How to Heal Trauma By Understanding Your Attachment Style

Mental health awareness highlights how secure attachment is the ideal model for any healthy relationship. Your earliest attachments with parents or caregivers shape your abilities and expectations for relationships throughout life. Your first relationships impact how your sense of self develops, and how you see relationships working.

From infancy, you begin to learn if you can depend on important people to keep you safe — or not. Attachment helps you learn how to manage your emotions – that you will always have support. Learning how to feel lovable as-is or struggling to cope with emotional pain if you don’t feel accepted may stem from your earliest attachments. If your bond is secure, your nervous system learns what it feels like to be in a relationship that gets primary importance and feels safe and stable.

Secure attachment teaches your nervous system how to regulate – by understanding what healthy consistent behavior and relationships are. You can learn that you are never alone and can weather any storm of emotions.

Your first relationships may teach you how to create a safe zone with someone to make sense of yourself and your emotions. On the other hand, you may learn you cannot trust a relationship to be a safe place to ask for what you need. In your relationships, you discover how much you can depend on someone close to soothe you or scare you, see you or shame you.

We have learned a lot from studies of babies and children that people grow up feeling different degrees of safety, acceptance and security in their first attachments. Over the years, researchers have given different names to describe different types of attachment, and the outcomes for people who experience them.

We now use categories for different degrees of emotional security in relationships. We call them attachment styles. Learning about them can help you understand yourself and your experiences in relationships better.

Here we will focus on four different attachment styles, how they form, and how they can change. I hope this will help you begin to identify and understand your own thoughts and feelings in relationships.

Learn more about the four attachment styles, where they come from, and how to heal based off of them by reading our full blog here.