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.