How attachment styles affect relationships?

Extensive work has been completed over the last several decades in analyzing attachment. What is attachment? The first person all people are attached to is its Mother. Whether this attachment is healthy is another matter. Attachment in human beings and some animals look quite different than in other species. There are three main types of attachment, and some stress a fourth, and there can be subsets of all of these. The ways people are cared for by the main caregiver at birth in this theory follow them all the way through until death, replaying, doing over, or correcting that which was not completed. In counseling, it has been observed that there are two types of behaviors inside relationships that seem clear. The people who continue the positive or negative behaviors hoping for a different response and those who have managed to gain insight and take corrective action in less desirable behaviors like dependency, immaturity, acting out, and dismissiveness.

The Types

A secure attachment is ideal for all. This attachment comes from a background of having emotional, mental, and physical needs met while having the freedom to individuate (become their own person). A secure person affects the relationship positively by a balance of giving and take, practicing reasonable nonreactivity and managing minor mistakes well, trusting and resilient, and having a cooperative and flexible engagement that allows relationships to grow.

An anxious attachment can emanate from a parent who had anxiety themselves and found it difficult to allow separation from communicating to the child to question their own movements. It can also be from instability in general throughout childhood in the way people engage with this person. People feel emotionally vacant, often needing reassurance, mistrusting when they get the assurance, fantasizing about an ideal relationship, and a general lack of mature output. Engaging with this type is challenging because they often cannot be direct with their needs and often act out for the attention they crave.

 A fearful-avoidant type can come from feeling unimportant and not regarded, sometimes from an abusive background and from emotionally neglecting caregivers. This type carries a deep internal instability, often unpredictable, and dramatizes their needs to control what feels uncontrollable constantly. They fear rejection, and their esteem is easily affected, which makes distancing the safest option in a push-pull form with their significant other.

And lastly, a dismissive-avoidant type often separates and isolates to remain in control and can present as being emotionally difficult to read, often ambiguous with their interactions. This type is extremely independent. Because they learned independence at such an early stage in all areas, they are often challenged to depend on one another.

Counseling offers a way to heal many of these areas in attachment style to begin engaging more healthfully.