How to leverage your attachment style to cultivate self-love
When I was first dating my husband Mark, we would spend almost every weekend together, hanging out until Monday morning, when we’d go our separate ways for the work week.
As Mark and I got deeper into our relationship, I noticed something shift. For most of the weekend, we would have a fantastic time together, and everything felt fun and easy. But by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around, I would start to get really annoyed with him. All his jokes would sound stupid to me. More and more, I felt like we were out of alignment with our sense of humor, not to mention our values. I started to come up with other reasons why he wasn’t an ideal partner for me.
All of my reasoning felt true and real.
In the meantime, I’d been working as a therapist for more than five years and was consciously creating the life I wanted, so I had some self-awareness. One Sunday, as I was forcing myself not to pick a fight with Mark, it hit me: I was doing with him what I’d witnessed my parents do with each other when I was a kid.
In other words, I was reacting to Mark in keeping with an attachment style I’d learned during childhood.
What is attachment theory?
In a nutshell, attachment theory is all about how our childhood experiences with parents/caregivers impact our relationships later in life. It looks at what we learned to do, and how we learned to survive, in response to our unmet emotional needs as kids.
There’s a lot of literature out there on attachment styles, and some debate around the different types. For the purposes of this post, I’ll briefly describe the main attachment styles and how they work, which you can read more about here.
Attachment styles are not fixed
Before we get into the different attachment styles, I want to emphasize that attachment styles are not fixed. They represent states of being, or behaviors that kick in when our emotions run high, and/or when we’re triggered.
To put it another way, just as all of us have to cope with the voice of the negative mind, we also struggle with our go-to attachment style. At one time or another, all of us are triggered into one or more of the following states. Depending on the situation we’re in, we move into and out of these states.
The 5 main attachment styles*
Anxious attachment style is characterized by a fear of uncertainty. When someone or something pulls them into an anxious state, no amount of affection or reinforcement feels like enough. Sometimes people describe them as suffocating.
Avoidant attachment style centers on detachment. Though they can be charismatic and fun, they move a million miles away emotionally when they feel hurt. Their partners often feel like they’re in a one-sided relationship, because they often act fine on the outside but are cut off on the inside.
Anxious-avoidant attachment style represents living in an ambivalent state. They flip back and forth between dependence and independence. The people they want to be with tend to be the same people they’re too frightened to be close to.
Dismissive-avoidant attachment style sacrifices their internal life to function. They go through the motions of relationships but don’t reap the benefits of having emotional connections. This attachment style can be common among those who are taught to put their family’s needs above their own.
Secure attachment style can give and receive love without sacrificing their own needs. They’re not scared of disagreements, because they’re operating from a place of unconditional love. They can hold onto others' love whether or not the other person is expressing it.
How to leverage your attachment style
As nice as it would be to live in a constant state of secure attachment, this isn’t our goal. Instead, we want to be aware of our go-to attachment style(s), to understand what’s triggering it, and not to judge ourselves when we get into a triggered attachment state.
Ultimately, when we’re aware of and understand our state, it gets easier to accept it—and eventually shift it.
Here’s how this can look in practice, going back to the example with Mark and me.
When I felt myself getting triggered on Sunday afternoons and wanting to pick fights with Mark, I would take myself for walks, trying to figure out what was driving my emotional response to him.
I knew how much I loved Mark on Saturday. He probably couldn’t be that different on Sunday, could he? I figured it was probably me and the glasses I had on.
One day it hit me: I remembered how my parents would always get into a huge fight at the airport at the end of every family vacation. After having all this fun together and feeling really close, we were going back to a reality where my dad would work long hours and my mom would go back to the day-to-day of raising me and keeping everything together at home.
Instead of having the emotional awareness to realize that they were going to feel sad about that impending separation, my parents would argue. In other words, they avoided processing the emotions they were feeling because they didn’t have the tools to process them.
All these years later, I was doing the exact same thing with Mark: trying to avoid the sadness I felt about us going our separate ways on Monday morning by getting mad at him on Sunday.
Once I made that connection between my experience with my parents and my current behavior with Mark, it was so much easier to be gentle with myself for going into an avoidant attachment state.
I made a conscious decision not to judge myself for reacting as I did, or tell myself this wasn’t who I wanted to be, that I needed to do better.
Instead, I thought, “Well yeah, this emotional need wasn’t met when I was a kid. And now I’m having this awareness for the first time, and I want to stay close to Mark in a way that’s different from what I knew in childhood.”
In other words, I didn’t want to take my unresolved/unhealed emotional injuries out on Mark.
After I became aware of what was going on with me emotionally, and as I cultivated compassion for myself around those emotions, I was able to move closer to Mark on Sundays. Our intimacy and trust for each other grew deeper and deeper.
In other words, as I practiced meeting myself with love, I was able to evolve past what I witnessed in my parents’ relationship. In the process of meeting myself with love, it became so much easier, and soon felt totally natural, to meet Mark with love, to spend more time in a state of secure attachment with him.
* These attachment style descriptions are courtesy of The Attachment Project. Want to learn more about how to leverage your attachment style? I have just the course for you.
During my three-month group course, I’ll guide you to create your own unique formula to build, nurture, and sustain self-love. Click here to learn more!