Your Attachment Style Is Not Your Personality: Looking Beyond the Labels
Attachment theory has become part of everyday language in a way I am not sure its early theorists could ever have imagined.
People describe themselves as anxiously attached. Partners are labelled avoidant. Social media offers quizzes promising to identify your attachment style in a few minutes, followed by lists explaining how someone with that style behaves in relationships.
There can be something genuinely useful in recognising ourselves in these descriptions. Sometimes having language for a familiar relational pattern helps us make sense of something that has previously felt confusing. We might notice how quickly we seek reassurance when someone feels distant, or recognise our tendency to withdraw when a conversation becomes emotionally intense.
The difficulty begins when a description of something we sometimes do becomes an explanation of who we are.
“I’m anxiously attached.”
“She’s avoidant.”
“That’s just my attachment style.”
A complicated human being can very quickly become a category. Attachment deserves rather more curiosity than that.
What do we actually mean by attachment?
Attachment theory has its origins in the work of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who was interested in the importance of children’s early relationships with their caregivers. Mary Ainsworth subsequently developed this work through observational research, including the well-known Strange Situation procedure.
At its heart, attachment theory asks important questions about human relationships. What happens when we need comfort? Who do we turn towards when we feel frightened or vulnerable? What happens when somebody important to us becomes unavailable? How do our experiences of being cared for influence what we expect from relationships?
Those questions remain enormously relevant.
However, attachment theory has travelled a considerable distance from observations of infants and caregivers to the way attachment is now discussed in adult relationships. Along the way, ideas that were already more complicated than they sometimes appear have often been distilled into a handful of attachment “styles”.
Secure … Anxious … Avoidant … Disorganised
Useful language, perhaps. But they are not four different kinds of human being.
When a pattern becomes an identity
One of my concerns about the popularisation of attachment theory is how easily its language can become fixed.
If I understand myself as an “anxiously attached person”, I may begin interpreting many of my responses through that identity. Wanting reassurance becomes evidence of my anxious attachment. Feeling unsettled when somebody does not reply becomes more evidence. Wanting to talk after an argument confirms it again.
The same can happen when we label somebody else.
If my partner is “avoidant”, their need for time alone can become evidence. Their reluctance to continue an argument at midnight can become evidence. So can their independence, difficulty expressing emotion or desire to think before talking.
Eventually, we risk becoming very good at finding evidence for a conclusion we have already reached.
More importantly, we can stop wondering what is actually happening.
Perhaps someone who usually feels comfortable with closeness becomes much more anxious in a relationship where affection is unpredictable. Someone who has previously sought reassurance may discover that they do far less of it with a partner who responds consistently. Someone who readily talks about feelings with friends may become quiet with a partner who reacts defensively whenever something difficult is raised.
Our responses do not happen in isolation. They happen with someone.
Perhaps attachment is more like a connection dial
I have been thinking about a different way of imagining this.
Rather than picturing ourselves as belonging to attachment categories, imagine that each of us has a connection dial.
The dial is not a personality test and it does not have one correct setting.
It moves.
At some moments we turn towards connection. We might want reassurance, conversation, physical closeness, affection or simply some indication that the other person is still there with us.
At other moments we turn towards space. We may need quiet, privacy, time to think, emotional distance or room to regulate ourselves before reconnecting.
Neither movement is inherently unhealthy. More importantly, the dial does not necessarily sit in the same place with everyone.
You might be wonderfully comfortable with emotional closeness in your friendships but find romantic intimacy frightening. You might feel relaxed and independent in one relationship and become intensely preoccupied in another. You might usually value plenty of space but find yourself wanting much more reassurance after bereavement, betrayal, illness, becoming a parent or another significant experience.
Even within the same relationship, the dial can move.
That is why I am wary of turning relational patterns into personality types.
What Moves Your Connection Dial?
This is where I think curiosity becomes considerably more useful than classification.
Instead of asking “Which attachment style am I?”, we might begin asking what happens to our need for connection under different circumstances.
Perhaps your dial moves towards closeness when somebody becomes quiet. Maybe silence carries a particular meaning for you. Perhaps you learned long ago that withdrawal preceded rejection, anger or abandonment.
Perhaps your dial moves towards distance when somebody wants an immediate response from you. Maybe emotional intensity feels overwhelming, or you learned that keeping things to yourself was the safest or most acceptable way of managing difficult feelings.
Sometimes two people’s dials respond to one another.
One person feels distance and reaches for connection. The other experiences that reaching as pressure and moves away. The first person experiences the movement away as further evidence that something is wrong and reaches harder. The second feels increasingly crowded and retreats further.
Before long, both people are responding not only to their own fears or needs, but also to each other’s responses.
Neither person necessarily is the problem. The pattern developing between them is worth understanding.
And patterns can change.
Attachment is not necessarily fixed
There is another problem with attachment labels. They can make something dynamic sound remarkably permanent.
The idea that early relationships matter does not mean that infancy writes an unchangeable relationship script that we spend the rest of our lives performing.
Relationships continue to affect us.
We encounter friends, teachers, partners, colleagues, therapists and communities. We experience acceptance and rejection, consistency and unpredictability, intimacy and loss. Some relationships reinforce what we already expect. Others surprise us.
Heidi Keller, in The Myth of Attachment Theory, examines some of the assumptions that have become attached to attachment theory itself. Among the issues she explores is whether attachment should be understood as universally fixed in the way it has sometimes been presented, alongside evidence and arguments concerning the influence of later experience, relationships and changing environments.
This does not require us to dismiss the significance of early relationships. It asks us not to confuse important with unchangeable.
If the connection dial has learned to move in a particular direction, that does not mean it can only ever move that way.
Who taught you where the dial should sit?
There is another question that receives far less attention in popular conversations about attachment.
Who decided what the “right” amount of connection looks like?
And what does it mean to be balanced when different families, relationships and cultures may answer that question very differently?
Attachment theory did not emerge outside culture. Neither do any of us.
Keller’s critique is particularly important here. Much of the theory and research that became influential within attachment thinking emerged from particular Western assumptions about childhood, caregiving, autonomy, independence and family life. She questions what happens when those assumptions are treated as though they describe human development everywhere.
Consider something as apparently straightforward as independence.
In one family or culture, a child confidently moving away from a caregiver to explore might be understood as an important sign of developing independence. Elsewhere, interdependence, proximity and participation in family life may be valued differently.
Neither tells us everything about the quality of the relationship. The same applies in adulthood. How often should partners contact one another during the day?
How much time should couples spend apart? How involved should extended family be?
Should difficult feelings be spoken about openly?
Is relying upon other people a sign of unhealthy dependence, or an ordinary part of belonging to a family or community?
At what age should somebody leave the family home?
What does being a “close family” actually mean?
There cannot be one answer to these questions that sits conveniently outside culture.
This is one reason I am uncomfortable when attachment language is used to judge behaviour without considering its context.
Behaviour doesn’t come with its meaning attached
Wanting frequent contact does not automatically mean somebody has anxious attachment.
Needing time alone does not automatically mean somebody is avoidant.
Feeling distressed by separation does not, by itself, tell us why that separation is difficult.
Comfort with independence does not automatically tell us that somebody feels secure.
Behaviour needs context.
Keller’s discussion of the Strange Situation makes this particularly interesting. The procedure involves an unfamiliar environment, separation between caregiver and child, interaction with a stranger and subsequent reunion. Yet the meaning and familiarity of those experiences cannot simply be assumed to be identical for children raised within very different caregiving arrangements and cultural worlds.
If separation itself is relatively unfamiliar to a child, their response to it cannot automatically be interpreted in precisely the same way as that of a child for whom separation from a primary caregiver is commonplace.
The broader point extends well beyond childhood.
We cannot fully understand behaviour without becoming curious about the world in which that behaviour developed.
Security is not a particular number on the dial
If we use the connection dial metaphor, it would be tempting to put “secure” neatly in the middle and assume that is where the dial should stay.
I don’t think that works.
There are times when moving strongly towards another person makes sense. There are times when stepping back is exactly what we need. There are relationships in which increased vigilance may be responding to something genuinely inconsistent or unsafe rather than revealing a defect in our attachment system.
Perhaps what matters more is flexibility.
Can I notice what is happening inside me?
Can I recognise when I am reaching for connection and understand something about why?
Can I ask for space without disappearing from the relationship?
Can I tolerate somebody else’s need for closeness without automatically experiencing it as a demand?
Can I tolerate somebody needing space without immediately assuming I am being abandoned?
Can we repair things when we get it wrong?
Even these questions need cultural context. The therapeutic ideals of independence, emotional expression and individual autonomy have their own cultural histories. We should be careful not to turn them into another supposedly universal standard for healthy relationships.
There may not be one perfect position for the connection dial.
From labels back to curiosity
Attachment theory can give us a useful language for thinking about relationships, particularly when it helps us recognise patterns that previously felt bewildering.
I become more cautious when that language closes down curiosity rather than opening it up.
“I’m anxious.”
“He’s avoidant.”
“We’re anxious-avoidant, so this relationship will never work.”
A label can feel reassuring because it appears to explain something. But sometimes the explanation arrives too quickly.
What happens if, instead, we become curious about the pattern?
What happened just before your connection dial moved? What did you notice in the other person? What did you imagine their behaviour meant? What did you need at that moment? What did you do next? How did they respond? Where have you experienced something similar before?
And perhaps just as importantly, does this happen with everyone, or does it happen here?
The difference matters.
You are not a category established in infancy and destined to repeat itself forever. Nor can your way of relating be understood separately from the people, relationships, experiences, communities and cultures that have surrounded you.
Our early relationships may be part of the story. They do not have to be the whole story.
Perhaps, then, the more interesting question is not:
“What is my attachment style?”
but:
“What is happening to my connection dial here, with this person, at this moment, and what might that be telling me?”
References:
If you’d like to explore further
Some of the ideas explored in this post draw on Heidi Keller’s critical examination of attachment theory, particularly its cultural assumptions and claims of universality:
- Keller, H. (2018). The Myth of Attachment Theory: A Critical Understanding for Multicultural Societies. Routledge.
