Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. Today I'm talking about attachment styles and how they affect your relationships. Attachment refers to the bond
that you form with people in close relationships, such
as your parents, children, close friends or romantic partners. Attachment theory was first
developed by psychologist, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, but it has since been expanded
upon by other researchers. And there's a few different
models with different terms, but I'm going to focus on the original three types of attachment
styles; secure, insecure anxious, and insecure avoidant. The two insecure styles
can be summed up as anxiety about being abandoned or
avoiding intimacy and closeness. What does this look like as an adult? If you have a secure attachment style, you feel comfortable letting
people get to know you and you feel content that
you can rely on the person to be there when you need them. If you have an anxious attachment style, you tend to be clingy in relationships and you're always on alert
for the smallest sign of rejection, you don't trust very easily, and it can be a rollercoaster
of emotions for you. You can end up with a lot
of broken relationships because you drive people
away with the suspicions. Also your fear of rejection can lead you to end a relationship so that
you can avoid being rejected or abandoned by the other person, so you initiate the breakup. If you have an avoidant attachment style, you can appear aloof and
distant and relationships. Essentially, you're not
very reactive to things. If you feel threatened in a relationship, you may ignore the threat and rely on your own personal resources to get you through the crisis. It's like complete
psychological independence. Your partner or friend can
feel like you don't need me, that's how it can look. Here's how these patterns develop. Attachment starts very early
on between infant and caregiver and continues through the
early years of childhood. During this period of development, you look to your caregiver
for reassurance and safety. The things that build attachment
are physical closeness, touch, reassuring facial expressions and providing a base of safety. And you can see this in the
infant stage when the baby coos and the caregiver responds
with smiles and kisses. You can see this in the toddler stage when the baby explores a new environment, by taking a few steps away from the parent and then comes back and
grabs a leg to hold onto, then the baby wanders a
little further and looks back to make sure everything's
okay at home base. The baby may even bring you a stick that they picked up from the floor. And this is all part of the
process of gaining reassurance that the parent is still
there at home base. In this back and forth
behavior of exploring the world and coming back to safety is
what establishes this bond. The child sees the
caregiver as a safe base from which to explore the
world and a safe haven to return to when feeling distressed. As you get older, your
important attachment figures transition from parents to close friends and romantic partners. There are some parenting
styles that can interfere with this process and
create insecure attachments. Having a parent who is
unresponsive and inattentive can cause you to be overly self-reliant and this can result in the
insecure avoidance style. And this kind of unresponsiveness is more than being too busy
cleaning the house to talk or not wanting to play the
same game for the eighth time. We're talking more at the level
of neglect or being absent. And sometimes being a depressed parent can make you emotionally
absent to the degree that it has this trickle down
effect of causing your child to have attachment problems. The insecure anxious type can result from having parents who
were harsh and critical. Unlike the insecure avoidant
who may have felt invisible and ignored, the insecure anxious person got too much negative attention that affected their view
of themselves and others. Of course, early childhood trauma can create insecure attachment, but faulty parenting or trauma doesn't always have to be the cause. Sometimes people are
hardwired to be more anxious or avoidant in the way
that they relate to others. For example, in some of
the attachment studies, the children who were identified
as being insecure avoidant would explore their environment and seem to forget that
the parent was there. They would start playing with toys and if the parent left the
room, they were unfazed. The children who were
insecure anxious would cry when the parents left the room and couldn't be consoled
when the parent returned and then the securely
attached children would cry when the parents left the room, but when the parent returned, they could be comforted and
then return to exploring. And these children all
had similar upbringings and their behavior couldn't
be linked to faulty parenting. You may notice that what I'm describing sounds like the personality disorders, and there is some overlap. The personality disorders
cause problems in relationships and some of the problems center
around bonding and intimacy. The insecure anxious style
can be seen in histrionic, avoidant, borderline and
dependent personalities. The insecure avoidant style can be seen in schizoid, narcissistic, antisocial and paranoid personalities, but having an insecure attachment style doesn't automatically mean you
have a personality disorder. If you have one of these
insecure attachment styles, all is not lost. Here are four things that you can do to improve your attachments. Number one is recognize
your attachment style and here's how you can do that. Take a look back at your
significant relationships. A failed relationship
doesn't mean that it was because you have an insecure attachment. All romantic relationships
fail until they don't and you become forever connected. Also, when looking back
over your relationships, it's important to include
close friendships as well. How secure did you feel
in these relationships? How close did you feel to the person? How does it having contact
with the person make you feel? It's natural to miss them, but do you become unglued or
do you start doubting yourself or their loyalty if you
haven't seen them a while? Or do you feel like you
don't really need to see them or talk to them? And remember, this is for people you
consider important to you. The second thing that you can do is practice self-compassion, researchers have shown that people with an adequate amount of self-compassion are more likely to
compromise in relationships and balance their own needs against the needs of someone else's. In both the anxious and
avoidant attachment styles, you over prioritize your needs. With the clingy anxious style, your needs drive you
to constantly appraise whether your needs are being
met by the other person. With the aloof avoidant style, you're not very interested
in how another person can meet your needs. So the way that you bond with other people starts with changing how
you feel about yourself. Dr. Kristin Neff has done
a lot of work in this area of self-compassion. She has several free
resources on her website, self-compassion.org that
lets you measure your level of self-compassion. She also has some self-compassion
exercises that you can do, but just to give you an
idea of how self-compassion is measured, here are a few of the items
on the assessment scale. When I fail at something important to me, I become consumed by
feelings of inadequacy. I try to be understanding and
patient toward those aspects of my personality that I don't like. When I'm feeling down, I tend
to feel like most other people are probably happier than I am. When I fail at something
that's important to me, I tend to feel alone in my failure. You can see the theme here,
how hard are you on yourself when you fail at something,
get upset about something or something doesn't go your way? It stands to reason that if
you're harsh and critical of yourself and your faults, it would be hard to feel
that you deserve closeness. Why would someone want to be close to you? Number three is to journal or reflect on your secure relationships. And this is called security priming, and there's various ways to do it and it's something that's still
being on exactly what to do. But in general, it involves
activating your thoughts around feeling secure and keeping that secure
feeling top of mind. One exercise is to think of someone with whom you felt secure and write about that person
for five to 10 minutes. Another exercise is to write a sentence using each of the following
four security words in their own sentence; love,
embrace, respect, and snuggle. And there's other words
you can use as well. Kind of all in the same
theme of feeling secure and about love and connectedness. So you write a sentence
that includes the words and try to make it personal, with either a personal experience or it could be a sentence
that talks about how you feel. You can make these exercises part of a daily journaling practice. The last thing you can
do is see a therapist for professional help with
making this transition from insecure to secure. Attachment based compassion therapy is a relatively new therapy that specifically addresses this issue, but other types of therapy
like psychodynamic, cognitive behavior, dialectical behavior and mentalization therapy also help. If you see a therapist, you
may want to ask the therapist if they can help you
form secure attachments. Watch my personality disorder playlist for more on the personalities. In this video, I talk about a different
way to conceptualize the personality disorders. Thanks for watching, see you next time.
