An attachment style refers to a pattern of emotional responses and behaviours a person has in relationships. Attachment theory proposes that the way we bond with our primary caregivers as infants, forms the way we attach to people throughout our lives. These patterns play out most strongly in romantic relationships.
Learning about attachment styles can empower you to create healthier and more harmonious relationships. In order to make any change in life, you first need awareness. If you seek to understand yourself and your partner’s (or potential partner’s) attachment style, you can choose to work together to create a more secure relationship.
How we perceive love and how much connection we can have with a romantic partner is influenced by our attachment style or strategy. We can use the terms style and strategy interchangeably because we are talking about the adaptations (strategies) we used as children, to try to get our needs met by our primary caregivers. It is worth noting that we can form different attachment styles or strategies in different relationships.
Why do we form attachment styles?
Underlying attachment styles or strategies are fears that originated from our past experiences. When dating we can have a fear of abandonment, rejection, betrayal, or engulfment. These fears stem from attachment wounds of invasion, intrusion, abuse or betrayal; or abandonment or neglect (neglect can be emotional or physical). Attachment wounds can also come from inconsistency and misattunement in parenting. Perhaps there was no soothing of your emotions, you may have been told to stop crying and after a while you learned to abandon yourself and repress your emotions. This is common. It doesn’t always mean your parents were abusive or ‘bad’ parents, perhaps they just didn’t know how to handle emotions.
Your attachment style or strategy can also be influenced by adult romantic relationships, for example if you were cheated on you may develop a fear that you will be cheated on again (betrayed), even if in childhood you didn’t have any attachment wounds. Or if you have been in an abusive adult relationship this can rewire your nervous system and create wounds and fears that change how you relate in future relationships.
Attachment Styles can change, you can become more secure
Attachment styles exist on a spectrum, and can change with effort. For example, a person can be slightly to moderately dismissive avoidant attachment style with some secure traits and the ability to connect and empathise; or a person could have an extremely dismissive avoidant attachment style where emotional attunement and empathy are lacking, and expression of more vulnerable emotions makes them extremely uncomfortable.
We are constantly shaped by relationships throughout our life. So even if you have insecure attachment, you can build security through practicing secure attachment behaviours in your current relationship. It’s even better if both people are working on themselves, they can help each other stay conscious and heal together. You can also learn to improve your communication skills so that you create more understanding between you and your partner (and in all of your other relationships).
However, transforming your attachment style is mostly up to you. You can work with the parts of you that feel insecure and hold attachment wounds. You can learn to presence these parts with love and self-compassion and regulate your nervous system. With consistent effort you will gradually unwind these patterns from your nervous system and grow new neural pathways and change your behaviour. Relying on your partner to fill a void or meet your every need will only act as a band-aid, never healing the core wound/s. These wounds will be activated over and over again until you learn to work through them and release them, and love yourself. You can heal yourself, and people like me are here to help you.
You can gain more secure attachment through counselling or psychotherapy sessions and heal relational trauma through somatic (body) based psychotherapies. As you do these kinds of sessions where your therapist is helping you to regulate your nervous system, and integrate, you will learn how to do this for yourself. I will address this topic on parts work and inner child healing in a future blog.
What is an attachment style and how is it formed?
Your attachment style describes how you relate with other people, especially romantic partners, and was formed mostly during your first two years of life, through your relationship with your primary caregivers.
It was formed through adaptation. You learned how to behave in response to how you were being cared for, and how attuned your caregivers were to your feelings and needs.
Attunement is about being in sync emotionally. It is about understanding and responding to a person’s feelings and needs, ensuring they feel heard, understood and valued. Attunement is the basis for empathy.
Babies and children will adopt a belief that there is something wrong with them if their needs are not being met, or if there is neglect, abuse, or addictions in the household. A child will adapt for their own survival as they instinctively know that they are completely dependent on their caregivers. It is terrifying for an infant to face the reality that they may have bad parents, so they will seek proximity even if the parent is dangerous at times.
If you are insecurely attached it doesn’t automatically mean your parents did a bad job – it could be that they provided everything you physically needed, however they were absent emotionally, overbearing, or misattuned to your needs. They may have tried their best and lacked the skills to attune to you, because of their own life experiences and lack of presence with themselves.
There are some basic things we need for well being. We need to feel safe, we need to feel that we matter and that we belong, and we need connection. These basic needs being met are the foundation for healthy relating and a regulated nervous system.
Origins of attachment theory
Attachment theory originated with British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. Bowlby’s research on mammals influenced his thinking as he observed that primates run to a protective adult to seek safety. Humans are also wired to form attachments, because we couldn’t survive without them.
Mary Ainsworth, a colleague of Bowlby’s, went on to conduct a series of field observations (in the 1960’s – 1970’s). Ainsworth developed a hypothesis that attunement (sensitivity to the child needs) was required from the caregiver. Essentially the caregiver needed to respond in a timely and effective manner to the signals sent by the child. In her mother and child study, she found that when caregivers promptly and effectively responded to young infants’ cries, the babies cried less by the end of the first year. Infants who developed confidence in their caregivers are securely attached because their caregivers have proven to be reliable – so they learn they don’t need to try so hard to get attention.
Ainsworth then developed the Strange Situation laboratory procedure which involved the infant and mother entering a toy-filled laboratory setting. They were joined by a stranger a few minutes later. The infant is left with the stranger for three minutes, until the mother returns. Next the infant is left alone briefly, until the mother returns again. This “strange situation” evokes separation anxiety in the child, which is thought to activate the inborn attachment system. They were able to then observe the different types of attachment. The infant’s response to reunion with the mother is the factor that determines the “classification” of the attachment relationship. Note that the child can have a different attachment response with different caregivers.
Ainsworth observed that with children with avoidant attachment patterns, in general their mothers held them as much as other mothers held their babies, just not when they really needed it. Therefore, they cried more in the routine home observations and explored less, than did the securely attached babies. Later, it was observed they were more dependent on their school teachers. Bowlby predicted that infants whose normal needs for sensitive responsiveness and emotional closeness weren’t met, including those pushed toward early independence, would later be more dependent.
Resilience
It’s been shown repeatedly that children with histories of secure attachment are less vulnerable to stress and better able to take advantage of opportunities for growth. When these same children go through a difficult time, their prior experience of feeling nurtured isn’t erased, so it still influences their response to the new situation. It is estimated that between 40% – 60% of the adult population are insecurely attached, to varying degrees.
People who had adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which includes abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, a parent with an addiction, a parent with mental health problems, death, a family member going to prison, or instability due to parents separating, are at a disadvantage – both in creating healthy relationships as adults and in health outcomes (refer to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study). The more ACEs a person has the more risk to their health – both physical and mental, and it can affect the level of education and career prospects they have, and it is also more likely they will develop a substance addiction or engage in risky behaviour.
Everyone’s relational history is different, and each individual will respond differently to the experiences they have. Trauma is not an event, trauma occurs when your nervous system is overwhelmed and you do not have the inner resources to cope with it. People are less likely to become traumatised when they are supported following an event. Children who are continually abused without a safe adult to soothe them will develop Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD).
A child having even one safe adult to go to can make all the difference for them, creating some resiliency through connection, soothing (nervous system regulation) and being able to trust. Being seen, understood, valued and loved, makes all of the difference. A child left alone to suffer in abuse with no one to turn may believe the world is a hostile place and react accordingly. Hurt people, hurt people.
Child Attachment Styles
Young children need to develop a bond with at least one primary caregiver in order for their social and emotional development to be healthy. During the first two years, how the caregivers respond to their infants, particularly during times of distress, establishes the types of patterns of attachment their children form. These patterns will go on to guide the child’s feelings, thoughts and expectations as an adult in future relationships.
Secure Attachment:
If an infant forms an emotional attachment to an adult who is attuned to them, between 0 – 2 years they will develop secure attachment. During the second year, children begin to use the adult as a secure base from which to explore the world and become more independent. A child in this type of relationship is securely attached. To be securely attached, the child must feel safe, seen and soothed.
Avoidant Attachment:
Caregivers who are emotionally unavailable and are therefore insensitive to and unaware of the needs of their children will shape the child to form an avoidant attachment. These adults have little or no response when a child is hurting or distressed, and discourage crying, and encourage independence. This can cause their children to quickly develop into “little adults” who take care of themselves. These children pull away from needing anything from anyone else and are self-contained, like an island.
Ambivalent/Anxious Attachment:
Caregivers who are inconsistently attuned to their children will shape them to have an ambivalent/anxious attachment to them due to their unpredictable behaviour. At times these adults are appropriately responsive and nurturing to the infant, but at other times they are intrusive and insensitive. Children with this kind of parenting become confused and insecure, as they do not know what type of treatment to expect. They don’t know if they can trust their parent but at the same time they act clingy and desperate, trying to get their needs met.
Disorganised Attachment:
When a parent or caregiver is abusive towards their child, the child experiences the physical or emotional cruelty as being life-threatening. The child is caught in a terrible dilemma: their survival instincts are telling them to flee to safety but safety is the very person who is terrifying them – due to their dependence on their caregiver. The attachment figure is the source of the child’s distress. These situations, cause children to disassociate from themselves (trauma). They detach from what is happening to them and what they are experiencing may be blocked from their consciousness. Children in this conflicted state have disorganised attachments with their fearsome parental figures.
Adult Attachment Styles
Many people, when referring to attachment styles, will talk about the ones outlined above. However attachment theory was extended to adult romantic relationships in the late 1980s by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver. They identified four styles of attachment in adults: secure, dismissive-avoidant, anxious-preoccupied, and fearful-avoidant. These roughly correspond to infant classifications: secure, avoidant, anxious-ambivalent, and disorganised attachment.
Secure:
Those who developed secure attachments in childhood have secure attachment patterns in adulthood. They have a strong sense of themselves. They desire close associations with others but are not clinging to them as they feel secure. They have a positive view of themselves, their partners and their relationships. Their lives are balanced as they are both secure in their independence and in their close relationships.
Dismissive Avoidant:
People who had avoidant attachments in childhood will most likely form dismissive attachment patterns as adults. These people tend to spend a lot of time alone. They may regard relationships and emotions as being less important. They are cerebral (left brain oriented) and often suppress their feelings. They often distance themselves from a person when in conflict or disagreement with them. These people are more inward and isolated, and emotionally removed from themselves and others. They are trying to preserve their autonomy and avoid intimacy because that feels safer to them.
Preoccupied Anxious:
Those infants who had an ambivalent/anxious attachment often grow up to have preoccupied attachment patterns. As adults, they are often self-critical and insecure. They will seek approval and reassurance from others, however this never relieves their self-doubt. In their relationships, they will experience deep-seated feelings that they are going to be abandoned which will make them worried and not trusting. This fear drives them to act clingy and overly dependent with their partner. They will fight for their relationships and often stay a long time in an unhealthy relationship, and abandon themselves in the process. (Which gives a clue about how to heal this – stop abandoning yourself, and begin to truly presence the parts of you that felt abandoned.)
Fearful-Avoidant:
Those who grew up with disorganised attachment due to childhood abuse, often develop fearful-avoidant patterns of attachment. When they were children they detached from their feelings during times of trauma so that they could survive the situation as they had no escape, and so as adults they continue to be somewhat detached from themselves. They desire relationships and may be comfortable in them up until they become close to the person. At this point, this can trigger the feelings that were repressed in childhood. The person can be re-living an old trauma. These people tend to not have a coherent sense of themselves nor do they have a clear connection with others.
People who are fearful-avoidant / disorganised feel both the pressure to stay in the relationship and the need to preserve autonomy at the same time, so that they feel safe. This is because when they were a child their caregivers were both a source of comfort (or just survival dependence) and the source of threat.
They can appear to be a mix of dismissive avoidant and preoccupied anxious – so when doing an attachment style quiz can have a mix of both of these in their results, plus fearful-avoidant/disorganised. They may adopt different attachment strategies with different partner’s depending on their partner’s behaviour. It’s less consistent than the other attachment styles, in the way it plays out in a romantic relationship. An individual could have this attachment style a little bit or to the extreme – and it’s only the more extreme cases that are being counted (around 5% of the population).
People with fearful-avoidant attachment style will often create a push-pull dynamic in the relationship. Pushing their partner away when the connection becomes overwhelming and triggers their fear of engulfment, and pulling the partner close when they are fearing abandonment. They find it hard to trust themselves and their partner. What is needed for people with this attachment style is to work with a therapist to heal their trauma, as well as to learn the skills to slow down, regulate themselves and communicate with their partner once they are regulated. So not from their initial reaction – as they do tend to overreact and misread things due to trauma.
As advised before, attachment styles are more on a spectrum – you can have some security and some insecure attachment style. It is quite nuanced as the human experience, and temperament is so varied. For example, lets say your basic survival needs were met, but your parents were angry and aggressive and emotionally abusive – putting you down regularly and sometimes hitting you or being unpredictable. You most likely adapted by trying to be invisible and avoiding anything that could trigger them because you learned you could be punished even when you didn’t do anything wrong. This would create some disorganised/fearful-avoidant attachment style. But you may also have high resiliency so you were able to adapt, still do well at school and later at work. As an adult you may find that you are only triggered in your romantic relationships – because close relationships don’t feel consistently safe to you. So you can still do well in life, but romantic relationships are challenging. In this example, I’m talking about my own experience a little bit, and how I developed some secure attachment and some fearful-avoidant attachment, because I did have a safe adult around sometimes. Fortunately, once I realised I had complex-PTSD I was able to start working through it and also become more securely attached. And you can too!
Neuroplasticity
The good news is, we can earn secure attachment. The brain continues to change itself in response to experiences throughout our lives – this is referred to as neuroplasticity. Relationships can stimulate changes, and even remove the legacy of early social experience.
Through therapy, individuals can experience what was missing in their younger years. Part of the benefit of the therapeutic relationship is it allows you to experience what it feels like for a person to be attuned to you, truly present with you and understanding you. For some people it could be their first time experiencing that.
In my experience, for the therapy to be truly affective it cannot be just talk therapy. You can analyse things for years and get nowhere. There needs to be a shift in perspective, and a shift in the felt sense of the body. Your body keeps the score – experiences are held onto by the body. There needs to be a resolution through healing experiences that change your perspective and your identity gradually, and release what is held by your nervous system. Essentially, you learn to regulate yourself through all that arises in the nervous system – bit by bit transformation occurs.
This can be achieved through parts work such as internal family systems therapy (IFS), somatic work and the embodiment meditation practice that I offer. There are many different somatic based modalities that can help. You don’t need to relive the trauma, but you do need to be able to process the sensations in the felt sense of the body until they completely dissolve (and this may take several or hundreds of times depending on how deeply embedded it is – so go gently with yourself, there is no rush).
As adults we can choose to take full responsibility for our lives and do the work to create healthy and happy relationships. We can learn to presence the parts of us that carry the wounds and give those parts the safety and love they need, so that we don’t need to keep playing out the same story and behavioural patterns in our relationships. Imagine how amazing the world would be if people where connecting with each other from their true self, not from their wounded parts.
Working on ourselves will help heal our nervous systems, grow our resilience, and increase our capacity to be truly with others, holding them with compassion, when they are in pain.
While we all need healthy relationships to truly thrive, our relationship towards ourselves is important and makes all the difference in what we will attract. If you are always expecting people to abandon you, then you will most likely attract those kinds of people or push people away by being too clingy! Whereas if you presence the parts of you that feel abandoned (and that you have abandoned by avoiding your own pain), those parts will come home to you, and you will feel more integrated and whole, not needing others to fill the void. Therefore you will feel empowered to choose those who will treat you well and be true friends and allies in your life.
Love and blessings,
Bella Aurora Starr
(Written by a real person – not written by A.I.)
References & Further Reading
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2025) About Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Available at: