RELATIONAL TRAUMA

What's Your Attachment Style? (Part 1)

ATTACHMENT & RELATIONSHIPS • July 21, 2018

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

SUMMARY

Your attachment style is the invisible operating system running your most important relationships — and it was written in childhood, long before you had any say in it. This guide explains the four attachment styles, what they look like in practice, where they come from, and most importantly: how they can change. Because they can.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. We all have an attachment style.
2. What are the four attachment styles?
3. Being a good-enough caretaker.
4. Attachment Styles In Brief
5. Seeing Yourself In An Attachment Style
6. What’s Running Your Life?
7. Frequently Asked Questions
8. References

“When we fight and he needs to take a break I get so incredibly overwhelmed and anxious. I can’t leave him alone! I text him or try and follow him around the house until he agrees to talk to me and makeup. It makes him so mad and makes the fight worse but I can’t help myself!”

SUMMARY

Attachment theory explains why you behave the way you do in close relationships — and the patterns usually trace back to childhood. Whether you tend to cling, pull away, or oscillate between the two, these responses aren’t personality flaws. They’re your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to stay safe. Understanding your attachment style is the starting point for changing it.

Definition: Attachment Style

An attachment style is a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving in close relationships, rooted in early childhood experiences with caregivers. Developed from John Bowlby’s and Mary Ainsworth’s research, the four primary styles — secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized — describe how the nervous system learned to navigate closeness, need, and potential loss based on how reliably needs were met in childhood. (PMID: 517843) (PMID: 13803480)

“It’s weird, I know, but I actually feel closer to her when she’s traveling for work or away on the weekend with her friends. When she’s home and acting super loving it feels kind of clingy to me! I actually end up getting mad and feel pretty distant from her. It’s weird, I know, shouldn’t I feel the opposite way?”

“I really want to date and find a partner but I just don’t think it’s going to happen for me. I don’t think anyone will want to date me or even if I find a guy that he’ll be faithful and won’t just leave me. I’m worried I’ll get hurt and just waste my time if I start dating but I also really want to get married and have a family. I feel stuck.”

“My wife and I have a good relationship. It’s not perfect but what is? I love her and mostly feel really close to her. Sure, we fight like all couples but we’re pretty good at making up afterward and working through it. It’s taken time, of course, but we’ve got a good marriage.”

Reading these vignettes above, could you see yourself in any aspect of them?

All of these vignettes describes a different kind of attachment style – the pattern we have in our close relationships (romantic, close friendships, family, etc).

Why does every single person have an attachment style, whether they know it or not?

DEFINITION ATTACHMENT STYLE

Attachment style refers to the characteristic pattern of relating to others that develops in early childhood based on the quality of care received from primary caregivers. These deeply ingrained relational blueprints, whether secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized, shape how we experience intimacy, trust, and emotional connection throughout adulthood.

The four types of attachment styles are anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, disorganized, and secure. The first three — anxious, avoidant, and disorganized — are all forms of insecure attachment, which develops when early caregiving was inconsistent, neglectful, or frightening.

Related Reading

• Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
• The Complete Guide to Trauma Bonding: Understanding and Breaking Free from Unhealthy Attachments
• How Attachment Styles Shape Leadership and Workplace Success

Many of us will see ourselves heavily in one attachment style. But it’s also possible to see yourself in two or more of these styles at some points.

We “learn” our attachment style based on our early childhood experiences which means that, for those of us who may have come from dysfunctional, neglectful, or relationally unsupportive homes, the chances are high that we might not have learned secure attachment, but, instead, learned and absorbed one of the other styles.

The challenging aspect of this is that when we have an attachment style that’s not secure, it can create challenges in our emotional lives and in our relationships. This leads to a host of impacts. Being frustrated and interrupted longings for intimacy, chaotic or unstable relationships, etc..

The good news is this: secure attachment can be learned and earned no matter what style you have today.

To learn more about these four attachment styles and to learn what it may take to become more securely attached, keep reading.

What are the four attachment styles and what do they each look like?

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Attachment theory – a psychological model pioneered by British child psychiatrist John Bowlby, MD that addresses how we as humans respond in relationship when we feel stress or perceive a threat – is, quite simply, the dominant patterns of relating to others that play out in our lives.

Our attachment styles are informed by our early childhood experiences. The “relational template” we picked up from our parents, caretakers, or other significant early influencers.

Attachment theory essentially says that infants will bond to any primary caretaker they are presented with. It’s this caretaker who is critical for the caretaker’s emotional and social development.

Now, please understand, attachment theory doesn’t aim to put even more pressure on parents/caretakers by implying that you have to be a “perfect” caretaker.

That’s not the goal (it’s also impossible).

What does it mean to be a “good-enough” caretaker, and why does it shape your attachment?

The goal instead is to be a good-enough caretaker. Who can repair ruptures with the infant and child when they happen (as they inevitably will).

But when this doesn’t happen, when a parent or caretaker repeatedly and egregiously fails to attune and repair after rupture and where there is outright abuse and neglect of an infant, that impacts the infant’s sense of secure attachment.

The bottom line is this: infants and little children are powerless.

Truly. They cannot “leave” the relationship with the adult when they are mistreated or not getting secure enough attachment.

But they can adapt. They can cope and manage that less-than-good-enough relationship in a variety of ways and behaviors. That, ultimately, can correspond to an attachment style.

Attachment theory was further developed upon and refined by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, Ph.D. – a student of Bowlby’s – during her work in the mid 20th century when she identified four main attachment styles, some of which are famously illustrated in The Strange Situation experiment.

These four attachment styles more specifically are secure, anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and disorganized.

What do the four attachment styles look like in brief?

Secure attachment

People with secure attachment, in general, find it relatively easy to become emotionally close to others and to let others become close to them.

Secure attachment allows individuals to feel comfortable with both independence and with intimacy.

Securely attached individuals are comfortable depending on and being depended upon by other and largely tend to have a positive view of themselves and of their relationships.

Secure attachment is learned through parenting and caregiving that is appropriately (remember, not perfectly) attuned to the child’s needs.

Anxious-Ambivalent

Anxious-ambivalent attachment is characterized by a need for high degrees of responsiveness, attunement, and reassurance from their attachment figure.

Folks with this style of attachment may feel a great deal of anxiety when they are separated from their attachment figure or when the bond between them is ruptured or perceived to be ruptured.

The anxiety can usually only be remedied with renewed contact with the attachment figure.

Because of this, individuals with an anxious-ambivalent attachment style can become overly dependent on their attachment figure

In contrast to securely attached individuals, those with an anxious-ambivalent attachment style may not have as high of a regard for themselves or their capacity to be in relationship.

Anxious-Avoidant

People with this kind of attachment style may be characterized as wanting and requiring a high degree of independence and self-sufficiency.

Fundamentally they do not believe it is safe to be emotionally close and so guard themselves against intimacy by not seeking out relationships or pushing intimacy away when it is presented and distancing themselves from the attachment figure.

In general, people with an anxious-avoidant attachment style feel discomfort being depended on and depending on others.

Likewise, they may not have high regard for themselves or relationships in general.

Disorganized

As you may have already guessed, individuals with a disorganized attachment style have a combination of characteristics of both the anxious-avoidant and anxious-ambivalent attachment styles.

For instance, they long for closeness (anxious-ambivalent) but also paradoxically fear closeness (anxious-avoidant). This can lead to chaotic and inconsistent responses when presented with intimacy.

As with anxious-ambivalent and anxious-avoidant types, people who have disorganized attachment styles tend to have a lower degree of regard for themselves and for relationships.

Which attachment style do you see yourself in most?

Again, these are the four main attachment styles in brief. There is much more I could write about each style. But perhaps even in these brief summaries, you saw enough of yourself to identify with them.

However, if you’re unsure which style you largely possess and are interested in learning more and even taking an attachment style quiz or questionnaire to help guide you to your style, there are a variety of resources out there.

Those that I recommend include this one. The original attachment three-category measure by Feeny, Noller and Hanrahan. Or this one by Dr. Diane Poole Heller. (Be advised you need to enter your email at the end to receive your results.)

But, regardless of how or if you choose to learn more about which attachment style you predominantly have, the big question for most of us who can’t necessarily identify with being securely attached is: So how do I become more securely attached?

I dive deep into this question in my next blog post in two weeks’ time. So please keep an eye on your inbox to learn more.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Attachment Styles: A Complete Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Attachment in the Preschool Years: Theory, Research, and Intervention.
• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
• Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
• Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 3. Loss, Sadness and Depression. Basic Books.
• Lyons-Ruth, K., & Jacobvitz, D. (2008). Attachment disorganization: Genetic factors, parenting contexts, and developmental transformation from infancy to adulthood. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications (2nd ed.).

How Attachment Styles Show Up for Driven Women at Work and at Home

One pattern I see with remarkable consistency in my practice: driven women often have entirely different attachment profiles depending on the domain. In professional settings — with clear external structures, defined roles, and stakes that feel more manageable — they can look remarkably secure. Confident, direct, collaborative. And then they walk into an emotionally significant personal relationship and something completely different comes online.

This isn’t inconsistency. It’s the nervous system doing what it was designed to do: activating attachment programming most intensely where the emotional stakes are highest. Your boss isn’t your caregiver. But your partner, your closest friend, your mother calling on a Sunday — these relationships speak a different language in the nervous system, one that gets routed through older, deeper channels.

Ana is a management consultant — the kind of person whose colleagues describe as “unflappable” in client presentations, under pressure, in crisis. She came to me after her third long-term relationship ended in the same way: with her partner feeling emotionally shut out and her feeling confused about why the closeness she genuinely wanted kept receding the moment it seemed within reach. Classic avoidant pattern. But not one she recognized in herself, because in every other domain of her life, she was warm, engaged, and relationally sophisticated.

The avoidance wasn’t about who she was. It was about what her nervous system had learned to do with vulnerability in relationships that felt truly important. When the stakes were low, she could be present. When the stakes felt existential — when real intimacy was possible and therefore real loss was possible — the old program activated: distance is safety. Needs are dangerous. Close the hatch.

Understanding this didn’t fix it overnight. But it gave her a framework to work with rather than against. And it fundamentally changed the story from “I’m emotionally unavailable” to “my nervous system has a very specific, very understandable fear — and we can work with that.”

This is also why understanding attachment in depth is so much more useful than simply knowing which category you’re in. The category gives you a language. The deeper work gives you a map of where the pattern came from, what it’s protecting, and what it might look like to gradually, carefully, do something different.

Attachment Isn’t Fixed: Earned Security and the Transformative Power of Co-Regulation

One of the most important — and most frequently overlooked — things I tell clients about attachment theory is this: your attachment style is not your destiny. The research that gave us the four attachment styles also gave us something discussed far less often in popular psychology: the concept of earned secure attachment. This is the finding, replicated across decades of longitudinal study, that adults who developed insecure attachment in childhood can and do develop secure attachment functioning later in life. Not by erasing the past or simply deciding to be different, but by accumulating relational experiences that gradually update the nervous system’s working model of what relationships are and what they’re capable of offering. This update doesn’t happen through insight alone, though insight is genuinely valuable. It happens through embodied, repeated relational experience: being met consistently by another person, having ruptures repaired rather than left to calcify, learning that your needs and your difficult feelings don’t destroy the people you bring them to. The nervous system learns by experiencing, not by understanding.

A central mechanism in this process is co-regulation, grounded in polyvagal theory and interpersonal neurobiology. Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and founder of the Polyvagal Institute, established through decades of research that the human nervous system is fundamentally designed to regulate itself in relationship with other nervous systems — that we are wired, at a biological level, to borrow safety from each other. We are not meant to self-regulate in isolation; that capacity was never meant to carry the full load. What I see consistently in my work with driven women who present with anxious or avoidant attachment is that they’ve developed sophisticated and effective strategies for going it alone — for managing their own emotional states without the vulnerability of depending on someone else’s regulated presence. These strategies made complete sense in the families they grew up in, where depending meant being disappointed or controlled. They’re now getting in the way of the co-regulation that would actually help them build the security they’ve been working so hard to maintain through individual effort.

Menakem’s framing locates the wound not only in what happened, but in the absence of adequate relational response afterward — the absence of the help that would have allowed recovery. This is precisely the terrain of insecure attachment: it’s often not a single traumatic event but the long absence of consistent repair, attunement, and co-regulatory presence that wrote the nervous system’s early conclusions about what relationships can be trusted to offer. And it’s the presence of those experiences — perhaps for the first time in a therapeutic relationship, perhaps in a partnership or friendship that does things differently than what you knew growing up — that begins to rewrite those conclusions at a level the nervous system can actually feel. Earned security doesn’t arrive as a revelation. It builds, quietly, as evidence accumulates that this time might be different.

Clinically, this is why understanding your attachment style is the beginning of the work, not the end of it. Naming your patterns gives you a map and reduces the self-blame that so often accompanies relational difficulty. But the territory changes only through relationship, through the slow experiential update of a nervous system that’s learning, repetition by repetition, that connection doesn’t have to cost what it once did. The next section takes this further by examining how earned security actually shows up in specific relational dynamics, and what it looks like in practice when someone who didn’t start out secure arrives there anyway.

Both/And: Your Attachment Style Is Not a Life Sentence

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived life.

The driven, ambitious women I work with often struggle with this because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives.

Applied to attachment: both of these things are true simultaneously. Your attachment style was shaped by real experiences, in a real childhood, with real caregivers who may have had limited capacity to give you what you needed. And your attachment style is not fixed. It is not destiny. The research on earned secure attachment — the finding that adults who grew up with insecure attachment can develop secure patterns through corrective relational experiences, including therapy — is one of the most hopeful findings in the entire attachment literature.

Erin came to me calling herself “anxiously attached” like it was a permanent category. “I’m just wired this way,” she said in our first session, with the mix of relief and resignation that a diagnosis can bring. What shifted over eighteen months of work was not that her anxious tendencies disappeared — they didn’t. What changed was her relationship to them. She stopped being ambushed by her own anxiety and started having just enough space between stimulus and response to choose differently. The attachment style softened. New evidence accumulated. And the “wired this way” story slowly, quietly began to loosen.

You can know your attachment style and also know that knowing it isn’t the ceiling. It’s the beginning.

The Systemic Lens: How Family Systems and Culture Shape Attachment

When we locate attachment struggles exclusively in the individual — “I have an anxious attachment style” or “I’m avoidant” — we miss the larger forces that shaped those patterns in the first place.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt — these aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me — and what systems made it possible?”

Families are systems with their own logic, rules, and homeostatic pressures. When you grew up in a family where emotional expression was discouraged, where needs were treated as inconveniences, where you learned that love came with conditions — you weren’t forming an attachment style in isolation. You were adapting to a system. And that system was itself shaped by what the generation before it absorbed and transmitted.

Intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns is one of the most robust findings in attachment research. Mary Main, PhD, developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley, and her colleagues demonstrated that a parent’s own attachment narrative — how coherently they can tell the story of their childhood — is one of the strongest predictors of their child’s attachment security. Parents who haven’t processed their own early experiences tend, without intention, to transmit insecure patterns to the next generation. Not because of failure or malice, but because you can’t give what you don’t have.

Understanding this context doesn’t excuse harm — it explains transmission. And it matters because it means the pattern you carry is not a reflection of your personal inadequacy. It’s the continuation of something that predates you by at least a generation. That reframe — from “something is wrong with me” to “I’m carrying something that was handed to me” — is often the shift that makes real change possible.

This is also why trauma-informed therapy is such an important part of this work. Understanding attachment intellectually is valuable. Actually experiencing a relationship that offers consistent attunement, repair after rupture, and genuine non-judgmental presence — that is what begins to update the nervous system’s template from the inside. The therapeutic relationship, at its best, is itself a corrective attachment experience. And for many of the driven women I work with, it’s the first one they’ve ever had.

The most important thing I want you to take from this piece is not a category label. It’s permission. Permission to understand yourself more clearly, to stop treating your relational patterns as character flaws, and to trust that change — real, lasting, nervous-system-level change — is possible. Not because you’re broken and need fixing. But because you’re a person who learned something in a particular context, and now you have the capacity to learn something different.

If you’re curious about which attachment style shapes your relationships most powerfully, our free quiz is a good starting point. And if you’re ready for the deeper work — the kind that actually updates the template — working with a trauma-informed therapist is one of the most meaningful investments you can make in your relational life.

What Earned Secure Attachment Actually Looks Like in Practice

One of the most hopeful findings in the entire attachment literature is this: the attachment style you developed in childhood is not the attachment style you’re sentenced to carry forever. The research on earned security — first documented by Mary Main, PhD, developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley — shows that adults who grew up with insecure attachment can develop secure patterns through what researchers call “corrective relational experiences.” That phrase is clinical, but the reality it describes is profoundly human.

Earned security doesn’t mean your early experiences didn’t happen. It means you’ve had enough new experiences — in therapy, in safe friendships, in a partnership that operated on different rules than the one you grew up in — that your nervous system has begun to update its prediction about what relationships are likely to do. The old template doesn’t disappear. But it stops being the only available template.

What this looks like in practice varies widely. For some women, it’s the first therapeutic relationship in which they experienced consistent attunement and genuine repair after rupture — and discovered, slowly, that a relationship could survive misattunement without ending. For others, it’s a friendship in which they tested the waters of vulnerability and found that vulnerability didn’t lead to abandonment or contempt. For others, it’s a romantic partnership with someone whose own relational patterns were steady enough that the anxious or avoidant strategies simply stopped being necessary.

Angela, a 44-year-old cardiologist, described her experience of earned security like this: “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop in my marriage. Every time things felt good, I’d find some reason to start a fight, or I’d go distant, or I’d catastrophize about something. And my husband — over and over — he’d just stay. He wasn’t passive about it; he’d name what he saw happening. But he’d stay. And eventually my nervous system started to believe that the staying was real.” That believing — that gradual update at the level of the body, not just the mind — is exactly what earned security looks like.

The therapeutic relationship as corrective attachment experience. For many driven, ambitious women, therapy is the first consistent relational container in which they’ve experienced what secure attachment actually feels like in real time: a relationship in which their emotional experience matters, repair is possible after rupture, and showing up imperfectly doesn’t result in loss of the relationship. That experience, repeated across time, is what begins to change the nervous system’s baseline expectation of what relationships are.

If you’re ready to explore what your attachment patterns look like — and what it would take to update them — trauma-informed therapy is one of the most direct paths to that work. You can also take our free quiz to begin identifying which patterns are most active in your relational life right now.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,
Annie

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

(PMID: 35961039)

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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