5 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Attachment Style

If the action on my free Attachment Style Quiz is any indication, there are a lot of people trying to figure out where they fall right now. Honestly, I’m grateful for the growing awareness of the science of attachment and how it’s paving the way for more people to understand themselves and how they show up in their most intimate relationships.

The importance of understanding yourself better, gaining insight, healing, and understanding what you need in a partner is a clear pathway to healthier relationships in your life. Which is what we all want, right?

The Four Attachment Styles

The best starting point for someone new to attachment styles is understanding whether they have a secure or insecure attachment. From there, if you have an insecure attachment, you can fall into anxious, avoidant, or fearful attachment styles. Depending on how you show up in your relationships will give you a pretty clear picture of which attachment style is most fitting.

For example, if I tend to self-abandon as my adaptive strategy, then I know I’m more likely to focus on meeting others’ needs and be less aware of my own. I might even sacrifice my own needs to stay in connection in a relationship. This is a hallmark of someone with an anxious attachment. Whereas a person who is avoidant might really struggle with meeting the needs of others and shut down or detach when they feel overwhelmed inside.

We can start to see where we land when we explore the styles. However, there are some hidden things that you should take into consideration when you start exploring attachment styles more so you can move beyond the label.

Five Things You Didn’t Know

1. Your attachment style is a label, and it’s not one size fits all. It’s definitely a good place to get started with understanding how you’ve adapted in your early years. Labels are helpful, but they are often not the full picture and can make us think we fit in only one category. As you’ll soon learn, our attachment style actually shifts depending on who we’re in relationship with.

2. Attachment is a two-way street. It’s true, it’s not just about your attachment style. While you show up with your adaptive patterns, ways of connection and learned behaviors, your partner does the same. Depending on their patterns, you might show up differently than you would in a past relationship, because how they behave and react to connection and attachment is going to impact you.

   For example, maybe you’re more anxiously attached, and you meet someone who has more anxiety than you. All of the sudden, your avoidant protectors might begin to surface. You may feel overwhelmed by their anxiety and start to pull away, making you question what’s going on.

   Or, if you’re anxiously attached and partner with someone who is very avoidant, you will likely feel like your adaptive patterns are amplified in an attempt to stay connected in the relationship, making connection even harder to maintain.

3. You can take on more than one attachment style. When you look more closely at interpersonal biology and the study of attachment styles, you’ll find that we take in the essence of our primary caregivers and anyone else who’s close to us in those early years.

   We internalize their essence and remember the way we were in connection with them. You can have one way of adapting and relating to your mom, and another with your dad, grandma, and/or nanny. We carry all of these attachment experiences inside of us.

4. Having healthy attachments is directly related to the quality of your life and health. I bet you didn’t know that having secure people in your life that you can rely on actually promotes having a healthy life. There is even scientific evidence to show the quality of your life is in direct correlation to the quality of your closest relationships.

   When we are born, we are not fully developed. We are still in the process of developing our nervous system, our heart, and many other important parts of our body. When we have secure, warm attachments early on, we actually develop in healthier ways. This stands true for adults as well. Our health benefits from secure, dependable relationships.

5. We are attaching to others from womb to death. We never stop needing connection and attachment. Connection is our biological imperative and essential for survival. We need each other and thrive most when we have interdependent relationships that allow us to be ourselves and feel connected at all times.

   This doesn’t change when we become adults. In fact, our society has us believing that we need to be independent and learn how to self-regulate, when in fact, that’s the very opposite of how we are designed to thrive. The good news is we have this inherent wisdom inside of us to always move toward safe connections, which allows us to work toward healing insecure attachment wounds.

BONUS! Your attachment style can change. When you spend time healing and building secure relationships, you move closer to a secure attachment. In fact, this is what my book, Anxiously Attached, is all about. If you haven’t already, click here to grab a copy.

Attachment styles are complex. While I find it completely useful to understand yours, it’s also important to understand the other three attachment styles and work towards building an understanding of your different protectors and adaptive strategies in relationships. Building self-awareness and spending time on healing your attachment patterns will help you create healthier connections and improve your well-being.

Do you want to learn more about the different types of Attachment Styles? Click here to learn more about my online course, Attachment Styles Unpacked.