Attachment Styles: A Summary

As humans, we need to be attached to others in order to thrive. Studies have shown that being attached to a partner in a healthy and stable relationship lowers your blood pressure and can add years to your life. Likewise, staying in an unhappy relationship will raise your blood pressure and threaten your health and longevity.

Our relationships are not just categorically healthy or unhealthy. Healthy relationships take work. We each bring baggage into our relationships and this creates negative patterns of interaction between us and our partners. One of the pieces of baggage we might bring is our attachment style. Part of changing our negative patterns with our partners lies in identifying what type of attachment style we have. 

There are three basic styles of attachment: anxious, avoidant and secure. Anxious attachment looks like needing intimacy (closeness, connection, safety) and worrying about your relationship. Avoidant attachment looks like craving independence and constantly feeling confined because your partner is too needy. Secure attachment looks like going with the flow and feeling a balance of both connection and independence. 

Having a healthy relationship depends on our ability to be accountable for ourselves and our stuff/baggage/parts of us that are unhelpful. If you think you may have an anxious attachment style, it’s your job to take responsibility for your feelings of neediness and worry about the relationship. You usually need to set good boundaries — yes, even with your partner — and focus on yourself as independent from your relationship. Alternatively, if you think you have an avoidant attachment style, it’s your job to take responsibility for your unhealthy level of need for independence and to notice some of your partner’s perceived neediness as bids for connection that are your job to respond to in kind.

…and if you think you are securely attached then you have no work to do. Just kidding, there’s always something.