SELF-CARE: What is Attachment & What’s YOUR Attachment Style? + FREE Relationship Conflict Decoder

Have you noticed that you tend to do the same thing over and over again in different relationships?

For example, maybe you get jealous easily in relationships.

Perhaps you cling to partners and loved ones almost to the point of driving them away.

Or maybe no matter how awesome someone seems, you never want to get close to them.

In my last post on inner child work and relationships, I talked about the benefits of identifying patterns in your relationships and how they may be linked to your childhood.

One specific link that’s especially helpful to explore is the one between your current relationship habits and patterns and the first relationship you were ever part of: the one you had with your primary caregiver.

Why is this first relationship so important—even if you don’t have any contact with this person now?

Because according to psychological theory, the first relationship that we form with our primary caregiver influences the relationships that we form later on in life, even in adulthood.

So if you want to get to the bottom of WHY you tend to get really jealous in relationships or why you often push people away, it’s helpful to uncover the type of bond that you had with your primary caregiver (which is what psychologists call “attachment”).

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through what attachment is all about, and I’ll break down the 4 attachment styles that people can have. This way, you can start to get clarity on what your relationship with your caregiver was like and how it may be affecting and possibly limiting your relationships today.

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What Is Attachment?

Attachment is the emotional bond that you formed with your primary caregiver when you were an infant. Your primary caregiver is the main person who raised you, and it could have been your biological parent, grandparent, foster or adoptive parent, or someone else.

The concept of attachment is a key part of attachment theory, which is a psychological theory developed by psychologist and psychiatrist John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth. According to the theory, how well you bond with your primary caregiver as an infant influences how well you bond with people later in life and how you respond to intimacy. To put it another way, this early relationship with your primary caregiver shapes the “templates” you use to approach and navigate relationships as an older child and adult.

How Does Attachment Form?

Infants are wired to form an attachment bond with their primary caregiver because they rely on this person to meet their needs and provide comfort and support. They signal their need for support using nonverbal communication, such as crying, cooing, and smiling. It’s then up to the primary caregiver to notice the infant’s cues, interpret them, and respond to them. The way that the caregiver responds to the child is what determines the type of attachment bond that ultimately forms between them.

Specifically, if your caregiver was able to accurately interpret your cues, respond to them consistently, and make you feel safe and understood, you probably developed a secure attachment to them. Your caregiver may have not always been able to immediately understand what you needed. (If you’ve ever been around a crying newborn, you know that it’s not always easy to figure out what it is that they want!) But as long as your caregiver consistently paid attention to your cues and tried to respond to them appropriately with love and care, you likely became securely attached to them.

Now, what if your caregiver didn’t consistently pay attention to your cues, interpret them correctly, or respond to them? In this case, you may have developed what’s called an insecure attachment to them.

Insecure attachment can form even if your caregiver didn’t intentionally ignore your cues or misinterpret them. As an infant, you wouldn’t have been able to identify your caregiver’s intentions. (Even now that you’re an adult, it isn’t always easy to identify someone’s true intentions, right?) So if your caregiver didn’t respond to you in the way that you needed them to, you would have just concluded that they weren’t meeting your needs. And you may have become insecurely attached to them as a result.

Note that secure attachment doesn’t form just based on a caregiver providing lots of love and care to a child. What matters is the quality of emotional communication. When the caregiver is consistently attuned to the child’s needs and responds appropriately, there’s a better chance that the child will develop a secure attachment.

What Causes Insecure Attachment?

I just mentioned that insecure attachment forms when a caregiver doesn’t consistently pick up on, interpret, and respond appropriately to an infant’s cues. But why might a caregiver be misattuned to a child’s nonverbal communication?

Here are some possible reasons:

• the caregiver is young or inexperienced and lacks the necessary parenting skills
• there is long-term separation from the caregiver because of death, illness, divorce, or adoption
• the caregiver is struggling with their mental health and can’t engage emotionally in the caregiver role
• the caregiver is struggling with addiction and is therefore less able to notice and respond to the child’s needs
• the caregiver abuses or neglects the child
• a traumatic experience disrupts the attachment process
• there is inconsistency in the primary caregiver (e.g., the child is cared for by her mother one month, her grandparents for the next two months, and her aunt during the subsequent month)

What Are the 4 Attachment Styles?

I mentioned earlier that depending on how your caregiver responded to you as an infant, you may have developed either a secure attachment or an insecure attachment to them. But there are actually 3 specific types of insecure attachment: anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. And together with secure attachment, they make up the 4 different ways or “styles” in which people bond with their primary caregiver and in intimate relationships as adults.

In this section, I’ll outline the key features of each of the 4 attachment styles. As you read them, think about which one you identify with the most. You might find that you don’t fit all characteristics of any one style, which is normal. Just focus on which one seems to describe you the best.

• Secure Attachment

 As you might remember from earlier in this post, infants form secure attachments when their caregiver consistently notices, accurately interprets, and responds to their physical and emotional needs. An infant with secure attachment tends to prefer being with their primary caregiver over other people and is calmed by them.

Infants who are securely attached tend to grow into adults who have an easier time forming and maintaining healthy relationships and feel safe and stable in them. They are more able to trust loved ones, manage relationship conflict effectively, welcome intimacy, and be reliable loved ones themselves. (I’ll be digging deeper into how each of the 4 attachment styles influences adult relationships in my next post—so say tuned for it!)

• Anxious Attachment

Anxious attachment forms when a caregiver responds to an infant’s needs inconsistently. This means that the caregiver sometimes responds to the infant’s needs but doesn’t always do so. In this case, infants learn that they can never really be sure about whether their caregiver will address their physical and emotional needs. As a result, anxiously attached infants aren’t as easily comforted by their caregivers.

In adulthood, people with an anxious attachment style long for close relationships, but they often worry about being abandoned. They tend to constantly seek their loved one’s reassurance about the relationship, which can make them seem clingy or needy.

• Avoidant Attachment

Avoidant attachment develops when a caregiver doesn’t reliably respond to an infant’s emotional needs. The caregiver may provide physical care to the child, such as feeding and bathing them, but they don’t give the child emotional comfort and support. As a result, the child learns that they can’t depend on their caregiver for comfort and must instead learn to self-soothe.

As an adult, someone who is avoidantly attached resists getting close to others in relationships. They instead prefer to be self-reliant and independent. As a result, they tend to struggle with letting others in and offering emotional support to loved ones.

• Disorganized Attachment

Lastly, disorganized attachment forms when an infant experiences a tumultuous childhood and an erratic relationship with their caregiver. It’s common for trauma, abuse, or neglect to play a role in the child’s early life.

Infants with a disorganized attachment style often become adults who want close relationships but find them unsettling and frightening. As a result, they may respond unpredictably and intensely with loved ones.

What’s Your Attachment Style?

Our first relationship with our primary caregiver plays a foundational role in shaping how we approach future relationships.

So if you find that you tend to fall into the same unhealthy patterns in relationships again and again, it can be helpful to explore this first relationship and the type of bond or attachment that characterized it.

As you reflect on and dig deeper into this relationship, think about which of the 4 attachment styles that I outlined above best describes the bond you had with your caregiver. This can help to give you clarity on why you might need frequent reassurance about your relationship, avoid letting others into your life, come across as intense and unpredictable to your loved ones, or engage in any other relationship-limiting behaviors.

Of course, to recognize the links between your current relationship habits and your early relationship with your primary caregiver, it’s important to know what these habits are in the first place.

To help you begin to identify these habits, I’ve created the Relationship Conflict Decoder. It’ll help you uncover patterns that you tend to repeat in relationships, especially during times of conflict. Although I created it with romantic relationships in mind, you can also use it to identify your habits in relationships with other close loved ones.

Now, what if you’re looking to dive deeper into how your current challenges are rooted in your early life experiences?

I’m glad you asked because I have a special opportunity that I’m rolling out to my community right now: during the month of October, I’ll be accepting a few new clients into my one-on-one Heal Your Inner Child Program.

To find out if this unique journey of deeper healing is right for you, schedule a FREE no-strings-attached strategy session with me.

And if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.

Until next time!

Vera

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