Healing From Trauma By Understanding Your Attachment Style

Understanding Your Attachment Style

There are many different recognizable attachment styles in trauma recovery which directly stem from how we perceive close relationships due to our past experiences. Understanding your attachment style means learning and identifying how you’re engaging and connecting to people around you for a better approach in your own healing process.

Four Types of Attachment Styles

Attachment theory has been identified and developed for the past 50 years. What we know is that it most often reflects our early childhood experiences with our caretakers. Thus, we identify four different types of attachment styles; secure attachment,

1.) – Secure Attachment

Secure attachment comes from past experiences of rekindling, such as a mother leaving, but always returning. People with secure attachment are not so bothered by sudden moments of absence. Their partner may want time on their own, go out with friends, or not answer the phone call for a couple of hours, and yet the relationship won’t suffer doubt and paranoia. Secure attachment means you feel secure in the relationship both when physically close and when distant.

2.) Insecure Avoidant

An insecure-avoidant attacher gets overwhelmed with too much connection, thus requiring space. If they feel like their partner is over-attached, they might shut down emotionally, withdraw, and/or even leave. In a case where only one partner is an insecure-avoidant attacher, it’s best to set boundaries and give them space. This allows them to bounce back and step forward at their own pace.

3.) Insecure Anxious

Insecure anxious attachers seek constant connection as a confirmation of a secure attachment. They constantly reach out in fear of their partner leaving. A good approach when in a relationship with an insecure anxious attacher is to use words and touch as a means of reassurance

4.) Disorganised attachment

Disorganised attachment is commonly associated with people who have experienced developmental or relational trauma and in translation means “being confused”. This is because they simultaneously want to reach out frequently, but are also terrified of doing so. Usually, people with disorganised attachment have had a parent or relationship that had been very unstable.

When we’re young, our parents set an example of how relationships should function. If they were often emotionally unavailable or even threatening, then it may cause a pattern of confusion – we love our parents and we want to be close with them, yet we’re terrified of their reaction. This pattern then transfers to our adult relationships.

What can help a disorganised attacher is:

a.) stability – rotate a routine between over connection and space-giving disconnection

b.) communicating understanding their needs through words

c.) understanding and recognising their (opposite) phases

Conclusion

In order to cultivate healthy and long-lasting relationships, we need to first and foremost understand how we attach and connect to people around us, and then which pattern those closest to us fall into. Once you recognise all the attachment styles and their individual patterns, you and your partner can communicate and understand each other’s needs better.