Not Ready To: Attachment and Bonding in Adulthood

Developmental trauma creates different personality types. Some learn to take care of everybody else but themselves, others turn inward and avoid. A therapist’s personal journey through attachment styles.

Becoming this type of therapist changed my life.

For the better.

Every relationship I had prior to becoming a therapist held a high level of reaction. I made future decisions based on psychological, emotional, and physical safety. Like every person does. I’ve encountered incredibly painful situations that affected my core self so intensely, that it forever altered my belief system and reality state. I relate personal experiences here because this is where I best can apply this theory and provide examples.

Attachment styles are those bonds we form in early childhood with our caregivers. These set the templates up for our future relationships with friends, family, and our own children. They forever follow us into our graves, from birth. They change over time, and that might be a good thing, or not, depending on how.

First, a basic explanation:

Bowlby discovered that young children, observed in a laboratory in interactions with their caregivers, displayed four types of interactions with those caregivers: secure, anxious-resistant, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles define the major ways that adults bond to romantic partners, friends, and family.

Levy, Ellison, and Scott (2010) explain: “The concept involves one’s confidence in the availability of the attachment figure for use as a secure base from which one can freely explore the world when not in distress as well as a safe haven from which one can seek support, protection, and comfort in times of distress. Exploration of the world includes not only the physical world but also relationships with other people and reflection on one’s internal experience.”

Secure Attachment

A secure attachment develops from consistent nurturing and caregiving. It involves a bond that is open, collaborative, compliant, trusting, and proactive. The partner with a secure attachment style feels free to explore their surroundings and relationships without fear of abandonment or judgment. This means they can be themselves without walls, maintain healthy boundaries, and not fear rejection from others. According to studies, most people have a secure attachment style- roughly 63% (Levy, Ellison, Scott, and Bernecker, 2010).

If you are securely attached, you lack jealousy, retain trust, and feel freedom within your relationship to move in and out of life phases. You prefer equality in your relationships and have open and honest communication.

Preoccupied Attachment

A preoccupied-attached forms from inconsistent caregiving. This person is needy, interpersonally, and hyperfocused on keeping the partner close in any way possible. The insecurely attached person craves love and intimacy but often lacks healthy levels of self-worth and esteem. They need constant reassurance and validation from others, require constant touch and interaction from partners/friends, tend to use guilt/blame/shame to keep their relationships close, likely neglect responsibilities due to preoccupation with the relationship, and overreact when there is a perceived threat to the relationship.

Think of borderline personality disorder.

This was the environment in which I first experienced life. My mother has a severe borderline narcissistic personality disorder.

Stepp, Whalen, Pilkonis, Hipwell, and Levine (2012) describe borderline personalities. Classified by stormy and intense relationships, uncontrollable anger, poor impulse control, and affective instability, these caregivers provide inconsistent environments for their children to form consistent nervous system regulation. Thus, they become inconsistently dysregulated and lead to avoidant patterns with their caregivers. In adulthood, with low self-esteem, these individuals have a 42% chance to become borderline themselves, setting them up for social, occupational, and academic challenges.

Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment

Those with dismissive-avoidant attachment styles are the polar opposite of anxious-avoidant. They don’t crave intimacy but run from it. During their developmental years, those avoidantly attached learned to suppress and avoid their feelings because their caregivers were somehow unable to provide that for them. The caregivers might have been physically present but not emotionally or psychologically. Avoidantly attached individuals are uncomfortable with deep feelings and intimate situations. They set extreme distance in their relationships, send mixed signals, are typically non-committal to relationships, and prefer casual sex over deeper intimacy.

Your typical Dismissive-Avoidant will usually attach with the preoccupied to create this perfect love storm of the love addiction/love avoidant cycle theorized by Pia Mellody. These are those fun relationships where intensity is mistaken for intimacy. Love-avoidants will be pushed away by the insecurities of the preoccupied. The more needy for love and approval the anxious-preoccupied attached is, the further the dismissive-avoidant attached partner will become. Able to shut themselves down immediately, detach, and live their lives inward, they continue to uphold surficial relationships while avoiding intimacy completely. Like a light switch, they turn off. Click.

Just like that, no more feelings. You’re safe in those walls where no one can hurt you again.

Disorganized Attachment

Exceptional fear runs the show in the disorganized attachment. 80% of those with developmental trauma will form this style of attachment (The Counseling Collective, 2019). Because of their own unresolved pain, loss, or trauma, parents fail to attach to their own children. Because their primary caregiver’s behavior was erratic and scary, their ability to regulate their nervous system remains impaired. They may have hot/cold attitudes, lack remorse, be antisocial, selfish, abuse drugs or alcohol, or recreate abusive patterns from childhood. Disorganized attached souls see the world as unsafe, and they learn to never trust.

Early on, I formed disorganized attachment styles. From a borderline mother, this set me up to learn no one was safe and I could only depend on myself. I shifted into avoidant over time as I caught myself up in cycles of failed relationships due to enmeshed boundaries and the usual power struggle. Never giving up my power, and always resistant to outside input, I maintained impenetrable walls with steel reinforcements.

Never to see the light of day, I was locked away safely. Moving through the motions, I ceased to live and took on the identity of what everybody else wanted me to be. Completely dead on the inside, I moved through daily motions on the outside for decades, living in a fantasy of success and delusionally healthy relationships.

I will never live like that again.

I still fight this. You absolutely can change it, and I have figured out how to form secure attachments with the help of my own council. Trust is essential. But how do you trust when every single person who was supposed to love and nurture you has overtly used and abused you instead? The layers of damage in complex trauma cases run deep, and sometimes the core may never be reached.

It’s always a struggle of imbalance. I figure through my journey of relationships, the balances of trust and vulnerability are the hardest to maintain. Like anybody else who works towards recovery and health, I will never find that perfect set point. But, it does get easier.

I trust. I get hurt. I fall. Then I grieve, analyze, and pick myself back up. I build better boundaries and use walls where necessary. For chronically abusive individuals, I gain distance like Forrest Gump’s cross-America trek. I have no problem cutting the cord for those that promise to love while sticking the knife through my back. I’ve gladly put these individuals in an area of my psyche where they can live, I don’t have to seek their validation and approval, nor suffer intense feelings of guilt and shame for not serving the purpose they projected on me to fulfill their needs.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. They can live their lives. I will continue with my journey despite their failed attempts to turn me into something I am not. I don’t know if I will ever be ready to make nice there, and I don’t have to. Once you get to the point people continue abusive patterns of behavior and dismiss all concerns, it’s deliberate. I have no room for outright toxicity in my world.

And that’s okay, I don’t need to stay connected with people that have no concern for my wellbeing. I also cease to hold anger for them. That gives them control. I built empathy for their stuck place in life. They will never find happiness and always depend on others for their needs.

We change our attachment styles over time and they can vary with people. You might have one partner you had an avoidant attachment style and the next anxious-preoccupied. As you move through life and gain experiences, the gathered wisdom can move you toward security. However, this takes conscious and proactive effort. Without basic levels of vulnerability or trust, you cannot form the foundation for a healthy relationship. You will forever run away from and avoid any kind of necessary emotional intimacy in anything but secure attachment. Walls will isolate your inner self as they form to protect you psychologically. They will also lock you into a prison cell where you hold the key to your own solitary confinement.

1. Kenneth N. Levy, William D. Ellison, Lori N. Scott, and Samantha L. Bernecker. “Attachment Style.” Pennsylvania State University. 2010 Wiley. Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 67:193–203, 2011. Obtained from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234138385_Attachment_Style
2. Stepp SD, Whalen DJ, Pilkonis PA, Hipwell AE, Levine MD. Children of mothers with borderline personality disorder: identifying parenting behaviors as potential targets for intervention. Personal Disord. 2012 Jan;3(1):76-91. doi: 10.1037/a0023081. PMID: 22299065; PMCID: PMC3268672.
3. The Counseling Collective: Fort Worth. “Understanding Attachment Styles: Relationships and Attachment.” Accessed from: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cb69ec034c4e2d5d613403f/t/5e62ca511302333644c7cd41/1583532626274/Understanding.pdf