Understanding Attachment Styles: How They Impact Your Relationships and What Therapy Can Do to Help
Relationships are central to our lives, offering love, support, and connection. Yet, they can also be sources of pain, confusion, and conflict. Understanding attachment and attachment styles can support healing and moving forward towards the relationships we desire.
What is Attachment
Attachment is the ways we connect and bond with others. We have a lifelong need for connection and attachment; the experiences in our attachment relationships, which begin with our first attachment bonds in early childhood with caregivers and further develop with our adult romantic attachment partners, fundamentally shape our ability to trust others, ourselves, and the world.
What Impacts Attachment
Painful experiences of relationship betrayal, infidelity, interpersonal violence, neglect, distrust, intimacy challenges, conflict, differing values, or broken communication can prompt us as individuals, or as a couple, to require safe environments and supports to aid collective healing. Childhood experiences of how attachment figures cared for us impact how a person shows up in their relationships. If you find yourself struggling in your relationships—whether with a partner, family member, or friend—it may be rooted in your attachment style. Understanding how attachment styles influence your behaviour and feelings in relationships can be a transformative first step in healing and growth.
What Are Attachment Styles
Attachment styles are patterns of relating to others that we develop early in life, usually based on our relationships with caregivers. These styles influence how we approach intimacy, trust, and dependency in adult relationships. There are four primary attachment styles:
Secure Attachment: People with a secure attachment style feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually able to balance closeness with independence. They tend to have healthy, trusting relationships.
Anxious Attachment: Individuals with an anxious attachment style often crave closeness and approval, but fear being abandoned or rejected. This can lead to clinginess, dependency, or overthinking in relationships.
Avoidant Attachment: Those with an avoidant attachment style value independence to the extent that they may avoid emotional closeness. They can be dismissive of others’ needs or may struggle with vulnerability.
Fearful-Avoidant (Disorganized) Attachment: People with this attachment style may want close relationships but also fear them. This can lead to a push-pull dynamic where they struggle with intimacy and trust.
How Attachment Styles Affect Your Relationships
Attachment styles play a significant role in how you relate to others, particularly in romantic relationships. Here’s how each style might manifest:
Secure Attachment: You’re likely to feel confident in your relationships, communicate effectively, and manage conflict in a healthy way.
Anxious Attachment: You might find yourself seeking constant reassurance from your partner, feeling anxious when they’re not around, or fearing that they’ll leave you.
Avoidant Attachment: You may keep your partner at a distance, struggle with expressing emotions, or feel overwhelmed by your partner’s needs.
Fearful-Avoidant Attachment: You might experience intense, conflicting emotions—wanting closeness but fearing it, which can lead to unpredictable or chaotic relationship dynamics.
Why Understanding Attachment Is Important
Recognizing your attachment style can help you understand the underlying patterns driving your relationship behaviour. For example, if you have an anxious attachment style, you might realize that your fears of abandonment are not necessarily reflective of your partner’s behaviour, but rather of unresolved feelings from your past.
How Attachment Therapy Can Help
Therapy offers a supportive space to explore and understand your attachment style, and to work on developing healthier relationship patterns. Attachment therapy can support individuals to heal from their attachment wounds and betrayals to move towards greater intimacy in their relationships.
By exploring how our defences are present in our relationships, and the meaning behind our defences, we can understand our reactions to conflictual situations and respond in more effective ways. Attachment therapy can also support individuals to be better able to assert their needs to foster greater satisfaction in their interpersonal relationships.
Understanding our relationship patterns and learning how to assert boundaries can support our relationships and sense of self with others. Exploring and understanding the meaning behind our reactions to relational difficulties can be powerful and prompt changes in all aspects of our lives.
Here’s how therapy can make a difference:
Self-Awareness: In therapy, you’ll gain insight into your attachment style and how it affects your relationships. Understanding these patterns is the first step toward change.
Healing Past Wounds: Many attachment issues stem from early life experiences. Therapy can help you process these experiences and heal from past hurts, allowing you to approach relationships with a clearer, more balanced perspective.
Developing Healthy Patterns: Therapy can help you learn new ways of relating to others. Whether it’s building trust, setting boundaries, or improving communication, therapy provides tools to create healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
Building Secure Attachment: Even if you didn’t develop a secure attachment style in childhood, therapy can help you cultivate more secure, balanced ways of connecting with others.
My Approach to Attachment and Relationship Therapy
As a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC), I specialize in helping you navigate the complexities of your relationships and gain a greater understanding of your emotional responses in romantic, family, or parenting relationships. I have extensive experience supporting those who have experienced hurtful or challenging experiences in childhood or as an adult that are impacting their current relationships.
I support individuals who are experiencing challenges in their relationships by understanding their attachment histories and the experiences that have shaped who they are in the world, as well as how they show up in their adult relationships.
Understanding how our past experiences influence our reactions in relationships is a crucial first step. Being aware of these patterns, which may have once been helpful survival strategies, is key. Recognizing how these patterns might now be hindering the growth of our current relationships allows us to identify and address them. This awareness empowers us to make positive changes. Processing past experiences where there have been hurts in attachment relationships that have created negative self-beliefs or relationship fears can be powerful in creating personal change in relationships.
These evidence-based approaches help clients to understand their attachment and improve their relationships:
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Attachment-Based Therapy guide clients toward understanding their attachment patterns and creating lasting change in their relationships.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy grounded in attachment-based understandings can be significant in gaining a compassionate understanding of oneself and creating adaptive beliefs about oneself and relationships resulting in change.
Understanding adult attachment security and relationship patterns through approaches like the Gottman method and family systems approaches.
Understanding how experiences of neurodiversity, such as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, impact relationships can also be helpful.
For anxiety and fears, approaches based in mindful understanding of our responses, defences, and nervous system patterns (fight-flight-freeze-orient) can be supportive.
Parts work (Internal Family System) and inner child work can help an understanding of what parts show up in each moment in our relationship dynamics.
Other approaches, such as Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and Mindfulness-Stress Based Reduction (MBSR) can be helpful in developing skills and tools to reduce responses not serving relationship well-being.
Moving Toward Healthier Relationships
Understanding your attachment style can be a powerful step toward improving your relationships. It’s never too late to develop healthier ways of connecting with others. If you’re experiencing challenges in your relationships, therapy can provide the insight and tools you need to build more secure, fulfilling connections.
If you’re ready to explore your attachment style and work on your relationships, I invite you to reach out and schedule a consultation. Together, we can work toward creating the relationships you deserve.
