Even if your parents do everything in their power to raise you right things can still go wrong, and they usually do to some degree.
PART 1: TRANSCRIPT
DAUGHTER: I don't know if you guys remember this, but when I started going to therapy she told me that I have an anxious attachment. However, I just took an attachment style quiz that came up fearful-avoidant. Neither are good, but do you know what they mean?
MOM: *pauses* please explain it.
DAUGHTER: So basically there are different types of attachment. And if you had all of your needs met as a child then you have a secure attachment. Anxious attachment is where you're always worried people don't like you and you feel like you can't depend on others. I was looking into some research and it said the roots of these attachment styles start in the first 12 months. Like fearful-avoidant happens if the parents are tentative and afraid of the baby.
DAD: That was definitely me.
DAUGHTER: Um, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about your feelings about that.
DAD: About an infant? I was terrified.
DAUGHTER: What helped you overcome that?
DAD: *motioning furiously at my mom*
MOM: You have to say words
DAD: Your mother! I was terrified. Quite honestly, I don't really care for infants that much. I found you much more interesting once you were older and started engaging and interacting. Prior to that, the funniest thing that we could do with you is move your feet and make your fart.
DAUGHTER: Jesus christ, that’s ridiculous.
DAD: There’s not a lot you can do with a child under two! They're adorable. They're cute, but-
MOM: Tim, I don’t think you give yourself enough credit though. You would play with Sydney. You would dance with her, but to your core, you were scared.
DAD: I was terrified of a two year old. I was afraid I was going to break you. I felt like we didn't really know what we were doing. Here you are given the most precious gift of all of life with no instruction manual and no clue how to, how to go forward.
DAUGHTER: Do you think that part of that has to do with your own upbringing?
DAD: I think everything has to deal with your own upbringing. Um, my mom used to watch kids all the time and as a child. I guess if I'm to be honest, I didn't really care for other kids in my household because of inconvenience.
DAUGHTER: That’s so ironic, because I remember hating that you were always playing with other people’s kids when I was younger, especially the youth group at church. So it's just funny that it came back around.
DAD: Well, I love playing with kids cause I think they have an incredible energy that adults just don't match. I mean the worst thing that can happen to a kid is that they'll cry. And then five minutes later they will be having the time of their lives, whereas an adult will contemplate their misery for the next five years. And that's one of the things I think adults can really learn from kids: how to accept what's happening, deal with it, and then move on.
MOM: And I think for myself, I had more experience with babysitting. So I didn't have-I'd like to think I didn't have-as much fear, but it was such new territory for me I know I was anxious.
DAUGHTER: Well, I also remember that when we talked about this a while ago, Mom, you were saying that going to visit your mom in Toledo was amazing because you could finally unwind a little bit. You would go there and your mom would take over.
MOM: Right, right. And you know, we had grandma Eve to watch you too. But if you have a partner that's afraid of handling an infant, then you're doing a lot of it yourself.
PART 2: MY THOUGHTS
I remember how shocked I was when the therapist first suggested that I didn’t have a secure attachment. I couldn’t comprehend how that was possible when I had such an objectively happy, stable childhood. Compared to the other children in my farm town, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a house that was fully functioning and my own bedroom.
Most of my friends came from houses with neglectful parents, multiple siblings, and absolutely no money to spare. I remember one time where my friend asked me to drive her home because her dad had gotten shit-faced the night prior and dragged his wife by her ear across the house. His mother, who was the only one with a car, protested so he threw her keys into the field. When we arrived that morning, we were met by a shirtless, sweaty, and only slightly apologetic father with his bedraggled family searching fruitlessly amongst the corn rows.
I also remember the time my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to go over to my best friend’s house anymore. They wouldn’t tell me why, so naturally I asked my friend, which ended up making the situation even stickier. It turned out that her dad was verbally abusive, and a racist skinhead, which was a term I didn’t even know the meaning of. My only memory of him is the way he laughed at how I ate all of the ingredients of a taco separately, which I have thankfully outgrown. In my mind, my friend’s house was just a place full of good climbing trees. I was oblivious to his threats to the family when they dared to eat anything while he wasn't around and his demands that his children get married already so he could stop wasting money on them.
Compared to my friends, my childhood was a breeze. What I didn’t realize until later was that the parts of their childhood that I was exposed to made me numb to my own issues and trauma. My habit of constantly comparing myself to them hindered me from processing the impact of my own past. For a long time, I was convinced that my issues weren’t worthy of the space they consumed in the face of other people’s pain.
It’s only after my therapist pointed out how silly it was to think that my experiences weren’t worth hearing that I realized my attachment style was having detrimental effects on my relationships and my life. My avoidance of the past, both in principle and in the form of those who reminded me of it, was directly related to things that were happening in the present. It’d gotten to the point where I started avoiding intimate relationships, jumping ship at the slightest suspicion that something might go wrong. I found it easier to go find new relationships and opportunities under the guise that I was just a go-getter. I didn’t realize that what I was really doing was avoiding the hard parts and the necessity of depending on others, which blossoms under stable relationships. All I knew was that I didn't want to be left behind ever again, so I decided to leave everything else behind in a desperate attempt to escape my past, which always seems to catch up to you regardless of what you do to fight it off.
I remember my friend accusing me of switching schools again my junior year of high school to avoid what had happened the previous year. I was taken aback. Of course it wasn't about that, it was about wanting to push myself harder academically, to set myself up for college to….to avoid thinking about what had happened without even realizing it. I was just so miserable, so tired of being told that our actions had been attention-seeking and that we were lying about what he’d done to us when it was our parents who forced us to go to the police in the first place.
My tendency towards avoidance started much earlier than that though, and while it’s hard to know exactly what caused me to go from an extremely extroverted toddler to the poster child for teenage angst (which involved lots of finger eleven and angry poems about death), I can tell you that therapy has greatly helped me overcome my fixation with the idea that no one likes me. It helped me process my trauma, helped me actually deal with my anger over how I felt like I’d somehow just let these things happen to me like I deserved them.
In reflecting on the past, I’ve realized that I just never had the words to express how others' actions made me feel in the moment, which is why I don’t agree with my dad’s idea that children are amazing at accepting what’s happened and moving on. I think children just haven’t developed the full emotional capacity to express how they feel, or to even understand what is happening to them at the moment. While my dad’s ideas of manifestation and bright thoughts towards a shiny future paint a wonderful picture, I think it leaves out a crucial part of the story. I also think his fixation on these ideas reflects his own coping mechanism.
That being said, I know my parents did the best they could for me. For instance, mom certainly held to her belief that making me feel heard as a child would help create a safe home. I learned from a very young age that my opinion mattered, something that both helps me navigate this world but also causes me to be brutally honest about my feelings.
Nevertheless, I will always remain thankful for my parents' endless love, which is why I feel like it’s an insult to this love to claim I have an insecure attachment. A lot of what happened to me wasn’t directly their fault, though they acknowledge that they could have been better about handling it. But I can’t help but wish my parents had only had the tools to help me with what I was feeling at the time.
PART 3: Research
Clearly something isn’t captured by these simple definitions of attachment. Though it’s said that you don’t need to identify with all the characteristics to fall into a certain category, it doesn’t explain how contradictory these categories can be. For instance, further research into the theories showed that anxious attachment causes a stronger link between work, home, and job satisfaction but avoidant attachment predicts a weaker link. If fearful-avoidant attachment is a blend of these two, then do these effects simply cancel themselves out? It’s far too confusing.
John Bowlby, the psychiatrist behind this theory, proposed that because caregivers are a child’s first social bonds, insecure attachments happen when the child feels that their needs aren’t being met. Anxious attachment comes from inconsistent parenting patterns, and such parents might appear intrusive or over-protective, which I don’t really relate to, but I did grow up in the generation of helicopter parents. Physical or psychological abuse is a lesser-known cause, which I suppose could explain some things if we are talking about interactions outside of my parents that happened way later in life. Perhaps that’s what caused my severe outward personality change in middle school.
It just doesn’t feel like the whole picture still, so when I came across this quiz for determining your attachment style during research I decided to take it. I’d never really questioned nor fully accepted what my therapist had deemed me as. While I agreed that I had a strong fear of abandonment, I didn’t think that summed it up. As expected, my result from the quiz came back as a different type: fearful-avoidant. This attachment style describes people who simultaneously crave intimacy but also experience difficulty depending on others because of their fear of getting hurt, which I can understand. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that reading all these attachment style descriptions was like reading my horoscope: just vague enough to trick me into thinking it applied uniquely to me.
I still had my parents take the quiz for comparison, and I was somewhat surprised to learn that they both have very secure attachments. I could tell you right now that wouldn’t have been the case for either of them if they’d taken it at my age, which makes me wonder how often these ‘attachment styles’ change for people. It reminds me of how personality tests fail to be an all-encompassing measure and serve rather more like a test of your current state of mind. Something I came across on The Attachment Project website proved this hunch. There was a disclaimer that many young adults experience unstable and insecure attachments, but it’s nothing to worry about because this is merely a product of puberty.
Regardless, I do agree that I could do some work on my attachment style. Lucky for me, there are many well-known methods for healing any insecure attachment. For starters, it is essential to become aware of your attachment style and how it affects your relationships. Self-reflection is almost always a huge step to overcoming any psychological barrier, something I’ve experienced repeatedly in the past few months. I’ve discovered that you have to fully process your past before you can break free from what’s holding you back. To work on how you interact with others, you can identify your emotional triggers and work on self-regulation methods that essentially help you stop and think like someone with a secure attachment. You can also focus on stabilizing exercises, such as breath exercises and body scans. If you work at it for long enough these methods will develop into habits that eventually change your entire outlook.
PART 4: SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
I will agree that our early interactions with our parents play a huge role over the years, but it’s also true that in a split second an unexpected encounter with a stranger can alter the course of your life. Human behavior is often too complex to be categorized by such simple definitions as those offered by attachment theory.
The human psyche and all the factors that influence it, both biological and environmental, are simply too complex to be captured in one theory. It’s a perpetual dilemma that the field of Psychology often acknowledges, but it is powerless to overcome. In the end, every theory is merely a best guess until proven otherwise. To this day, there remain many things about the brain that still aren’t fully understood.
Yet, it makes us feel more in control to be able to label things. It can comfort those that feel like they are crazy by allowing them to attribute abnormal behavior to a broader phenomenon. Perhaps attachment theory is useful solely in the fact that it provides a loose scoop for people to be able to start sorting through their emotions and work on themselves. Perhaps, even if you get a so-called wrong categorization, finding your attachment style serves to spark a deeper conversation within yourself.
If your curious, take the quiz for yourself and see what you get: https://www.attachmentproject.com/attachment-style-quiz/
REFERENCES
Chong, Alexandra, et al. “The Influences of Work and Home Interference and Facilitation on Job
Satisfaction: An Attachment Theory Perspective.” Journal of Personnel Psychology, vol. 17, no. 2, 2018, pp. 94–101. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1027/1866-5888/a000202 (Supplemental).
Fader, Sarah. “Self Soothe Anxious Attachment: Attachment Theory and Riding Yourself of
Anxiety.” BetterHelp, BetterHelp, 27 Jan. 2018, https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/anxiety/ridding-yourself-of-attachment-anxiety
“The Attachment Project: Learn Attachment Theory from Experts.”
Attachment Project, 28 July 2021, http://www.attachmentproject.com/.
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