How our Attachment Style Affects Adult Relationships

Attachment is a flow between requests of the infant, and responses of the adult. As an infant, a relationship with someone determines whether we survive—we have needs and we hope a parent or caregiver can effectively meet those needs. Attachment ultimately rests on having a need and the consistency and predictability of the need being met or not (Jobe, T., Shultz-Jobe, B., McFarland, L. & Naylor, K., 2021). Babies cannot seek food, shelter, or clothing to regulate temperature or hunger cues; rather, they are completely dependent on the adults around them. Beyond basic physical needs, we are also completely dependent on the coregulation of the adults around us for managing our emotional regulation as an infant. The dance between a caregiver’s sensitivity to the needs of a child, based on the caregiver’s own experiences, history, attachment and stress, all come together to impact the relationship with the child.

Research from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard (2007) has continued to show that our earliest experiences and relationships go onward to impact us later in life; in the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second. Profound things happen in our brain in the first few years of life, with every interaction mattering. When our world is unpredictable, volatile or arrhythmic in childhood, our brain organizes itself in a way that prioritizes lower regions of the brain, such as the brain stem, which tends to see the world through the binary lens of safe or unsafe. When our world and caregiver is predictable, our brain organizes itself in a way that trusts relationships later in life, with a basic belief that our needs will be met. Humans can exhibit more than one style of attachment as they step into adulthood, however depending on our childhood history and environmental stressors, we tend to exhibit one primary way of attaching that starts when we are younger.


The research on attachment stems back over 70 years. Just before WWII, while working a center for troubled boys in London, psychologist John Bowlby was curious about the absence of emotional responses in the children he was treating. The kids shared a common denominator in their developmental history: each of them had been separated from their mothers at a young age or had not formed a close bond with a parent (Hrdy, 1999).


Bowlby, curious about how early attachments were formed, went on to explore the work of Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, who was studying infant monkeys. In Harlow’s research, baby monkeys were offered the choice between a “mother-surrogate” who was warm, soft and cozy on the surface, or a doll made of a barren wire, but equipped with milk bottles (Hrdy, 1999). The baby monkeys chose the soft surrogates for most of their time, only scurrying to the wire to feed when necessary, indicating the nature of the attachment had to do with security, rather than satisfying hunger (Hrdy, 1999).


Bowlby’s associate, Mary Ainsworth, went on to conduct a seminal research study that deepened our understanding of human attachment. In Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Experiment, a one-way mirror was positioned such that developmental psychologists could view the interaction between a mother, child and stranger. In the experiment, participants, namely a mother and baby, are playing in a room when a female stranger joins them. After some time, the mother leaves the baby alone in the room with the stranger, then later returns and reunites with the baby. After witnessing these interactions, psychologists discovered children either had secure or insecure attachment, and broke these patterns into four main categories.


If a human infant feels very connected and secure in their relationship with a primary caregiver, in this case a mother, the child can tolerate the distance, and might not even notice the mother has left the room (Hrdy, 1999). In this secure attachment style, the infant will light up when their mother finally reenters the space, despite having little distress over her absence. Other infants were found to have an insecure attachment style and might be distressed before the mother even left the room, escalating further after the mother exited. Some infants failed to look at their mother or avoided her all together upon her return. How the infant tolerated the distance and the separation from the mother, as well as the reunion, helped to determine the attachment style.


These different responses to the Strange Situation Experiment were broken down into patterns and labeled as secure or insecure attachments. Within insecure attachments, one group was defined as insecure/ambivalent, ie hesitant to trust their mother. These infants were distressed when she left and not necessarily comforted by her return (Hrdy, 1999). Other infants were labeled as insecure/avoidant; these infants were seemingly unbothered by the separation and avoided their mother on her return (Hrdy, 1999). Mary Main, Ainsworth’s former student, went on to define a third category of insecure attachment—disorganized, where the infant upon the mother’s return seemed confused, both wanting the mother and avoiding her (Hrdy, 1999). Mary Main determined this was often the case in an abusive dynamic, where an infant was both seeking security and afraid of the mother, creating internal conflict and confusion. Separated babies have been shown to have higher levels of cortisol and faster heartbeat rhythms (Hrdy, 1999). As the studies progressed to be able to measure biological markers of stress, researchers began to understand that an infant’s ability to tolerate separation from a mother, and the level of distress caused by separation, had to do with how secure the child/parent bond had been prior to the separation.


Attachment theory demonstrates the centrality of relationship and connection between a primary care giver and an infant. The neuroplasticity of the brain through rhythmic and predictable sensory input overtime can help us to move towards earning a secure attachment, even later in life in our adult relationships (Perry &Winfrey, 2021). We are hurt in relationship with others and we can heal in relationship with others. As psychotherapist Carl Rogers, founder of person-centered psychotherapy, posits: the relationship in therapy is the vehicle for change.


Secure attachment is earned through consistency and can tolerate both attachment and detachment. We can optimize healthy, connected relationships through practices that activate engagement, presence and attunement. As we connect in with another adult who is calm, safe and regulated, we ourselves can become more regulated. We can learn to trust that other safe adults will be there for us, whether we are in the same room as them or haven’t seen them in weeks. Sometimes starting with a person is too hard, and an animal is easier. Often we don’t have the same neuropatterning associated with animals that we do other humans (Jobe, et al, 2021). As we learn to lean into connection in relationship, we build the scaffolding in our brain to be able to eventually trust other humans as well.


Understanding our basic attachment style can help us to illuminate patterns of behavior in relationship with others as we work towards earning a secure attachment. For more information on your own attachment style and a free brief quiz on which style is dominant for you, check out the Attachment Project:

https://quiz.attachmentproject.com/

***note, the percentages of each attachment style noted in the video above have changed as the research has grown on this subject. I realized after recording that I had some outdated research on the exact number of the percentages of each type of attachment style. For more information check out the references below.

References:

Ainsworth, MD, Bell, SM.(1970). Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation. Child Development, 41(1), 49-67.

Bakermans-kranenburg, M. & van IJzendoorn, M. (2009). The first 10,000 Adult Attachment Interviews: Distributions of adult attachment representations in clinical and non-clinical groups. Attachment & human development. 11. 223-63. 10.1080/14616730902814762.

Birch, J. (2018). Knowing your ‘Attachment Style’ Could Make you a Smarter Dater. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2018/08/16/knowing-your-attachment-style-could-make-you-a-smarter-dater/

Bowlby, J.(1982). Attachment and Loss: Volume 1 Attachment. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books

Cassidy, J. & Shaver, P. R. (2008). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.

Center on the Developing Child (2007). The Science of Early Childhood Development (InBrief). Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.

Cozolino, Louis. The neuroscience of human relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). WW Norton & Company, 2014.

Jobe, T., Shultz-Jobe, B., McFarland, L. & Naylor, K. (2021). Natural Lifemanship’s Trauma-
Focused Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (TF-EAP) and Trauma Informed Equine Assisted Learning (TI-EAL). Liberty Hill: Natural Lifemanship.

Hrdy, S. (1999). “Meeting the Eyes of Love.” In Mother nature: maternal instincts and. How they shape the human species. Ballantine Books, NY. (394-407).

Perry, B. D. and Szalavitz, M. (2006). The boy who was raised as a dog and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook: What traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing. New York: Basic Books.

Perry, B. D. and Winfrey, O. (2021). What happened to you? Conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing. New York: Flatiron Books.

Perry, Bruce D., and Erin P. Hambrick. "The neurosequential model of therapeutics." Reclaiming children and youth 17.3 (2008): 38.

Stern, J., Barbarin, O. & Cassidy, J. (2021) Working toward anti-racist perspectives in attachment theory, research, and practice, Attachment & Human Development, DOI: 10.1080/14616734.2021.1976933

Teicher, M. H., Andersen, S. L., Polcari, A., Anderson, C. M., Navalta, C. P., & Kim, D. M. (2003). The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 27(1), 33-44.