Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Have you ever found it difficult to build strong emotional connections with others? Or perhaps you’ve experienced a constant fear that someone close to you might leave, making you anxious and uncertain? If these feelings sound familiar, you might be dealing with deeper issues tied to your attachment style. Understanding your attachment style is crucial, as it reveals how you form relationships and how you react to emotional closeness or distance.
Attachment theory, a concept rooted in psychology, explains that the way we relate to others is shaped by our early experiences with parenting styles. These experiences often form patterns of behavior that carry over into adulthood, influencing how we connect with romantic partners, friends, and family members. There are four main attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Each one reflects a unique approach to intimacy, trust, and emotional bonding.
For instance, people with an anxious attachment style might constantly seek reassurance and fear abandonment, making them overly dependent on others. On the other hand, those with an avoidant attachment style may struggle with emotional intimacy, pushing others away to maintain a sense of independence. Meanwhile, individuals with a secure attachment style tend to have healthy, balanced relationships and are comfortable with emotional closeness.
If you’ve ever felt uncertain about your relationships or noticed recurring patterns of insecurity, understanding your attachment style could be the key to unlocking the root of these challenges. By recognizing your attachment tendencies, you can take steps to develop healthier, more fulfilling relationships. So, if you find yourself wondering why you react the way you do in relationships, it might be time to explore your attachment style and gain a better understanding of yourself in the process.
Attachment style is the way or the style when someone tries to build a relationship with others. It was shaped by the parenting style of their parents. But, attachment styles can change depending on the experience of life of others. Generally, attachment styles have 4 kinds with different characteristics.
- Secure attachment
This attachment is considered as the most healthy attachment style. Secure attachment created by a healthy relationship between child and parents. The child who gets secure attachment from their parents usually grows as a confident person when they become an adult. So they can have healthy relationships with others. The characteristics of secure attachment are:
- Able to manage emotions well
- Independent
- Easy to get trust from others
- Respect their own self (Self esteem)
- Self love
- Having good communication skill
- Having good relationships with others
- Managing conflict well
- Anxious attachment
Anxious attachment created by inconsistent parenting style. Sometimes parents can spoil their children but in other ways parents ignore them. This parenting style makes children have trust issues in a relationship. So, they will seek the securities in a relationship because they are scared if their partner leaves them. The following is characteristics of anxious attachment:
- Difficulty taking criticism well
- Need validation from others
- Easy to jealous
- Lack of independency
- Dependent to other or partner
- Low self confident
- Feel unworthy
- Scared to leave by the closest
- Have trust issues
- Avoidant attachment
This attachment style is shaped by the hope of parents to their children that they can be independent but the other way, parents tend to lack emotional support for their children. Therefore, the children who are raised by this parenting style tend to avoid commitment in relationships when they grow up. Besides that, they will become independent and reluctant to rely on other people. This is the following characteristics of avoidant attachment:
- Independent (tend to feel don’t need other person)
- Limiting emotional relationships with others
- Ignore others’ feels
- Have difficulty committing
- Underestimate others’ person
- Lack of trust in other
- Spend time alone
- Fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment
People who have this attachment style might feel that there’s no safe place outside their room. They also feel difficult to manage their own emotions. In fact generally they have mental health disorder or personality disorder so they tend to have difficulty in having healthy relationships. Fearful avoidant is shaped by so many reason, but in generally it’s because lack of attention/abandoned parenting style, trauma, or sexual harassment. Characteristics of people with fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment, namely:
- Scared of being hurt by others
- Feel unworthy to be loved
- Tend to anxiety
- Have trust issue to others
- Have the potential to behave violently towards others or partners
Knowing the type of attachment style is important to build healthy relationships. After understanding those attachment styles, the next step is to understand how the attachment style affects the behaviour or relationships with others. This is the following step that we can do:
- Self understanding
Understanding attachment style is the first important step to understanding our behavior and reaction in a relationship. Different people have different attachment styles. So, every person has their own way to respond to emotional attachment and conflict in relationships.
- Communicate with other about the needs
After knowing the attachment style, the next step is to talk to a partner, family, or the closest person to communicate the emotional needs. This step helps others to understand more how we interact in relationships.
- Increase emotional security
Emotional security is the foundation of a healthy relationship. When we feel secure emotionally, we feel easier to open ourselves, showing our vulnerability, and build deeper closeness with others.
- Focus on personal development
Although attachment style is influenced by childhood experiences, it is not something that is permanent. Everyone has the ability to grow and develop. If we feel that our attachment style is not conducive to healthy relationships, we can focus on self-development. This can be learning better communication skills, managing emotions, or correcting unhealthy behavioral patterns in relationships. This personal development can be done by reading books, taking training, or getting guidance from a therapist or counselor.
- Learn to adapt
In relationships, it is important to learn to adjust to others who have different attachment styles. A person’s attachment style affects not only themselves, but also their relationships with others.
- Seek professional help if you need it.
If you are struggling to manage the behavioral or emotional patterns that arise from your attachment style, or if these patterns are interfering with your relationships, seeking professional help can be very helpful. A therapist or counselor can help you dig deeper into your emotional issues or attachment patterns and provide strategies or techniques for changing them. Professional help can also help in the healing process if your attachment style stems from past painful experiences or trauma.
Understanding attachment style is important to build healthy relationships. Attachment styles, formed in childhood through interactions with parents, influence how we form relationships and interact with others throughout our lives. But it isn’t permanent even though some attachment styles have unhealthy patterns. By understanding and working to overcome unhealthy attachment patterns, we can create more fulfilling and deeper relationships. Recognizing and changing unhealthy attachment patterns will help us become more aware, more empathetic, and better equipped to build relationships filled with mutual respect and trust.