Attachment theory and repair, at long last
Part one: Trauma-Insta, Attachment theory vs "styles," and the four main types
Over three years after I published the below article, I’m getting to the followup posts I said I’d make at the bottom of it, where I promised “more about PTSD, C-PTSD, attachment styles and disorders… and more about untangling one’s own traumatic patterns.” In this early post, I was trying to trace the weird acceleration of these psych concepts in the popular culture over the preceding ten years or so.
But it turned out that in order to talk more deeply about any of those things, I needed to get to the other side of them. Or at least, to a place from which I could see them clearly, which I can tell you is absolutely not while deep in the center of an attachment repair. There is very little that anyone can see from the inside of the start of a relationship in which both parties are attempting to make the other into the secure attachment figure they never had as a child. The only thing you can do is 1. explode, or 2. decide very firmly to do that work on purpose.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the following *mumblenumber* posts, I’m going to lay out a bunch of stuff about attachment theory, so-called attachment “styles,” attachment repair, a wild thing called earned secure attachment, and how I got mine, mostly.
So first: what is this attachment theory that nobody can shut up about, where does it come from, and what does it have to do with adult relationships?
The conversation around trauma, continued
One of the big trends in the sea of Instagram-therapy and “trauma-informed” everything is talk of attachment styles. This idea takes its cue from attachment theory, a more complex set of ideas drawn originally from John Bowlby’s research and later his colleague Mary Ainsworth’s work with mothers and babies. Attachment theory describes a whole range of experiences and behaviors around connection between caregivers and very young children, and makes some predictions about how that impacts those children as adults trying to make intimate connections.
The adult-relationship “styles” part has exploded in popularity because it does offer a useful framework for noticing whether you tend to cling or withdraw when in an intimate relationship. (Other options include bonding healthily and having skills for resolving conflicts, which, okay, I guess. Seriously, we’ll talk a bit later about secure attachment and why it can be frustrating for those lacking it.)
For some, though, the popularization of these types of psychoanalytic theories and frameworks has become irksome. I can’t say I’m completely unbothered by it; as with so many things that emerge as useful and healing, attachment theory has been packaged and commodified and it’s likely that the wrong people — which is to say, people who aren’t actually offering healing — are making a lot of money about it.
Which I find frustrating, not because I’m not the one making all the money about it, but because the process of a true and useful thing being turned into a marketable product tends to rob it of both its usefulness and of some of its truth. Commodification means simplification and standardization, if not mass production. And words that once held power become dogma to those who stake their faith in the product, and nonsense to those who now dismiss the idea as either “woo” or capitalist-driven garbage. (Increasingly, these last two are the same thing; thanks, RFK Jr., but I digress.)
What’s your attachment style? It’s probably the wrong one!
From this research about young children and their caregivers, further research has explored what happens to people in adulthood when they attempt to connect to romantic partners. Currently, we’re in a boom of social media soundbyting about it, and while it’s not really this simple, the idea is that children grow up to carry the attachment successes or failures into their intimate relationships. Much of the conflict one sees in mainstream relationship problems, the idea goes, is due to a mismatch in style: are you secure, anxious, or avoidant? (Take the quiz!)
Which is a bit of a facile way to talk about how people behave in romantic relationships. (Don’t get me started on the other relationship-related current obsession with so-called narcissists.) So I sort of hate this framing, because it’s very convenient and packaged, and as with so many trendy therapy topics, it serves largely to allow people who have learned a little bit about it to accuse their romantic partner of something while smugly refusing to work on themselves. Talking about “attachment styles” makes it sound as if attachment wounds were a fashion statement you could change like clothes, and at the same time makes it seem like an identity rather than a set of observable responses, behaviors, and emotional states that can be witnessed, worked through, and healed.
But although I’d prefer that people not handle some of the most delicate relational challenges in their lives using the equivalent of a Cosmo quiz, that is the world we are living in, so, onward.
Attachment Theory Basics
Annoying popularization notwithstanding, attachment theory is a pretty cool way of thinking about how we relate, especially to the people closest to us. The core of it is the following: how secure or insecure your attachment to your primary caregiver is in the first years of your life impacts how you behave in intimate relationships when you’re older. That’s it, that’s the tweet, though naturally there have been many decades of research and refinement. It’s worthwhile, though, to dig a bit further into where these ideas originated.
John Bowlby and the bawling of babies
20th century psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s work was initially about studying children who’d been separated from their parents too early in life. (He had been sent to boarding school at age 7, and the experience never left him.) Later, he studied infants, and theorized that their fairly predictable behaviors (crying, clinging, searching) serve an adaptive, evolutionary purpose. (Naturally, the psychoanalysts of the day thought of these behaviors as “immature defense mechanisms that were operating to repress emotional pain,” because…they were idiots.) He proposed the “attachment behavioral system” as something operating in many mammalian species to keep infants close to their caregivers, better ensuring their survival.
He suggested that the health of this system — that is, the security of the infant’s attachment with the parent — impacts the developing personality of the child.
The strange situation of Mary Ainsworth
Later in the 60s, Mary Ainsworth began working with Bowlby. She had previously studied mothers and infants in Uganda, and proposed the idea of the secure base, which would become a key pillar in attachment theory. In essence, a child who feels their parent to be safe, available, and attentive develops a secure base from which to explore and grow.
While with Bowlby, Ainsworth developed the famous “strange situation” studies. In this experiment, babies a year old or younger are brought into a room with their caregiver — usually their mothers. Then, a stranger comes in and joins the mother in conversation. Next, the mother leaves the baby with the stranger. Finally, the mother returns. Ainsworth’s observations of the babies’ behavior in this study followed three very clear patterns:
In the strange situation, most children… become upset when the parent leaves the room, but, when he or she returns, they actively seek the parent and are easily comforted... Children who exhibit this pattern of behavior are often called secure. Other children…are ill-at-ease initially, and, upon separation, become extremely distressed. Importantly, when reunited with their parents, these children have a difficult time being soothed, and often exhibit conflicting behaviors that suggest they want to be comforted, but that they also want to "punish" the parent for leaving. These children are often called anxious-resistant. The third pattern of attachment that Ainsworth and her colleagues documented is called avoidant. Avoidant children…don't appear too distressed by the separation, and, upon reunion, actively avoid seeking contact with their parent, sometimes turning their attention to play objects on the laboratory floor.
Later, a fourth type, called disorganized attachment, emerged. Presumably, this type was rarely seen in the lab, because it is generally the result of abuse or neglect. I’m guessing there weren’t a lot of parent/child subjects available for a study who were at the level of dysfunction I’m thinking of. Plus, in the ‘60s there weren’t a lot of people even willing to discuss child abuse and neglect as a thing. For disorganized children, the behavior ranges from inconsolable anxiety to checked-out freeze responses. The child’s attachment system, receiving violence, neglect, or both, possibly alternating with occasional attuned attention, uses every strategy available to keep the child alive and safe.
And then…adulthood
As attachment theory evolved through the ‘70s and 80s, it moved toward a lot of what we see now: the idea that the way you were related to as a child powerfully influences the way you relate to romantic partners as an adult. The simple graphic below tells the story in very few words, showing how attachment between infants and caregivers morphs into adult behavior in relationships.
Now while the above graph is good simple shorthand, it’s worth noting that it even presents its information confusingly. On the site, the writers can’t seem to keep straight which of the words apply to children and which to adults. The graph shows “preoccupied” and “dismissive” as parentheticals to “anxious” and “avoidant,” and says that Anxious and Avoidant are the children-words. But apparently “disorganized” is the children-word in the final type, with Fearful as the adult word. A lot of these also don’t line up with earlier versions of the terminology in the research. So the whole thing can start to look pretty slapdash.
That said, there is some real value to looking at the four main types in more detail, and seeing what the essence of their point is. In later posts, I’ll get into my own relationship with this framework.
The four main attachment styles
Of the four types, one is simply “secure,” and the other three are subtypes of insecure attachment. The main split, between “secure” and “insecure,” has to do with how attuned a caregiver is to a child. The subtypes of insecure attachment can stem from lots of different ruptures, failures to bond, unreadiness for parenthood, intergenerational trauma, and on and on. Indeed, depending on a child’s personality, parental experience, birth order, and random resiliency factors, two different children may emerge very differently from the same household.
The “types” described below also don’t necessarily apply to everyone; you may see yourself in more than one type. It’s simply a framework for looking at the ways disrupted attachment in childhood can make things a bit tougher for adults.
Secure attachment
According to some research, something like 50% of people are securely attached. This can sometimes make the rest of us upset, which may explain something about the world right now. But in essence: a person who received consistent enough attention, connection, and guidance as a little kid develops the sense that their parent is a reliable source of care and will help them when they need it. Such a child develops a longer and longer umbilical cord as they age, venturing farther from the secure base of the parent and toward independence, knowing that if they falter, they’ll have support.
Because of this, the theory goes, such a child grows into an adult that expects their intimate partner to be reliable, secure in themselves, emotionally available, and healthily interdependent. A securely attached couple clearly rely on each other, not because they can’t get along on their own but because everything is better with two.
Insecure-Anxious/Preoccupied
The anxious type tends to form when a parent is inconsistent with emotional attention. They may be emotionally reactive rather than attuned, or sometimes very coddling and sometimes absent. It can also result from an interrupted attachment, which is where I tend to fall: an attachment figure isn’t present often enough, or is present early on but then vanishes from the child’s life. These are the babies from Ainsworth’s study who are already nervous when the parent is around, get very distressed when they leave, and can’t be easily soothed when they return.
In adulthood, an anxiously attached child may become what people call “clingy” in relationships. A person with an anxious attachment style is often fearing abandonment or that their needs won’t be met by their partner. They may grab very hard onto a partner once they’re dating, even if the partner isn’t right for them. Even with a compatible partner, the anxious person may constantly worry that their partner will leave, and may even behave in ways that cause their fears to become reality.
Insecure-Avoidant/Dismissive
The second kind of insecure attachment is called avoidant or dismissive. In childhood, the main caregiver may be good at providing for the child’s physical needs but not great at bonding emotionally. They may be light on praise, or give praise only for academic or athletic achievements. A rupture early in life may be around not cuddling the infant enough, making them feel wanted and loved and safe. A lot of kids in my generation were made to “cry it out” to get to sleep at a very young age, and that is thought to have done a lot of damage.
A kid who learns that their emotional needs won’t be met by their parent can become an adult who keeps intimate partners at arm’s length, doesn’t open up about their feelings, and maybe isn’t even in touch with their feelings within themselves. Such a person is hard to get close to, and is often also afraid of someone getting too close. An avoidant partner may freeze their partner out, leave texts on read, change the subject rather than engage when there’s conflict, and break things off when a relationship threatens to get too serious.
Disorganized Attachment
The final type to be recognized is disorganized attachment, which tends to arise from highly dysfunctional childhood environments. Physical, emotional or sexual abuse, neglect, parents who are physically absent or “checked out” due to substance problems or severe mental illness, or huge disruptions in home life can result in a child who simply stops expecting their caregiver to meet their needs at a very young age.
A kid who survives this into adulthood may have major mental health issues themselves, may live in the margins of society, or may just have a real struggle getting on in the mainstream world. Less severe cases may have had some resiliency factors like other loving adults or mentors that helped them get out and find a way in the world. Intimate relationships tend to be a struggle, but contrary to the stereotype, not impossible. Folks with disorganized attachment just tend to need to work on themselves a lot, and if you’ve met and loved one, you’ve probably either been through the wringer with them before they disappeared, or you’ve found someone who works on themselves harder than anyone you’ve ever met.
Next up: Feeling and dealing
In the next installment, I’m going to talk about how I was first introduced to attachment theory, and how valuable that’s been for how I approach it in my work and life now. As I’ve written this first part, I’ve realized how very much I have to say on this topic, and have started three other drafts. So hopefully, this will mark a return to more regular posting here. Stay tuned.
As I’ve been saying for a while, Substack is seeming like a less and less viable place to call home in the long term. I’ve never accepted money here anyway, but I do need your help if I’m going to keep writing. I have a Patreon for that purpose, and over the coming months I also expect to transition to something like Ghost for all my different writing / website needs. That’s a ways out though, so, if you can manage it, please support me on Patreon. Thanks.