Childhood Bonding: What To Do If You Are Not Securely Attached?
This is part six in a series of articles about childhood bonding or attachment. In this article I look at what you can do if you believe you did not experience secure attachment.
Is it Just Me?
You are not alone if you think you did not experience secure attachment as a child. If your parent’s attachment style was primarily anxious, avoidant or disorganized then there is a strong likelihood that you will not be securely attached. Even if your parent was securely attached as a child, shock traumas or the influence of a culture’s baby raising practices (think of Dr Spock who endorsed time feedings of infants) could have significantly strained your parent’s ability to foster secure attachment in you.
A Mixed Bag
It is not uncommon to act in ways that sometimes reflect secure attachment while at other times the strategies of anxious, avoidant or disorganized styles appear. If this is the case, the latter three strategies are more likely to show up in intimate relationships. It is also possible to demonstrate behaviors characteristic of any of these strategies depending on the situation. For example, a friend who appears helpless may elicit in you caretaking behaviors typical of anxious attachment while a boss who is emotionally unavailable my stimulate a desire to withdraw in ways that reflect an avoidant style.
Take Action
If you suspect that relationship difficulties in any arena of your life are influenced negatively by your attachment style, then here are some steps to take:
- Assess your attachment style. A free survey is available from Dr Diane Poole Heller, PhD. Go to Attachment Quiz
- Bring compassion to yourself. Understand that your attachment style reflects how you, as a very young child, adapted to how threatening the environment was for your nervous system. Avoid using the style as a fixed label of who you are as person.
- Consider working with a body-focused therapist who understands the attachment styles. A therapist with this training may be the most helpful as she will understand how to support an over- or under-active nervous system and how to use touch when appropriate to restore a sense of connectedness.
- Ask for feedback from people, who are kind and respectful, about your patterns of behavior and how they are affected by how you treat them. Their feedback could be used to confirm (or deny) what the assessment survey revealed.
Learn more about attachment styles.
- Read: Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship (Paperback) by Stan Tatkin
- Read: A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (Paperback) by John Bowlby
- Read: Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love (Hardcover) by Amir Levine
- Enroll in the DARE training by Diane Poole Heller, PhD http://dianepooleheller.com/workshops/dare-1/
Next Step?
If you are interested in exploring your attachment style with me, I can be reached at 720-635-7943 in metro Denver, CO. I offer a complimentary 30-minute consultation during which we can see if we are a good fit for one another.
