pairs are anxious with avoidant or anxious with anxious-avoidant. Avoidant with avoidant typically doesn’t last long because neither is providing the relationship with the glue to hold it together in the first place.
Your attachment style will influence how you communicate your needs and boundaries, how you empathize with others, how you trust others, and even how you treat yourself. When at least one person in a relationship does not feel safe or secure and does not have the assertive communication skills to express that in healthy or respectful ways, it is going to result in unhealthy and non-productive ways of getting that message out there. Miscommunication between differing attachment styles will cause turbulence in the flow of connectedness between people and can take a painful toll on the entire relationship.
When people with different attachment styles are in a relationship with each other (which by the way, avoidants can still exist in long-term committed relationships) it can be difficult to preserve a balance. This type of relationship requires compromising, while respecting one’s own and each other’s needs. If there isn’t a clear understanding of needs and expectations there will likely be a lot of arguing or a lot of bottled up anger and resentment.
Many people are not aware of their attachment style and therefore enter relationships in which they can’t understand why the other person has such different preferences or has what can sometimes feel like unmeetable needs. However, if you know your attachment style and are able to identify what causes your fear or anxiety triggers, you can learn effective ways to communicate it to your partner in order to give them the opportunity to cooperatively problem-solve how to help you both feel safe and secure.
You can make your relationship work, even when you have different attachment styles.
All relationship take some compromise and work (if by work we mean putting in effort to create a balance of peace and happiness between us and our partner). And while we covered the different factors that can cause challenges between people with different non-secure attachment styles, it does not at all mean it is impossible to have a happy and healthy relationship with them. The most important thing is that they each find ways to get their needs met. Whether it is an avoidant writing a list of all the things they love about their anxiously attached significant other and requesting they read the list instead of texting them nonstop when they are separated, or an anxiously attached person asserting their need for their partner to say goodnight every night before bed. No matter what, the expectations must be clear and agreed upon for the relationship to work, otherwise the gloomy cloud of imbalance will constantly be raining down on the relationship.
Summary
When you’re aware of your attachment style it becomes a pathway to being able to more clearly express your needs, what influences you to feel secure, and what causes you to feel insecure. Knowing these things and being able to communicate them helps you choose relationships with those that understand you and accept you for exactly who you are.
If you don’t didn’t win the attachment style lottery of having a secure attachment style, and instead identify as either avoidant attachment, anxious, or anxious-avoidant, it is possible for you to have healthy and meaningful relationships as long as you are honest about your wants and needs and can detach from relationships with people in which your needs are not being met.
Interested in exploring more about fun things like your attachment style and that of those closest to you? Check out our gamified communication program for families by clicking the link below.
