Attachment Theory

Let’s take a look at the four adult attachment styles:

• Avoidant Attachment: People with avoidant attachment are highly independent and feel uncomfortable getting close to anyone. They don’t feel like they need to rely on their significant other, and believe their partner shouldn’t rely on them. That’s why an avoidant person may seem emotionally unavailable. 

• Anxious Attachment: Those with anxious attachment crave constant intimacy, and can often push people away by demanding too much. They tend to be insecure in their relationship and fear that their partner will leave them. 

• Fearful-Avoidant Attachment: A combination of the two attachment styles, fearful-avoidant people long for intimacy but also fear getting too close to people. They thus feel conflicted about intimacy and may experience a great deal of push-pull in their relationships.  

• Secure Attachment: Secure attachment is the gold standard of attachment. Secure people are comfortable with intimacy and vulnerability. They trust their partners and tend not to fear rejection or abandonment. This attachment style signals that their needs were consistently met as a child in a balanced way, while also allowing autonomy. Secure attachment allows for both space and closeness in equal measure, promoting both intimacy and individuation. 

Those with avoidant, anxious, and fearful attachments will often struggle with relationships.

Those with secure attachments are typically more self-confident, independent, successful at work, and enjoy stable, healthy relationships in life.

There’s even a science to what type of person you attract, and how compatible your relationship will be depending on both you and your significant other’s attachment styles.

For example, if you’re fearful-avoidant, you often attract partners that are avoidant. You tend to find people with secure attachment a little boring.

Conversely, if you identify with secure attachment, you will most likely gravitate toward someone who is also secure and can meet you on the same level.

But it’s important to remember that it’s not your fault if you struggle with unhealthy attachment styles. 

Because you’re not responsible for internalizing the dynamics that were modeled for you as a child––that’s a developmental inevitability.

Your insecure attachment style does not define you and can be changed if you’re willing to do the work to shift the way you relate to yourself and others.

Our attachment-based experiential, somatic, and psychodynamic therapy modalities will help you begin to develop greater emotional awareness surrounding attachment issues so that you can begin to develop more meaningful, stable relationships with others and a greater sense of self-confidence and vitality as an individual. 

At My LA Therapy, we integrate a variety of research-proven techniques to help heal insecure attachment and create a customized approach for your individual needs and situation.