What’s your attachment style? How understanding whether you’re secure, anxious or avoidant could help your relationship

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Relationships can be difficult. There’s so much we don’t truly understand about ourselves, and yet we are expected to understand those we love (and them us). This often causes friction, which, in a good and healthy relationship, we typically overcome. But sometimes triggers can arise that completely destabilise the relationship or how we feel about it.

Fortunately, the psychological construct of relationship attachments can help with this. Pioneered by John Bowlby and developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, attachment theory offers us distinct patterns and “types” of attachment that we form within the context of relationships. Understanding yours, or your partner’s, can help you both to grow and learn more about one another together. 

What are the relationship attachment styles?

Different types of therapy can have different opinions, but the popular consensus is that there are four different types of attachment patterns. Dr Martina Paglia, a Clinical Psychologist and founder of Mind a Porter, a therapist matching platform, explains these as: “secure, anxious, avoidant and fearful-avoidant, sometimes called disorganised.” 

People who have a secure pattern generally feel comfortable in a relationship, but those with an anxious pattern tend to feel “greater sensitivity to rejection or abandonment,” Dr Paglia says. On the other side of things, Dr Paglia adds that an avoidant pattern “can involve discomfort with emotional dependence or closeness. While fearful-avoidant attachment can involve wanting connection while simultaneously feeling threatened by it.” 

None of these are necessarily good or bad, though people who are secure generally feel comfortable and have little tension in their love life. Nor, as Psychotherapist and Clinical Sexologist Lulu Sunnucks says, are they “fixed personality types,” but should be seen more as “unconscious blueprints the mind uses to predict what closeness will feel like.”

In any of these cases, we have to remember they are more based on previous behaviours than something that is innatel within us. Our attachment style can be brought into a secure place, and can even change from anxious to avoidant. They are not permanent states, “nor does everyone fit neatly into any one category,” says Reuven Rosen, a couples therapist at  ConnectWell Therapy. 

How to identify your relationship attachment style

For many, we only really notice our relationship style when we come across potential worries within our relationship. “The trigger is generally felt when something makes you question whether your partner is there for you,” Rosen says.

In these instances Dr Paglia says that “people with more anxious tendencies might become particularly sensitive to changes in communication, seek reassurance or interpret distance as rejection.” 

All of which, signalling a heightened state of emotion to how they were before the threat. It can lead to thoughts such as “Are they losing interest?” or “Have I done something wrong?” A key trait within an anxious style is seeking reassurance, sensing a need to effectively keep as close to the person as possible. 

“Someone with more avoidant tendencies may respond to the same stress by pulling away,” Dr Paglia adds. This could be by minimsing their feelings in conversation, avoiding talking about the issue all-together, or doing all they can to find more space from the partner.

“Disorganised attachment blends the two where safety and fear get tangled up in the same person, producing push-pull dynamics,” Sunnucks adds. This can come across as erratic or indecisive, but it’s important to remember that these aren’t intentional ways in which a partner may behave, they are reactions to feeling emotionally threatened or less stable in the relationship. 

Why understanding your type is useful

While sometimes it can feek difficult to admit to having a predisposition that isn’t purely secure, it can be a great opportunity to understand more about how you work as an individual – both for your own ability to have compassion for yourself, and to communicate who you are to others. 

“If you know that uncertainty makes you seek immediate reassurance, for example, you can learn to notice that urge before acting on it. If your instinct is to withdraw whenever somebody needs emotional closeness, you can become curious about that response rather than automatically distancing yourself,” Dr Paglia says. Fearful-avoidant (or disorganised) types tend to benefit from having an awareness of which of these is what they are doing, and aiming to work with that in a moment-by-moment basis. 

It’s also very useful as these relationship styles can easily interact. You could be a secure person dating an anxious or avoidant person, you could be anxious dating an avoidant person, you could both be fearful-avoidant. Having a vocabulary and sense of yourselves can help you to both become better partners by having understanding for one another’s way of coping when they feel a threat to the relationship. “Try to use attachment as a way of understanding each other, not diagnosing each other,” though, Dr Paglia reminds us. 

Can attachment styles change?

In short, they absolutely can. Dr Paglia says that “people can feel more or less secure depending on the relationship, their experiences and what is happening in their lives.” Security or self-esteem issues that come from other places in life such as job insecurity or redundancy, sexual issues, or body image issues can also lead to feeling less secure in a relationship, which then triggers these same responses.

This means we can go from a sense of security to insecurity not just because we feel it, but because other parts of our life impact us and change our pattern. We can also have a bad experience that alters our pattern, even turning us from avoidant to anxious, or the reverse. We can also become secure.  

Regardless, Sunnucks says that “the goal isn’t never getting triggered, it’s widening the gap between trigger and old automatic response.” It’s about restoring a feeling of security, and in moments where that is tested, to be able to work to restore a sense of security. We can’t control feeling threatened now and then, we are only human. 

Finally, Rosen adds that it is important to remember that “you’re not responsible for making someone secure by accepting repeated hurt or giving up your boundaries.” Relationships are a mutual responsibility, whatever our attachment style or any other part of our psyche may bring up in us.