Attachment Styles: No Correlation with Blogging Tendencies

I haven’t updated in a very long time.

Time to start! If you’re reading this, throw your arms up and say “hooray!”

I recently finished the final assessment for my Special Topics in Psychology course which focused on Attachment Theory and Relationships and I discovered that I had in fact gotten a High Distinction overall. Now, as some of the readers of my blog would know, getting a really, really high mark on an essay at the undergraduate level of university means that whatever you’ve said is correct on a global scale, is totally proven and should thus be used as the basis for your honours research proposal.

Taking this into account, I got a really, really high mark for an entire COURSE at the undergraduate level, so logically I must be at the level of psychological super powers when it comes to talking about attachment and relationships!

In case the sarcasm didn’t get across, here is a sentence telling you I was being sarcastic. However, I did want to talk about attachment styles and relationships in this post and I do know a fair bit about them. Just don’t kill me if some of my ideas are wrong, not well supported etc. I also don’t really have a direction for this post to go in, I just need to be able to expel some emotion from my chest and writing is a fantastic way to do that.

I suppose the best part to start is right at the beginning for anyone who doesn’t know what attachment style is. A simple google search of attachment style will bring up a wealth of pages, including several wikipedia entries, a bunch of unofficial psychology pages and a questionnaire based on the work of Bartholomew and Horowitz (1990). So if you wanted to find out a bit more, you could search that but I’ll cover the very basics right here. Bowlby (1980) wrote about models of attachment that we have to significant people in our lives. These people are known as attachment figures and of them we tend to have a primary attachment figure. We rely on these people for many things including social and emotional support, instrumental support (help with jobs, not help with saxophones), survival etc. and so it should come as no surprise that our first attachment figures are (generally) our parents, with our mother being our first primary attachment figure. Thing is, human beings aren’t always the most stable or nurturing of people and our genetics are certainly very different from each other. These factors affect a lot of things in our lives but in regards to attachment, what they do is moderate our attachment style.

As I mentioned, Bowlby (1980) talks about attachment styles and proposes three: Secure, Anxious and Avoidant. The names themselves provide a lot of speculative information about the characteristics of each attachment style. If I were to go up to a random person in the street and ask them what they thought these words meant with regards to attachment, I’d most likely get answers that were close to the ballpark in terms of actual, observed traits. That is, provided I didn’t get told to shove off. Before I summarise the styles though, anyone wondering what sort of attachment style they have should go and do this questionnaire before reading further. Now, let’s summarise attachment styles (very) briefly:

• Secure: Fairly stable and comfortable in relationships. Has independence from their attachment figure but also a solid, stable secure base with them. Generally lacking in Anxious and Avoidant characteristics.
• Anxious: Overbearing. Can have serious problems when their attachment figure is not available. Generally nervous in relationships. Focuses heavily on negative aspects. Fearful of relationship breakdown, or being hurt. Tends to be persistently intimate (not necessarily sexually) the majority of the time.
• Avoidant: Avoids intimacy. Has difficulty opening up to their partner. Difficulty establishing a rapport with their partner. Tendency to shut down and avoid problems with a relationship or avoids dealing with other aspects of a relationship.

Don’t take the above as gospel. There is far more to each attachment style and the above is just a very, very general outline. If you think you fit into one of the categories I would recommend using the questionnaire I posted earlier but bear in mind that your results may vary now that you are thinking about what style you may be (this is an effect known as priming and it can have significant repercussions for results regarding attachment; more on that in another post).

If you’ve done the questionnaire, you might be thinking to yourself “Hold on… There are four categories here but Thesreyn has only mentioned three.” Well congratulations, you’ve delved a little bit further down the rabbit warren that is attachment style and discovered Bartholomew and Horowitz’s (1990) expanded model of attachment styles. You see, three styles is all well and good, but four is just such a better number, so B and H decided they’d just make something up in order to have four, then try and work a theory in behind it.

No wait, that’s how theoretical physics works.

Anyway, Bartholomew and Horowitz (1990) conceptualised attachment and avoidance as two crossed spectrum’s such that if they were graphed (which they often are) the X axis would be anxiety and the Y axis would be avoidance. What this does is create four categories:

• Low Anxiety, Low Avoidance: Known as Secure attachment,
• Low Anxiety, High Avoidance: Known as Dismissive attachment (essentially, avoidant attachment renamed),
• High Anxiety, Low Avoidance: Known as Preoccupied attachment (essentially, anxious attachment renamed) and
• High Anxiety, High Avoidance: Known as Fearful attachment

Those who fall into the Fearful attachment category are likely to have aspects of both the Dismissive and Preoccupied attachment styles, even those which seem mutually exclusive. For example, they may crave intimacy (a Preoccupied trait) but at the same time be wishing for and attempting to avoid intimacy (a Dismissive trait) and both of these traits can be acting on the person at the same time. This can be seen in very young children in what is known as the Strange Situation. I’ll spare you the details, but once the child’s mother re-enters the room, the child will approach the mother, seeking intimacy but also look away from and not attend to the mother, due to avoidant tendencies.

So what does all of this mean? Well, for the majority of us it doesn’t mean much, since we’re going to go about our relationships the same way no matter what. However, attachment style affects an enormous amount of what happens in our relationships, right down to the process of breaking up and how we deal with it afterwards. I think I’ve finally realised this far into the post what it is I wanted to get written and that is this:

Regardless of attachment style, the process of breaking up involves the loss of someone who is in most cases your primary attachment figure. This is not something that can be taken lightly and it is not something that is easily gotten over. Even securely attached people still require the support of their attachment figures and losing one can be extremely difficult, even for them.

What I mean to say, is that if you’re breaking up from a serious relationship, you can’t expect it to be easy. Transference and loss of attachment is a difficult process and in order to cope, it can be tempting to quickly transfer that attachment to someone else; a “rebound” if you will. This is not a wise idea. It is difficult, it isn’t fun and there will always seem to be an easier way out, but the best thing you can do is to persevere and in time you will be able to re-establish a true attachment bond with another person, a bond that isn’t simply the remnants of an old bond haphazardly thrown around.

If you have any questions about this stuff, feel free to ask me in comments or via any other medium that allows you to contact me. I’ll answer to the best of my abilities! Now, though, I provide recognition for the works which I have referenced in this article so if you would like to read more, have a look around for these:

Bartholomew, K. & Horowitz, L. M. (1990). Attachment Styles Among Young Adults: A Test of a Four-Category Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 2, 226-244.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Sadness and depression. New York: Basic Books.