How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Relationships
Do you know your attachment style? Understanding my attachment style, and attachment theory in general, has been a key part of my journey to creating a partnership where I feel safe to express myself and ask for what I need. And becoming a safe person for others to honor themselves and set boundaries with.
A glimpse into attachment theory
Attachment theory is more complex than just the four standard attachment styles you may have heard of: anxious, avoidant, mixed and secure. Attachment tendencies actually exist on a continuum and many of us have elements of all four, which different people and experiences can provoke.
But for today let’s keep it simple…
First, it’s important to know that you can’t choose your attachment style, it chooses you. No matter how you slice it, how you attach to your primary caregivers (before you have a choice in the matter) influences how you attach as an adult.
If a parent is inconsistently there for you, or sometimes soothes you and sometimes doesn’t, this can lead to anxious attachment. And if a parent is regularly unreliable, this can lead to avoidant attachment (the belief that “I can only rely on myself”). If a parent is reliably there for and attuned to you most of the time, this creates secure attachment.
(Note that a person’s attachment style is often not the fault of the caregivers. As much as neglect and abuse create insecure attachment, other factors like working long hours to provide, having many children to look after, adoption, mental illness, or divorce can create insecure attachment.)
Stan Tatkin uses the terms “wave” and “island” to describe the insecure attachment styles.
People with anxious attachment are considered waves; they lean in for connection when triggered, sometimes aggressively.
People with avoidant tendencies are called islands; they want (dare I say need) to be alone when triggered, sometimes disappearing without explanation. (If you’ve ever been ghosted, there’s a good chance that person has some island/avoidant tendencies.)
The nuances of anxious attachment in my own life
Before I was aware of my anxious attachment tendencies, I felt a lot of shame around needing lots of connection, communication and reassurance.
Dissociating from or sugar coating my true feelings was my MO for years. Most of the time I wasn’t intentionally hiding my feelings from men, my family, friends, etc, this tendency stemmed from a lack of connection to how I was feeling within myself.
Sometimes I would feel like a bomb went off on the inside, but act totally cool and calm on the outside. Overtime, this pattern of bypassing my emotions (which is a protective mechanism and nothing to be ashamed of, just something to lovingly notice) disrupted my ability to attune to myself - my heart, my feelings, my needs, my capacity, my boundaries, my preferences, wants and desires.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but I had become very skilled at “making myself feel better” in the face of my needs not being met and feeling abandoned or unsafe in relationships. I could self-soothe* all day and overtime I stopped trusting that others could handle my truth.
*I’m not saying there isn’t value in self-soothing, or being able to ground and re-orient ourselves when we’re triggered. This is an essential part of intimacy too, we just don’t want to do it at the expense of inviting connection.
I wasn’t connected with my emotional experience and my triggers as they showed up, in real time, in my body. The moment I had a feeling, my protective mechanism was to go into my head and think it away…They didn’t mean to…It’s not a big deal…What can I do to feel better?
And beneath that was the fear that if I shared my truth — for example, told a boyfriend that I felt anxious when I didn’t hear from them — they would think I was dramatic, crazy, needy…and possibly leave me.
Can you see how this tendency to with-hold my raw, true feelings from first myself, then others, totally held me back from creating the intimacy and partnership that I longed for?
It wasn’t until I identified myself as anxiously attached and worked through the shame of this (as a perfectionist I thought I should be able “fix” this about myself) that I realized that my needs for regular communication and reassurance were totally valid. And from here I started to recognize when a need or boundary would arise, in my body, versus bypassing it all together.
This embodied connection to my feelings allowed me to invite the men I was dating into my experience, and invite them to take care of me in the way I needed to feel safe in the relationship. And ask them to learn/share about their own attachment tendencies so I could determine from a more level-headed (versus patterned) place whether we would be a good match for each other.
How to become more securely attached
When it comes to the insecure attachment styles (anxious, avoidant and mixed) we can develop awareness and agency around our tendencies, but that doesn’t mean we won’t need what we need - in the simplest terms, either connection or space - when we’re triggered.
If we’re committed to exploring the intricacies of ourselves and each other, it is possible to develop secure attachment. I speak from experience, as I have swung from mostly anxious to mostly secure. That said, I still feel anxious and jump to worst case scenario thinking from time to time: for example, he’s being really quiet, does he still want to be with me? The difference is I now invite my partner in in these moments and he knows exactly what to say to reassure me.
The way to feel more secure is to vulnerably let your partner/lover in on your inner experience and honor what you need when you’re triggered. If you struggle to do this, and feel frustrated that the same painful patterns keep repeating for you in dating or your long-term relationship, I’d love to support you in shaking things up so that you can show up in your relationships differently, and create new grooves that get you the love and connection you desire.
Explore ways to work with me and book a free Discovery call here.
(Psssst….If you don’t know it, you can explore your attachment style deeper here.)
About the Author: Allie Andrews, Sex & Intimacy Coach
Whether it’s through boutique coaching, intimate groups, transformational workshops or writing, Allie helps individuals and couples have better sex and feel happier and more secure in themselves and their relationships.
Allie is a Somatica® Certified Sex and Relationship Coach, Certified Yoga Teacher and Certified Holistic Health Coach with her Masters in Education. Learn more >>
