If you’ve ever heard about the four attachment styles, then you might be researching two slightly different but related ideas.
First, we have the basic four attachment styles of psychology. Then, there’s the four attachment styles speaking of love – as in the four ways someone expresses love, according to the type of attachment they feel.
First, let’s consider what are the four attachment styles and why people follow these patterns.
Defining Attachment
According to Scientific American, attachment is a bond that we form with a caregiver, typically a parent in the formative years of youth. When you’re a baby you look up to the person taking care of you and will continue throughout your life. Eventually, the great love you have for a parent affects the way you think, feel, and even the way you approach romantic relationships.
Even when you grow up you will still feel the same feelings of attachment, to a parent, and eventually to a person you want to date. Most psychologists agree these attachment styles include:
● Secure
● Dismissive-Avoidant
● Anxious-Preoccupied
● Fearful-Avoidant
Let’s consider each of these and how they work. Then, we’ll discuss how it affects the way you “love” in relationships.
1. Secure
Secure attachment style means that you grew up feeling safe in your home. You always felt protected, welcomed, and comforted by your parents or guardian at that place. As time went on, you matured and had high confidence, a good sense of who you were and what you wanted, and knew what kind of relationship you wanted, when you were ready to marry.
When you love someone, you understand what motivates them. You can commit and adapt fairly easily when you know your partner’s needs. You are emotionally open and honest about what you feel. You’re independent alone but also can come together as a team.
2. Anxious-Preoccupied
This attachment style typically happens when childhood role models are inconsistent. Parents may have been emotionally moody, unpredictable, and erratic. They were not necessarily abusive but uneven in their approach to emotional openness.
Therefore, children will become confused about how to love. This kind of attachment is characterized by anxiety – to the extent that you put the needs of your partner over your own. You can have normal relationships, but you will often lose the sense of what you really want and who you are, by trying too hard to please the other person.
Emotional highs and lows may cause stress in your relationship. You do want to connect and you even want to be intimate with someone and find happiness. But the dependency on your partner and the clinging behavior may push your partner away, despite your best intentions.
3. Fearful-Avoidant Attachment
For children who experienced great loss, trauma, or even abuse during youth, they can develop a destructive dismissive-avoidant approach to relationships. They may long to be close to someone emotionally but may also fear what they really want.
If you tend to push a person away, pull them back to you, perhaps apologizing, and then doing the same thing again, this is a pattern of mistrust. Other people may see you as indecisive, ambiguous or even abusive, especially if you lash out at others in anger.
They key issue is that you don’t like depending on others, trusting others, and cannot deal with the stress of that in a healthy way. In fact, it might be easier for you to isolate yourself and find other unhealthy coping mechanisms (like loveless sex or alcohol) rather than chasing what you truly want.
4. Avoidant-Dismissive
Avoidant-dismissive attachment results from a childhood of detached parental love. If your parent(s) were emotionally detached or even completely unavailable or absent. In this category type, a parent’s coldness (but not abusive behavior, mind you) teaches you the pattern of distancing yourself emotionally from others.
You may have great difficulty developing closeness to a partner, just as you found it difficult to open up emotionally with your parent(s). You see yourself as a lone wolf. On one hand, you are independent and perhaps emotionally mature, at least on your own. Your self-esteem may be high and you may feel successful.
But you will find it very difficult to trust others or become emotionally vulnerable with someone else. In fact, avoiding emotion is what keeps you strong. You may not be opposed to trying to love someone, but when it’s time to confront feelings and have those honest and stressful conversations, you tend to hide.
Can You Change Your Style?
Once you realize what attachment style seems like you, you have a choice. To see the pattern and learn where it comes from, and then make a conscious choice to avoid the same actions that make you unhappy.
Learning these patterns and understanding where they come from doesn’t mean you blame your parents. It simply means you have observed these patterns, you accept them, but you also accept that you can change.
It’s not a matter of you “should” change. Rather, if you want to be happy and change your bad dating experiences to something positive, you can make a conscious effort to avoid reverting back to those patterns.
You can see the disaster coming. This time, you understand that it’s not your bad luck, your destiny, or another sad chapter in the novel of your life. You learn, over time, that every relationship we enter into is by choice.
You always have the choice to see the pattern coming and put a stop to it. Rather than letting the wrong type of guy into your heart, or the wrong type of circumstances qualifying for a relationship, you can make an effort to do something different.
Not surprisingly, as soon as you start making different choices, you notice immediately that these new relationships turn out different. You resist falling back into the same old patterns just because they’re familiar. Even though emotionally they feel right, your logical mind says, “Maybe I shouldn’t do this anymore. It’s always brought me heartbreak.”
Yes, you can always “change your bad luck” and start creating the relationship you deserve and truly want.
Where Did Your Attachment Style Come From?
A lot of how we love starts with how we grew up, and with our dads.
My free test helps you spot whether old father wounds are shaping who you pick.
Take the “Daddy Issues Test” »
For a lot of women, these patterns start with their dad. If that sounds like you, my free daddy issues quiz shows which one fits you, with no email needed.
