Relationship conflicts within the household relationships are very often related to the attachment styles of the individuals involved.
An attachment style is a set of automatic relationship processes that each of us as children developed to help us cope with our particular family environment.
And because these patterns of coping with the interpersonal environment were practiced so many times during our childhood and adolescent years, they become entrenched in our thoughts, behaviors and emotional systems… and so powerfully influence how you behave and respond within your adult relationships today.
In this newsletter, I will again be drawing on the writings of well known US psychologist Hal Shorey to help you to identify one of the common styles of insecure attachment, termed the anxious attachment style, and to start to learn how to cope with this attachment style in yourself and/or others.
Three key questions for you to consider that relate to your relationships with your important people (such as your partner, close friends, etc):
Do you find that others are reluctant to get as close to you as you would like?
Do you often worry that your important people don’t really love you or won’t want to stay or spend time with you?
Do you often want to get very close to your important others and this sometimes scares people away and/or leaves you feeling scared that you will be let down?
If your answer is “Yes (most of the time)” to these questions, then it is likely that you have what is termed an “insecure attachment style” and, more specifically, an “anxious attachment style.”
Scientific research suggests that many of us are likely to have an anxious attachment style. So, if you don’t have this personality style then you are most likely in relationships with people who do. Understanding this personality style and how it impacts emotions and interpersonal behaviours can help to relieve distress and conflict, avoid damage, and promote healthy and mutually satisfying relationships.
Imagine the following situation involving you and a close friend or significant other:
After an interaction with this person they seem rather distant and dismissing of you. The person leaves without providing an explanation, and you feel a slight surge of anxiety as you try to work out why the person behaved towards you in this way.
As the day progresses, you think about all of the other interactions you have had with this person. You recall other times that you have felt rejected and “less than.” You wonder if that person really likes you. You might begin to feel angry or misunderstood. And it is not long before your discomfort causes you to give them a call.
You ask the person if anything is wrong and it is very difficult to hide the upset in your voice. The other person tells you that you are over-reacting, and sounds irritated. After the call, you feel even worse.
At the end of the day, you call the person again and it turns into an unpleasant argument with accusatory statements flying between the two of you, and you end up feeling angry and betrayed.
Similar situations might unfold in relation to your boss and/or certain colleagues. You often perceive these individuals to be rather distant with you and, as a result, you spend a lot of time ruminating over your recent interactions with them.
And when you confront any one of these individuals you often leave the interaction feeling as though they look down on you.
When trying to determine what happened in any one of these difficult interactions, the truth is often that you will have experienced an emotional hijacking because of an “anxious attachment style” that became wired within your personality and emotional system during your childhood years.
If you do have an anxious attachment style, you can learn to recognize and understand it, capitalise on the strengths that it gives you, and override the parts that cause you problems. If you don’t have an anxious attachment style, then this may help you understand those who do.
There are more than 40 years of research on attachment styles, which indicates that if you have an anxious style (called “preoccupied” in adults), you were probably raised by one or more parents who were inconsistent in how they responded to you when you were young, especially when you were upset and needed reassurance.
Sometimes the parent is warm and accepting and at other times cold and rejecting. The key is that their child never knows what s/he is going to get. Because children need to feel safe and secure in their relationships with their parents, these children will learn to closely monitor their parents so that they can tell how their parents will respond to them.
This monitoring enables the child to shift his or her behaviour in order to head off painful rejection. This coping strategy works well during childhood but becomes the automatic relationship mode in adulthood.
Over the course of childhood, the anxiously attached person becomes “hypervigilant” for threat cues and “preoccupied” with his/her close relationships. This style reflects a “hyper-activation” of the attachment system wherein the person’s social-threat-detection apparatus is permanently stuck in the “on position.”
Brain imaging research shows that those brain structures that identify threat cues in the environment are actually larger in people with anxious attachment styles.
So, if you have this style, you are likely to pick up readily on subtle emotional cues from others, experience strong emotional reactions, take a long time to calm yourself down, and ruminate while you are activated.
Your thoughts ‘force’ you to fix the situation and you enact behaviours to do just that, such as confronting the person who you feel is rejecting you. The problem is that what you do to fix things often results in just making them worse.
The good news is that having an overly sensitive threat detector can make you very empathetic and compassionate to the emotional experiences of others. You can also take some of the following steps to control the negative aspects of this pattern:
• Realize that your threat detector will often give you false positive readings.
• Be aware that it will be hard to think clearly when you are emotionally activated.
• Give yourself 30 minutes or more to calm down before responding.
• If the other person tries to distance him/herself, leave it and try again later.
• Tell yourself there is nothing to fix, and that it can wait until tomorrow.
• Distract yourself or do something else to take your mind off of it.
• Acknowledge that rehashing the problem with your friends might keep you activated instead of making you feel better.
Crucially, the brains of people with anxious attachment styles will interpret neutral facial expressions from others as a threat cue and as an indicator that they may reject you. So, your friend or partner who is trying to calm you down by not reacting or remaining calm while you are upset might just be having the opposite effect.
If you can accept that it was your childhood home environment that shaped your emotional system and relationship patterns, you may be able to stop blaming yourself.
And taking a mindfulness course can help you to begin to identify your habitual way of relating to others especially during difficult and/or stressful situations. This will enable you to gradually make the changes that will allow your relationships to flourish within the home environment and elsewhere.
With warm regards,
Alistair Mork-Chadwick (Psychologist)
30 Jul2020