How we are trained to create relationships as adults has its foundation in a complex set of habits and skills we primarily learned in childhood through interactions with our parents (or primary caregivers). This means that unless we have significantly altered our early relationship programming and habits, the quality of our earliest relationships shapes how we create our adult relationships.
Relationship modeling by our parents and our experience of being cared for by them teaches us to do the same for ourselves and others and creates emotional patterns as well. Said differently, this foundational learning is what determines, as adults, how well we can feel safe enough to create openness, care and safety for others. It also influences how we react when we don’t perceive a safe environment or ‘feel’ or experience security and care. Our early family experiences shape how and if we express emotions and form secure, caring, and productive connections or struggle in romance, friendship and at work and community throughout our lives.
Our early family experiences shape how and if we express emotions and form secure, caring, and productive connections or struggle in romance, friendship and at work and community throughout our lives.
One way to understand how our past influences us as adults is through the lens of Attachment Theory, developed by John Bowlby in the late sixties and further developed by Mary Ainsworth in the seventies. Ainsworth created an experiment called, “The Strange Situation” to categorize how children respond to caregivers. It has been developed since then to describe how the caregiver-child relationship can affect us as we later navigate adult relationships.
These patterns are usually blind spots and thus invisible to us, but their influence is so immense that I believe everyone would benefit from understanding them. What follows is so important that I’ve spent the past 15 years studying and incorporating the understanding of the way early relationships and attachment styles affect us every day as adults and how to free people from their influence to create more success in life. I’ve observed myself, my family, my romantic partnerships, my friends, and my clients both in the struggle and in overcoming the hold these attachment styles can have on us. The most meaningful work I’ve done in both the personal and corporate arenas involves creating the optimal environment for awareness and insights about how our early programming impacts, deepening our relationship with ourselves and creating shifts in how we experience life going forward on our path to success in love, work, and everywhere.
Four Attachment Styles that Affect Our Communication, Relationships, and Collaboration
Those who grew up in a family environment where emotional needs are consistently met learn to create relationships, attach to others, feel safe expressing we, and trust others to develop a secure attachment style. People with this attachment style are comfortable, confident in relationships, and willing to be vulnerable and seek support when needed. A securely attached adult creates safety for others by being consistently responsive and empathetic, acknowledging others’ feelings and needs, and providing a stable and supportive presence. Knowing how to regulate our emotions makes others feel calm and secure in our presence. This encourages open communication, allowing others to express themselves without fear of judgment, ridicule, or punishment, reflecting the care of loving parents or skills hard learned later in life. Such people also have healthy boundaries that are adaptable to their needs and situations. The epitome of secure attachment is pure and complete self-love that allows for full and complete love of another.
The epitome of secure attachment is pure and complete self-love that allows for full and complete love of another.
Those of us who grow up in environments where emotional needs are neglected, dismissed, minimized, or punished or where abandonment or abuse occurs would be more likely to develop one of three insecure attachment styles that follow.
One type of insecure attachment style is anxious attachment. This can result from inconsistent care, where a child doesn’t know whether their emotional needs will be met or ignored. Growing up with such emotional neglect can lead to self-neglect, fear of rejection, a deep and pervasive need for reassurance, and general nervousness in relationships and otherwise as an adult. Other people may perceive an anxiously attached person as emotionally open, available, generous, and attentive. Still, when they don’t feel safe or connected, they can be anxious, overly challenging to satisfy, controlling in attempt to get their needs met and neurotic as they struggle to be taken care of in a way that makes up for their past and satisfies in the present.
The second type of insecure attachment style is an avoidant attachment style, which may develop when a child learns that expressing emotions is unwelcome or that their caregivers are unable or unwilling to provide emotional support when needed. Avoidantly attached people struggle with allowing closeness and intimacy, avoid vulnerability, and have difficulty trusting others. Thus, they keep people at a distance to feel safe. Others experience them as difficult to know, except superficially, because they don’t share much about themselves, and especially not their most vulnerable emotions. People may perceive them as distant and emotionally unavailable, not self or other aware, and even uncaring or unresponsive to the emotional or other needs of others and lacking empathy. When feeling unsafe, perceiving an emotional attack or someone trying to get too close, a person who is avoidantly attached may disappear, go inward and even demand space, shut down, or express anger. The avoidant style is characterized by difficulty trusting and maintaining closeness with others and fear of intimacy.
The third type of insecure attachment style is a disorganized (or mixed anxious/avoidant) attachment style. It is the least common of the four styles and represents a combination of the anxious and avoidant attachment styles. It results from a combination of childhood emotional neglect or abandonment, on one side, and a violation of boundaries on the other, through enmeshment or abuse. It is characterized by an anxious need for attention and reassurance and an avoidance of intimacy and vulnerability. People perceive them as unpredictable, sometimes nervous and connective and at other times distant, unavailable, or extreme. This makes them most difficult to connect with because it requires being neither too close nor too far, meaning that there is a sweet spot that is required for them to feel safe that is difficult or sometimes impossible to achieve.
People with secure attachment styles can best create safety in relationships, be least reactive and instead thoughtfully responsive to a lack of safety, and most likely to recognize and opt out of perpetually emotionally or psychologically unsafe relationships. People with insecure attachment styles are most likely to have more difficulty when they perceive a lack of safety and may not know when to remove themselves from an unsafe situation or relationship. Instead, they may stay in and suffer their emotional reactivity to their detriment and the detriment of others or then separate firmly and assertively or even violently.
When securely attached people find each other, their openness and easy-going natures make for warm, comfortable, honest, pleasant, and supportively loving relationships. That doesn’t mean there are never difficulties. Still, securely attached people trust in the connection and move through challenges with relative ease, learning and growing from each other in romance and business.
And, as it is commonly said, opposites sometimes also attract. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it is a mess, whether at home or at work. Anxiously and disorganized attached people are often attracted to the independent, resilient, and seemingly stable nature of the avoidant personality — whether as a romantic partner, a friend, or a colleague in the workplace — hoping it may be a healing counterbalance to their insecurities and anxiety. Similarly, an avoidantly attached person can be attracted to the vulnerability and pursuit of closeness and dependence of an anxiously or disorganized attached person as the avoidant subconsciously craves for connection. These relationships are more challenging, often requiring and benefiting from outside support from others securely attached to model healthy and effective relationship behaviors and communication skills.
Once the initial honeymoon phase wears off, if the parties are sub-optimally matched, the anxious, disorganized, and avoidant personality types will all demonstrate their fears and behaviors that make the relationship challenging. This is when romantic partners start fighting or breaking up, and professional relationships become challenging. It is also when people become surprised, noting how things were different before and asking themselves what happened and why things are different now.
If the polarity is subtle or both parties can introspect, empathize, learn, and grow, the evolving relationship can guide each to learn new skills and toward the security balanced center of secure attachment. This can result in both people thriving as they become self-actualized, open, loving, productive, and happy. Suppose the polarity is extreme or the relationship remains unsafe, volatile, or combative. In that case, the result can be destructive and can cause more harm than good, leading to break-ups, people getting fired, and hopefully not, but sometimes violence and lawsuits.
The Tetter-Toter Model of Attachment Theory
The Tetter-Toter is an apt metaphor for explaining the relationship between the four attachment styles and how the dynamics play out in action. Imagine locating people on the spectrum of a teeter-totter, with avoidance on one side, anxious on the other, and secure attachment, the most peaceful and truly loving in the center; I also consider the center the goal for all humanity. The further one is from the center, the more avoidant they are on one side and more anxious on the other, in any given moment. The farther the parties are from the center, the more volatile the relationship. For a relationship to sustain, the tetter-totter must balance. Thus, it is common for a very avoidant person on one far side to find balance, in a relationship with a highly anxiously attached person on the other far side and vis versa. Similarly, two securely attached people can sit near the center and find a much more peaceful, loving and connected balance just as they might by sitting knee and hugging in the center of a tetter-totter.
This model clarifies why a securely attached person, sitting in the loving center seeking a similar connection, would not tolerate a relationship with an avoidant partner at a far end -– there wouldn’t be enough closeness or connection — they wouldn’t balance – unless avoidantly attached person does the emotional work to move themselves toward the center to meet their partner. When an anxiously attached person does their emotional work to release their unhealthy anxiously addicted attachment to avoidance, they will similarly let go of their willingness to tolerate avoidant partners, instead opting for a peaceful, satisfying secure connection in the center. Said differently, if the avoidant doesn’t heal their unhealthy avoidance of intimacy, they may very well lose their partner when their partner heals their anxiously addicted tendencies.
Imagine a disorganized attached person straddling both sides of a very wide teeter-totter with one leg on each side of the tetter-totter. Now imagine that they move a bit to the right or to the left depending on their mood, being avoidant or anxious. Now imagine you as their partner trying to move quickly to and frow to keep the tetter-totter in balance. It would not be easy; hence the challenges of keeping balance in a relationship with a disorganized attached person.
Whether in business, community or romance, smart choices about partners and constant attention on creating emotionally safe, open, honest environments and relationships are the most healthy, responsible, and practical choices, as they are best for everyone in every way. This requires knowing ourselves and doing our part, starting with openness and curiosity to understand ourselves and others. This way, we can be aware when we need something and able to ask for it and be compassionate and curious when someone shows up differently or has different needs than we do — even looking for how to offer what is missing, even when the other doesn’t see it or can’t contribute it themselves.
Resources
- Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
- Ainsworth, M. S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Erlbaum.
- Levine, Amir. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find and Keep Love.Jeremy P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011
