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Attachment styles and relationships

by |Published
Here at the San Francisco Counseling Center, we’ve decided to explore the subject of attachment in a series of blog posts. Our attachment style plays an important role in how we navigate socially and form and maintain relationships. Our attachment style primarily comes from our upbringing and how our caregivers responded to our needs. These early experiences can create a template of how we view relationships and how comfortable we feel within them. We can feel securely attached in relationships allowing us to seek out closeness and feel confident in our connection with others. Another attachment style can be withdrawing and avoiding close connections with others causing closeness to feel uncomfortable to us and driving us to distance ourselves from those we care about. We can also approach attachment to others in yet another way in which we worry about our connections to those we care about and often desire more closeness than our loved ones might. 

In our work as therapists, we see struggles around attachment emerge in all types of relationships. Typically, each person brings one of these types of attachment styles into relationships and these styles can compliment one another or the opposite- cause an increased amount of difficulty or anxiety for each respective individual. For example, in a relationship in which one member of a couple travels often for work, the couples’ attachment styles can create conflicts in that one person may desire more contact during the seperation than the other. In conflicts such as these people can come to blame themselves or their partners for their varying levels of needs. People come to us often having damaging and harmful words ascribed to them including things like withdrawn, unavailable, codependent or needy.

 

Our style of attachment does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. In fact, our desire for closeness and our relationship to it is what likely served our early ancestors very well. It would have given us an evolutionary edge to know how to be closely bonded to a few select members of our tribe. In our modern day world, what can help us navigate this is an awareness of what type of attachment style we tend to exhibit. For example, if you are someone who can be more avoidant, the knowledge that you might distance yourself when closeness feels a little scary can help you to approach this in a different way and find comfortable ways of relating. Our attachment style also does not necessarily have to be set throughout our lives. Through awareness and within the context of important relationships (the therapeutic relationship being one of them), we can learn to become more securely attached and begin to have more fulfilling relationships. Stay tuned for more blog posts about dating and attachment and technology’s effect on attachment in relationships.

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