Attachment Styles: the good, the bad, the ugly

Embrace your emotional blueprint, and press override when you need to…

Once upon a time when I was about 11, I ran out of books to read. The only books left that I hadn’t devoured were my mother’s Russian literature, and the A-Z of Common Ailments - a preposterously big tome that could have landed me in A & E if I had dropped it on my foot. I dove into this cornucopia of medical delights with surprising enthusiasm.?

By the time I got to B, I had convinced myself I had a whole raft of mysterious and possibly life-changing diseases beginning with A… hitherto undiagnosed but I sensed their presence…When I explained to my mum that I thought, probably, I had Addison’s disease and many other ailments from the A section she found it highly amusing.?

Similarly, when it comes to attachment styles, I’ve often found myself identifying with more than one. Like a little butterfly, I’ve hovered from one to the other, and eventually - emitting a very big mouth raspberry - I’ve left my perusing, and gone off and lived my life.?In fact, if truth be told, I perambulated the globe, chalking up relationship disasters in nearly every continent, until I finally confronted my patterns, kicked them into touch, and met and married my gorgeous husband.

What Are Attachment Styles, Anyway?

They’re quick-n-easy descriptors of the connection and relationship patterns that develop early in life and shape how we connect with others throughout our lives. Based on a nature and nurture mix, they’re heavily influenced by the interactions we have with our caregivers during infancy and childhood. They are important to get our head around because they lay the foundation for how we perceive and respond to intimacy, trust, and emotional support as adults.

There are roughly four attachment styles… secure attachment - the holy grail of attachment bonding - and three different flavours of insecure attachment: anxious, avoidant and fearful avoidant.?

Like anything, if you scrutinise them enough you’ll eventually find some element in each of them that applies to you, since we’re all a lot more similar than we often care to acknowledge, but overall there’s probably one attachment style that you recognise in yourself more than any other.?

Although they make up part of our emotional blueprint, forged in childhood, our attachment styles are not an immutable part of our character. By understanding them we can better understand ourselves, our triggers, our reactions and consciously choose to override them where appropriate, and implement better thought processes.

Two points I would like you to clutch to your heart…in duality.

1. Attachment styles do matter… Understanding the way we bond with others can unlock a lot of mysteries and open the door to more stable connections. (If you’re on a roll, check out my Substack about patterns where I write about attachment styles and our destiny to repeat them ad nauseum until we break the cycle.)

If we don’t get our head around our attachment style - and the patterns we operate from - then we’re likely to end up in repeated relationship disaster cycles. When we emotionally invest time after time, we can start to lose a bit of ourselves… Perhaps our ability to securely attach is a bit like a plaster (an Elastoplast if you’re American), and if you keep ripping it off time after time, eventually it starts to lose its stick.?

2. What we focus on grows…We might think we’re “doing some worthy inner work” but if we are laser-focused on the study of love and attachment styles, then this pursuit in and of itself can be merely academic. It can even be used, as can any rationalising/intellectualising process, as a buttress against actually getting out there, baring your raw beating heart and trying to attach to another in the best way you know how. (Erm… and this can be especially true if you have some avoidant attachment going on!)

Phew, with all caveats outlined, I can now proceed…

Oh, oops…there’s a third very important point.?

3. You are worthy! Whatever your attachment style, you are worthy of love and capable of loving. Right? Right. We all struggle with this a bit, it’s part of being human, but we have to work at it.?

Okay….off we go… let’s Dive into the Four Attachment Styles!?

The Worried Sparrow… (aka Anxious Attachment)

Most likely to think/say:?

• "I wish I knew if you really care about me."
• "I just want to feel secure in your love."
• "Sometimes I worry I’m not enough for you."
• "I hope I don’t lose you."
• "I always wonder if you’re thinking about me too."
• "I just want to be close to you and feel safe."
• "Why do I always feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop?"
• "I miss you even when you’re right here with me."
• "I can’t help but think about all the what-ifs."
• “Meep meep, I’m too frightened to fly… and how will I find a mate?” (??This last one comes from a book called The Worried Sparrow https://amzn.to/4f1A3ea I can still remember my lovely mum reading this to me.).

I also call this attachment style, “the preoccupied heart”, because it’s known as preoccupied or anxious-ambivalent in childhood, and it’s a poignant tale of longing and vulnerability. Like the little worried sparrow, who worries about e v e r y t h i n g, people with this attachment style often experienced a childhood where their caregivers were inconsistent—sometimes present and nurturing, other times absent or unavailable. This unpredictable caregiving creates a deep-seated fear of abandonment. Like everything it’s present by degrees… it’s not always that your parents were the most neglectful non-caring monsters, or divorced, or posted overseas, sometimes even simply being ‘lost’ in the hurly burly of a big family can create this pattern in a sensitive heart.?

Worried sparrows literally crave intimacy and validation and often feel insecure about their relationships. This attachment style is rooted in an intense fear of being unloved or abandoned, and manifests in two common patterns:?

• Clingy: Doubt and fear mean they tend to worry excessively about a partner's love and commitment, often becoming clingy and with a tendency to slide into co-dependency. Their perpetual pursuit of reassurance can be tiring for a partner - resulting in them distancing themselves, which makes the worried sparrow meep and cheep and feel like the world has come to an end.?
• Up and down: their emotional world is a rollercoaster - they feel intense joy when reassured and profound anxiety when they perceive a threat to the relationship.

The story: I am not safe; I could be abandoned or unloved at any point.

The healing balm: Empathy and consistent reassurance can help soothe the worried sparrow, creating a more secure and trusting bond. And SELF-SOOTHING is also totally an option! The aim is to build self-esteem and trust, enabling the lovable worriers to create a more stable emotional environment.

“Do you love me?” I occasionally say this to my husband, as a quasi-joke… with a little bit of a self-indulgent smile on my face. He often tells me he loves me, which I love. And sometimes I just feel like making him say it again… I literally THANK GOD that I didn’t pick an avoidant man!?

To read the rest of this article for free, please hop over to my Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/naomisnelling/p/attachment-styles-the-good-the-bad?r=sljyi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true