Enough With all the Platitudes, I Need REAL Connection!

Understanding Adult Attachment Styles

“All you need is love”

“Relationships are the spaces where you feel loved, supported and understood”

“Love yourself and you will be loved by others”

Do these sentences make you cringe and want to stop reading? You are not alone. It is so common to confuse cheesy love platitudes with true connection.

Yes, we are all wired for connection, but what does that mean about love?

It’s no secret that humans are wired for connection..and while love does truly make the world go round, what does that mean when you’re not actually feeling that “love”? What happens when connections are scary or make you feel confused?

Oftentimes our anxieties get in the way of creating and building strong, healthy and fulfilling bonds with others. Many people get stuck in patterns that leave them feeling alone (even when they are not.) We can be married or have a romantic partner and family all around and still feel lonely, and alternatively, we can be all alone and feel full and cared for. Sounds like another platitude, no? “Loneliness is a state of mind.”

Single or Coupled, we can all relate to feeling lonely sometimes.

It’s a universal experience.

There are ways we can develop a better sense of connection with ourselves and with others so that even when we do find ourselves alone, it doesn’t feel like the devastating sort of loneliness.

You Do Not Need To “Earn” Love And Care. It’s Yours For the Taking!

As you might have read in my previous blogs on attachment, our feelings about love and connection often stem from our earliest primary relationships. Our ability to trust, feel secure and be vulnerable in our relationships will largely depend on how we learned relationships are “supposed” to go. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The reality is that every single person has the right to change their lives and be unconditionally cared for. If you resonate with the toxic messaging, “I must not be worthy”, please know that it’s a belief you picked up during your childhood, or from an unhealthy adult relationship, to get through some tough times, but that does not mean it is actually true. I can assure you, it’s not.

How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Satisfaction In Adult Relationships

As an adult, if you find that you pull back when a loved one wants more connection and intimacy, take a moment to check if the anxiety from past relationships is impacting why you are pulling away now. You might also notice that you get clingy and feel “needy” when someone shows you that you can rely on them or if they play hard-to-get, you chase them. You might have been searching for safety and belonging your whole life and now that you are in an adult relationship, you might start to feel like a child grabbing for a warm blanket or other comfort measures.

You may even find that your behavior reminds yourself of you at a certain childhood stage. A part of you knows these behaviors are stemming from your younger, child parts, though you want to be able to connect from a primary adult self (Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 2011).

When Your Inner Child Takes The Driver’s Seat

It’ s normal for a younger part of self (inner child) to show up when engaging in new relationships. With that being said, you can learn new, mature, adult ways to better navigate this new love.

It can help for you to understand attachment patterns; the patterns you learnt from your caregivers when you were younger.

If you have not yet read my blog about what attachment is, it might be helpful to review here.

4 PRIMARY ATTACHMENT STYLES

1. Secure Attachment

If as a child you felt safe, were soothed when you got upset and were reassured by your primary caregiver, it is very likely that you developed a well rounded sense of security in your relationships. Since you felt acknowledged and heard by your parents and your needs were met when you expressed them, you felt a sense of security in knowing you will have what you need, or at least, will be heard and supported. Through rough patches, this sense of security was deeply comforting and helped you feel safe in being who you are.

This nurturing will have spilled over into other relationships throughout your life. When you are in adult relationships, you will more easily trust the other person to be there for you when you need them. You can handle the bumps and won’t be worried that there are colossal issues at every turn.

You will feel confident knowing that your partner will show up for you, and feel confident that if they don’t it’s for a good reason. You get that your partner is a separate individual and has his or her own independence, but you still connect and ask for things from each other within healthy limits. (Becker- Phelps, 2014)

2. Anxious Preoccupied Attachment

As a child, you got verbal or non-verbal messages that your needs were not important. When you were in need of comfort or support, your parents were not there reliably or they were not capable of being there for you in the way you needed them to be (usually due to their own anxieties, stressors, traumas or mental health issues.) Instead of soothing and helping you make sense of your strong feelings of anger, hurt or loneliness, you were left to tend to these big feelings, for the most part, on your own. You might have even been criticized for having those big feelings.

You might have gotten the message either explicitly or implicitly that your emotions don’t matter or that they are a burden.

Instead of feeling empowered to survive your big feelings, you were left to feel scared when any situation arose that brought your big emotions forward. Instead of learning to effectively express or stay with your emotions, you learned to shove the feelings inside and feel ashamed of them.

When we learn to shove feelings deep deep down instead of communicating them, the body ultimately feels restless and expresses that repression through all forms of anxiety and irritability.

You might have even learned that big emotions require big reactions in order to be heard. In relationships, this expresses itself as being seemingly needy or clingy toward others because subconsciously you’re always looking to find external comfort.

3. Dismissive Avoidant Attachment

If you were met by passivity from your parents, you might be lacking in your ability to bond emotionally with others. As a child, you existed but you may have felt like a “thing” that was just there, a part of the house, as opposed to a person who had feelings, needed physical touch, emotional presence and bonding experiences. As an adult, you might feel like it’s painful to be emotionally available to others, and you might deny the importance of your loved ones in your life.

You might avoid conflicts instead of deepening your relationships.

Family members might tell you that they often feel ignored by you. (Behary & Skeen, 2014) If you were raised by a caregiver who loved you deeply but was completely dissociated, narcissistic or emotionally absent during your formative years you could also be challenged with this attachment style.

4. Fearful Avoidant Attachment

You’re stuck between two strong feelings; you crave love and attention from your loved ones, but you’re terrified of getting too close. You want closeness, but something about intimacy feels dangerous and makes you worried that you’ll end up hurt and disappointed.

To avoid the anticipated pain, you run away from people who love you, or want to get to know you better. You avoid thoughts, feelings and issues that arise instead of facing them head on and working them through.

This may stem from the fact that every time (or most of the time) you had hopes or expectations from a parent, you were let down and left feeling heartbroken. (Heller & Levine, 2012)

Attachment Patterns Will Vary From Relationship to Relationship

The above are very broad attachment types, and although we all have primary attachment patterns, you may notice differences in the way you engage and interact from relationship to relationship. Some relationships will promote a feeling of safety and others may invoke feelings of insecurity, doubt and fear.

Why You Can Have a Secure Attachment With One Person and An Anxious Attachment with Someone Else

Since attachment is the connection between two people you may have more of a secure attachment with someone who has been steady in your life (or reminds you of someone who has been steady for you) and you may feel more anxious with someone who has been inconsistent or caused you harm in your life (or someone who subconsciously reminds you of your caregiver who hurt you.)

This is important to note, because you want to take note of those who provoke a feeling of security and calm, and pull away from those, whose interactions with you leave you feeing shut down, grasping or confused.

Anxiety in Your Relationships? We got you covered.

If you notice some anxiety in your current relationships, don’t fret. Awareness is the first step to making a change. Regardless of your attachment style or type, you can choose to practice skills today to make your connections better!

If you want to reduce relationship anxiety and worries that are keeping you in a frustrating cycle, read this: 9 Ways to Reduce Anxiety in Your Relationships”.

Next steps…

If you live in New York or anywhere in the Five Towns, Nassau County or anywhere else in Long Island, NY and are seeking support today, reach out here. We offer a free 15 minute consult so we can help you experience anxiety relief + more meaningful connections today.

SCHEDULE MY FREE 15 MIN CONSULT

Sources:

Becker- Phelps, 2014. Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

Behary & Skeen, 2014. Love Me, Don't Leave Me: Overcoming Fear of Abandonment and Building Lasting, Loving Relationships

Heller & Levine, 2012. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YouFindandKeepLove

The Relation Between Insecure Attachment and Child Anxiety: A Meta-Analytic Review. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology 40 (4): 630-45, July 2011.