Attachment Styles: “You’re Not Just One Thing”

Professor Overall: I grew up in a family of five girls. I’m the middle of five daughters, and we’re seven years apart. Which meant that I grew up in this context where, like many people do in large families and in cultures in which we’re very relational, I grew up just not really understanding myself apart from other people, and negotiating relationships all the time. So I think I came out of my childhood years with a natural understanding, or just perspective, of relating to other people in different ways.

Everybody is different, right? So I’m in this very close group of sisters who – and of course, we loved each other, and we fought, and we did everything that siblings do. Knowing a lot of different people, trying to find my way within those relationships, I think I naturally thought ‘relationally’ because of that.

But I was really interested in clinical psychology to begin with. I left home very young, and I had some struggles as a young person, so I didn’t actually go to university until my 20s. I was an adult student, and I really went there with this motivation to learn about psychology so that I could help other people. I started down that track but really realized that most people’s difficulties and struggles in their life stem from (or at least are affecting) their relationships.

Relationships are just such a pivotal part of who we are and how we relate to each other. Everything that we care about to understand humans occurs within relationships – the way we think, the way we feel, why we behave the way we do, our greatest joys and our biggest pains. Then I had the opportunity to start doing research as a postgraduate, and it just really resonated with me. I think because of the importance of relationships, and because of just who I am as a person, and how I developed in my family.

Professor Overall: The first piece of research I did was on attachment. It was my master’s research, and I was looking at different types of attachment across different types of relationships. Like you do at the Attachment Project, the questionnaires that you get people to complete, where they complete an assessment for, like, their mother, or their father, their friends, or their romantic partner.

At the time – it was a long time ago now, over two decades ago this was published – people thought of attachment orientations as a style: that you’re either attachment anxious, or attachment avoidant, or you’re secure, and that you have this kind of global working model that describes your relative attachment security across all kinds of relationships.

But everybody knows that their relationships differ. And also, Bowlby – obviously the founder of attachment theory – really argued that the attachment system was one that was about flexibility. It was providing us a kind of map of the world, to know how to relate to other people in the context and experiences that we’ve had. But that it should be a flexible, adaptive system. And that flexible, adaptive system means that we should have representations that are reflective of our meaningful relationships and variation within those relationships.

My first publication, a long time ago, was really showing that people do have these relationship-specific attachment representations.¹ There are similarities across these that capture a kind of global attachment orientation, but there can be variation across different types of domains – your family, your friends, your romantic partners – and even specific family members that represent your actual lived experience with those people.

I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind when people are diagnosing themselves as one type of attachment style: We’re not just one thing. We operate in different types of relationships, and we should fairly represent the degree to which we feel safe and secure in those different types of relationship contexts.

Professor Overall: Absolutely. I think one of the most misunderstood aspects – and a key misunderstanding that hinders people’s feelings about themselves and their relationships – is that anxiety and avoidance are seen as bad things, that they’re deficits in some way.

But our attachment orientations are based on the information that we’ve been given about the world, and our personality and our natural temperaments that interact with the context that we’ve encountered. If you have encountered relationships that have been neglectful, that are harmful to you, then it isn’t adaptive to be secure in that context. You’re opening up yourself for harm. It is more adaptive to negotiate that environment with a level of distrust that reflects the experiences that you’ve had, and that protects yourself – for example, by avoiding dependence in the case of attachment avoidance.

The same goes with attachment anxiety. The founding theory about the attachment system is that it’s an adaptive one that’s responding to the environment, that’s creating strategies to negotiate relationships in that environmental context. For people who are high in attachment anxiety – who have fears of abandonment, or who’ve had inconsistent caregiving where sometimes they’ve received the care they want and sometimes they haven’t – it makes sense to be a little bit vigilant about whether it’s this time that I’m going to get care and love, or whether it isn’t.

So there are benefits to it for the individual, and sometimes for relationships, that actually can reinforce these types of attachment strategies even when they may no longer be useful. But nonetheless, it’s not a deficit. I think we can be a lot more compassionate about attachment difficulties in that way, and that will enable us to have more courage to change those insecurities if we are in a better environment in which we could let go of some of those strategies.³

Professor Overall: A core part of the different attachment orientations is that they have captured different types of emotion regulation strategies. Attachment avoidance is associated with emotional suppression, and that comes along with a protective, autonomous, independent nature: that emotions aren’t safe, and that I need to protect myself, and so I withdraw and suppress those emotions – from myself, but also from my partner.

Attachment anxiety is more strongly associated with rumination – a kind of hyper-vigilance toward my own emotions, paying attention to emotions, catastrophizing, emotion regulation patterns that are basically about expressing emotions to get care and love.⁴

We think of those emotion regulation strategies as bad. And sure, those two types of strategies can have negative effects for health and well-being, because you’re either not processing your emotions or you’re stuck in those emotions. They can have negative effects for close relationships – when you’re suppressing, you’re not being responsive to your partner, you’re not expressing your needs, they can’t be responsive to you. And when you’re ruminating, you can be stuck in the emotion of it instead of moving toward problem solving.

But even in the affective science literature, it’s very clear now that the adaptive or maladaptive nature of these types of strategies really depends on the context. Sometimes you have to suppress your emotions. Sometimes it’s good to suppress your emotions to be able to stop yourself from expressing emotions that are harmful, in order to then move to a place where you can be better at resolving problems in safer situations. Sometimes rumination is important. There are models of rumination that the adaptive nature of rumination is really about: there is a problem that needs to be solved, and your brain will keep going over it until you feel it solved.

For many people, regardless of their attachment orientation, these types of emotion regulation patterns can be useful in different types of situations. The issue with attachment insecurity and the links with those emotions is that they become more set in stone – less flexible to the context. Somebody who is high in attachment avoidance is going to routinely engage in that kind of disengagement strategy, even when it might not be useful. People who are high in attachment anxiety are going to have this kind of hyperactive emotion reaction that prolongs distress.

But if they’re in an environment that can turn off those insecurities, they may be able to reduce the degree to which those emotion regulation strategies impact their own health and well-being, and the way they’re resolving the dilemmas in their relationship that cause these negative emotions to begin with.

Professor Overall: You have to understand that these get activated in times of threat – when we need to rely on the strategies that we have to figure out how to negotiate. Every time we come into a relationship dilemma of some kind, in which our attachment needs or our emotions are activated, it doesn’t make sense to approach those situations like, “Oh, let’s take five minutes to figure out what I’m doing.” That’s not what humans do, and it wouldn’t be adaptive to do that.

Instead, we’re approaching those situations based on these routine emotional and behavioral strategies of negotiating conflict, or support, or intimacy – where we’re responding based on these strategies that are developed, that become kind of automatic ways of responding to our partners and thinking about ourselves and thinking about our partners. Based on all of the experiences that we’ve had so far. And because they’re slow to adapt to different contexts – and they should be as well.

Professor Overall: In the empirical literature – in the science of relationships and attachment when we’re studying these in adulthood – we now measure dimensions.² We’re measuring the degree to which people higher versus lower in anxiety are behaving in this particular way, and people higher versus lower in avoidance are more likely to respond in this particular way. We’re controlling for the shared association, because there’s a shared kind of insecurity there, and that is expressed in different ways between anxiety and avoidance.

What that means is that we’re not studying categories. Most of the literature and the findings relate to whether you’re higher or lower in anxiety or whether you’re higher or lower in avoidance, recognizing that people vary. And it’s not often the case that we would find statistical interactions between anxiety and avoidance.

In most studies, we don’t find those interactions, or they’re not reported. It’s not that it isn’t the case that people can be high on both, but it’s quite rare. You’re usually one flavour – more one flavour than the other.

But also, when you’re thinking about the scientific literature, it is important to consider who is participating in these studies. People who are very highly avoidant, or very highly anxious (and especially people that are very high on both!) – are not participating in our studies. We’re speaking more to the general patterns of emotions and cognitions and behavior that occur that can be explained by variance in these dimensions.

So we actually know very little about whether there’s a specific manifestation of what you’re calling “fearful avoidant“. In the therapy room, that might be quite different – because if you are high in both, you’re more likely to be having a lot more struggles, and therefore they’re probably overrepresented in that space. But again, just like the anxiety-avoidance pairs, you can think about people who don’t have to be high in anxiety or high in avoidance, but are just at medium levels of both. They’re going to have the same kinds of behavioral responses activated in these situations. And if they’ve got both concerns, then you’re going to see different reactions across different situations, depending on what concerns are most prominent in that context.

That makes it difficult for the individual to figure out why they’re responding that way, when they might be switching types of beliefs and concerns and orientations. And it’s difficult for their partners to be able to respond in ways that address their attachment needs and soothe their attachment concerns.

Professor Overall: We study attachment in dimensions, recognizing that we all vary along these dimensions – all of us. Those levels go up and down depending on different contexts, different relationships, different domains, different life circumstances. That’s important to keep in mind, because you’re not just one thing.

But thinking about them as categories – as anxious, or avoidant, or “I’m more likely an anxious person, or I’m more likely an avoidant person, or my partner is” – is helpful. And thinking about how to use this knowledge to understand yourself, and your partner, or your children, or your parents, or whatever relationship that you’re trying to improve and manage and grow and make happy – that’s important.

So I’m not trying to derogate the use of categories or styles. Their usefulness in helping people is important. But it is also really helpful for people to keep in mind that you’re not just one thing. You’re not just one thing in one relationship. And you can change. You can be less of that one thing.⁵ You might always kind of be more anxious – but the “little” or “more” makes a real difference. Whereas if you just think of yourself as anxious, that actually restricts the degree to which you think about how you can change and be better in interactions. And especially if you think about others as just in one box, that really changes how you might respond to them, and the space you might allow them to become more secure.

Professor Overall: The advice I would give is based on what we’ve talked about, which is: you’re not one thing in one relationship or all relationships. We vary in our concerns, in the way we express those across different relationship contexts. And so do our partners and the other close others that we have relationships with.

Figuring out how to effectively navigate relationship challenges requires us both to try to understand, and to be open to becoming more constructive in the interaction. That requires us to have motivation. It requires us to learn skills – how to do that. But it also requires us to have the energy.

One thing that we haven’t talked about is that a lot of what we’re talking about – how to behave more effectively within interactions, and soothe our insecurities and soothe those of our partners – requires energy. And when we’re really stressed, when we have stressful lives, that’s very hard. So sometimes removing the stress, and allowing people to just be better, is the most constructive thing that we can do.⁶