Do you long to have more functional, stable, warm and connected relationships in your life?
Today’s post is just for you.
So, in my last blog post two weeks ago I introduced the ideas of attachment theory and attachment styles and provided snapshots for you of the four primary styles: secure, anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and disorganized.
In today’s post, I answer the question that is probably top of mind for anyone with other than a secure attachment type: so how do I become more securely attached?
To learn how, keep reading.
What contributes to our various attachment styles?
To answer this question, it’s important to recall from the last blog post that our attachment styles largely form in relationship to our early caregivers – our parents or other guardians – who were the primary individuals we turned to for caretaking and attunement.
It’s worth noting, too, that our attachment style can be also influenced later in life. Through circumstances or personality changes. Like being in a toxic or abusive romantic relationship. Or how teenagers largely push away from their attachment figures during adolescence.
However, for most of us, the dominant force in shaping our attachment style as adults will be our early childhood experiences.
What this means is that if you had good enough parents who largely made efforts to try and attune, respond, and appropriately react to you and who also tried to mend the relational ruptures between you two when they happened, you may form what’s known as secure attachment: a relative ease, capacity for, and positive view of relational intimacy.
If you did not have this kind of parenting, if your parents were preoccupied with circumstances (such as poverty, environmental traumas, job changes, ill health) or their own internal limitations (mental illness, addiction, personality disorders), you as a child may have “coped” and “managed” this probably lack of consistent, good enough attunement by developing beliefs and behaviors that fit into one of the other attachment styles: anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, or disorganized.
A sense of shame and defeat when we realize that we aren’t securely attached.
But please hear me: your attachment style is not your “fault”!
You come by it very honestly. And it’s more than likely that your attachment style kept you safe. Through times when it may not have been very safe to closely attach.
It was actually very clever of you as a child to view and manage relationships the way you did.
It’s just that now, as an adult, that same attachment style may no longer be working quite so well for you and you may be sitting with the questions:
So is this it? Or can I become more securely attached? And how does that happen?
