How many of you feel confused about the relationship patterns in your life? Perhaps you’re seeking answers to understand why things feel stuck in negativity and conflict. Whatever the cycles are, there’s a strong chance that your habits and perceptions were formed in childhood. Through no fault of your own, your adult relationships are still being shaped by what you were shown and taught in your early attachments.
Specific attachment styles are discussed below, but all of them influence your intimate relationships. Deconstructing this connection will help you make sense of what has you puzzled and frustrated. When you know more about your early attachments, you can effectively apply that knowledge in your life today.
What Are Attachment Styles?
When we’re young, we need our parents and other caregivers to do virtually everything for us. If those people provided reliable, nurturing, and trustworthy support, you felt safe. You learned, firsthand, what a secure connection feels like. From there, you moved forward to seek out healthy forms of security in your adult attachments.
However, it’s far more common for young people to deal with less-than-secure treatment in their earliest days. This isn’t automatically a judgment of their caregivers. There are countless factors involved. But, as adults, kids raised without feeling safe typically have attachment styles like:
Anxious Preoccupied Attachment
If your caregivers were inconsistent in caring, you craved attention but didn’t always get it. As a result, you may never feel certain that the people in your life love you.
Dismissive Avoidant Attachment
When a child doesn’t get what they desperately need, they can choose a dysfunctional coping mechanism that relies on detachment. After all, the unhealthy thinking goes, you can’t get hurt if you let yourself be vulnerable.
Fearful Avoidant Attachment
Another possible response to neglect is anxiety. An anxious person may seek security in their partner but become clingy and needy.
The Role of Early Attachments in Shaping Our Adult Relationships
A child raised in an insecure environment of any kind can have trouble trusting, relaxing, and expressing their needs and emotions. In adulthood, this can manifest in unhealthy communication skills along with struggles in all settings of your life. This very much includes your romantic life.
Becoming intimate with someone in a healthy manner requires both partners to feel safe. If one or both of you didn’t have role models of security, it’s easy to believe such a connection is not possible. Also, when see happy couples, you may be convinced that there is something wrong with you.
However, it’s important to remember that other factors exist. The socio-economic factors in a person’s life can play a role. In addition, in the years between infancy and adulthood, many events can occur that create obstacles in your ability to attach. So, it’s not “all your parent’s fault” but again, nothing can shape your attachment style as profoundly as your treatment during your earliest years.
But There’s Good News
Your current attachment style is not permanent. It can be changed. It will be changed if you put in the hard work and create a crucial new attachment: with a therapist. With the help of a skilled outsider, you can detach from the attachment style that felt necessary in your childhood years. It may not happen overnight, but diligent effort can bring about results like:
- Being less reactive
- Learning how to self-soothe and self-love
- Develop healthy conflict-resolution skills
- Healing your guilt and shame
- Practice acceptance
- Being able to name and express your emotions and needs
- Develop more self-esteem
- Take healthy risks
You can heal, change, and recover. I’d love to help on this life-altering journey.
