Attached to attachment theory
Is it really the grand unifying theory of human psychology?
Before I started formally studying psychology, I was under the misapprehension I had a personality—silly me. I now realise I have a string of mood disorders.
‘Medical student syndrome’, a branch of hypochondria, is common for anyone studying life sciences. Most recently, I’ve gone deep on attachment theory, the most fashionable (and one of the most evidence-based) approaches to understanding the human psyche in recent decades.
It’s intrinsically millennial, inevitably social, and insists that the most important component of human psychology is our relationship to one another. Despite what the stoics and the dude-bros on YouTube will tell you, no man is an island. We can not grit our teeth and muster ourselves into well-being alone. Our entire template for understanding the world is how we were informed about relationships in our early years.
So I’ve been walking around lately with this uncomfortable feeling I can’t quite articulate. If I were a house, it would feel like something had come to life in the deep, dark basement. The rest of the house is running normally, but shit is going on down there. It is as if my imagination has turned on a forgotten light bulb and is swinging it around. Boxes of junk shudder in the light and shake off their dust.
I am ten when it happens. I have come to expect the bullying, and I do my best to clothe myself in the armour my parents and therapist insist will help me: ‘just ignore it’. The armour does nothing, it turns out. But in regional Queensland in the 90s, it’s the best armour money can buy.
It’s swimming lessons. There is a pool. An unsupervised locker room. And a bunch of boys who flick towels and leave red streaks across my bottom and thighs.
It’s not the event that is traumatic. It’s the moments after. I spent hours as an adult unpacking the responses when I complained to some of the adults in my life. Bottom line: I felt abandoned.
Psychologists figured out attachment theory by making babies cry.
They bring an eighteen-month-old and their mother into a room with toys. Then, a stranger arrives. The mother leaves. After a while, the mother returns.
Psychologists watch the baby’s response. It turns out that you can categorise the responses into four types.
Psychologists are fans of splitting things into lists and categories, and I don’t think the human imagination is as neat as we would like. Still, most couples counselling is based on the idea that your romantic relationships will be shaped by your earliest relationships with your parents. It’s been proven to have neurological, social, and emotional effects deep into adulthood.
It seems a natural extension to think early emotional templates equally weight your friendships and professional life.
The only times I’ve been in yelling arguments are with male friends or mentors. I have always felt more comfortable around women. But I crave and fear male intimacy. I don’t know how to crack it. My emotional resilience is lower around them. I want to be accepted by them but I also fear their gaze.
Can a straight line be drawn from the locker room when I was ten to my professional and personal relationships with grown men? Perhaps.
Sometimes referred to as fearful-avoidant, this style is marked by a lot of internal conflict. It is difficult to trust and there is an inability to regulate emotions. You can usually find the source in young relationships with trusted sources who were neglectful, confrontational, or harsh.
God, I clung to her like a lifeboat. Lucy: beautiful, free and joyful, and I became the cage to her bird. We loved each other and still do, but our dynamic would never succeed in the long term.
Lucy was my first ‘proper’ relationship. Once the heady mix of young love settled, we grew into one of couples' most common dysfunctional patterns.
I was anxious. I had an insatiable emotional hunger and would run away in fantasies of our lives together. Anxious styles usually come from caregiving situations where there is turbulence, the source of safe and unconditional love is inconsistent, or there is a lack of nurturing.
As the relationship grew, Lucy withdrew. Her retreat only made me more anxious. She drifted into the dismissive type. We couldn’t meet each other.
I don’t think a week has gone by in my professional life when I haven’t thought about quitting. When there is a big award (like now), a big commission, or any big opportunity, I try to convince myself I do not care.
I isolate myself, decide I am ambiguous about my ambitions, and do everything I can to provide emotional distance.
That’s the dismissive type, usually coming from a background where a key nurturing force was absent or unreliable. To survive, the child develops a central thesis on life: I don’t need anyone else. I can do it on my own.
Arts worker folks, think for a second about why we may have been attracted to a career path where our emotional needs are so often dismissed, and we face rejection constantly. It is an industry that demands we rely only on ourselves to succeed. What early relationship are we re-creating?
So. Anxious. Dismissive. Fearful-Avoidant.
And then there’s secure.
These people can go fuck themselves.
Confident. Capable of balanced relationships. Non-reactive. Resilient. And reciprocal.
They were able to grow up in an environment where they felt a strong sense of reliable, consistent support and love. Their emotions and attachments weren’t shamed or dismissed.
Those people have better outcomes - health, income, relationships - across the board.
However, many therapies concentrate on enabling the client to re-parent themselves into a sense of secure attachment. Our hang-ups and habits can be overcome.
I sit on the couch with my daughter. She is upset. She is crying. The crying makes me uncomfortable. I want to do something, but I have trained myself out of doing much at all. I hold her. I let her cry. Together, we wait for the tears to pass. I hold her tight. And tell her I love her.
She runs back off to play, happy. The storm has passed. I pray that I am the parent she needs me to be.
Strike a chord? Leave a comment. Or check out other posts on parenting and psychology like this one.
This was a great read. As an arts worker/filmmaker (quite nearly on the verge of quitting) your comment about anxious attachment styles really resonated with me!