Early attachment patterns shape our relationships, and they can lead us to make unconscious choices about who we partner with and how we behave in the relationship.
How Attachment Styles Influence Relationship Choices
The idea that one might be “destined” in any unfavorable direction is a scary one. Scientists might declare a construct like destiny untenable, while on the other side of the spectrum, most organized religions hold specific teleological views predicated upon if-then scenarios that amount to “destiny.” (For example: “if” one believes in certain principles and lives according to the rules governing that religion “then” a place in some benevolent Afterlife is secure.)
Here in the domain of mental health, while it often seems that what we describe as a predisposition for certain unfavorable outcomes, so predictive are our early relational experiences–to our future ability to regulate our moods, emotions, thoughts, and behavior, and navigate the space between ourselves and those around us–that in practice it looks quite a bit like “destiny.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in intimate partnerships—particularly when one feels to be truly “in love,” or deeply attracted to, another. This is the setting in which any emotional wounds we’ve been carrying since infancy will manifest, influencing the way we interpret everything from our mate’s tone of voice, facial expressions, wording, behavior, feedback to us about ourselves, to their overall general emotional presence or absence.
These interpretations, many/most of which take place below the level of our active consciousness, mirror our early attachment schemas, and are the culprits when we choose someone that will be “distressing” to date or mate. These are so entrenched that no matter how determined a person may be to pick someone better—someone that meets their needs this next time—using their better educated, honed-in-years-of-therapy, left-brain-based appraisal system—the PICKER devolves back to the attachment system, which seeks familiarity and resonance above all else.
Characteristics of Adult Attachment Styles
Secure Attachment: A Foundation for Healthy Relationships
Attachment experiences with primary caregivers in infancy yield either secure or insecure adult attachment styles. A securely attached adult in a relationship seems to be able to balance needs for interdependency and autonomy. Such individuals are generally able to respond to bids for connection with partners without feeling overwhelmed, attacked, drained, or intruded upon.
Insecure Attachment: Anxious, Avoidant, and Disorganized Styles
There are three subsets of insecure attachment styles: “anxious,” “avoidant,” and “disorganized.”
Anxious and avoidant styles are considered “organized” attachment styles, as these individuals do have a coherent strategy–debilitating as it might be–for dealing with unmanageable affect.
- The anxious individual is highly sensitive to vacillations in their partner’s emotional availability, and the perception of reduced “presence” will spark protest and reassurance-seeking until some sort of “repair” is offered by their partner.
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An avoidant is also sensitive to shifts in their partner’s emotional availability, but the reception of reduced presence sparks their own withdrawal. Additionally, if an avoidant feels a bid for reassurance coming their way, their typical response will be to check out/withdraw/dissociate–and they may angrily deflect it as well–until the intrusive emotional bid recedes and their partner returns to “acting normal.”
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The third insecure style—disorganized--is less common than the other two, and messier. Disorganized attachment responses can manifest in a variety of ways—ask anyone who ever had their tires slashed by an irate soon-to-be “Ex”–but in general can be frantic bids for reassurance wrapped in tricky behaviors designed to repel the person from whom reassurance is wanted, which then serves as “proof” that everyone will disappoint/reject them, and they’ll never be loved/lovable (reflecting the profound wound imbedded in their self-structure). Individuals with a disorganized style in romantic relationships build psychological obstacle courses for their partners to run through, “knowing” they will fail, despite how much they long for closeness.
Are You Destined to Pick a Distresser?
So the question becomes: are you destined to pick a Distresser? There are three answers.
Yes, most likely, if you have an insecure attachment style.
That might sound harsh…and it does suck. (But stay tuned for the hopeful message here shortly…)
No, if you’re okay settling for someone who makes you feel “safe” but doesn’t turn you on.
It is very common for someone who has been on roller-coaster ride relationships—characterized by chronic triggering of unpleasant, unproductive, or down-right destructive attachment responses—to seek shelter in the relative peace and safety of a relationship with a “non-distresser.” That SOUNDS logical! Great idea! This choice might yield a pleasant and companionate relationship, and its comfort and stability may be enough for you. But it won’t work at a gratifyingly intimate level.
Why it doesn’t work at that level is that our attachment system seems to govern our sexual attraction to others. A prospective mate’s interpersonal style needs to trigger That Thing* hard-coded in the implicit memory of our limbic system, which lights up our attachment system in recognition, if it’s to provide gratifying sexual intimacy (*That Thing = that which is familiar, resonant with our earliest experiences of closeness and care.).
Yes, and doing so can create an opportunity for growth and repair of an insecure attachment style as one learns to manage the distress the relationship engenders.
The Laboratory of Attachment Repair: An Opportunity for Growth
When someone abstains from romantic relationships with the notion they are going to “fix themselves first,” therapy isn’t that useful, at least for the real work that needs to be done. Sure, there’s plenty of self-awareness that can be cultivated there on the mountaintop in Tibet, but it’s going to be primarily an intellectual exercise, one in which you’ll practice your improved narrative about you and your self-worth and that which you are entitled to in relationships, but within this echo chamber you’re not going to suffer the discomfort of tackling your insecure attachment system.
To “fix it,” you need to be in–what I have come to call–the laboratory. The laboratory is a new relationship you’ll get drawn into with—surprise surprise!—another Distresser (maybe a slightly better one, given those improved powers of appraisal)—that triggers your insecure attachment responses.
Here, in the land of infinite discomfort, you will do the actual work, and therapy is the best place in which to undertake it. And yes, it can be in your own therapy. It does not need to be in couples counseling, although it’s certainly a plus if a partner is willing to go on this journey WITH you, and you are working to facilitate your own AND your partner’s “earned secure attachment.”
Therapy Goals for Earned Secure Attachment
Individual therapy, for someone who is actively in the laboratory, committed to a better outcome in their current relationship than they’ve arrived at previously, and has an end game of “earned secure attachment” as a target should be focused on:
- Increasing distress tolerance
- Slowing reactivity
- Increasing attunement to somatic distress cues
- Cultivation of “bottom up” and “top down” self regulation skills
- Interrupting cycles of rumination
- Replacing self-defeating/pessimistic narratives about the certainty of failure with ones more likely to “manifest” desired outcome
(*Note these are not linear steps, but rather a series of concurrent, interlocking efforts that with practice yield the “skills” needed—and later reflecting—earned secure attachment).
The author, Elisabeth Ihlenfeld, LPC, owns Level Up Phoenix and provide therapy services at Phoenix Therapists’ Hub.
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