What you think about your attachment style might be completely wrong

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It’s not uncommon that new clients come into Kelsie Coles’ therapy office and declare their attachment style.

“I ask them a question, and people will say, ‘Well, I need you to know that I identify as anxiously attached,’” said Coles, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle. “It’s kind of helpful data to understand them, but attachment styles are not concrete.”

Attachment theory — or at least the simplified, TikTok version of it — has become part of mainstream thinking on relationships.

But there are things people are getting wrong about attachment styles, said Dr. Amir Levine, whose 2010 book, “Attached,” popularized a theory that had been developing for half a century.

“It’s constantly being propagated in the culture that the attachment style that you have as a child is the attachment style you’re going to have as an adult,” Levine said. “No, not at all.”

A brief explanation of attachment styles

Attachment theory emerged from work in the 1950s by British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who identified a survival-behavior system after studying children separated from their caregivers during World War II. Psychologist Mary Ainsworth later expanded the research by observing how infants reacted to brief separations and reunions with their mothers.

Ainsworth identified attachment patterns in children as secure, anxious and avoidant (a fourth category known as fearful-avoidant was later recognized.) Relationship researchers then found a link between childhood attachment and the way adults attach to partners.

Simply put, a securely attached adult is comfortable with intimacy and readily works to repair relationship issues. Anxiously attached people often worry about their partner’s capacity to love them back, and need a lot of validation. Avoidants typically fear loss of independence and minimize closeness (fearful-avoidant is a mixture of the two).

Levine thinks of attachment style as a person’s “safety radar” in a relationship, or the behaviors they exhibit that make them feel safe. Problems arise when anxious or avoidant people treat the designation like a diagnosis that needs to be treated, said Levine, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University whose new book on the topic, “Secure,” is to be published in April.

“These are not pathologies,” he said. “They’re just variations on the norm.”

A label isn’t always helpful

Omri Gillath, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who has been studying attachment in relationships for more than 20 years, said that since the categories are based on large samples of statistics, they won’t be a perfect fit for anyone. Everyone can be a little anxious or a little avoidant, depending on circumstances.

For some people, the label could do more harm than good.

Some might take an online quiz that says they are avoidant and use it as an excuse to not change, even if their partner is suffering, Gillath said. Others see a result of anxious and feel they are doomed or doing something wrong.

Feeling pigeonholed, he said, is “not so good for individuals and their own understanding of who they are and how they can change.”

It’s not all about your mother

Levine said that despite having a strong association with how caregivers treated children, attachment style comes from a combination of factors that can break stereotypes. For instance, in his practice he has seen many avoidants who had a warm, loving childhood.

He also believes there is a biological propensity for how much closeness and distance people prefer. To explain it, he gave the example of Caenorhabditis elegans, a microscopic roundworm with large neurons that neuroscientists use to study the human brain.

Most of the worms feed together, but some are solitary feeders that crawl away when others approach. If you switch a single protein in their brain, they switch from solitary to social, he said.

“I don’t know what it is with psychology and psychiatry,” Levine said. “First, we blamed mothers for schizophrenia. Then we blamed the parents for having autistic kids.”

Attachment styles are not set in stone

Knowing your attachment style can still be a helpful first step by identifying problematic patterns in your relationships, Gillath said.

“Attachment can help you a lot with understanding yourself, with understanding your relationships, and with understanding the roadblocks on the way to happiness,” Gillath said.

Levine built an online tool based on an attachment questionnaire developed by R. Chris Fraley, another relationship researcher at the University of Illinois.

Levine noted that different relationships can provoke different responses in people that change their attachment style. And because human brains are malleable, people can learn to be more secure over time.

“It’s the small interactions that can create more secure interactions that really can change the brain, structurally, in a very profound way,” he said. “And we can actually use that ability to help people become more secure.”

Albert Stumm, The Associated Press