Attachment (Part 2): Understanding the Root of Problems in Relationships

Our adult relationships can take on many of the same features that characterized our earliest attachment relationships with our primary caregivers. Our current experiences are filtered through these “lenses,” and the past becomes recreated in our present. In this article, I’ll discuss the different styles of attachment we can develop, how our core attachment styles give rise to the variety of problems we experience as adults in relationships, and how our problematic attachment styles may be modified to make changes that last.

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What are the different styles of attachment we can develop?

Depending on the level of security of our original attachment relationships, we develop different styles of attachment that persist into our adult relationships [1]. Many of us came from families where our attachment was more secure. Our bids for attention were met with reliable responsiveness from a loving caregiver, and we continue to reap the benefits by establishing and maintaining relatively healthy adult relationships.

​For others, our attachment was more insecure. Acceptance and love was contingent on our behaving in particular ways, and our pleas for attention were either ignored or met inconsistently. Although we each likely experience aspects of ourselves all along the spectrum, the security of our attachment relationships may be characterized by 1 of 4 main attachment styles. Each attachment style has implications for the dynamics we find in our personalities. Keep in mind that each category below is a short summary and does not fully capture the full complexity, variation, and nuance we find in our day-to-day lives  [2]:
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1.  Secure Attachment 

Secure Attachment: Secure attachment is characterized by a healthy dependence on others for comfort and soothing. When these infants sought safety and reassurance from their parent in stressful circumstances, they were met with comfort and protection. Adults who are securely attached are free to explore, connect, and reflect on their experiences. They exhibit an ability to experience and express a full range of emotions, they see others as sources of comfort when upset, and they seek others for help when facing problems. They have an ability to experience both pleasurable and upsetting emotions without becoming unduly overwhelmed by either, and they retain the ability to reflect on their experiences of themselves (this is referred to as positive “reflective functioning”). Secure attachment thus represents the "healthy" category through which the other styles of attachment may be compared and contrasted.

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2.  Avoidant Attachment

Avoidant Attachment: Avoidant/dismissing attachment is characterized by the tendency to withdraw from connection, avoid closeness, and suppress attachment needs. When these infants expressed needs, they experienced their parent as consistently unavailable and formed relationship models shaped by unavailability, neglect, and rejection. Adults who are avoidantly attached are unable to experience healthy neediness and dependence since such emotions were met with neglect, silence, or discouragement from parents. Nothing they tried achieved the responsiveness they desired, so they learned to withdraw and “dismiss” their needs. By minimizing their needs, they learned to prevent the pain of disappointment. As adults, avoidantly attached people are often logical, more remote, and often dismiss and repress emotions of longing, affection, and neediness. They often take pride in their independence. When others desire closeness with them, they may feel threatened and withdraw, seeing others as overly needy and dependent. Although they too experience needs and feel things deeply, they tend to experience their own needs and emotions as flaws and liabilities, and may defend against awareness of these aspects in themselves for fear of being rejected or disappointed because of them.

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3. Anxious Attachment

Anxious Attachment: Anxious attachment is characterized by a fear of abandonment, a “preoccupation” with getting one’s needs met, and expressing needs in an overly emotional manner.  Because parents of these infants were inconsistent in their affection and responsiveness, ambivalently attached infants develop mental models in which they see others as inconsistent – sometimes their parent was responsive while at other times he or she was unresponsive or abandoning.  Since only their most dramatic displays of emotion evoked the recognition they desired, they learned their needs must be amplified in order to get a response.  Expressing their emotions loudly and frequently became the best way they could develop to ensure their needs would be met.  Preoccupied adults tend to have difficulty being alone and have difficulty achieving autonomy and independence in relationships.  Since they frequently exaggerate their emotions to obtain the responsiveness they once needed in the past, they now have difficulty identifying their actual emotions and discerning their preferences. Maintaining safety was so important, it precluded their capacity to know and discover themselves. As adults, they often struggle with a poor sense of identity, indecisiveness, and anxiety and depression. 

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4. Disorganized Attachment

Disorganized Attachment: Disorganized attachment is characterized by confusion, chaos, and difficulty discerning reality at times. Parents of people with disorganized attachment were highly unreliable, absent, or dramatically inconsistent.  They were often both the sources of comfort and the sources of fear.  At times, these infants’ requests for comfort were met with loving kindness and responsiveness and at other times physical or sexual abuse – leaving the child unsure of what to expect.  Parents’ often contradictory responsiveness kept these infants in a state of constant arousal and prevented them from forming reliable expectations of the world. Adults with disorganized attachment often have a history of trauma, often feel confused, and can rapidly switch between different feeling states with little awareness of the transition.  When needs arise for people with disorganized attachment, they often fight, freeze, or dissociate in which they can feel disconnected from their body, have difficulty recalling significant portions of their lives, or re-experience in the present traumatic episodes from their past. Psychologically "splitting off" memory of traumatic experiences was a primary way of surviving for these individuals leaving them with discontinuous memories of the past and a disrupted sense of identity in the present.

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Attachment at the Root of Problems in Relationships

​Many of the problems we experience have roots in these underlying attachment wounds.  As children, we repeat those behaviors that are met with affection and responsiveness and sacrifice those that are met with rejection or withdrawal to guarantee continued connection with our caregiver.  We learn that maintaining our vital connections to others requires that we sacrifice certain aspects of ourselves.  This sacrifice comes at a high price, however, and we can experience a variety of problems as a result of our restricted repertoire of behavior.  Below are some examples of the many ways our earlier attachment histories can lead to problems we are familiar with: 

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• We can develop a “false self.” [3] When we have exchanged what we truly want and need in order to maintain needed connections to important people in our lives, we can lose a sense of who we are, what we like, and what we want to do.  The self we present to the world becomes a false self, manufactured to maintain connection to others but divorced from our true wants and needs.  We may act overly “nice,” be overly accommodating, and dismiss our actual desires and preferences.  We may then feel empty and alone even when spending time with others.  Our hidden "true" self remains disconnected from the potential nourishment offered by relationship with others.

• Identity Problems.  When we give up our genuine desires, we don’t know who we are, what we want, what we like, and what we don’t like.  We become overly reliant on others’ opinions to gain a better sense of ourselves. This can leave us vulnerable to harm and manipulation by others. Being alone may be similarly intolerable since our sense of self remains so depleted. We can't afford to be discriminating about who we spend time with. 

• Depression & Low Self-Esteem.  Interacting with others from a false self keeps us from allowing our entire real selves to participate in our relationships.  We conclude the hidden parts of us are “bad” and begin to devalue and despise ourselves.  We unconsciously believe that if we are the ones to blame, our important relationships may be preserved.  Our self-blame and depression can even result in self-harm behaviors in which we deliver the punishment we feel we deserve.   

• Boundary Problems.  If our sense of stability is overly dependent on others, we will often sacrifice anything that threatens to disrupt these relationships.  Since setting boundaries and saying “no” to others can jeopardize these important connections, we can often find ourselves biting off more than we can chew and putting up with more than we should.  We can agree to do things to a degree that we are unable to sustain, leaving us depleted, exhausted, and more susceptible to illness, addictions, and more bad decisions. 

• Anger, Irritability, & Difficulty Trusting Others.  If we habitually sacrifice aspects of ourselves, we begin believing that others would reject us if they discovered who we really are.  We may develop anger and resentment in response to our anticipation of how others would perceive us were they to find out our true thoughts and feelings.  Pushing others away through our anger affords us a sense of control over being rejected and allows us to preserve the fantasy that we would be accepted if not for the angry rejecting behavior of our own making.

• Anxiety & Panic.  When our sense of worth and value is dependent on others’ responsiveness, we can become frightened by anything that threatens these important ties.  We can feel extreme panic and anxiety when confronting others whose diminished responsiveness or neglect has serious consequences on our sense of well-being.  We may be in a state of panic about losing our source of “emotional oxygen.” We may feel burdened to try harder to impress others and maintain their affection.

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• Addictive & Compulsive Behavior.  To cope with feelings of sadness, loneliness, anger, anxiety, fear, or shame, we can use substances or engage in excessive activities as a means of distraction.  We can reduce our pain by numbing our sensations, however, this only compounds our problems.  Drinking, dug use, or excessive activity can diminish the intensity of our feelings, but they often deplete us and push others away, leaving us feeling even more alone and susceptible to repeating these unhealthy behaviors. ​

Attachment Styles Can Change and be Transformed 

​If we grew up with an insecure attachment, we are not destined to repeat our past.  Our attachment patterns may be modified and transformed resulting in the development of a different style of attachment called “Earned Secure Attachment.” [4] Individuals with earned secure attachment came from families in which they originally developed one of the three insecure attachment styles but modified their attachment patterns by developing relationships with securely attached individuals. 
 
The discovery that we may change our attachment style by developing new relationships with securely attached people has monumental implications for the possibility of transformation.  If we have an insecure attachment and begin the process of healing, we can begin choosing more securely attached individuals.  Our spouse or a close friend can become a new secure attachment figure where we can begin to work on changing our rooted relational patterns of attachment.  If we have an insecure attachment style, however, we tend to gravitate towards other insecurely attached people making it difficult to interrupt the vicious cycle of repetition.  Fortunately, there are other avenues for developing an earned secure attachment.
 
Psychotherapy provides an opportunity for repairing our attachment wounds.  By developing a deep relationship with a relatively securely attached therapist (or a therapist with an earned secure attachment), we have the opportunity to modify our own attachment patterns.  Our therapist’s attachment style can be transmitted to us in much the same ways a parent transmits attachment patterns to his or her child.  Our therapist can recognize hurts we have long dismissed, acknowledge our pain without abandoning us, and confront us gently to help us change in ways that are responsive to our needs.  He or she can notice nonverbal indications of our feelings, help us put words to experiences too frightening for us to talk about, and provide a sense of security and comfort when feeling threatened.  (See the "Most Important Question to Ask Your Therapist" blog post for how to choose a therapist since this is such an important factor in the possibility for genuine change in therapy).

Since it was within the context of relationships that we were hurt, it’s only within the context of a relationship where our painful patterns of relating may be modified if any hope for genuine change is to be realized.  A therapy relationship with a healthy therapist provides the right conditions for these new patterns of attachment to be coaxed back into existence and cultivated towards genuine transformation.  The next blog post will be exploring the kind of factors involved in making genuine transformational changes in therapy.

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References​

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[1] Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1-2), 66-104.

[2] Wallin, D.J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

[3] Winnicott, D.W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In D. W. Winnicott (Ed.), The maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 140-152). London: Hogarth Press.
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[4] Main, M., & Goldwyn, R. (1984). Adult attachment scoring and classification system. Unpublished manuscript, University of California at Berkeley.

About the author

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Tyson Davis, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at Glen Forest Psychological Services, LLC.  He specializes in helping individuals and couples dig deeper to make lasting transformation in their lives.  Tyson has a special interest in the study of personality development and psychoanalytic psychotherapy for individuals and couples. ​​

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