The Big Deal About Attachment Theory

Attachment, Security, and the Relationships That Shape Us

We all carry maps of relationship formed long before we knew we were drawing them. Growing security means learning when the old map no longer fits the territory.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a professor who became enormously influential in how I eventually thought about people and relationships. He had studied directly under John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who developed what became known as Attachment Theory, so Bowlby naturally found his way into a lot of our lectures.

Bowlby had written three enormous volumes called Attachment and Loss. My professor apparently believed undergraduates ought to encounter the real thing rather than somebody's six-page summary of it. He had four sets reserved behind the library counter, and for certain assignments we had to check out one of the volumes for a two-hour block, find somewhere to sit, and attempt to understand what John Bowlby had needed several thousand pages to explain.

I cannot tell you that I appreciated this arrangement every time I walked to the circulation desk. At that age, two hours with an enormous book on separation and loss was competing with several other things I considered more urgent.

But more than forty years later, I am still talking about Bowlby.

That probably says something.

For all those pages, the idea underneath Attachment Theory is surprisingly simple: human beings are built to need other human beings.

Bowlby came to this partly by paying attention to what young mammals do when they are frightened. Many animals run toward a place of safety. Primates do something different. They run toward other primates. A frightened young chimpanzee doesn't merely look for a protected location; it seeks a protective adult who can carry it to safety. Bowlby believed human beings are organized in much the same way.

This makes considerable evolutionary sense. Human infants arrive remarkably dependent. We cannot feed ourselves, move ourselves out of danger, or do much of anything useful for quite some time. Survival requires relationship.

But Bowlby's larger insight was that the importance of relationship doesn't disappear once we emancipate. For the rest of our lives we remain relational creatures. We are social beings.

We continue to look for people who provide something like what Bowlby called a secure base. We want to know that someone important to us is available, responsive, and emotionally reachable. When we feel reasonably secure in that relationship, we are freer to explore the rest of life because we don't have to spend quite so much energy monitoring whether the relationship itself is in danger.

That is where Attachment Theory starts getting interesting.

We Learn Relationships Before We Have Words for Them

Long before children can explain what is happening, they are learning what happens between people. When I am frightened, does somebody come? When I am distressed, does my distress make sense to someone? If I reach toward another person, what happens next? Do I have to become louder before anyone notices me? Is needing somebody safe, embarrassing, dangerous, or pointless?

Mary Ainsworth, one of Bowlby's most important collaborators, discovered that what mattered wasn't simply whether parents were affectionate. The more important quality was attunement—whether a caregiver could notice the child's signals, make reasonable sense of them, and respond in a timely and appropriate way.

That distinction matters because loving someone and accurately reading them are not quite the same thing. You can love someone enormously and still miss what is happening inside them.

Couples do this every day.

Over time, these repeated experiences begin forming expectations. We learn whether people are generally dependable. We learn whether closeness is comforting or complicated. We learn whether our needs are likely to be welcomed, ignored, criticized, or experienced as burdensome. Somewhere along the way, we are also learning something personal: Am I someone worth responding to?

Attachment researchers call some of these expectations internal working models. I think of them as maps. A map saves us from having to rediscover the entire world every morning. If I already know where the river is, where the road bends, and where the steep ground begins, I can move through the country more efficiently.

The difficulty comes when we keep navigating with an old map after the territory has changed.

A child who repeatedly discovers that reaching for someone ends in disappointment may learn to stop reaching. Another child who experiences relationships as inconsistent may become exceptionally good at detecting the slightest indication that somebody is pulling away. One learns, Don't need too much. The other learns, Don't stop watching.

Neither response is foolish. At the time, it may have been remarkably adaptive.

The trouble is that children grow up and carry these maps with them.

Two Maps Meet

This is where Attachment Theory enters our living room of every day life, and is considerably more intriguing than something I once had to read in the university library. Two adults enter a relationship carrying two different histories of what closeness means. They also bring different histories of conflict, reassurance, vulnerability, dependence, disappointment, affection, and repair.

Imagine that one partner becomes quiet when conflict gets intense. Pulling inward has always helped that person settle down. The other partner experiences the silence as distance and moves closer—asking questions, seeking reassurance, increasing the emotional volume, trying harder to get some sign that the relationship is okay.

Now something interesting happens.

The first person experiences the pursuit as pressure and retreats farther. The second experiences the retreat as evidence that something really is wrong and pursues harder. Before long, they aren't arguing about whatever started the disagreement. They are arguing about what happened after it started.

Each person is now reacting to the other person's protection.

This is one reason couples can have essentially the same argument for fifteen years while changing the subject matter regularly. The topic may be money, sex, family, work, parenting, or whose turn it was to make the reservation. Underneath the rotating scenery, the dance can remain remarkably consistent.

One reaches. One retreats. The reaching becomes louder. The retreat becomes farther. Eventually both people conclude that the problem is the other person's personality.

Attachment Theory offers a different question:

What is each person trying to protect?

Security Is Not the Absence of Distress

One of the things I most appreciate about attachment research is that secure people are not presented as people who never get upset. Mary Ainsworth demonstrated this beautifully in her famous Strange Situation research. A young child experienced a brief separation from a caregiver, and researchers paid particular attention to what happened when the caregiver returned.

Some securely attached children became quite distressed by the separation. That wasn't what distinguished them. What mattered was reunion. When the caregiver returned, the securely attached child could reconnect, receive comfort, settle, and eventually return to exploring. Security wasn't demonstrated by never needing anyone. It was demonstrated by being able to use the relationship when it was needed and then return to the world.

I find that wonderfully hopeful.

Healthy adult relationships aren't relationships in which nobody becomes anxious, angry, hurt, jealous, frightened, disappointed, or occasionally ridiculous. Secure couples aren't necessarily brilliant communicators, nor do they resolve every disagreement particularly well. What they become increasingly good at is reunion—finding their way back to each other after something has gone wrong.

That distinction matters. Repair happens after something happens. We hurt each other, misunderstand, withdraw, overreact, say something badly, or fail to say something that needed saying. Security isn't found in preventing all of that. It grows in the repeated experience of discovering that after we lose each other for a while, we know how to find each other again.

Can I reach for you when I am hurt without attacking you?

Can you stay present without having to fix me?

Can we disagree without treating the relationship itself as endangered?

Can we repair what we just did?

Can we find each other again?

How we answer may be one of the most useful things Attachment Theory has taught us.

Your Attachment Style Is Not Your Horoscope

Attachment language has become popular enough that it has acquired some of the problems that accompany popularity. People now announce, "I'm avoidant," with approximately the same finality with which they might announce their blood type. Someone else diagnoses a spouse as anxious after watching three videos online. Before long, four attachment categories are expected to explain most of Western civilization.

Bowlby's theory was considerably more interesting than that.

Attachment is relational. Ainsworth's research showed that a child could have different attachment patterns with different caregivers. Her Strange Situation was intended to assess the quality of a particular relationship, not discover an unchangeable ingredient inside the child.

So I am cautious about turning attachment into another identity.

You are not an attachment category. You are a person who learned ways of managing closeness, distance, dependence, uncertainty, fear, and connection. Some of those strategies may have been extraordinarily intelligent responses to the relationships available to you at the time.

They simply may not work particularly well anymore.

That difference matters.

It moves us away from What is wrong with me? and toward What did I learn to do, and do I still need to do it?

Familiar Is Not the Same as Good

In “A Case For Attachment Theory (2011) Sroufe and Siegel noted how people can become "lost in familiar places." Early patterns can become so deeply learned that we recreate versions of them later without consciously intending to do so.

Therapists see this constantly.

A person desperately wants closeness but repeatedly becomes involved with unavailable people. Someone wants reassurance but asks for it in ways that eventually exhaust the person providing it. Another longs to be deeply known while revealing almost nothing vulnerable. Someone hates conflict so thoroughly that difficult conversations are postponed until there is enough accumulated resentment to produce an impressive one.

From the outside, these behaviors can look irrational. From inside an attachment history, they often make considerable sense.

We tend to imagine that human beings naturally move toward whatever feels best. I'm not convinced that's always true. Sometimes we move toward what we recognize—what we know.

There is a strange comfort in knowing the terrain, even when it isn't particularly navigable.

The Map Is Not the Territory

Attachment Theory can easily be misunderstood. It can sound as though something happened before kindergarten and the rest of adulthood is merely the lengthy explanation. That isn't Bowlby's view, and it isn't what the research Sroufe and Siegel describe suggests.

Their Minnesota longitudinal research followed development over decades and found that early secure attachment predicted later differences in emotional regulation, self-esteem, friendships, social competence, and the ability to form trusting romantic relationships. Early relationships matter.

Bowlby thought about development in terms of pathways rather than predetermined destinations. Ground we have already walked influences where we are likely to go next, but it does not dictate where we must end up. New experiences, new relationships, changing circumstances, and different choices can alter the direction.

Though our history matters, it doesn’t have to have a lasting impression, especially if mature adults learn to pattern their relationships on a blueprint detailing what a secure relationship looks like. This is part of Attachment Theory I wish more people understood.

Adults can develop greater security even after difficult beginnings. Sroufe and Siegel emphasize that therapeutic relationships and other supportive relationships can alter developmental pathways, and that the brain remains capable of changing in response to experience throughout life.

In ordinary language, we can learn something new.

We can discover that disagreement doesn't necessarily mean abandonment. We can learn that another person's need for space doesn't automatically mean rejection. We can discover that needing reassurance occasionally doesn't make us weak, and that needing independence doesn't necessarily mean we don't love someone.

We can also get better at recognizing when an old alarm system is responding to a new situation.

Perhaps most importantly, we can have relationships in which the ending becomes different from the one we expected.

Someone stays when we expected them to leave. Someone listens when we expected an argument. Someone comes back after conflict. Someone apologizes. Someone sees the fear underneath the anger or the longing underneath the withdrawal. These repair attempts lead to more secure relationships.

Enough of those experiences accumulate, and the old map begins revising.

What I Think My Professor Was Trying to Teach Me

After more than thirty years in a counseling environment I think the lessons I learned early on in my psychology education, Attachment Theory, has lasted because it describes something recognizably human.

Underneath a remarkable amount of adult behavior are some surprisingly simple questions.

Are you there? Do I matter to you? Can I depend on you when I need you? Can I be myself and still belong? If something goes wrong between us, can we find our way back?

Adults rarely ask these questions quite so plainly.

We have more sophisticated methods.

We criticize. We withdraw. We explain ourselves for the seventh time. We become defensive, pursue harder, go silent, fix things nobody asked us to fix, insist that nothing is wrong, or announce that we don't care nearly as convincingly as we had hoped.

But underneath all that adult sophistication, an ancient attachment system may still be asking something much simpler:

Are we okay?

I didn't understand all of that when I walked up to the library counter as an undergraduate and asked for one of those enormous volumes for another two-hour encounter with John Bowlby.

At the time, I probably thought my professor was teaching me a theory. But looking back, I think he was trying to teach me something larger: that human beings cannot be understood very well apart from the relationships that have formed them, the relationships they are trying to create now, and the people they reach toward when life becomes frightening.

It took me a lot longer than two hours to understand that.

I suspect he knew it would.