Understanding Attachment: The Foundation of Secure and Lasting Relationships
What is Attachment?
Attachment is known as our ability to form and maintain secure and lasting bonds with others. These relationships soothe, support and provide comfort in times of distress.
From the moment we're born, we start to form bonds with the people around us. Though this attachment may be considered psychological, it is a fundamental human need, like water, food, or air.
Attachment as a Survival Strategy
The attachment system is a biological built-in survival strategy, hard-wired into us as human beings. Humans, especially babies, depend on their attachment figures for protection, emotional regulation, and reassurance. An infant would die if it could not elicit a response from a caregiver to help them receive nurturing and protection. The functioning of the attachment system can be described as a continuous scanning process that evaluates the surrounding environment for signs of attachment safety or threats to attachment, as outlined in this image:
Bonding theory suggests close connections with trusted others create an essential environment for the human brain, nervous system, and behavioural patterns to evolve, providing the foundation for us to grow into our best selves. Our early experiences with our attachment figures shape the way we bond with others and lead to different attachment styles. Secure bonds in our relationships with others are linked to an increase in mental health, vitality, well-being and resilience.
How Babies Communicate Their Attachment Needs
Bowlby (1969) found attachment behaviours such as proximity seeking are instinctive and triggered by separation, fear, insecurity or any other threat of closeness with an attachment figure. Behaviours we see in babies, such as crying are adaptive responses to trigger caretaking to have their needs met by a primary attachment figure, which is usually a parent. Attachment is shaped not by food, but by care, engagement and responsiveness.
An infant feels free to explore the world when it knows it can always return to the safety and comfort of its attachment figure—this is the essence of secure attachment. When that sense of security is disrupted, the infant no longer feels safe and instinctively engages in attachment behaviours to reestablish a connection with the caregiver. If these initial attempts fail, the infant experiences growing separation distress, which may escalate into anger or eventually lead to shutting down or withdrawing altogether.
Protest: an infant will cry, get louder, scream, cling to their attachment figure and reject other people to try to establish reconnection with their attachment figure.
Despair: if an infant’s protest is not responded to by their caregiver it can lead to despair. The protests stop and an infant will appear calmer although still upset. They will refuse comfort from others and will appear withdrawn, uninterested, less active, and hopeless.
Detachment: if despair continues an infant may detach from their caregiver. While they may seem happy, calm and content on the outside, they are suppressing their emotions. They appear to move on from their attachment figure, ignoring them and engaging with others.
For a visual demonstration, watch Edward Tronick’s Still Face Experiment.
The Impact of Early Attachment Experiences
Shaping Attachment Styles
The way a caregiver responds socially and emotionally gives an infant important clues about the world, other people, and their own sense of worth. For example, these interactions help a person decide whether they feel worthy of love and care and whether they believe others are reliable and available to help (Bowlby, 1969).
Bowlby called this understanding an internal working model (IWM). It starts as a mental and emotional picture of the infant’s first close relationship and grows into the foundation for their attachment style. As people get older, their internal working model shapes how they view themselves and interact in their relationships. It affects their memories, expectations, and how they view and respond to others(Bretherton & Munholland, 1999).
Attachment in Adulthood
From infancy, responsive caregiving fosters trust, emotional regulation, and secure bonds, shaping how we explore, connect, and form relationships throughout life, often without us even realizing it. These early attachment experiences create a blueprint for adult relationships, influencing our ability to trust and feel secure. Dr. Sue Johnson described this innate need for emotional closeness with significant others as a "survival response," explaining that "this need never disappears; it evolves into an adult need for a secure bond with a partner."
10 Principles of Attachment Theory
Dr. Sue Johnson described ten key principles of attachment theory in her book Attachment Theory in Practice as:
Humans long for close physical and emotional connection with irreplaceable special people especially in times of risk, threat, pain or uncertainty. Sharing vulnerability in relationships strengthens these bonds, highlighting our attachment need for connection and comfort, and encourages us to reach for others.
Our nervous system is soothed, and we feel comforted and reassured by the predictable, reliable responsiveness of an attachment figure. This creates a sense of a ‘safe haven’, regulating our nervous system to feel safer and more secure.
Safe Haven: from this ‘safe haven,’ individuals develop a confident, positive and integrated sense of self that empowers them to express their attachment needs and seek connection with others. This builds positive views of others as trustworthy, accessible, responsive and reliable for support.
Secure Base: the felt sense of a secure base prime a sense of competence, autonomy - effective dependency.
Are you there for me? Accessibility, responsiveness, and emotional engagement define the quality of a bond.
Separation distress is primed when a secure connection is lost and will lead to protest, clinging, despair, and then eventually detachment.
Can I count on you? Am I worthy of your love? Key interactions are held in mental models of self and others. Expectations, Biases, beliefs, and procedural strategies are a part of those memories. What is experienced becomes reality itself.
Attachment security: individuals with secure attachment styles can acknowledge needs, send clear coherent messages, reach out, take in care, and give out care.
Insecure attachment styles can minimize their attachment needs and become self-reliant. Vulnerability can trigger distancing behaviour. Someone with attachment trauma can vacillate between longing and fear. They may demand connection, and then distance from it. There is a predictable pattern of insecure attachment:
Anxious - fight, hyperarousal, high needs, vigilant.
Avoidant - flee, hypoarousal, minimize need, connection.
Fearful - Avoidant, flip between the above. Other is a source of both solace/fear.
Strategies can be adaptive or become styles, often habitual, rigid, generalized, and constraining.
Insecurity is a risk factor for almost all problems in adaptation.
Adult relationships are reciprocal involving caretaking and sexuality. Security is associated with higher levels of arousal, intimacy, pleasure and sexual satisfaction in relationships.
How Therapy Can Help Heal Attachment Wounds
It’s Never Too Late for Secure Attachment
It's never too late to develop a secure attachment. The negative effects of not having ideal early attachment experiences are reversible. Although attachment patterns formed in infancy may persist, you can shift to a more secure style. The first step is recognizing your current style of attachment. Research shows that understanding your attachment style and childhood experiences predicts future relationship security. Additionally, forming a bond with someone secure can enhance your own sense of security.
Meeting with a therapist who specializes in attachment theory can be beneficial. The therapist can help you understand your insecurities and provide guidance on shifting and changing attachment patterns that hinder healthy relationships. This journey allows for deeper self-awareness by exploring past experiences. While it may require time and varying degrees of courage, this process can enhance your resilience, giving you a stronger sense of security to face life's adversities.
Attachment Therapy in Alberta
Whether you’re looking to strengthen your partnership or family bonds or heal your attachment style as an individual, our team at Williamson & Associates is here to support you. We offer attachment, relationship and trauma therapy for adults, couples, families, youth in our offices in Olds in Central Alberta as well as online to anyone in the province of Alberta.
Take the First Step for Attachment Therapy in Olds, Central Alberta or Online in Alberta
Contact us today to schedule a session and take the first step to learn how the attachment science of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT), Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT), and Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) can help you nurture deeper, more secure relationships.
See other posts about Counselling in Olds, Central Alberta:
Understanding Different Attachment Styles and Their Impact on Relationships
ADHD and Marriage: How EFT Couples Counselling Can Help Couples Affected by ADHD
Couples Counselling, Family Therapy and Mental Health: Supporting Each Other Through Tough Times
Financial Stress and Relationships: How Couples Therapy Can Help
Rekindling Intimacy: A Couple's Guide to Sexual Healing and Connection
The Top 5 Myths about Couples Counselling, Marriage Therapy and Relationship Therapy