Do You Have Attachment Issues With Your Attachment Style?
“We had a perfect date, but he clearly has attachment issues.”
“I don’t know…she needs to work on her anxious attachment before I would even consider something serious.”
“We’re just not a match. They’re a dismissive-avoidant, and I’m secure.”
For many in the modern dating scene, these sentences might sound familiar.
Attachment issues have been a popular interest in the healing space over the past several years. While it’s great that we’re now aware of the topic and its effect on our behavior, we seem to be reaching a counterintuitive level of awareness. They’ve almost become a part of our identity. Instead of using them to understand each other, we’re using them to remain misunderstood.
Discovering your attachment style is not a “terminal diagnosis.” They aren't something we're stuck with for life, quite the opposite actually. Attachment issues can be healed with healthy attention and a proper understanding of how they impact your decisions.
Attachment Theory Explained in 30 Seconds
Attachment theory was pioneered by psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1950s and was later expanded by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth with her infamous experiment, The Strange Situation. Both found that our earliest interactions with caregivers (usually parents) shape the way we connect with people throughout our entire lives.
As children, we form attachment patterns by adapting to our environment to help us survive. Bowlby discovered these patterns develop as the nervous system learns what to expect from relationships and how to stay safe.
Attachment patterns aren’t personality or neurological defects. They are simply a survival response. Early attachment patterns wire themselves into our malleable brains and nervous systems, affecting how we view safety and connection.
There are four types of attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and anxious-avoidant. To know which one you are takes serious self-reflecting, journaling, and honesty with yourself. Take the time to reflect on your past relationships, where you went wrong, and where you were wronged, and it also wouldn’t hurt to reflect on your parent’s relational behavior too. We often inherit our parents’ attachment styles.
Secure Attachment: Healthy Connection
Secure attachment represents a healthy relational pattern where individuals feel comfortable with both emotional closeness and independence. This well-rounded attachment style develops when caregivers consistently respond to a child's needs when they’re a baby.
Anna Drescher, BSc Psychology, describes people with secure attachment:
“Securely attached individuals have a positive view of themselves and others. They are comfortable with intimacy and independence and are able to build stable and healthy relationships. They also tend to have a positive view of their childhood and upbringing.”
Adults with a secure attachment style are trusting and emotionally regulated. They can maintain healthy boundaries and work through disagreements without feeling threatened. Securely attached people are vulnerable with their partners without losing their sense of self.
Secure attachment provides a healthy foundation for navigating relationships throughout one’s entire life. It allows people to experience intimate relationships while maintaining autonomy. Securely attached individuals can experience a heavy emotional bond without putting their own life and needs on the emotional line.
Anxious Attachment: Fear of Abandonment
Anxious attachment develops when caregiving is inconsistent, meaning sometimes it’s available and responsive, and sometimes it’s distant or “preoccupied.” This unpredictability teaches the nervous system to stay hypervigilant, always scanning for signs of rejection. According to The Attachment Project, people with anxious attachment experience heightened emotional reactions in relationships and are always on alert for indications of losing it.
Signs of anxious attachment are constant overthinking in a relationship, having difficulty trusting your partner’s feelings, exhibiting people-pleasing behavior, and experiencing emotional highs and lows based on your partner's. It’s also common to seek reassurance or feel consumed by the fear of abandonment.
Anxious attachment exists because you deeply crave connection and safety. It's an attempt to stay close to the people you love. It’s not a character flaw! Healing this attachment wound often involves learning to self-soothe, setting boundaries, and building trust in your own worthiness of love.
Dismissive-Avoidant: Hyper-Independence
Dismissive avoidant attachment forms when caregivers are emotionally unavailable, dismissive of a child’s emotions, or uncomfortable with dependence. Children in these environments learn that needing others is unsafe, so they adapt by becoming self-reliant and emotionally distant.
Adults with this style often value independence over intimacy. They tend to feel uncomfortable with vulnerability, suppress emotions, and fear losing autonomy in relationships. In an article for Psychology Today, Dan Neuharth, PhD, explains, “People with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style may appear aloof, resist commitment, and not be attuned to their deeper feelings.”
Someone with this attachment style may pride themselves on not needing anyone, yet carry a deep-rooted feeling of loneliness. If this sounds like you, you’re not broken. This is a protective strategy that once kept you safe. It developed in an environment where emotional availability was potentially damaging.
Fearful-Avoidant: Push & Pull
Fearful avoidant attachment, or disorganized attachment, is defined as both a fear of closeness and a fear of abandonment: a confusing internal contradiction. This style typically develops in people marked by early trauma, neglect, abuse, or chaotic parenting.
First identified by Dr. Mary Main, the disorganized style was the most recent of the four attachment styles to be observed. In her research, she found that children whose parents were either the source of fear or unable to provide comfort from it often developed disorganized attachment patterns. These patterns are characterized by confused and contradictory behaviors toward their caregivers.
Adults with fearful avoidant attachment often display “push-pull” behavior. They crave intimacy but also tend to sabotage it. Attachment issues in adults with this style may include difficulty trusting both others and themselves, intense emotional dysregulation, and confusion about what they want in relationships.
Fearful-avoidant attachment usually comes with untreated trauma. Healing this attachment wound requires deep compassion and patience from yourself and your partner. You're not "too much" or "too difficult"; you're learning to rewire a nervous system that once needed these settings to survive.
Heal Your Attachment Trauma, Don’t Romanticize it
It’s important to remember that none of these attachment styles are inherently "bad". They don’t mean you’re “damaged goods”. They were survival responses that helped you navigate your childhood environment. As we age and build awareness over our behavior, we realize we no longer need to behave the same way we were forced to as a child when it comes to relationships.
The brightside? Attachment issues can be healed. It might not be emotionally easy, and it won’t happen overnight, but working toward a secure attachment style is possible…and worth it!
It's easy to fall into self-loathing questions like, "What's wrong with me?" “Am I unlovable?” “Am I cooked?”, but these never help with healing.
Instead try asking yourself questions from a place of love and compassion, "What did I need that I didn't receive? How did I learn to adapt?" “Was this about me or something I couldn’t see at the time?” “What was my role in this?”
Shifting from shame to compassion opens the door to genuine healing and starts to reveal the shift to secure attachment.
Break Up With Your Attachment Style
Understanding attachment styles is a necessary step on your healing journey, but it doesn’t define you. It’s not something you’re stuck with for life. You’re not “broken.” There’s nothing wrong with you–attachment issues actually mean you’re normal!
Your nervous system adapted to keep you safe in the early circumstances you were dealt with. Now that you’re aware, you have the opportunity to bring love, not shame, to these patterns.
Take a moment to reflect or journal: Which part of this resonated most with you? How can you meet that part of yourself with more compassion today? What actionable steps can you take toward a secure attachment style?
Healing is possible, connection is possible, and your past does not define you.
