Adult Attachment Styles: How to Know Your Attachment Style

Who are you in your relationships? Each individual has a different way they inhabit and express themselves in their relationships. A variety of factors influence this style, including formative past experiences. Adult attachment styles are an important way to discuss how people form and maintain their relationships, and help understand how to nurture healthier relationships.

When you understand yourself better, you can discern the patterns, challenges, and areas that require change and growth in your relationships. Your attachment style plays a significant role in your relationships, and understanding the style that best captures your relationship patterns can be a game-changer for you.

Attachment Styles in Brief

What is an attachment style? One way to break down this important concept is to say that it is the set of relational and emotional patterns that you develop and use in your interactions and relationships with others. The attachment pattern that best maps out your behaviors functions like an unconscious template that governs how you relate to others as an adult.

Your particular attachment style is primarily developed in your childhood. It developed based on how safe and connected you felt with your primary caregivers. Whatever pattern you enter into adulthood with isn’t permanent. This is important to note because the alternative would lead to despair. Thankfully, you can change things, even those set in place during your childhood.

Your attachment style influences how you deal with conflict, how you love others, how you receive love, and how you handle intimacy and independence from others. The different attachment styles will be explored further shortly.

The Different Attachment Styles

There are four types of attachment styles, all of which play a role in how we communicate, connect with others, and respond to intimacy. These attachment styles, including brief descriptions of them as well as how they might impact relationships, are as follows:

Secure attachment This form of attachment most often develops in childhood when a child’s caregivers are loving, consistent, physically present, and emotionally available. When the child expresses their needs, whether it’s for food, comfort, attention, or play, the needs are consistently met. As a result, the child carries the expectation that it’s okay to express needs, and those needs will be met.

An adult with secure attachment style will typically be comfortable with both independence and intimacy. They can trust others with themselves, and because they can share their emotions and thoughts as well as emotionally regulate themselves, they can communicate and manage conflict well. They can receive and give love in a balanced and healthy way.

The impact this sort of attachment style has on relationships is that those relationships will likely be stable, nurturing, and balanced. These are the sorts of relationships where both freedom and closeness are appreciated.

Avoidant (dismissive) attachment One of the insecure forms of attachment is avoidant attachment. This form of attachment most often develops in situations where a child’s caregivers are critical, emotionally distant, or unavailable. The child learns to depend on themselves and not on others, as others may not reliably meet their needs.

When an adult has an avoidant attachment style, they will often be quite self-reliant, and they may feel uncomfortable being emotionally intimate with others. Instead, they’ll tend to suppress their emotions. In times of stress, their default may be to distance themselves from others.

In a relationship, an avoidant adult will often engage in emotionally shallow relationships, avoiding deeper connections with and reliance on others. The avoidant partner may disconnect easily from their partner, and their partner, in turn, can feel shut out.

Anxious (preoccupied) attachment A second form of insecure attachment is anxious attachment. When a parent or caregiver is inconsistent with their care, that can result in this form of attachment. When the caregiver is sometimes distant but sometimes attentive and present, this can leave the child feeling uncertain about their position and security.

For the adult with anxious attachment, they may crave to be close to others. This, incidentally, distinguishes them from the avoidant attachment style. While craving closeness and reassurance, the anxious partner also fears being abandoned. They are highly sensitive to changes in their partner’s mood or behavior and can easily interpret actions as rejection or a prelude to abandonment.

The impact this attachment style could have on relationships includes excessive clinginess to one’s partner. The anxious partner may also tend to overthink. They navigate emotional highs and lows as they draw near, then withdraw as they experience what feels like rejection.

They may require excessive reassurances, even testing their partner’s affections and commitment, which can derail things.

Disorganized (fearful-avoidant) attachment The last major type of attachment style is the disorganized attachment style. The individuals who have this style of attachment often developed in an environment where there was neglect, abuse, or trauma. In those settings, their caregiver may have functioned as a source of both fear and of comfort.

When an adult has a disorganized form of attachment, they will often experience and express their inner conflict. They may desire closeness or intimacy, but they also fear being vulnerable. This can result in a pendulum swing from withdrawing, on the one hand, to seeking intimacy, on the other, without rhyme or reason.

In a relationship, the disorganized attachment style may lead to unstable or unpredictable bonds. There will often be confusion and mistrust in the relationship, leading to a lot of unintended hurt.

These main attachment styles are broad descriptions of how people relate to others in relationships and the patterns they follow. A given individual may have elements of the different styles and relate differently to others depending on the person they are in a relationship with. These attachment styles will often be defaults that a person reverts to, particularly in times of stress or conflict.

How to Move Toward Healthier Relationships

Take the time to acknowledge and discern your attachment style. Set aside your ideas and intentions in your relationships, and honestly examine how you act in relationships. When your partner doesn’t text you back immediately, what goes through your mind? Are you okay with the silence, or do you start to fill the gaps with ideas about what the silence means? Is your default to resist sharing your thoughts and feelings?

The way to move toward healthier relationships involves growing in self-awareness of your relationship patterns. Your childhood experiences may be influential, but they aren’t definitive or a final word on where your story will end. Growth is possible, and it requires emotional and spiritual work.

Take some time to consider your childhood and how you tend to respond to others in relationships today. Ask the Holy Spirit to unearth the patterns in your life, and the patterns your heart tends to default to. Other steps include the following:

Seek supportive, healthy relationships Nurturing healthy connections with friends, mentors, family, and partners who display emotional maturity and health is essential. These are people who aren’t emotionally reactive, who can freely share their feelings and thoughts with others (not as a way to manipulate or control them), and who handle conflict well. When you learn to be vulnerable in the right environment, that can result in growth.

Share yourself openly and honestly You can, in those safe and supportive relationships, practice expressing your needs and feelings without fear or defensiveness. When you share yourself openly, and you receive empathy and understanding, it builds secure bonds and promotes better dialogue in the relationship.

Seek healing from the Lord Your past can define you if you let it. Where does your help, ultimate security, and identity come from? That security, sense of self, ought to be rooted in the Lord. He will never abandon or forsake you (Psalm 27:10), and He is the only unchanging reality that you can build your entire life upon. Allow Him to redefine your sense of worth, as well as your sense of security.

Consider professional counseling Professional Christian counseling can be profoundly helpful in understanding secure attachment patterns and moving toward healthier relationships. Your counselor can help you explore Scripture as well as cognitive and therapeutic strategies that help you overcome unhealthy patterns. With that kind of help, you can cultivate more secure attachment patterns in your relationships.

When you embark upon your journey, be patient with yourself. The patterns of relating that you default to were formed over time; they are familiar and comfortable, even when they aren’t helpful. Not only should you be patient with yourself, but you should also take opportunities to celebrate even small steps toward intimacy, trust, healthy independence, and learning mutual respect in your relationships.

You can have healthy relationships, and a healthy, secure attachment style that undergirds such relationships. It’s possible to experience wholeness, safety, trust, and joy in your relationships, as the Lord intended. If you need help with relationships, reach out and connect with a Christian counselor near you or on this site.