Part 2: Childhood Attachment Styles: An Overview

-Attachment-
Written By Evelyn Rodriguez, LMFT

The Attachment Series:

Part 2

Edited By: Antonio T.

“People have two needs, attachment and authenticity. When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.”

Dr. Gabor Mate

INTRODUCTION

In this second article, you will learn more about childhood attachment and will be able to start the process of identifying your own childhood attachment style.

What is an attachment style and what makes it so important? How can understanding an attachment style help me develop healthier relationships? When you understand your primary attachment style, you can understand why certain relationship dynamics cause you to experience high anxiety or other strong emotions.  

Learning more about your attachment system can help you learn how to rewire how you view relationship issues and help you improve your ability to engage in healthy relationship habits. The articles on Childhood Attachment Styles, are intended to help you start the process of identifying your childhood attachment style and to understand how it developed. To be able to explain childhood attachment styles sufficiently, this topic will be broken down into two articles, Part 2 and Part 3 in this series.

You are welcome to skip to the next article, Part 3 of the Attachment Series for an activity aimed at helping you identify your attachment style.

WHAT IS AN ATTACHMENT STYLE?

Your early relationship experiences and attachment system form a “blueprint” that becomes a basic “program” or internal working model of relationships in your brain. This brain response system is your attachment style, and it is what tells you how to think, feel, and act when you are in a stressful situation and it lets you know what feels safe and secure and what doesn’t. Essentially, your attachment style indicates how you will experience and respond to anxiety in relationships. 

Simply put, an attachment style is the specific way you connect to and relate to others in relationships. Attachment styles were brought into our awareness thanks to the research of Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby in the 1950s. They discovered that our attachment is molded and created through the interactions we have with our early caregivers. Your early childhood attachment will ultimately lead you to develop an adult bonding style that is based on those early childhood experiences you had involving affection.

Essentially, you learn how to love and connect with others based on what you learned about love and connection from your parental figures or childhood caregivers. The quality of that early childhood bond (loving, secure, safe, unhealthy, inconsistent, insecure, etc.) contributes to how your brain wires itself to respond to relationship distress and impacts how you react and behave when you feel your relationship is being threatened. 

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HOW DOES AN ATTACHMENT STYLE DEVELOP?

An attachment style starts to develop based on how your primary caregiver responds to you as a child when you are experiencing emotional distress. How your caregivers reacted to your cues, nurtured, and helped you to resolve your emotional distress taught you how to cope with your emotions in early childhood. As you continue to grow and develop, you may continue to use these early childhood coping methods because your brain tells you it is how you “should” respond to emotional distress. 

 

Your attachment style inadvertently becomes the way you manage your feelings and cope with anxiety or distress as an adult. Your attachment style continues to develop through life experiences. Your attachment style can become more secure if you engage in healthier relationships or if you continue to educate yourself about healthy tools to manage your emotional needs. However, your attachment style may remain insecure and can cause problems in your relationships if you end up experiencing several unhealthy relationships.

HOW DOES KNOWING MY ATTACHMENT STYLE HELP ME?

There is evidence that suggests that attachment styles are intergenerational, meaning that they are family traits/patterns that get passed down from one generation to the next. Understanding your attachment style can help you understand healthy and unhealthy patterns in your relationships. Attachment influences how you develop friendships, romantic relationships, and relationship satisfaction, how you parent, how you grieve, and in general how you cope in stressful situations. 

The more you learn about how you attach emotionally, the more you can learn effective ways to manage stressors and improve your ability to self-regulate when you are upset. Understanding your attachment style can empower you in your relationships and improve relational skills related to communication and resolving conflict. 

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ATTACHMENT COMPARED TO LOVE WITHIN THE FAMILY SYSTEM

Remember that attachment bonding does not equate to how much a caregiver loves you. Oftentimes, caregivers respond with love and empathy but don’t often know how to help you emotionally when you are in distress. Caregivers could be loving to you throughout the day, but when they see you in distress, they may not know how to manage their own worry enough to respond effectively to you. 

It is important to be able to recognize that you can have loving caregivers and still develop an insecure attachment style. If your caregivers didn’t have the most effective coping skills to manage their own anxiety/distress, then they inadvertently may have modeled unhealthy coping skills when you were a child. Attachment styles are intergenerational, meaning that similar bonding styles and coping skills get passed down from one generation to the next. 

Additionally, everyone learns to express love differently. In many older generations, love was not often expressed directly or in overt ways. For example, rigid, cold, unaffectionate, and over-protective parents can still love their child immensely but may not have learned how to demonstrate love through affection. 

It is vital to remember that having an insecure attachment style does NOT mean that your parents did not love you. It simply means that your parents did not have the coping skills necessary to teach you how to handle emotional distress effectively.

Family attachment patterns start to change when someone in the family system starts to learn and identify healthier copings skills to manage distress and anxiety. The person who breaks this generational chain often is able to model healthier emotion regulation skills and this starts to change how the family responds to stressful situations collectively. This change process can take years, but it is possible to alter unhealthy family patterns. 

THE FOUR ATTACHMENT STYLES

There are four primary childhood attachment styles:

  1. Secure Attachment

  2. Fearful-Avoidant; also named Disorganized Attachment 

  3. Anxious-Ambivalent; also named Anxious-Resistant or Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment 

  4. Anxious-Avoidant; also named Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment 

Before learning more about the childhood attachment styles, take a look at this video of an attachment experiment. It gives an example of three babies with different attachment styles. One has a Secure Attachment, one has an Anxious-Avoidant Attachment, and one has an Anxious-Ambivalent/Resistant Attachment. Can you guess which is which?

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WHAT IS MY ATTACHMENT STYLE?

To learn more about each individual attachment style you can do the activity in the next article “Childhood Attachment Styles: What is My Attachment Style?”. If you prefer not to do the activity, you are welcome to skip to the results section to read up on what each attachment style can look like when you are a child. 

RESOURCES

AND REFERENCES

Evelyn Rodriguez, LMFT
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Part 3: Childhood Attachment Styles: What is My Attachment Style?
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