Attachment styles and how they affect relationships

Attachment styles

Attachment styles create our thoughts and our perceptions.

Beliefs such as:

“Not being good enough”

“Not being worthy”

“Not being chosen”

“Low self esteem”

are the starting point and lead to disjointed communication and behaviours in relationships.  

Understanding our attachment style is one of the most essential parts of communication, understanding WHY we communicate the way we do, why we REACT the way we do, what it is that drives us and what we are really seeking when we talk or communicate with partners.

Our “CORE WOUND” is arguably the biggest cause of most of our relationship problems and that happens to us as young children, through our conditioning.

Communication is a representation of the self and it also allows our partners to feel safe to show themselves in the same way. If we are authentic in our communication, if we do the work to heal from our core wounds, we create a safe space to challenge and to connect. If you know that you’re coming from an authentic space, you are more willing to step into the stickier parts of relationships 

Understanding the needs of the self is the first step to clear communication. Understanding yourself is crucial to being able to create beautiful and authentic not just communication, but relationships.  When you discover who you are and where your wounds are coming from, you can start to think about how you approach the life that you live.  By taking that one element, communication and noticing how your core wound creates the watermark on this vital part of relationships, and how you push your relationship in a certain way to have a self-affirming particular result, you will heal and have healthier relationships. 

Make no mistake, the core wound is not just a traumatic event but rather, it is a series of small hurts. Because our brains are not fully developed as children (the prefrontal cortex is not online yet), we look at any situation where we did not have our basic emotional needs met as hurtful. This happens even if they have a logical reason behind them such as Mom needs to help my younger sibling or Dad works shift work and is unavailable sometimes.  

When the reasoning portion of your brain is not developed and you’re in any environment where you feel even slightly less prioritized by your parents or caregivers, if you didn’t get the love or the connection that you really wanted, you’re going to take this as an affront to you; that you are somehow responsible. These small traumas develop and add up to making a core wound that may manifest as not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy. Other manifestations of your core wound are having self-worth that’s attached to the external, low self-esteem or not feeling chosen.

What your core wound is telling you is important because it determines how you communicate.  These beliefs are held in the subconscious and they actually drive us toward connections with other people and create beliefs about those connections. 

The core wound also determines your attachment style. Attachment styles are defined as the way we respond emotionally to others as well as our behaviours and interactions. Understanding your core wounds will give you deep insight into what you want out of communication with your partner, which is a central part of our relationships.

Your motivations in communicating are determined by your attachment style. Your attachment style is essentially a coping mechanism developed to maintain a certain homeostasis around your core wound.  This is how the ego developed while dealing with that wound.  It is a strategy for survival.  

And a lot of us stay at that point, survival.  But surviving is not thriving, Surviving is the bare minimum. It’s not a space where you are empowered or connected with anything in a meaningful way. 

If we continue to use our coping methods, that are developed from our attachment styles in our relationships, then our relationships will also be just head above water, not thriving.  If we seek to understand our attachment styles then we understand more about our communication and the way that we express ourselves in general. 

While we do inherit some subtle communication traits from parental modeling and cultural influences, at the core of our method of communication is our attachment style. This is the coping method that we learned as a child to deal with hurt or trauma.

Not only does the attachment style determine the greatest aspect of our relationship, our communication, but it also determines the commitment of attachment that we seek from our partner.

Most of us want to learn how to better communicate with our partners, if we understand our attachment styles, we get to disarm the method that we’re constantly using to create a type of connection that may be inhibiting the very connection that we seek.  

Attachment styles: 

Anxious, avoidant, disorganized, and secure

Anxious attachment: strong emotional attachment to a partner and a dependency on the partner.

For avoidant, it’s a strong attachment to non-emotional areas of life so, therefore, a stronger disconnection from the partner but a stronger connection to profession, hobbies, pets, etc.

There are reasons why these things happen in a certain way.  With the anxious, when they felt rejected or abandoned as a child, their coping mechanism was to fight for it to ultimately gain that connection. With avoidant, they tried to ask for love and someone denied them so instead, they rejected emotions, their thoughts are “I don’t want anything to do with emotions again”, they go into themselves and put their life’s effort into something that can’t really reject them because they have no capacity to do otherwise. 

The disorganized, they don’t generally have a clear strategy because their relationship with their caregivers, was unpredictable.  They may have been very loving and then very abusive: physically, emotionally, or other.  In this situation and not knowing which way they can go, they have the traits of both avoidant and anxious.  

The secure style of attachment creates a more regulated connection. they don’t fear abandonment because they are healing that inner child.  So if there’s a situation of rejection or abandonment with a partner or a friend they recognize that that is an expression of choice or of priorities but they don’t take it to mean something about themselves. 

This all really matters when it comes to communication styles because when we start to become more secure, we don’t need to blame someone else we don’t need to attack someone else with our communication and we also create less of an expectation for them to be ac certain way or for them to communicate in a certain way with us.

What kind of attachment style do you have and how do you see it playing out in your relationships?