38. Healing unhealthy attachment styles

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello, it's great to have you here listening in to the podcast. Welcome, Welcome back, Welcome. If it's your first time, I hope you stick around. Yeah, it's been a very busy couple of weeks for me, but I thought it was a really great time to talk about a topic that I've kind of had in the archive, something I've wanted to talk about for a while. You've clicked on this episode, you know. We're talking about attachment styles and attachment theory, a big Pandora's box of information and studies and misconceptions and psychobabble and pop culture. Yeah, a pretty big topic, one that is incredibly important in our twenties, probably one of the most important things for the long term health and stability of our relationships throughout our lives. But it also has its roots in childhood. So a very complicated episode, but one that I think definitely involves a bit of a discussion and some more information out there to really understand what attachment styles are I wanted to talk about them because their role in relationships of every nature, not just romantic relationships, is so important in our twenties, and like most things, this decade, this first decade of adulthood is where they really start to take a hold and solidify and concrete. So, yeah, they are super important, and they're important because really that our health and well being is greatly influenced by our emotional and social connections with others, particularly those that are our life partners or those were intimate with, or those we're really close with, like our family and our friends. And recently, attachment styles, I've seen them cropping up everywhere. They've become a big part of the psychobabble recently, and they've been highly popularized to become kind of part of our communication and part of general conversations. I see tiktoks about attachment styles all their time, saying like, oh, you know, I'm an anxious attachment, which is why you know I need someone to message me back, or you know, I'm securely attached, Like this is what it's like, and all of it is kind of you know, using attachment styles as a source of entertainment or as an explanation for things that perhaps we all go through, but that is so far from the truth. Their role in pop culture and in our daily kind of conversations and dialogue really deeply misconstrues and differs from what attachment theory really seeks to explain in clinical psychology, and attachment styles are a way of explaining a disorder and a disordered way of relating, loving, and interacting with others. They're not a quick and easy explanation. They're not a general explanation. They're actually quite serious, and I think recently they have become almost like horoscopes, almost like a personality assessment. When I was looking up some recent papers for to kind of bring into this episode and kind of doing my research, I found this website and on the website it was like take a quiz to determine your attachment style, which I just found so funny. I found it so so funny because the internet or self assessment cannot confirm for you what your attachment style is. It is so much more serious than that, and the true implications of what your attachment style are, particularly if you are not securely attached, a much more extreme and severe and we're going to get into that later, but nonetheless, on a lighter, less extreme level, they are a really interesting concept to consider and apply, especially on perhaps a more scaled down level to our relationships in our twenties and primarily our romantic relationships. So let's jump in and discuss what attachment styles mean, the types of attachment styles, their clinical implications, the history, and why they're not a death sentence for the stability and sustainability and healthiness of your relationship. Okay, so we're going to begin with a bit of a history lesson, as we often do with these episodes, talking about where attachment theory and the idea of attachment styles have come from and their origin in not just psychology but in the world and the context that kind of led to the theories around attachment style becoming quite popular and even originating in the first place. So, as is, although I think attachment styles, and if you do have some pre understanding of attachment styles and you know what the four attachment styles are, they might seem quite common sense, and they might kind of seem quite intuitive something that we have probably we didn't need a psychologist or some deep research to tell us. It's just a pretty yeah, pretty easy to understand concept that people relate to others and experience their relationships in different ways. But before the nineteen fifties, which is when research on attachment styles first began, there really wasn't much of an investigation into how people relate to others and how that might be different, the outcomes that that might have for them, and where it kind of begins. So attachment theory came from the brain was the brainchild of a psychologist and a researcher called John Bolby. If you have studied psychology before, you would have heard this name. He is very famous in social psychology, one of the first leading social psychologists, primarily because of his work on attachment styles, which is obviously what we are discussing today. So John Bolby, he began his work in the nineteen fifties after World War Two, and what he observed why he wanted to look into this, the different ways that people relate to each other, was because he was observing this strange pattern in a lot of children, where children were entering their teenage years and children that were born during World War One, sorry, World War two, we're entering their teenage years, and there seemed to be very different outcomes in very different ways that kids were relating to their caregivers and to their romantic partners, their teachers, their friends. And what he thought was this probably has something to do with the role and the differing role that parents had with their kids during World War Two. You know, it was a time of war. People lost parents, people had distant parents, you know, men and women came back from the front lines and had PTSD, and that really bled into their relationship and how they raised their children. And what he found was there were some kids that seemed to have much more secure relationships, be a lot less worried about their relationships compared to others. There was also this emerging idea that how we look after and care for children when they are infants actually seems to be quite important. Before this, it was kind of I think, there was this idea that you know, kids, all they really need is food and water and you know, a soft bed and they will be fine. Love and things like that and comfort and security. Yep, they're important. They're nice, but they don't really determine what happens to a child, and they don't really have much of an influence. But there was a big change in that and one of the reasons why there was this big investigation or study into these kids that were removed from their parents or were orphaned during the war or in the US, they were removed and they were put into the care of these nurses and these foster nurses. They weren't put into homes. They were put into hospital settings almost and all of these kids received the food, they received water, they were clean, they had light, they exercised, their health was taken care of, but they all quite a few of them started getting really sick or showing real signs of developmental delay. Some of them even died. And what they kind of realized from that was it's not just the basic bare necessities that determine the outcomes for children and are important to their health, but it's the kind of love they receive and the love and care they receive primarily from their caregiver. And in this situation, they didn't have a stable caregiver. They had people who were employed to look after them, and these people rotated in and out of the hospital wards, there wasn't always the same person to look after you. And importantly, the kids that formed strong attachments and relationships with a particular nurse or a particular doctor did seem to do better, especially when that relationship did contain an extra degree of love. So John Bolby steps into this saying, thinking and willing to explore in the wake of this kind of interesting phenomenon, why is that kids seemed to need love and need more than just the basic necessities to live. And that was also meeting some of those observations he was making about these three to four different categories of children that were becoming adults and having difficulties in their relationships, some more than others. So John Bolby he run these experiments on children, observational experiments where he would have a child and a parent in a room and he would see what would happen when the parent left. Pretty simple, but the outcomes were really really interesting. Some children would naturally get upset, they would cry, but when someone else came in, they could be comforted by someone else, but they did still really want their primary caregiver. These kids, he would assume, were quite secure, they had a good relationship with their caregiver, but they also could be comforted by someone else and had to trust that they caregiver would return. Then there were the other types of children, and these children were very, very different in many many ways. So when their caregivers left, what tended to happen. There were three different types of reactions. Some of the kids just did not give a fuck, like they really didn't care, which was really interesting because caregivers are so fundamental to the lives that we leave as children. They're fundamental to our survival. We're dependent on them for absolutely everything. So it makes sense that the relationship you have with your caregiver, with your primary care giver, whether that's a parent or someone else, would be really really important to your outcomes as a child, but also as an adult. They are just the most important figure in our lives. So John, mister Bowlby and this man observed that there was this category of children that when their parents left, they really did not care. They didn't they didn't care when they came back, they just appeared really really disinterested. And then there was another category of children who got incredibly upset. They couldn't be comforted, they didn't want to play with anything, but when their caregiver came back into the room, they ignored them. The caregiver would try and give them attention and they would turn the other way, they would still be crying, but it didn't seem that their caregiver could comfort them. And he made this observation that how the parents were treating their children outside of this experimental setting was deeply, deeply important to how this child would react in this setting. In this experiment, parents who would consistently show their children love and show their children care their children would be the ones who were securely attached, who would be upset when their parents left, but once they came back in, they trusted they would return and they could be comforted by them. But this other group of kids, the kids who really didn't care, who didn't seem to have any attachment to their caregiver, or the ones who were almost angry at them, who had this weird distrust. He kind of made the conclusion, came to the conclusion that the relationship and the way that these parents were caring for their kids was probably not too ideal. There was probably maybe a degree of maltreatment. There was a degree of distrust and a lack of love, a lack of consistency, and that really impacted how this child would react to their caregiver and how children relate to their caregivers. He also found through this longitudinal study that he did that the relationships they tended to have. He tracked kids in all the kids were in the same condition, but he tracked the kids based on their reaction for years. So he had three categories initially, and he found that the kids would have one of those three reactions, and so he grouped them up and then he studied a few select members of each of these groups over the next ten to twenty years, and what he found was that the relationship and the reaction that those children had in that experiment was deeply, deeply had deep, long lasting impact on their relationships as adults, and in some ways was really unforgiving when it came to their outer relationships and not just romantic. It is important to note that a lot of this research was highly heteronormative. At the time. Gay couples couldn't adopt, children, didn't have children, weren't recognized as suitable caregivers, which is obviously we now know is kind of ridiculous. So there has been this discussion recently of having a look at how the relationship children have with parents who are both the same gender might differ, or whether there would be a higher rate of secure attachment and things like that. There's also heaps of studies done on single parents and whether the attachment styles of children who have single parents is different, and the outcomes of that is that it really isn't doesn't matter if you have one or two parents unless the parent that you do have is one that you can't trust, is one that isn't providing you with love and care, one that might be might be treating you badly or abusing you on drugs, or not absent who was absent, So that's really what matters. But from these observations from this experiment, John Bolby made the observation that there are three to four attachment stars and pretty much every single person would fall into one of these attachment stars. So let's discuss what they are. So after John Bolby's initial work, this was expanded on by Mary Ainsworth and she set the premise along with him about the four attachment stars that we now know of. And these are secure avoidant that's also known as dismissive, and which is also known as preoccupied and disorganized, which is also known as fearful avoidant, So four categories. Now, it's worth saying the majority of people would be secure, securely attached, and secure attachment is kind of what we're all aiming for. The other three are really characterized by a lot of difficulties with cultivating and maintaining healthy relationships. But in contrast, the secure attachment style it implies that a person is healthy in their relationships, secure in their relationships, and comfortable expressing emotions openly asking for things, being able to communicate, being able to have their needs met, and adults with secure attachment styles they can depend on their partners and their friends and their family and in turn let their partners and their loved ones rely on them. It also shows a lot of studies have shown that those who are securely attached do tend to have healthier lives overall. They're happier than more content, warm, easy going. They tend to build deep, meaningful and long lasting relationships, which is what we know contributes to a lot of physical health and well being indicators. And they even seem to be more well liked in the workplace. They are better parents generally. Obviously we don't like to make generalizations. Everyone can be a good parent, and as I'll talk about later on, your attachment style isn't kind of a death sentence, But secure attachment is kind of the gold standard secure. If you're securely attached, you had someone, you had caregivers that you could rely upon when you're a child, or you've had people in your life mentors, teachers, family members who have shown you love consistently, who have shown you that you can trust others, and so these people tend to thrive in their relationships. But they also don't fear being on their own, which is a really important caveat. They don't depend on the responsiveness or approval of people in their lives, and they do tend to have a positive view of themselves and others. That sounds fucking great, sounds awesome, And the chances are if you're listening to this, you probably are securely attached. There is this sense that, you know, everyone kind of likes to label themselves as the other three types, which will go into but studies and research has shown that the majority of people, if you haven't experienced some trauma in your upbringing, you will grow up to become a securely attached adult. So what about the others? What about anxious and preoccupied? So for adults with an anxious attachment style, the partner is often what they would see as their better half. They also have a lot of anxiety around relationships. They find that relationships, especially the early stages or even you know, long term relationships, bring them a lot of anxiety. They don't bring them joy. They're not easy things to cultivate. They're filled with ups and downs. They often don't feel like they can trust their partner, even if there's no evidence for that. The thought of living without their partner or being alone in general can also cause pretty higher levels of anxiety, and people with this type of attachment style typically have a pretty negative self image of themselves as being unlovable, whilst they have a really positive view of others. And in response to that low self esteem, in response to that sense that people are going to leave them, they're going to abandon them, they can't trust others, they can't rely on others, the anxious adult will often seek approval, support and responsiveness from their partner of those in their lives kind of really consistently, almost to a point of excess, and they're often worried and anxious that their loved ones are not invested or as invested in the relationship as they are. It's also characterized, and this is perhaps the main element of anxious or preoccupied. It's characterized by a strong fear of abandonment. They often feel that they cannot rely on the people, or especially their intimate partners, and they're going to leave them. That you know, even in the early stages of relationships, if you just started dating someone, you know you might see or might feel that someone is, you know, minutes away, seconds away from ignoring you, from ghosting you. They don't want to see you, and that really hurts. You're looking for red flags, You're looking for signs they're going to walk away, and because of that, you often feel really anxious when it comes to how fast their replies are or whether they're consistently making plans. You have this really acute kind of alarm setting for any indication that someone is going to leave, and it's almost a coping mechanism. It's a security blanket so that you can be the one who walks away first. So, yeah, anxious and preoccupied characterized by a lot of anxiety but also a strong fear of abandonment doesn't sound very pleasant, does it not? At all? Parents of children who become anxiously attached, were perhaps not always there for their children, perhaps they had a parent who left them, who abandoned them. Often it's seen in kids who had unstable caregivers who would show them a lot of love and then leave, which is you know, quite sad. But the next one we have is avoidant or dismissive, So they dismissing or avoidant type. We would often see them as like lone wolves, people who in our lives, who don't really seem to care or need affection or validation from others. They're independent, they're self sufficient, and they're quite absent emotionally. The first two things sound great, you know, strong independent, Sorry first three strong independent, self sufficient. That sounds amazing, right, But not so much in our relationships because they tend to believe that they don't really need anyone. They don't want to depend on others, have others depend on them, they don't want to seek support or approval in social bonds, and it's generally characterized by a lack of emotional closeness. So although this person may avoid getting attached to people and may not want to get attached to people, our relationships and social connection is really really important. So it is a disordered way of relating to others if you have absolutely no need to have any level of connection or emotional closeness with anyone. And they also tend to hide or suppress their feelings when they're faced with the potentially emotionally dense or extreme situation. So we can kind of see what kind of parents these people may have had, or the kind of early relationships they may have had that have contributed to this dismissive way of things. They were not able to rely on someone, and because of that, they've reacted with a kind of hyper independence, which is a trauma response, which we know is a trauma response. They have convinced themselves their brain has trained itself to not need anyone because no one has ever consistently been there for them. And that's not a really great way to live. You know, Love and romance and deep connections with friends and family is one of the best parts of life, So not having that does kind of fit in the category of having some kind of disordered way of relating to others. And finally we have the last one, which is disorganized or fearful avoidant. So the disorganized type tends to show unstable and ambiguous behaviors in the social bonds. It's often seen as a mix of that avoidant dismissive and of that anxious or preoccupied. So for adults with this style of attachment, the partner, their partner, or their relationships are often the source of both a strong need and desire but also fear so fearful avoidant people, they do want intimacy and closeness, they're anxious about receiving it, but at the same time they really struggle to trust others and they often push people away. They aren't able to regulate their emotions well, and they don't really tend to have strong emotional attachment, primarily due to their fear of getting hurt. So a person who might have this, an adult who might have this attachment style, might react with both anxiety but then a really extreme coldness when they're not receiving what they want from their partner, when they feel their partner is pulling away, or even just in general when everything seems to be going really really well. But I really just want to quickly talk about these final three attachment styles, the disordered attachment styles that being disorganized and fearful avoidant dismissive, and anxious preoccupied a little bit more Like I've kind of mentioned, there is this idea that we can kind of self diagnose, and there is a lot of information online or on TikTok or Instagram with people very flippantly being like, oh, I'm anxiously attached or I'm avoidant, dismissive. That might be the case. You might not know what's going on in their life. But it's important to recognize that when we talk about these three attachment styles, we are talking about an extreme disorder. We are talking about something that is consistent, something that isn't dependent on who you're with. You know, everyone might be you know, I think especially with anxious attachment. For example, if you are with someone who does not treat you right and who pulls away and who is not consistent, it's a natural reaction to be very anxious. But the anxious attachment style, and especially a disordered version, will still be present when your partner is the most loving, stable, caring person in the world. But we don't tend to see these three disordered attachment style in the general population. Very often. It often shows up in children who have been abused or people who have been abused as children or deprived, or have come from a really harsh environment, maybe from an environment in which they didn't have any kind of stable caregiver like a foster system, or if they were moving around a lot without a stable parent or caregiver in their lives. So it is really important to recognize that it's probably unlikely. And I'm not saying I know you're well enough to say this, but it is important to consider that it's if you are, you know, if you aren't someone who has experienced severe trauma in your childhood or early life, it's unlikely that you will consistently fall into one of the three disordered attachment styles. They're genuinely, you know, kind of reserve for people who have experienced something really traumatic that has, you know, just completely changed the structure of their brain and how they relate to others. But attachment styles are still important on a smaller scale, and they can be used to inform how we treat our relationships. But our attachment styles can also change, you know, your attachment styles with your coworkers, with your family and friends might also be different. Must you might be secure with your family and your friends, you might experience a level of disorganized or fearful avoid an attachment style with an intimate partner or with someone that you love, and that can also be based on previous relationships that you have had. So one of the things I said and just previously is that you can experience the signs of a disordered attachment style based on the relationship that you in that you're in, it doesn't necessarily mean that that is your attachment style full stop. I remember I was in a relationship with someone last year and they were really not that nice to me, and they didn't they weren't consistent, they didn't give as much as they took, and there was always this sense of like, you really don't seem to care for me or respect me. At any point you could walk away. And I think during that point I was really really anxious, and I was constantly worried about where we were and where we stood. And then after that relationship ended, there was that level of fearful avoidant, like I don't want to end up in a situation like that again, I don't want to be that emotionally close with someone who I can't rely on. But it doesn't mean that I have an attachment disorder. I am definitely securely attached. I had loving parents, I do have people in my life that I can trust, and I don't have a problem trusting them. But it is a sense that you can float in and out of ways of relating with people based on what is going on in your life. But I also think there is a civil lining for people who have experienced trauma and as a result, do have an attachment style disorder or aren't securely attached. There is hope and light at the end of the tunnel, and I think it is also worth saying that secure attachment maist it might sound great, isn't the only way that people can have positive, healthy, long term and stable relationships. So you might be someone who has experienced experiencing a disordered attachment style, maybe just for a period, but you know, maybe it's something that you're dealing with on a long term basis. I think it's important to note that people can still have fulfilling, fulfilling relationships and they might not even experience any problems, but can still be characterized as being one of the three disordered attachment styles that can change though as well. You're not kind of locked into an attachment style from the moment of birth or from when you start to mature. Yes, you cannot change how your care givers or those in your life important people in your life have treated you and how that may have ended a resulted in you not having the most great times informing close relationships. But it's not permanent. It's not something that is stagnant as something that changes. There is this problem though, of there being a pattern of seeking people who treat us how our caregivers did, or seeking people out who are emotionally unavailable and who are going to make us feel anxious out of in this weird kind of self fulfilling prophecy way that will reinforce your previous experiences as ones that you deserve and reinforcing your behaviors. That's something that we're not always consciously aware of, and if we're talking about changing attachment styles, it's something that you do need to be aware of. You do need to be aware that how you relate to others is very much in your control, although it might be influenced by factors that you can't control, like whether your caregivers were present or absent in your life. When we do start to gain more conscious awareness, of how we relate to others. Recognizing that we might be seeking relationships that reinforce unhealthy patterns or unhealthy attachment styles is really important. It's a habit, it's a pattern of behavior that we can unlearn, and that's obviously going to be most successful when you're guided by a therapist or guided by someone with clinical experience. But one thing that they might tell you is that you are able to teach people how to treat you, and you get to decide how you want to be treated. I'm just going to say that again. You get to teach people how to treat you, and that is a real step towards healing a disordered attachment style. If you can recognize that previously you may have been acting or reacting or choosing partners that didn't fulfill your needs, that didn't understand your unique needs, and you can undo those harmful learning experiences. And there's heaps of evidence that shows that you can. There was this study published quite recently that just suggests that people can change their attachment styles over time and feel better about their relationships. There's also, i think a big role there's a big age plays a really big role in aging and maturing and growing up plays a really big role. So one study suggests that attachment styles they just tend to become more secure over time, simply because the older we get, the less time we have full relationships that don't meet us, meet our needs, or make us unhappy, the more learning experiences we have. But in another experiment, they reviewed twenty or sorry, seventy I think heterosexual couples, and they got these couples to complete surveys about their relationship and then participate in a series of kind of brief activities. Half of the couples completed activities designed to increase closeness, and so they took turns answering questions about themselves that the other person had asked them, and they also participated in partner at yoga where they held hands or otherwise connected to create poses. And the other half of the couples discussed more impersonal questions, ones that weren't really related to you and how you felt about the other person, and they only did individual yoga. There wasn't a bonding experience there after the intimacy building exercises. Participants with more avoidant attachment styles rated their relationship as higher quality than they had beforehand. Meanwhile, participants with more secure or anxious attachment styles didn't report an increase in relationship satisfaction. But for those who didn't participate in those activities, who had anything but a secure attachment style, they did report that their sense of closeness to their partner wasn't really changing or was in some sense to client, And according to a survey of participants one month later, more avoidant participants who had done intimacy building activities had actually decreased in their attachment avoidance. That is really really interesting because it shows that although we cannot change how we have grown up, how we've been treated as a child or in our early formative relationships, being with the right person, having the right friends, having closeness with mentors or close family members, and experiencing love in closeness in those relationships does have the potential to change how we relate to others in a very much more holistic sense. If you take the time and actively seek to build trust and to put yourself in positions with people you trust. When you can build intimacy and feel loved and experience emotional closeness, you can kind of begin to heal previously disord attachment styles, and for those two of us who are securely attached, that also shows the importance of maintaining those kinds of activities and maintaining a lifestyle or habits that or boundaries as well, boundaries of those in our lives. That leaves no room for anxiety, leaves no room for on and off again, leaves no room for abuse or for maltreatment from those we love, but isn't instead founded on trust and loyalty and a sense of belonging with someone else. So really really interesting, and I think also an important disclaimer to make here is that this works best and if you do think you have one of the three disordered attachment styles, it's best to see a therapist, to talk to someone who has clinical experiences, because I can imagine that the outcomes of those closeness based activities would be definitely, would definitely benefit and improve if you did have clinical guidance with someone who really really knew what they were talking about, really knew what was happening and had observed it and seen it in the past. But all really really interesting stuff and so important for our twenties, when we are beginning to have serious relationships and have close relationships and maybe even start to see the problems or the disordered ways in which we attach ourselves to others. I definitely doing research for this episode, did see and was able to kind of have a better understanding of how the relationships we've had in our past does tend to influence and will influence the relationships we have in our future. Not just those that we have with our care givers, that everyone, everyone who has had an impact on us. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode and this history lesson and this deep dive into attachment stars. I hope you've learned something that, if nothing else, I hope you've learned that you do have the opportunity to be securely attached and to feel stable and loved in your relationships and to feel emotional closeness with other people, which is kind of what we all want, especially when we're young and we're learning how we want to be respected and treated. So thank you so much for listening, and as always, if you do feel called to, please leave a review of the podcast on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It helps me grow this platform and it just really makes my day to put things out there and know that people are listening and that perhaps they've had an impact. So thank you again for listening, and we will be back next week for another episode of the Psychology of Your Twenties.