Have you ever found that the same old problems keep cropping up time and again in your relationships?
It can often seem no matter how hard you try to change your relationship. Or change the type of person you end up dating. Your relationships often pan out in the same old way.
Neurobiology of attachment tells us that parent-child interactions in the first two years of life actually encode within the brain pathways of responses to stress and difficulty in our relationships. In a sense this means you are internally pre-programmed to have certain expectations of how others will respond to you in times of relationship stress and difficulty. This can then set the tone for your own emotional responses and behaviour towards others within your close relationships.
There are understood to be four main attachment styles that people adopt;
Does one of these styles sound like you?
Secure
You feel positive about yourself and feel comfortable displaying affection within your relationships. You are able to prioritize your relationships and establish and stick to boundaries. You are emotionally flexible and balanced and able to accept conflict and appropriately repair conflict within your relationships.
Anxious-preoccupied
You often feel anxious about the state of your relationships. You often feel negative about yourself and have trouble trusting in your relationships. You often feel the need to be close to your partner seeking reassurance that things are alright. You put your partners needs above your own and are preoccupied with your partners moods. You overthink things and are unable to fully understand why your partner doesn’t seem to feel or act the way you do.
Avoidant-dismissive
You often feel positive about yourself and are quite independent and self-sufficient. You can often feel quite negative about your relationships and find you keep people at a distance. When relationships get too close and intimate you can feel uncomfortable. You are quite rational about life and relationships and do not understand why others are so needy. You often feel “suffocated” within your relationships and adopt strategies and behaviours to avoid commitment or emotional intimacy.
Fearful-avoidant
You often feel negative about yourself and others this leads you to have quite mixed feelings about your relationships. You wish for closeness and intimacy yet are quite fearful of it. In your relationships you can easily feel overwhelmed by closeness and unable to trust your partner. Your relationships are often quite volatile, in a push and pull pattern, of volatile rows and separations and then making up and the pattern repeats.
Relationship patterns
Most couples find a partner that fits their attachment style and communication needs. For example an anxious person often fits into a relationship with an avoidant person. This pairing works as the avoidant person pushes away the anxious persons advances. This confirms the expectations of the anxious person who then reacts by seeking more and more attention until they receive the reassurance they need. This behaviour reassures the avoidant type that they can keep their partner at an emotional distance and they will stick with them. This pattern of chased and chaser are roles that the anxious and avoidant types expect to experience in their intimate relationships. Even though it may confirm their expectations it can lead to unhappy and difficult relationships for both partners.
How do you change your attachment style?
The first part is to find out what style you have by doing an online questionnaire. Once you know your style this doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it for life. Research indicates our attachment patterns adapt and fluctuate in our life’s.
For instance you could be a secure type in a strong relationship with an insecure type. This is due to the fact a secure person is better able to manage and cope with the others issues bringing emotional stability and a secure sense of dependency into the relationship. However an affair by the insecure type, loss of job or another kind of emotional trauma may negatively impact the secure persons capacity to cope leading them to defensively become more anxious or avoidant.
The opposite can also happen an insecure person can have a secure and balanced relationship usually with a secure type. Over time this enables them to trust in their relationships, feel their needs matter and will be attended to leading them to feel more secure about themselves and others.
So once you have established your attachment style become more aware of the triggers that activate your emotional and attachment responses. Your partner doesn’t know how their behaviour affects you so try to be brave about your feelings and express them to your partner. This develops a joint understanding of how you both experience each other’s moods and behaviour. You will probably be quite surprised by how different your take can be on the exact same situation or issue.
Try to be clear with your partner about your ideas and expectations. It may feel difficult but the only way your partner can know this is if you assertively let them know your needs, values and wishes within your life and relationship.
Remember relationship conflict is not a battle to be fought over and won. Conflict is an opportunity for the relationship to grow and develop. Respect and accept your differences and work together to mutually agree on appropriate compromises to benefit how you function as a couple.
All of this may help you both adapt how you interact and communicate with each other. This can then help make you both feel more secure, understood and supported on a day-to-day basis and in your relationship as a whole.
Remember change in your attachment style can take time and often occurs over the long-term rather than weeks. Some people also find it helpful to work on their attachment patterns and relationships issues in therapy as this provides an impartial and neutral setting to observe and better understand your emotional experience and behaviours. Therapy may help a person develop their insight, self-awareness and their own capacities to regulate their feelings which may facilitate behavioural change within their relationships.
For couples it can be helpful to understand how your individual attachment style may link into your patterns of relating or behaviour as a couple. In couple counselling some of the process can be around helping each partner ‘see’ the differences in how they experience the same issue or problem and each other within it and how this may link into their own attachment style. This awareness, or insight around how conflict or difficulty is managed within the couple may lead to more open communication and flexibility into how you respond and react to each other to begin to shift your old familiar patterns.