Attachment styles are the scripts our brains form to stay safe and emotionally stable in close relationships.1 Attachment styles determine how emotionally and physically close a person is to other people, especially caregivers. Secure attachment in infancy and childhood leads to more emotional intelligence in adulthood.
What Is Attachment?
Attachment patterns—the original phrase used by attachment theorist, Mary Ainsworth—or attachment styles—the term popularized in social psychology research—are the scripts our brains learn to keep safe and emotionally stable in close relationships.1
In a more basic sense, attachment is an evolutionary system that helps keep animals alive during periods of vulnerability, especially when creatures have not fully developed the knowledge and skills they need to survive.
When we ride a bike, by analogy, we stay upright by creating forward momentum while keeping our weight centered within a certain range. Attachment styles operate by a similar principle. Staying upright in relationships is about managing “proximity,” or closeness. This can be both in a literal sense (moving towards or away from a caregiver), or in the abstract, emotional sense (showing more or less emotional reactivity).
Secure Attachment vs Insecure Attachment
Attachment is characterized by patterns of adaptations that young children develop to maximize their chances at survival. Childhood is where we need to take a closer look at secure and insecure patterns of attachment that develop early in a child’s life.
Secure Attachment
Secure attachment is a basic trust in the availability of help and emotional support from the people in one’s social network. Trust in others leads to the capacity to take healthy risks, learn, and explore. The more those around us can be trusted, the more autonomy we develop. Trusting others leads to faith in oneself to take on difficult challenges.
Secure attachment in childhood develops out of having reliable caregivers who are sensitive to a child’s nonverbal expressions of need. Attachment to a competent caregiver is a necessity given how much brain development must occur after humans are born.
While we all grow out of the utter helplessness of infancy, humans never outgrow the need to be a valued member of social groups. Security with caregivers extends to security with friends, peers, teachers, the larger community, and eventually, society as a whole.
Characteristics of secure attachment include:
- Emotional flexibility
- Ability to self-reflect and to see relationship conflicts from multiple perspectives
- Valuing relationships
- Capacity to be trusting and vulnerable
- Ability to express emotional needs and confront conflict in a coherent and direct manner
- Freedom to express a full range of emotions with the ability to return to equilibrium on receiving comfort and care
- Perception by others as being emotionally vital (i.e., fresh, engaged/engaging, energetic, spontaneous, and relatable)
Stable relationships, employment history, and overall contentment with one’s place in the world are all results of secure attachment.2
Insecure Attachment
Insecure attachment is divided into two categories: anxious attachment (preoccupied, ambivalent) and avoidant attachment (dismissing). People with anxious attachment desperately want to participate in the social world yet consistently find themselves in drama, chaotic situations, and overall uneasiness.2
Characteristics of anxious (preoccupied) attachment include:
- Heightened emotions around relationships and a high level of emotional sensitivity (especially around abandonment and past disappointments)
- Difficulty returning to emotional baseline after conflict
- Marked anger or indications of vigilance against anger (e.g., extremely meek, indirect, highly anxious and inarticulate when confronted)
- History of volatile relationships
- Perception by others as emotionally “hot” or “overheated”
People with avoidant attachment see social participation as pointless and foolhardy. They resign themselves to living at the margins of society. People with avoidant attachment gravitate towards people and situations they can control.2
Characteristics of avoidant (dismissing) attachment include:
- Sees self as a lone wolf and lacks a collaborative mentality with others
- Devalues relationships and minimizes own dependency needs
- Expresses very few emotions
- Exhibits limited awareness of feelings and poor ability to elaborate and reflect on negative emotional states
- Sees others as soft or weak
- Perceived by others as emotionally “cold” (especially in the sense of being withdrawn and rigid)
How Is Attachment Developed?
Around four months old, infants develop the capacity to give and respond to social cues. Between four months and one year of age, children share smiles, laughs, and other communicative expressions with their caregivers. Organized patterns of attachment emerge out of the hours and hours of back and forth interaction between children and their caregivers.
Attachment styles are sets of expectations that form in a child’s mind as they experience more frequent and complex human interactions. By around one year of age, children have encountered enough social data to have classifiable patterns of attachment.
Attachment patterns are most easily observed during times of stress in the relationship, such as separations. Mary Ainsworth developed an experimental procedure called “The Strange Situation,” which allowed trained observers to identify a child’s primary attachment pattern.1 The procedure worked by creating mild stress to a child’s attachment system through short separations from the caregiver, and brief, scripted interactions with a “stranger” (that is, a member of the research team).
How Do Attachment Styles Influence Adult Behavior?
Attachment experiences are our first encounters with the outside world, which we may refer to as “social reality.” Human beings’ relationship with the social world can be viewed as a reflection on early attachment experiences with a primary caregiver (or a composite of main caregivers).
The skills that make up emotional intelligence are directly impacted by early relationships with caregivers formed in early attachment. Reading social cues, delay of gratification, setting boundaries, and resolving conflict are all important aspects of the emotional intelligence needed to function in a complex social world.
Delay of gratification is one aspect of emotional intelligence that predicts long-term success.3 If a child is unable to trust caregivers, then faith in a fair society will be extremely difficult to foster. How then could such a person believe that foregoing pleasure now for rewards in the future is worthwhile?
How Do I Find Out My Attachment Style?
The gold standard for assessing adult attachment patterns is the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a 90-minute interview that a trained interviewer administers, records, and transcribes. Coders who receive 80 hours of specialized training and complete a rigorous reliability test over the course of 18 months, review the transcripts and assign the relevant attachment pattern.
People interested in having their attachment pattern formally assessed or wish to speak with a clinician trained in this system can contact one of the handful of certified trainers for a referral. Conceptually, the AAI is quite complex and its inner workings have been protected as proprietary knowledge. However, the creators of the AAI published a helpful overview of the system in Clinical Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview for people interested in learning how it works.
Social psychologists use a much more straightforward method for assessing attachment style. Most research on attachment published in social psychology journals makes use of a 36-item, self-report questionnaire called the Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) scale.4 This questionnaire is available to complete for free online here.
Results from this questionnaire will result in an assignment to the best-fitting attachment style according to how the respondent answers questions assessing two dimensions of attachment: anxiety and avoidance.5
How to Get Help for Attachment Issues
All forms of talk therapy have at least some built-in attachment work and can thus help with attachment issues. The mere act of returning to a reliable figure (in this case, a therapist) to receive emotional and practical help underscores the importance and value of human attachment.
Many forms of psychotherapy make extensive use of the therapeutic relationship, referencing the dynamics between clinician and patient, to make unknown algorithms in the attachment system observable and conscious. Search a therapist directory for a therapist who leans heavily on attachment-based, relational, or interpersonal methods.
In fact, the quality of the working relationship between therapist and patient, is recognized as one of the most robust factors in creating therapeutic change.6 Working through, or repairing, inevitable ruptures in the therapeutic relationship allows for more effective and more hopeful relationship patterns to take hold.7
Final Thoughts on Attachment Styles
Attachment styles are inherently neither good nor bad. Each organized pattern of attachment has adaptive qualities based on the environment in which you were raised; sometimes these adaptations generalize well to the rest of your life, and sometimes they don’t. If your usual assumptions, patterns of behavior, and resulting outcomes aren’t working for you, you can work to change them.
