HOW LEARNING MY ATTACHMENT STYLE LEAD ME TO MY HEALTHIEST RELATIONSHIP
On a train across France, I had an earth-shaking “aha!” moment. Headphones in, audiobook on blast, a tear of solace rolled down my cheek. I was halfway through the countryside and through the book “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love.” A realization slid into my conscious mind as swiftly as the provincial vineyards beyond the train windows, altering my perspective on love forever.
If you’ve even as much as dipped a baby toe into the waters of self-help you may be familiar with the term attachment, but for those just joining us, here’s a quick synopsis: Attachment theory was brought to life by psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who observed the relationships between anxious infants and their primary caregivers. What he found was that our most formative years (usually the ages 0-4) of establishing our personalities, and needs, our dynamic with our primary caregiver can be incredibly impactful on how we develop our relational habits with others for the rest of our lives.
The theory outlines four attachment styles: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. If we have a parent or guardian who does not nurture us or whose presence we cannot depend on, we may feel that our needs are not safe and we may become anxious, avoidant, dismissive, and fearful in close relationships. If we have a parent who is able to model consistency and we feel our needs are met, this could allow us to develop a stable attachment style that would carry through our lives as we grow up and become romantically involved with others.
My “aha!” moment from earlier? It had been as such: I had been choosing romantic partners that were simply unable to hold space for my needs. It wasn’t that either of us was inherently bad, or that my needs were too many. Our attachment styles simply didn’t match. Our necessities weren’t speaking the same language.
I became an attachment-style hobbyist, learning as much as I could on the subject. As I dug deeper, I realized I had fallen into the trope of the fiercely independent person. I had no skills for voicing my emotional needs for fear of being burned, or worse, labeled as needy. In Attached, the authors make a point to speak to the individualist culture we glorify in our contemporary society. The archetypes of the independent woman who needs no one but her bank account and her mace keychain, or of the dude who is seemingly above human emotions in order to keep his masculinity intact, have proven to be incredibly detrimental to not only our biology but our relationships.
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