Today we are talking about attachment styles and attachment theory.
Why? Because it's the foundation of ALL RELATIONSHIPS!
Do you ever find yourself struggling in romantic relationships or friendships? With your partners, do you often find yourself jealous, stressed about if they’re cheating on you, if they’re going to find someone better, why are they taking so long to text you back? Or on the flip side, do you ever feel like you struggle to connect with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you feel cringe when you start developing feelings or when someone opens up to you? This all comes down to attachment styles.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not a professional therapist. Just a girl in therapy with experience and research :)
So I’ll go over the four main attachment styles: anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized attachment and secure attachment. And it’s possible to be a blend of different ones!
I’ll break down the childhood traumas that can sprout these attachments and other experiences in life like bullying, strict parents, death of loved ones, etc.
I’ll also give you guys question prompts to journal about, meditate over and or talk to a therapist about. I hope this video is a jumping off point to your self healing journey. Also be sure to check out my video on boundaries. If you liked this, I’m sure you’ll like that one.
And you can go your whole life not realizing what your style of attachment is, which is wild because your attachment style is truly the foundation, the bedrock of how you interact with everyone from your friends to your romantic partners. It sets the tone for how you think, how you feel, how you communicate and is crucial for healthy relationships.
It wasn’t until recently that I started intentionally learning and understanding more about attachment styles, identified which I was and started working on how to heal that. When you learn about attachment styles, something you realize off the bat is the repeated pattern --- you see how the same behaviors play out in many relationships in your life -- maybe that’s ghosting people over and over again or maybe it’s always stressing over how fast someone texts you back. You understand why you act the way you do.
And it impacts every part of our life. How we deal with friendships, romantic partners, how we act at work, how we see ourselves, how we raise our kids.
And so that It is the lens in which we see the world. It’s like we are programmed and pre-disposed to act a certain way in our relationships.
And knowing your attachment style is so so so crucial to having healthy relationships.
Because able to recognize our disruptive patterns and cycles -- i.e. jealousy or fear or withdrawal or ghosting.
And we can’t talk about attachment without talking about childhood. And our attachment styles mainly form from our childhood. Experiences later in life absolutely can affect attachment but how we connected with our parents from birth to adolescence is typically the main root of our adult attachment styles.
A lot of people are in denial -- like oh that happened when I was a child, it doesn’t affect me now, that’s what I used to say. … just a coincidence -- a strange pattern that all my relationships go like this..? Not tied together at all..
How we bonded with our caregivers in childhood translates to how we naturally behave and in every relationship in adulthood. I said NATURALLY behave. It’s how we are hard wired to think but that doesn’t mean we can’t work to reprogram that and work towards healthy adulthood bonds.
