Growing Out of Attachment Styles
If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet looking for relationship help, no doubt you’ve heard of “attachment styles”. A term first coined by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. The idea is that we all form a certain attachment style based on how well our needs were responded to by our parents/caregivers. We can fall into one of four categories as our primary “style”: Secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized.
I absolutely agree that we all start out completely dependent upon our caregivers to help us form early attachments, which in turn produces a sense of self (whether healthy, or not). We literally develop a self-concept by being in direct relationship with others. We reference them to determine who we are, and how we are to be in the world. Our experiences teach us if the world is a safe place, and whether or not people are trustworthy.
I also agree that we can carry much of these internalized concepts and beliefs about ourselves into adult relationships, for better or worse. It can be an important part of healing to “go back” mentally, long enough to understand how we got to where we are and what experiences helped to shape our current belief structure. That is productive work insofar as we use that information to make a more deterministic choice for ourselves in how to behave/engage moving forward, or if we need to make some adjustments. I don’t think it’s helpful to take a quiz and then use our attachment style as a way to manage our partner, and demand that they behave a certain way towards us to accommodate our fragile sense of self. That would be halting our progression as individuals, and therefore as a couple.
The healthiest marriages and relationships I’ve seen are not dependency-based or need-based; they are choice based. It is when two emotionally healthy and interdependent (not codependent or anti-dependent) individuals have a realistic understanding of who they are, who their partner is, and choose to participate in the marriage or relationship from a place of genuine love and commitment. Not because they don’t know who they are without the other person, or because they’re not strong enough to be on their own, but from a place of high differentiation. The danger of adhering too much to attachment styles, or love languages, is that we use these ideas to try and create a marriage or relationship free of anxiety or pressure. We wield this information over our partners to get them to conform to our needs. Instead, we can use our committed relationships as a source of development. It should be the crucible that helps to “grow us up” into stronger individuals more capable of loving and receiving love. That is my aim in my work with couples. To help them develop more differentiation, which fosters much more intimate partnerships.
*For more information on differentiation you can read the books of Dr. David Schnarch.
