What Your Attachment Style Says About Your Relational Needs
Your relationships have a powerful influence on your well-being physically, emotionally, and mentally.
Having emotionally safe and attuned relationships is a basic human need that is required for living a healthy and joy-filled life.
Attachment offers us a source of resiliency in times of difficulty and the support to take healthy risks in life. When we are in an unhappy relationship, we feel the effects on an emotional AND physical level. People in stressful or toxic relationships are more vulnerable to experiencing high blood pressure and serious medical conditions, such as heart disease.
Relationships take many forms and not all of us experience this need for attachment in the same way. For some, we may prefer a degree of emotional distance, while others may prefer extreme closeness to our significant others. This has to do with the attachment styles we have learned throughout our lives.
If you are experiencing ongoing conflict in your relationship, your differing attachment styles and relational needs may be at the root of the issue!
Whether you are dating and searching for your lifelong partner, or are married and trying to strengthen your bond, knowing your attachment style helps you communicate your relational needs and identify the people in your life who are able to satisfy those needs.
The 4 Attachment Styles
Understanding your attachment style affects the quality of your relationship
The way we connect with people in our lives goes all the way back to our days of infancy when we learned what to expect from our relationships. The attachment pattern we developed as a child serves as a lens through which we experience other close relationships throughout our lives. The more an attachment figure is caring and responsive to us, the more we develop a sense of secure attachment.
As I lay out the several attachment patterns, keep in mind that your attachment pattern is yourstyleof relating. It is notwhoyou are and it is not indicative of how you will always relate. These attachment patterns can change over time.
Secure Attachment—
A securely attached person experienced their caregivers as accessible, attentive, and responsive. As children, they felt safe, loved, and free to explore and regulate their emotions.
Unlike the insecure forms of attachment, securely attached people desire and pursue close relationships while still maintaining a sense of autonomy.
Securely attached people tend to…
-Be emotionally responsive and available
-Be reliable and consistent
-Feel comfortable with expressing feelings to their partner
-Feel comfortable with emotional intimacy
Anxious Attachment—
An anxiously attached person had a caregiver who was often pre-occupied with their own anxieties or stressors. As children, they sought out love and feared that they could lose that love at any moment.
Anxiously attached people tend to…
-Experience intense concerns about their partner’s love for them
-Be preoccupied with the relationship
-Have a strong desire for closeness
-Frequently wonder if their partner considers them valuable
Avoidant Attachment—
Avoidantly attached people learned as children that their caregiver was not going to be reliable in meeting their needs, so they learned to rely on themselves.
Avoidantly attached people tend to…
-Feel unsafe opening themselves up to others
-Prefer self-reliance
-Search for little “problems” with their partner as an excuse to maintain emotional distance
-Feel emotionally threatened and engulfed by their partner’s emotions
-Push others away
Disorganized Attachment—
A person with disorganized attachment had experiences as a child where they both desired and feared closeness to their caregivers. This is common in children who experienced abusive or neglectful caregivers.
People with disorganized attachment tend to…
-View themselves and others negatively
-Both fear and desire love deeply
-Have low self-confidence
-Are more susceptible to destructive and abusive relationships
Each attachment pattern is born out of our life experiences. If you have experienced relational trauma or painful relationships that make intimacy difficult, know that it does not have to always be this way. Offer yourself compassion.
These wounds run deep, but they do not have to be the end of your story.
You are worthy of love, and healing is possible.
Uncover Your Relational Needs
Secure Attachment Needs—
A person with a secure attachment approaches relationships with a “go with the flow” attitude. They are comfortable with intimacy and neither fear losing or approaching it.
I will not spend much time on the needs of a securely attached person because, for the most part, they have had consistent experiences throughout their lives of others meeting their emotional needs.
Relational needs of securely attached people include…
-Respect for their individuality
-Interdependence within a relationship
Anxious Attachment Needs—
A person with an anxious attachment style has a hyperactive attachment system, which searches for any sign that their relationship is being threatened. To return to a state of calm, this attachment system requires reassurance from their partner that the relationship is safe.
The more the anxiously attached person does not receive reassurance, the more aggressive the attachment system becomes. This is when we see dysfunctional protest behaviors such as picking fights, manipulation, crying, or extreme anger. Beneath all these protest behaviors is an attempt to feel heard and loved. While the behavior is dysfunctional, the need beneath that behavior is functional.
Relational needs of anxiously attached people include…
-Knowing that your partner is consistently available and accessible to you
-Frequent affirmation of the relationship bond
-Feeling heard by your partner through validation, empathy, and emotional presence
-Feeling that you can trust your partner
If you identify as someone with an anxious attachment style, here are a few things you can do to support the quality of your relationship:
-Learn to express your needs. You will not truly be happy in a relationship until your needs are met, and your partner is not a mind-reader!
-Take your time before jumping into relationships. Give yourself a chance to get to know the other person and see if they can meet your relational needs.
-When your fear begins to take over, recognize these negative thoughts early and explain them to your partner. This offers your partner a chance to respond to you with reassurance, which will strengthen your relationship.
TIP #1
If you are in a relationship with someone who is anxiously attached, one of the best things you can do is offer this reassurance to your partner consistently so that they can learn to trust you and the relationship.
Avoidant Attachment Needs
Avoidantly attached people crave independence in a relationship and avoid getting too close to people out of fear of losing this independence. When their need for independence feels threatened, they may even use deactivating strategies to keep their partner at an arm’s length.
Examples of deactivating strategies include:
-Focusing on small imperfections in their partner,
-Avoiding commitment,
-Pulling way when things are going well,
-Keeping secrets and being unclear in their communication, and
-Not expressing their feelings.
Relational needs of avoidantly attached people include…
-Space—to have the space in their life to exercise their independence. This may mean doing hobbies apart from their partner or having alone time.
-Privacy—to have the autonomy to choose what they share with their partner when it comes to their feelings, thoughts, or plans.
If you identify as someone with an avoidant attachment style, here are a few things you can do to support the quality of your relationship:
-Focus on positive qualities in your partner
-Practice straightforward communication about your needs
-Practice reading between the lines and picking up on emotional cues in your partner
TIP #2
If you are an avoidantly attached person in a relationship with an anxiously attached person, your relationship probably feels like an emotional roller-coaster. Your partner’s anxiety may trigger your fear of losing autonomy. Unless each partner learns to respond to the emotional needs of the other person, dismissiveness and pain remain common experiences in the relationship.
Expect your partner to question you about your need for space until they become more secure and have learned to trust. Until your partner has learned to trust, you will need to be consistently transparent and trustworthy. This helps your partner respect your need for space without taking it personally.
Disorganized Attachment Needs
People with this attachment style have deep unmet needs and are terrified of both abandonment and losing themselves in the other person. They both love and fear deeply.
Relational needs of people with a disorganized attachment style include…
-Stability- to have enough consistency in the relationship that they feel safe. They need their partner to be emotionally consistent, predictable, and a place of comfort and safety. This helps them learn to trust love and release fear.
-Patience- because they often experience trauma responses (fight/ flight/ freeze), they need the time and space to feel safe and trust the love in the relationship.
If you identify as someone with a disorganized attachment style, here are a few things you can do to support the quality of your relationship:
-Develop regulation skills that will help you return to a state of calm when you are having a trauma response
-Seek support in therapy from a trauma-informed therapist who can help you heal your relational trauma so that you can have healthy and emotionally safe relationships.
-Ask your partner to spend some time educating themselves on trauma so that they can learn how to better support you.
TIP #3
Develop a list of regulating activities that you and your partner can do together when you feel triggered. Learning to co-regulate with your partner will support the felt sense of safety in the relationship. Examples may include massage, brushing your hair, going for a walk, or holding your hand.
Relational Needs Offer Paths for Healing
Strengthening the most significant relationship in your life will be the most healing intervention you can experience. It is not because your partner is a great problem-solver or has a great deal of strength. They will help you heal simply because having an attuned and responsive relationship IS healing.
Being able to respond to your partner’s emotional needs lies at the core of an attuned and responsive relationship.
The more you lean into each other’s emotional needs, the more stable, healthy, and connected your relationship will be.
Remember, you are worthy of love, and healing is for YOU, too.
Sources:
Bowlby, J., 1982. Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation: Anxiety and Anger. Basic Books; New York.
Fraley, C. (2018). Adult attachment theory and research. Retrieved from http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
Levine, A. (2019). Attached- The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YouFind – and Keep – Love. Bluebird.
