The 4 Attachment Styles and How Understanding Them Helps Inform Healing from Trauma
We are always talking about children being able to form healthy attachments or relationships with their caregivers. This is also known as a secure attachment, and is the most ideal model for the basis of any healthy relationship. Your earliest attachments with parents and caregivers shape your abilities and expectations for relationships throughout your life. In other words, your first relationships impact your sense of self and how it develops, as well as how you see relationships working.
Understanding How Relationships Affect Development
When a child experiences broken trust and trauma, you can see how that truly shapes their development and how they understand relationships in a negative way. From infancy, we begin to learn whether we can depend on the people in our lives to keep us safe or not. It’s where our nervous system develops to either grow to understand that we are lovable as is or drives us to cope with the emotional pain of not being accepted.
Secure relationships literally teach your nervous system how to regulate because you understand what consistent and reliable behavior and relationships look like. You also learn that you are never alone and have a support system to help you get through tough emotional times.
Secure relationships allow you the space to discover yourself and your emotions. Trauma teaches that you cannot trust a person or place to be safe, and that you cannot ask for what you need. Relationships have the ability to soothe or scare you, see you or shame you, depending on the attachment style.
The 4 Attachment Styles
Let’s take a look at the 4 attachment styles. Knowing these will help you better understand your child’s trauma. We will take a look at what it would look like as a child to have that attachment style, and what behaviors that causes as an adult, which you may already see being presented by your child.
Remember, the most ideal style between caregiver and child is a secure attachment style. Despite it being the most ideal, studies have shown that only 60% of adults have a secure attachment style. To help your child heal from trauma, it’s important that you try to cultivate a secure attachment with your child.
1 | Secure Attachment
No one has the perfect childhood but if you grew up with a secure emotional bond, your caregivers or parents were good enough at being consistent. With this attachment style, a caregiver’s behavior allows a child to feel safe and protected. Children with this attachment style feel confident that their parents accept them and are emotionally present with them.
In this attachment style, children learn that if they become upset, they feel seen. This is because parents in this style create a safe place for children to process their hurt until things return to normal. In other words, children feel secure.
As an adult, children with this attachment style are more likely to become close with others easily. They develop relationships that are healthy and “feel good.” They are comfortable with being close to others and being vulnerable with a partner. They are also comfortable with independence and your emotions feel tolerable.
2 | Avoidant (Dismissive) Attachment
Some babies and caregivers had to depend on a caregiver who was emotionally unavailable or unaware of their needs. In some cases, crying was discouraged and a child may have felt they had to grow up quickly.
As an adult, children with this attachment style place importance on independence. This is often because the child felt uncomfortable depending on someone else, or being depended on by others. As adults, they often feel emotionally removed from others, pulling away from people when presented with opportunities for closeness. In fact, those who had this attachment style as a child may not seek out relationships as an adult because they feel that relying on others is unsafe. They will also avoid stressful situations and conflict.
3 | Anxious/Insecure (Preoccupied) Attachment
This is when a parent at times responded well to the child’s needs, but then at other times, was not present for the child. For example, one or both parents could have gotten stuck in their own anxiety and responded in hurtful or critical ways to the child’s needs. This can make you grow up feeling insecure and uncertain of what treatment to expect.
As an adult, these children will find they need a lot of reassurance and responsiveness in a relationship. They can become over-dependent on their relationships to make them feel okay. It could get to the point that when the person they care about is gone, they feel heightened anxiety.
4 | Disorganized (Unresolved) Attachment
This type of attachment style can be a combination of avoidant and anxious styles. Perhaps the parents or caregiver was frightening, abusive, or behaved in inappropriate ways toward the child. Children in this attachment style felt fearful of their caregiver. The caregiver was not present, yet a child’s instincts often led them to believe that they should be loyal to their caregivers because they were their parents. They may long for closeness, but also fear it. This can lead to inconsistent or confusing actions and relationships. Disorganized attachment is also the primary style for survivors of complex trauma.
Healing Through Emotionally Corrective Relationships
Therapy and the experience of emotionally secure relationships are healing! As a caregiver for a child who has experienced trauma in the past, cultivating a secure attachment style with your child can help them heal from past trauma. Understanding how your child forms attachments can help you to reach them where they are and to speak to them in a way that reassures them.
Children are resilient and as they learn to trust and rely on others, their brain makes new pathways and helps them heal. Focusing on forming a positive, safe relationship allows your child to begin to feel secure, safe, and loved.
If you are an adult trying to heal from unresolved trauma, it’s important to know that there is still hope. Attachment styles are not set in stone. No matter which style you currently have, secure attachment is possible for you. Learning and practicing new ways to connect through self-awareness, therapy, and healthy relationships can help you heal. Learning about attachment styles is just the beginning of the journey and you are already headed in the right direction by choosing to read this!
Whether you are the parent of a child with trauma or an adult with unresolved trauma, finding a licensed therapist that specializes in trauma-informed care can help set you on the path toward healing. Then, it’s about learning to trust yourself and others while practicing self-compassion.
