Attachment Styles and the Road to Secure Relating
“We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves” - Dan Siegel
What happens when there’s a pattern of unmet attachment needs? What happens when the body’s adaptations to early relational pain calcify into strategies that affect every future connection?
That’s the essence of attachment styles: our relational blueprints, like survival maps that were drawn based on how our early environments responded to our attachment needs. They represent a dance between the parts of us that need closeness or space, where trust in the steps determines whether the connection deepens or dissolves.
These blueprints shape how we love, fight, and repair in close relationships - but attachment isn’t limited to romance or family. It ripples through every layer of life: how we relate to ourselves, our communities, even the world around us. Later in this chapter, we’ll zoom out to explore those wider layers.
Wired to Connect: The Research Behind Attachment
In the 1950s, Harry Harlow’s experiments with rhesus monkeys revealed a surprising result: that comfort, not food, is the foundation of attachment. He observed that infant monkeys consistently preferred a soft cloth-covered surrogate mother over a wire mother that provided milk. When frightened, the infants sought comfort from the soft surrogate. This landmark study challenged Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, showing that emotional comfort is just as vital as physical survival.
In the 1940s, John Bowlby observed that juvenile offenders were far more likely to have experienced maternal separation or neglect than their non-delinquent peers, highlighting the emotional cost of disrupted attachment. Later, Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiments in the 1970s identified predictable patterns in how infants respond to separation and reunion. This formed the foundation for what we now understand as attachment styles.
There are five main patterns, one secure and four insecure. These aren't diagnoses; they're the unique survival maps your nervous system drew long ago to keep you safe - and crucially, maps can always be redrawn.
Secure Attachment (~50-60% of Adults)
This is the relational ideal. Secure attachment is marked by the ability to seek comfort, express needs, tolerate distance, and repair conflict. People with secure attachment know they are lovable and that others are generally reliable, and when they aren’t, they set boundaries. They’re not immune to stress or conflict, but they trust that relationships can weather storms.
For example, during a stressful week, a woman notices she’s feeling more irritable and withdrawn. Instead of hiding it, she tells her partner, “I’m feeling off today. I think I need some extra comfort tonight, maybe a quiet dinner together.” She’s not ashamed of the need, nor worried it’s too much. She trusts the relationship can hold her vulnerability.
Secure individuals have consistently received enough of the Six Attachment Needs. Their early environment likely mirrored emotional presence with structure. Not perfectly, but reliably enough that their nervous systems came to expect responsiveness from caregivers. For example, a child says, “I don’t want a hug right now.” The adult smiles gently and responds, “Okay, thanks for telling me. I’m here when you do.” In that small moment, the child learns that their space is respected and that connection isn’t bound to compliance.
People with secure attachments tend to recall childhood in a coherent and emotionally balanced way. They remember both positive and negative moments without distortion or minimization. Their stories often reflect nuance and trust, “My mom wasn’t perfect, but I always knew she cared.” These individuals have internalized the message that their emotions mattered and could be held, which gives their memories structure and meaning. Even hard times are remembered through a lens of resilience and care.
When you imagine secure relating, like being able to ask for comfort or set boundaries without fear - does it feel familiar or foreign? Can you recall a moment in your life when this kind of safety was present?
Now that you’ve seen what secure looks like, let’s explore the patterns that develop when needs go unmet.
Anxious Attachment (~20-25% of Adults)
Anxiously attached people fear abandonment. They often experience heightened sensitivity to relational cues and may become preoccupied with reassurance or perceived rejection. Their nervous systems tilt toward hyperarousal and are sensitive to cues of disconnection.
This style develops when care was inconsistent: sometimes warm, sometimes withdrawn. Imagine a child who excitedly runs to show their drawing, hoping for praise. One day, the parent lights up, “That’s amazing! You’re so talented!” The child beams. On another day, the same gesture is met with indifference or irritation, “I’m busy. Why are you bugging me?” This emotional unpredictability sends a message that love is available, but only sometimes, and not reliably. Over time, the child becomes hyper-attuned to the parent’s mood, striving to perform or please in hopes of securing warmth again. The nervous system begins to equate worthiness with vigilance, perfection, and emotional labor.
Internalized beliefs develop such as, "I have to work to earn love," or "If I’m not perfect, they’ll leave." Anxious attachment is about feeling uncertain whether your needs will be met, coupled with the perception that love is conditional. The cost of connection feels high, and the urgency to preserve it, at any cost, is greater.
Those with anxious attachment often recall childhood through vivid emotional intensity. Memories may center on unpredictability or longing, like times they felt overlooked or had to chase affection. “I remember waiting by the window, hoping she’d come.” Their nervous systems encoded these moments as urgent, and recall is often charged with unmet needs. These individuals may ruminate, seeking acknowledgment they never received, and struggle to feel confident in how their past shaped them.
Which parts of this pattern feel familiar to you? Do you remember a childhood moment when love felt unpredictable—sometimes warm, sometimes withdrawn? What did you learn to do to stay connected?
Avoidant Attachment (~20-25% of Adults)
Avoidantly attached individuals tend to suppress needs, downplay emotions, and prize independence. Connection feels risky, so they learn to rely on themselves. But underneath that self-reliance is often a profound fear of being suffocated, criticized, or rejected.
This style emerges when caregivers were emotionally distant or shaming about a child’s needs. For example, a child cries after a hard day at school and wants a hug. Instead of offering comfort, the parent replies, “Oh come on, you’re too sensitive. Big kids don’t act like this.” The message received: a need for comfort is excessive, embarrassing, or wrong. Over time, the child learns to hide those needs because expressing them leads to shame or rejection, internalizing the belief, "Needing less makes me safer."
But those needs don’t actually go away.
Avoidantly attached people still desire intimacy - to a point. This attachment style represents a strategy for preserving control and reducing vulnerability. It essentially says, "If I keep my distance, I can’t be hurt by you."
When asked about childhood, they tend to minimize or flatten their emotional memories. They may say, “It was fine,” but struggle to recall specific or emotionally meaningful events. Their narratives often emphasize independence over connection and downplay emotional neglect - because they weren’t even aware it happened. This reflects a learned strategy, “if emotions aren’t welcome, it becomes safer to forget or ignore them.” Memory becomes more about function than feeling, often focused on tasks or expectations rather than relational warmth.
Notice your body as you read this. Does suppressing needs feel safer than voicing them? When did you first learn that needing less might protect you?
Anxious-Avoidant (~4-5% of Adults)
Also called fearful-avoidant, this attachment style combines the core features of both anxious and avoidant patterns. Individuals with this style often long for closeness but feel overwhelmed by it once it arrives. Their nervous system swings between activation and shutdown where they will be seeking reassurance one moment, then retreating in discomfort the next.
This style typically emerges in environments marked by high emotional unpredictability and relational trauma. The caregiver may have been a source of both comfort and fear, leaving the child with no reliable strategy for staying safe in connection. The result is a nervous system wired to expect danger from both intimacy and distance.
For example, a caregiver frequently tells their child, “I love you so much,” but in the next breath threatens, “If you keep acting like this, I’ll leave you here.” The affection is real, and so is the fear. The child clings lovingly one moment, then shuts down the next. This emotional whiplash painfully pairs love with danger.
In adulthood, anxious-avoidant people may form intense emotional bonds quickly, only to withdraw or sabotage the relationship as soon as vulnerability deepens. This hot-and-cold dynamic is a reflection of unresolved inner conflict. At their core, they want love and belonging, but the path to it feels threatening. These individuals often feel torn: if they reach out, they fear being hurt; if they pull away, they fear being alone. The result is often confusion, ambivalence, or emotional paralysis.
For those with anxious-avoidant attachment, their childhood memory is often conflicted and unstable. They may remember needing closeness but also feeling overwhelmed by it. “I wanted my dad’s attention, but being around him was exhausting.” Recollections are emotionally inconsistent; sometimes they are vivid, other times foggy. They may shift quickly between vulnerable longing and protective detachment, making it difficult for listeners to get a clear narrative of their past.
Do you resonate with the push-pull of longing and fear? How has this tension shown up in your adult relationships?
Disorganized Attachment (<1%)
Disorganized attachment is the most trauma-rooted and dysregulated of the attachment styles. It typically develops in early environments where caregivers were severely abusive and neglectful. Typically, where severe mental illness or unpredictable behavior was present. These children are caught in an impossible bind: the person they instinctively turn to for safety is also the source of threat.
Without a consistent strategy to manage this conflict, the nervous system becomes disoriented. The result is fragmentation. These individuals may freeze, dissociate, or struggle to organize their emotional experiences at all. In adulthood, this can manifest as intense relational fear, emotional volatility, identity instability, or numbness.
Disorganized attachment leads to fragmented, often dysregulated memory recall. These individuals may describe their caregivers as both loving and frightening, with no coherent thread between the two. “Sometimes she sang to me, other times she screamed, and I never knew which version I’d get.” Emotional memories may feel like disconnected pieces rather than a story. The nervous system encoded these moments as confusing or dangerous, and recall can cause dysregulation and dissociation.
Disorganized attachment is often associated with complex trauma and may co-occur with conditions like complex PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, or certain personality disorders. Healing requires long-term trauma-informed work.
Attachment Styles Are Adaptations, Not Life Sentences
Take note of which attachment style resonates most with you, but while you do that, know that your attachment style is not your destiny. It’s a map of your past, not a fixed identity, and you can rewire the pattern. Research over several decades suggests that approximately 30% of individuals experience changes in their attachment style (Kirkpatrick & Hazan, 1994; Chopik, Edelstein, & Grimm, 2019), and I believe it would be higher if people knew how.
The goal is not to become perfectly “secure” because that’s a myth. The real goal is an earned secure attachment. This is the kind that comes from reflection, healing, and new relational experiences. You begin to notice your patterns, name your needs, and slowly choose new ways of relating.
Here’s examples of earned secure relating in practice:
After years of staying silent during conflict, a woman in her thirties practiced pausing during an argument with her partner to express why she’s shut down: “I’m scared if I tell you how I feel you’ll leave.” She followed that up with a request for clarity that he’s still committed, which he was able to provide along with acknowledgement that her feelings matter. Instead of stonewalling in fear, she learned to name her need and respond to it, which helped move their interactions out of an unproductive cycle.
A man in his forties, raised in a home where crying was punished with isolation, found himself facing another one of his kid’s after-school meltdowns. Historically he’d try to shut it down, but instead he crouched beside them, offered a hug and said, “It’s been a hard day, huh? I’m here.” At first his child was surprised, but quickly embraced and calmed down. In that moment, he celebrated the breaking of a generational pattern. By offering his child comfort, he also offered it to a part of himself that never received it. Instead of parenting from old wounds, he began parenting from repair.
A young adult who had always feared being “too much” noticed a close friend growing distant. Instead of overthinking or withdrawing, we talked about asking for clarity with a message, “Hey, I’ve been feeling a little unsure, can I check in with you?” Her friend responded warmly, citing being overwhelmed at work. We later processed how kind requests aren’t a demand or a plea, but a bid for connection, and reinforced how she can honor and not hide it.
Attachment work is about expanding your range with closeness or space, learning how to stay present when triggered, and developing the willingness to express need without shame. It also means building the ability to hold paradoxes, such as sitting with conflicting truths without collapsing into panic or retreat. Like knowing you love someone and still setting a firm boundary. Like feeling fear and staying anyway. Like holding your own pain while offering empathy to another.
These moments can be uncomfortable, but they are the markers of secure relating. These skills are entirely learnable, best paired with a healthy model of secure attachment, and have the capacity to transform an insecure attachment style to one where relationships become a source of emotional safety and restoration.
How the Six Needs Show Up in Attachment Styles
As you've seen, each attachment style represents a unique way of navigating closeness and distance, often distorting or deprioritizing certain needs. What's often overlooked is how these patterns manifest in specific ways: some needs get magnified (like acknowledgment for the anxious style), while others get pushed underground (like comfort for the avoidant style). These distortions give rise to familiar inner beliefs ("I have to work for love," "Needing less keeps me safe") and set the stage for what healing will require.
The table below maps each attachment style to the Six Attachment Needs, showing which needs are overemphasized or avoided, the core beliefs that emerge, and what healing might look like in practice. Use it as both a mirror and a compass:
Which patterns resonate? Which beliefs feel familiar? Which invitations toward healing stir something in you?
| Attachment Style | Distorted Needs (Over/Under-Emphasized) | Typical Internal Beliefs | Healing Focus / Invitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secure | Balanced access to all six needs; no extreme distortions. | “My needs matter. Others are mostly reliable. I can ask and receive.” |
Maintain balance; model secure relating for self and others. Practice self-compassion during inevitable relational ruptures. |
| Anxious | Overemphasizes: Acknowledgment & Clarity (hyper-vigilant to cues). Avoids: Space (fears distance = abandonment). |
“I have to work for love.” “If I’m not perfect, they’ll leave.” “Closeness keeps me safe.” |
Build internal safety; learn to tolerate space without panic. Practice self-soothing and asking for clarity without overexplaining. |
| Avoidant | Overemphasizes: Space & Clarity (control via distance). Avoids: Acknowledgment, Comfort, Understanding (minimizes vulnerability). |
“Needing less keeps me safe.” “If I depend on others, I’ll get hurt or criticized.” |
Practice receiving comfort and acknowledgment; experiment with safe vulnerability; reframe interdependence as strength, not weakness. |
| Anxious- Avoidant |
Overemphasizes: All needs at once (intense longing for closeness). Avoids: All needs at once (fears engulfment and abandonment). |
“I crave love, but it’s dangerous.” “I’ll be hurt if I get close… but I’ll be alone if I pull away.” |
Build nervous system regulation to tolerate closeness; practice gradual trust-building; differentiate present vs. past threat. |
| Disorganized | Overemphasizes/Avoids: All six needs unpredictably (chaotic oscillation). | “Love is both comfort and danger.” “I can’t trust anyone - not even myself.” |
Trauma-informed healing; prioritize safety and stabilization first. Slow exposure to comfort and acknowledgment; repair fractured self-trust. |
Remember, your attachment style isn't a quirk; it's a deeply ingrained survival strategy for the relational terrain you grew up in. By exploring these patterns, you start to rewire your internal compass to guide you toward relational security.
Rebalancing begins with awareness. Ask yourself:
Which of the Six Attachment Needs do I find easiest to receive?
Which ones feel threatening or unfamiliar?
In conflict, which needs do I reach for? And which do I withhold?
There's a quiz at the end of the book to help answer these questions in more detail. Remember, these questions don't just reveal your style; they show you your growing edge.
Expanding the Map: The Six Levels of Attachment
To truly understand secure relating, we must also zoom out.
Attachment doesn’t just operate in romantic relationships or childhood bonds. It influences our connection to everything. From the self, to society, to our spiritual connections. Just as there are six core attachment needs, we can explore six levels of attachment. These layers offer a deeper lens through which to understand how safety and belonging ripple outward, and how insecurity can echo across all domains of life.
Attachment to Self
This is your foundation. Secure self-attachment means trusting your inner world. Believing you can feel hard things and still be worthy. You can fail and still be enough. Insecure self-attachment shows up as chronic self-doubt, externalized worth, or shame spirals.
Attachment to Relationships
This is where traditional conceptions of attachment styles live, how we show up with partners, friends, and family. Do you believe your needs can be expressed without threat? Can you stay open and present in conflict? Secure relationship attachment builds on the previous level of self-trust and teaches that intimacy can coexist with autonomy.
Attachment to Community
Beyond the personal, do you feel you belong in your community? Can you show up as yourself or are you constantly performing? A secure community bond makes you feel anchored and accepted. Insecure community attachment fosters alienation, vigilance, and suspicion. Do you trust your neighbors will look out for you? That the police will come when called? That your city will provide reliable basic services?
Attachment to Society
This level asks: Do you trust the systems you live in? Secure attachment here means believing in fairness and coherence, that effort is rewarded, justice prevails, and societal order exists. Insecurity at this level breeds cynicism, paranoia, and existential dread. Do you trust in law and order? That your government has your best interest? That your money will retain its value?
Attachment to the World
Here, we touch our relationship to the planet and the unknown. Are you in awe or afraid? Can you hold the beauty and fragility of life or does it feel overwhelming? Climate grief, economic anxiety, and fear of societal collapse often stem from wounded attachment at this level.
Attachment to Spirit
Finally, this is your relationship to meaning, mystery, and what lies beyond. Secure spiritual attachment offers peace in uncertainty - a sense that you are connected to something larger, even if you don’t have all the answers. Insecurity here can manifest as existential terror or rigid belief systems used to ward off chaos. One person might sit quietly under a night sky and feel held by its vastness, whereas another might spiral into panic at the thought that life has no inherent meaning.
These six levels mirror how attachment is both relational and existential. When one level is fractured, it often reverberates across the others. I remember working with a woman during my residency who had recently experienced a recurrence of breast cancer. The news devastated her. She had believed that God guided her healing the first time but now felt abandoned, as though her faith had betrayed her. She sank into despair, questioning the meaning of everything, and became suicidal. Our work became about spiritual repair, helping her reconcile the recurrence with her beliefs, and rediscover a sense of connection that could hold her, even in uncertainty.
Healing involves repair at each of these layers, beginning where the pain is loudest.
Moving Toward Secure Relating
Relational healing doesn’t happen in grand gestures - it happens in small, repeated moments. Each time you name a need instead of hiding it, stay present in a hard conversation instead of retreating, or allow yourself to be comforted without apologizing for it, you are sending your nervous system a new message: Connection can be safe.
Here’s what that might look like in everyday language:
“I’m not mad, I’m just overwhelmed. I need a little space.”
“It hurt when you canceled. I needed acknowledgement that I matter.”
“I’m not used to asking for help, but I could use some comfort right now.”
You don’t need perfect phrasing or to memorize the Six Attachment Needs to do this. What matters is the practice - the willingness to slow down, notice your body’s signals, and respond with care. Each microdose of secure relating not only shifts how others experience you, it rewires how you experience yourself.
Healing attachment is not about getting it right every time. It’s about getting curious instead of critical, compassionate instead of performative, and practicing presence with your needs - even when it’s messy. These moments of attunement, whether from another or from yourself, are what gradually reshape your internal map toward wholeness.
Tracing the Map Back to Its Source
Understanding your attachment style helps explain how you’ve learned to navigate closeness and distance. But it doesn’t yet explain why. Why did your nervous system draw this particular survival map? Why do certain memories echo louder than others, or certain triggers feel so sharp? To answer that, we need to talk about the hard things that have happened to us.
This brings us to trauma - not just the big, obvious events we label as traumatic - but also the quieter ruptures and unmet needs that shaped how safe (or unsafe) the world felt in your body. In the next blog, we’ll explore what trauma is and isn’t, how it lives in the nervous system, and why healing it is less about re-experiencing the past, and more about rewriting your relationship to it.
Secure relating isn’t perfection. It’s the courage to stay real, stay kind, and stay connected - even when it’s hard.
