How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Relationships
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Have you ever jumped from relationship to relationship every few months, wondering why you can’t find the perfect partner? Or maybe you’ve been left wondering why the partners you choose are always emotionally unavailable. What if you knew that your relationship choices and the way you attach to others has been established since you were in the womb?
How you learn to connect in relationships is deeply rooted in your attachment style. It's how you learn to cultivate relationships and maintain them. Your attachment style is influenced by the way you experienced the early and most significant relationships in your life, and the behaviors of your primary caregivers contributed to and helped form the way you experience close relationships and how you get your needs met within those spaces.
What are the Four Attachment Styles?
Anxious Attachment: Closeness and feeling connected in your relationships creates security for you. When you feel like your partner is pulling away, your anxiety is activated. The anxiously attached adult often seeks approval, support, and responsiveness from their partner. So if you feel your partner "pulling away", you hop into fix it mode so to secure this responsiveness whether they're actually pulling away or if you simply "feel" this way.
Avoidant Attachment: Is closeness uncomfortable for you? Avoidant adults tend to believe that they don’t have to be in a relationship to feel complete. If you're avoidant, you generally avoid emotional closeness and at times you may even seem aloof or distant. Relationships aren't always a safe space for you and the close someone gets, the more you move a
Fearful-Avoidant Attachment: Closeness in relationships scare you, but you desire it nonetheless. It's a ongoing conflicting feeling when you're in relationships because you can show up inconsistently with ambiguous behaviors. Your fear of getting hurt leads to avoidance and although closeness is a desire, you struggle the most when you're trying to deepen a connection because of your lack of trust in these situations.
Secure Attachment: Closeness and distance aren't immediate triggers for you. You understand that if either presents itself in the relationship, you can manage the experience. The give and take nature of relationships is expected and something you engage in freely. When you're securely attached you don't depend on the responsiveness or approval of your partners, you create space for the relationship to unfold and don’t abandon self in order to stay connected.
How to Self-regulate in Relationships when you're Insecurely Attached:
Self-regulation is the ability to control your emotions and the actions that you take in response to them according to what is appropriate for the situation at hand. This ability is the key to successfully maintaining healthy relationships, problem-solving when there’s a conflict, and having a stable sense of self-confidence.
Here’s what you can do to self-regulate when you’re attachment style is activated in your relationship:
Anxious: Remember that what you're thinking may not be what's actually happen. Check in with self to see if you're making any assumptions about your partners behaviors. Recognize how your behavior changes when triggered and try calming yourself by utilizing a period of "pause" before you react to big emotions.
Anxious-Avoidant: Acknowledge your emotions and learn to effectively communicate them. Your fear involves being let down or hurt, the issue with avoidance is that you prevent your partner from showing up for you in a way that would reassure their love and commitment towards you. You literally block the very thing you desire all due to your fear of being hurt.
Avoidant: Don't suppress your emotions! Acknowledge that you feel things (and probably deeply) and allow people to show for you. Trusting other is hard for you, but you can learn to trust and allow others in to your world. If you can identify your needs and what creates safety in relationships, you can align yourself with people who show these characteristics.
Do you identify with an anxious or avoidant attachment style? Research today shows that you are not cemented into that attachment style for life. You can make a conscious effort to have a secure attachment style. They are not necessarily set in stone. If you are anxious or avoidant, you can take steps to have more fulfilling relationships and move towards a secure attachment style with greater fulfillment in your relationships.
Two ways to become more securely attached:
Increase Self awareness: Learn the why and how of your insecure attachment. What contributed to it, how is it showing up in your life, and what do you need to do to change? The more self-aware you are, the better you become at assessing the depths and locations of the scars in your inner landscape so you don't keep falling into those same patterns for the rest of your life.
Change your negative association with being alone: Insecurely attached adults fear abandonment, rejection, separation, and the uncomfortable feelings that come with being alone. Learning to change this association is vital to creating more secure attachments in your relationships. Create space and opportunities for you to acknowledge that being alone is not confirmation that you are undesirable, not wanted, being rejected, or something to be feared. Implement dedicated times and opportunities to find joy in your own company so that a persons exit or absence does not send you into a frenzy
Understanding your attachment style can help give you insight into how to have deeper and more fulfilling relationships. When you take the steps to understand what you need in a relationship and to communicate how you feel regularly, both partners can feel secure and supported. Relationships are a fulfilling part of life and it helps to know you have someone encouraging to depend on.
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