I'm A Clinical Psychologist & We Need To Reframe How We Think About Attachment Styles

As a clinical psychologist, I hear a lot about attachment styles. One client even told me recently she felt she was "hard work because of her anxious attachment" and had to make up for it by letting other people get their way all the time.

Our attachment is the intimate bond that forms with our caregivers when we are infants. Depending on this attachment bond, as well as genetics, we develop a particular attachment style that helps us best survive and adapt to the environment we are born into—and this influences the way our relationships play out in the future. 

As adults, our everyday experiences of relationships continue to mirror what happens in our attachment bond as children. We have needs that others can or cannot meet, and we may or may not be able to express them. We are interdependent on others for both material resources and for warmth and affection. 

Having interdependent, healthy, and strong relationships helps us feel safe enough to express our needs and to create stable futures. However, in relationships where our needs are consistently not met—whether or not we express them—we may experience anxiety, avoidance, ambivalence, and other distressing feelings.

And it doesn't just affect our mental health. While great relationships are equally great for our physical health (i.e., happily married people have lower blood pressure than social singles), toxic and ambivalent relationships can actually be terrible for our heart health1.

The problem with this obsession with attachment styles is twofold. 

First, people dismiss themselves and define themselves solely based on having a "bad" attachment style and therefore believe they must work harder and overextend in relationships. They incinerate energy and self-esteem by telling themselves they're a mess or difficult people, and the shame can be crippling.

This can also make you delicious prey for toxic dark personality types, who have a keenly attuned radar for people who work too hard in relationships and feel deficient about themselves—the perfect partners to exploit, abuse, and gaslight. 

Second, people think that attachment style is a be-all and end-all. I see this in how some people similarly obsess over their personality types or neural wiring, using those things to justify their behavior as if there's no other way.

Instead, learning about our attachment styles is useful because we learn about how we automatically react to people. For example, someone anxiously attached may learn that they obsess over relationships way too early, and that may cause them to do or say things they regret later. Or, an avoidantly attached person may realize they tend to oscillate between disappearing and intense closeness. 

As with all forms of self-awareness, this is about learning that we are not resigned to our patterns of behavior. Even if something feels very much like an autopilot setting, we learn to observe and break the cycle faster, so we feel more in control.

And in that process, rather than feeling intense shame and shutting down due to our actions, we learn to accept that this is currently our default wiring—and that we can do something about it instead of feeling helpless and creating more messes in our relationships.

Just because you have certain needs for closeness or space—or both at different times or with certain people—doesn't make you emotionally unhealthy, difficult, or less of a person.

Needing intimacy and space is not a marker of strength or weakness, it just is what it is. We simply have to ask for it in a healthy way. Because the truth is, human beings are interdependent creatures who cocreate our realities. Being doggedly overly independent or believing we have to always be very close to someone else (especially if this is based on some cultural idea and not based on what you actually need) are not healthy ways to live.

Because when we have our needs met, we co-regulate our heart rates and brain waves, and we feel safe. As I always say in corporate culture training, no amount of communication, relationship, or personality workshops are going to bear fruit if we do not feel psychologically safe. 

The truth is, our attachment styles can change with conscious awareness and effort, especially if we choose the relationships that are healthiest for us. When it comes to any kind of growth, I always advocate taking matters into your own hands because time does not always heal, and if we let our habits and mindsets stay passive, we calcify into a worse version of ourselves.