Sweet Sweet Chain, Part 3: About Attachment Theory (and my painful pattern)

Let me tell you about John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s (1991) Attachment Theory. According to Attachment Theory our earliest relationships, the one with our parents or primary caretakers, teaches us how to be in relationship with other people throughout our lives. It is our first relationship that sets the standard for how relationships look, what we can expect, and how we should behave.

If parents were attuned to our needs, we become, what is called securely attached, and learn that we can trust and rely on other people including friends and romantic partners. If, on the other hand, our parents were neglectful or unavailable or smothering or inconsistent or abusive or some combination of the above, we might become, what is called, insecurely attached and we might reenact certain painful relational patterns that once served a purpose when we were infants or children or teenagers.

There are two main types of insecure attachment- anxious attachment (that’s me) and avoidant attachment (basically all of my ex-boyfriends). Anxiously attached children usually grow up with inconsistent caregivers. Sometimes their parents are available, sometimes unresponsive. Parenthood is hard, everyone is doing the best they can with the tools at their disposal. That being said, well-intentioned (or not), inconsistent and misattuned parenting, means the child doesn’t know if the caretaker, whom they rely on for survival, will be available or not and fear of abandonment develops.

As a result, anxiously attached infants learn to cry, scream, and appear in crisis, because they are in crisis. Crying and screaming are how the child gets their needs met and how they survive in infancy. Anxiously attached children usually grow up to become anxiously attached adults who tend to see reality through a filter of I am going to be rejected and abandoned because this was the fear in childhood. They might relate to people and perceive reality through this distorted filter. For example, if someone doesn’t answer a phone call, an anxiously attached individual might experience this through the filter of I am being rejected and abandoned and panic might ensue.

The anxiously attached individual will not necessarily be aware of their rejection and abandonment filter or that the intensity of their panic and pain is a result of deep-seated childhood wounds. And without any awareness of what lies at the root of the panicked feeling, an anxiously attached individual might react through emotionally expressive and seemingly dramatic ways (e.g. calling incessantly, crying, screaming, emotional displays) because that is how they sometimes got their needs met when feeling abandoned as children. Do you like how I keep referring to her as “the anxiously attached individual” when clearly, I’m talking about me?

Avoidantly attached individuals usually grow up with either smothering parents or neglectful parents. With smothering parents, children learn that being close to someone means losing their sense of self or autonomy. They grow up relating to people through the filter of people are trying to control me and they learn to equate intimacy with control in relationships. With neglectful parents, children learn that their needs will never be met. If these children cry and scream, parents will not usually respond, so these children learn to emotionally shut down and withdraw. Shutting down is a way to protect from the risk of parental rejection. These children grow up to become adults who relate to people through the filter of feelings are things that should be suppressed. In both cases, avoidantly attached individuals tend to respond to their own emotional discomfort, or the emotional discomfort expressed by others, through shutting down and withdrawing as well as avoiding intimacy in relationships, the polar opposite of what the anxiously attached individual does. 

Here’s the interesting part, or maybe it’s more sad than interesting, I don’t know. Anxiously attached individuals and avoidantly attached individuals tend to end up in romantic partnerships with one another in a dynamic that replays and reinforces childhood wounds. 

Here’s an example of what this could look like. The anxious partner asks, “what time are you coming home?” The avoidant partner hears the question through the filter of people trying to control me and responds with, “I’ll come home when I come home, I don’t understand why you need that information.” The anxious partner hears this response through the filter of I am being rejected and abandoned and starts to panic, which causes the avoidant to think feelings and needs are things that should be suppressed and so starts to shut down, which causes the anxious to feel even more rejected and panics even more, which causes the avoidant to fear emotional displays and shut down even more, and so on. The avoidant partner’s tendency to withdraw triggers the anxious partner’s abandonment fears, and confirms their sense that they are unwanted and unloved. The anxious partner’s tendency towards emotional reactivity triggers the avoidant partner’s fear of being controlled or smothered. Their natural responses trigger one another in a painful pattern that reinforces the validity of childhood wounds. Psychologist and researcher, Sue Johnson (2007) (who co-developed a form of couple’s therapy rooted in Attachment Theory) coins the term “dance of despair” to describe the dynamic of the anxious and avoidant. Johnson writes, “this dance is self-perpetuating since each partner, with uncanny precision, starts dealing with their emotions in a way which evokes the very responses from the other that keep this distress going” (p.12).

Another way to think about this relational pattern is through the framework of the fight-flight response. When the anxiously attached individual is panicked, they fight. When the avoidantly attached individual is panicked they take flight. These responses trigger more panic in the other. 

It can be argued that individuals end up in relationships like this due to a force that feels outside of their control. Subconsciously there is something pulling them to replay what they know about relationships, based on what was passed down to them from their parents, and their parents’ parents, and so on through the multigenerational transmission process.