Attachment Styles: How to change your strategy
Attachment styles are not just abstract concepts. They are the strategies we employ daily to achieve closeness, desire, and intimacy and respond to relational threats. We can understand a comprehensive overview of attachment theory to better understand ourselves, but it's just one aspect of our relational selves. You can find plenty of quizzes to identify your attachment style, but before you do, let's depathologize attachment styles as a problem and explore them as part of the human experience.
"My tendency is to shut down." What happens when you experience relational conflict? It may not even be a real conflict, but you feel a bit of tension rise, leading to the perception of disharmony. Then, the feeling of overwhelm takes hold, leading to a flood of emotions that debilitate words. You feel the other person's energy take hold of the space you're in, leaving you to conflate their emotions for yours. You make up stories about what's happening to try to understand it all. Your entire being becomes consumed when relational threats arise, and our instincts will take over to do our best to protect us.
"My tendency is to keep going." What happens when you experience relational conflict? You experience the other person pulling away from you, and your immediate response is to cling to them, even if that means arguing. The deep, visceral feeling of emotional abandonment takes hold, and you feel the tornado of emotions that encroach toward the other person in an attempt to pull them back in. Your entire being becomes consumed with the wound that you'll be doomed alone if the other person leaves.
Where does this come from? These strategies have roots in childhood, transgenerational patterns, wounds bestowed on us, and our own formulaic experiences. What if all these patterns attempt to answer one question: Am I loveable?
Intimacy is what we fear the most and what we want the most. We look to our intimate relationships to confirm or deny our lovability, leaving us in the dance of pursuing what we don't know we deserve and pushing back what we don't know we deserve. This question exists at the human condition's core, and most of us logically understand that no one can truly answer it for us. Emotionally, this core question runs so deep that we create strategies to protect ourselves from getting too close to potentially losing love or clinging to another person to keep it.
Being Intimate Requires: REV
Reflection: Write your story as if you're a main character in a movie. What does the main character do to push intimacy away or cling to it?
Empathy: Willingness to understand with emotional curiosity
Vulnerability: Lean into uncertainty, take risks, and practice emotional exposure with people you've established trusting relationships with
