Attachment
What is
What is
attachment?
Whether child to parent, sibling to sibling, or partner to partner — people who understand or know how to navigate attachment understand the health and safety in relationship.
Whether child to parent, sibling to sibling, or partner to partner — people who understand or know how to navigate attachment understand the health and safety in relationship.
A decade of couples work has taught me that security in relationship has a great deal to do with how we feel and experience security — when we are close, and when we are further away. The study of how couples, parents, and partnerships manage communication, connection, and the security of space is called attachment.
In this theory, healthy attachment is security within a partnership even across distance and separation, and also when the relationship becomes close and intimate. As children we learned what felt comfortable: staying at set distances and set degrees of closeness. Without increasing attachment security, the same patterns that bound us in childhood can keep us bound in adult life. Attachment work seeks to build the security and comfort necessary to truly find interdependence.
The advantage of attachment work with me is that education and practice are available when each of you is ready to change a pattern. That is more than a book telling you what is true. In therapy with me you learn your partner, yourself, and what moving together looks and feels like.
Mental health communities have gotten confused about attachment in two ways. First, they often split models — one for child and parent, another for couples — as if those worlds were unrelated. Second, they treat attachment “styles” as fixed personalities. And while I don’t mean to slam my colleagues here, it seems to me that the security someone experiences inside themselves is not the security they experience in an outside relationship. For example, a partner can feel insecurities inside that they do not feel in their relationship. And when a partner realizes that security in relationship is not the same as security in themselves or in their partner, they can experience the beauty of a healthy attached relationship — no matter what they have been through.
Attachment work with me is also more coherent than what I often meet in books and trainings. A decade with children and parents, and more than seven years with couples, taught me how security in dependent relationship relates to both the dependency and the independence of a partnership. I can respect where each of you came from relationally — and what each of you will need to build what you were not given, or what your partner needs now.
In all cases, healthy attachment means getting the unique aspects of partners right without either partner compromising who they are. This is why I think the age-old couples advice that relationship is about “compromise” is right for siblings, but rarely right for couples. When relationship serves something greater, it both asks more and gives more than any two people could do on their own. I believe this, and I support this in my work.
Here are the common attachment styles with descriptions I wrote. Do remember that these are attachment strategies, not identities or personality types.
Whether there was distance or closeness, need could be found and met — both for myself and my other.
The body learned to reach louder — get bigger, give more, stay in it. The fight part of the alarm system. This style often believes it’s up to them to hold everything together.
When connection was too quick or too much of the wrong thing. This style tends to get quiet, logistical — let’s not make a bigger mess. Perceived avoidance is often their best way of making peace.
A complex attachment where the needs themselves trigger the body into forms of dissociation. It is not simply “a style”; it is what happens when trauma begins to physiologically prevent movement itself.
I help couples train this into their nervous system and their relationship.
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