The earliest research on adult attachment involved studying
the association between individual differences in adult attachment and the way
people think about their relationships and their memories for what their
relationships with their parents are like. Hazan and Shaver developed a simple
questionnaire to measure these individual differences. These individual
differences are often referred to as attachment styles, attachment
patterns, attachment orientations, or differences in the
organization of the attachment system. In short, Hazan and Shaver asked
research subjects to read the three paragraphs listed below, and indicate which
paragraph best characterized the way they think, feel, and behave in close
relationships:
A. I am somewhat uncomfortable
being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult
to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and
often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being.
B. I find it relatively easy to get
close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on
me. I don't worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to
me.
C. I find that others are reluctant
to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really
love me or won't want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner,
and this sometimes scares people away.
Based on this three-category measure, Hazan and Shaver found
that the distribution of categories was similar to that observed in infancy. In
other words, about 60% of adults classified themselves as secure (paragraph B),
about 20% described themselves as avoidant (paragraph A), and about 20%
described themselves as anxious-resistant (paragraph C).
Attachment Styles
When we fall in love as an adult, the style of attachment
formed as an infant influences how we treat our romantic partners.
Secure Attachment
People who formed a secure attachment to their caregivers tend to form a similar
secure attachment to the
person they love. As adults, they usually have trusting, more satisfying and
longer lasting relationships. Secure individuals
are comfortable being close to their partners. They are comfortable
having someone depend on them just as they are comfortable being dependent on
another individual. Being more trusting, open, and understanding, they
approach problems and issues that may arise with their partners in a
constructive manner.
Other key characteristics of securely attached individuals
include having high self-esteem, enjoying intimate relationships, seeking out
social support, and an ability to share feelings with other people.
In several studies, researchers found that women with a
secure attachment style had more positive feelings about their adult romantic
relationships than other women with insecure attachment styles.
Anxious Attachment
People who formed an anxious or preoccupied attachment
as an infant, by comparison, are more likely to be preoccupied with their
relationships as an adult. Anxious or preoccupied adults are constantly
worried and anxious about their love life - they crave and desperately need
intimacy - but, they never stop questioning their partner’s love (“do you
really love me?”). Anxious individuals
are concerned that their partners will leave them. These adults are
obsessed with their relationships and everything that happens in them.
They rarely feel completely loved and they experience extreme emotional highs
and lows. One minute their romantic partner can make their day by showing
them the smallest level of interest and the next minute they are worried that
their partner doesn't care about them.
Overall, anxiously attached
individuals are hard to satisfy; you can’t love them enough, or be close enough
to them, and they constantly monitor their relationships for problems. Ironically, their need for love makes it easy for anxious individuals to be taken advantage of when it comes to
love and romance, which in the long run can create even more suspicion and
doubt.
Dismissing Attachment
Finally, people who had a dismissing (or avoidant) style of attachment as an infant are
likely to form a dismissing attachment
to their romantic partners. As adults, dismissing individuals are uncomfortable with intimacy and
close relationships - they actually fear it. They do not like it when
people get close, and they don’t like being dependent on a partner or having
someone be dependent on them. Dismissing individuals tend not to trust others, and they are
more self-sufficient, cynical, and independent in nature. They are less
likely to fall deeply in love and need a lot less affection and intimacy. They
do not invest much emotion in relationships and experience little distress when
a relationship ends. Dismissing individuals
are more apt to put their time into their careers, hobbies, and activities than
their relationships. They often avoid intimacy by using excuses (such as
long work hours), or may fantasize about other people during sex. They also get
easily annoyed with their relational partners and often display negative
feelings and hostility toward their loved ones.
Research has also shown that adults with an avoidant
attachment style are more accepting and likely to engage in casual sex. Other
common characteristics include a failure to support partners during stressful
times and an inability to share feelings, thoughts and emotions with partners.
Disorganized Attachment
The adult with a disorganized pattern of attachment has
difficulty viewing others without significant distortions. As children they had
parents who were frightening. Often they have experienced chronic early
maltreatment within a caregiving relationship and may be described as having significant
dysfunction in their capacity to form emotionally meaningful relationships and
attachments. Many people with personality disorders, such as borderline
personality disorder, have a disorganized state of mind with respect to
attachment. During discussions of loss or abuse, these
individuals show a striking lapse in the monitoring of reasoning or discourse.
For example, the individual may briefly indicate a belief that a dead person is
still alive in the physical sense or that this person was killed by a childhood
thought. Individuals may lapse into prolonged silence or eulogistic speech.
Their relationships tend to be volatile.
Main and Solomon (1986) proposed that inconsistent behavior
on the part of parents might be a contributing factor in this style of
attachment. In later research, Main and Hesse (1990) argued that parents who
act as figures of both fear and reassurance to a child contribute to a disorganized
attachment style. Because the child feels both comforted and frightened by the
parent, confusion results.
Can you Change your
Attachment Style?
Can adults with insecure attachments develop a more positive
view of themselves and change the long-term interactive patterns they
demonstrate in relationships? Since these patterns have existed since
childhood and are deeply embedded in their unconscious beliefs and neurological
pathways change is not easy, but certainly possible. Change can come
about in a number of ways.
Some adults, despite their insecure attachments, may engage
with a partner who is able to accept and understand their insecurities, not
respond in negative ways and over time repair the damage from the early
childhood relationships. In time the positive experience in the adult
relationship overrides the early belief that intimate relationships are not
trustworthy and safe.
Although such a positive experience can occur, most adults
with insecure attachments will need to enter therapy to change their beliefs
about and patterns in relationships. They will need to develop a
relationship with a therapist who has knowledge about Attachment Theory, who
will understand their attachment patterns in relationships and allow this
pattern to develop in the therapeutic relationship. Over time the therapist
will need to help the adult client/patient to develop insight into
himself/herself, work through his or her losses and hurts from childhood and
risk change in both the therapeutic relationship and natural intimate
relationships.
The insecure person may have to mourn for what they did not
receive from their parents as a young child. Longing for the early nurturing
and closeness is a normal feeling but must be understood and resolved in order
to develop a secure and realistic adult relationship. This can be a painful stage
in the therapy and it is important that the therapist allow for the sadness to
be supported until the mourning process is complete. Without the
resolution of this longing, individual adults will seek what they missed as a
child in an adult relationship, when this is no longer appropriate.
Adult relationships differ from infant/child relationships
in that they are mutually interactive. In parent/infant relationships the
parent is the giver, not expecting the child to meet their adult needs.
Each individual in an adult relationship must be both a giver and receiver. At
times in an adult relationship one partner may be more stressed and in greater
need of support, requiring the other partner to be more nurturing and giving.
At other times of stress, the other partner may be more the recipient of the
support and nurturing. It is this mutual give and take with understanding and
the capacity to receive less for a period of time, which characterizes healthy
adult attachment relationships.
Redeveloping a secure adult attachment is possible and
essential if one is going to be a healthy parent, develop satisfying intimate
relationships and have self-awareness and a feeling of self-worth. There is
good evidence that if a mother has an insecure adult attachment she will have
an insecurely attached child. Individuals who have mutually
satisfying marriages and partnerships have secure attachments, whether from
good childhood experiences or resolving poor early childhood experiences.
Individuals with secure attachments have self-awareness, are able to accept
differences in others and have a positive view of themselves and of
relationships. Redeveloping a secure adult attachment is possible through
Attachment Focused Therapy and worth the effort and pain required to achieve
this.
Sources and Additional
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