Learn how attachment styles influence your adult relationships — and how therapy can help you heal and build healthier connections.
Many of us tend to repeat unhealthy patterns in relationships — even when we know they’re not serving us. These patterns are often shaped by early experiences, which can attachment theory can help explain. It’s a powerful psychological framework for understanding why we relate the way we do as adults.
Maybe you pull away when things get too close. Or feel anxious and uncertain when someone doesn’t text back. Or maybe you have a hard time trusting others.
There’s nothing wrong with you, we’re just prone to leaning on what we know. Unfortunately, these relational blind spots are often subconscious, making it harder to break the cycles we’re caught in.
These patterns are not our destiny. Attachment theory also offers insight into how we can begin to change.
What Is Attachment Theory and Why It Matters in Adult Relationships
Attachment is the emotional bond we form with our primary caregivers in early life. It teaches us about safety, comfort, and connection. These early experiences lay down patterns that influence our adult relationships, including how we navigate intimate relationships, conflict, emotional regulation, and our relationship to ourselves.
Psychologist John Bowlby, considered the founder of attachment theory, believed that these early bonds shape what he called: internal working models. In other words, these are the expectations we carry about ourselves (“Am I worthy of love?”) and about others (“Can I trust you to be there for me?”).
How Attachment Styles from Childhood Affect Your Adult Relationships
Research over the past few decades has identified different attachment styles.
What Are the Four Attachment Styles?
- Secure: You have a sense of “felt security” which means that you generally feel safe in relationships, can trust others, and are comfortable with closeness and independence. You communicate your needs effectively and regulate your emotions without being too overwhelmed by them.
- Avoidant/Dismissive: You might downplay your needs, feel uneasy with too much closeness, and prefer to stay self-reliant. You often have a hard time trusting others for genuine intimacy and tend to distance yourself from thoughts, feelings and desires that may lead you to seek out connection or care.
- Anxious/Preoccupied: You may crave connection but fear rejection. As such, you may struggle with self-doubt and seek reassurance from others. You have a hard time believing you can depend on yourself, and are hyper-aware of thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations that signal threat, including rejection. This makes it hard to remain emotionally balanced, build self-esteem and trust others.
- Disorganized/Unresolved: Often linked with trauma or loss, this style can lead to feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected in relationships. You may feel pulled towards connection, but also fear intimacy, which makes it hard to maintain stability in relationships. You may also feel disconnected from parts of yourself and your experience.
With the three insecure attachment styles, different parts of the self are disowned or pushed away and remain unintegrated and undeveloped. These patterns aren’t fixed, but they tend to repeat — until something interrupts the cycle.
Therapy Can Be That “Something”
One of the most healing parts of therapy is the relationship itself. It may sound simple, but feeling truly seen, heard, and accepted can be a transformative experience — especially if you didn’t always have that growing up. In therapy, the disowned and unintegrated parts are invited into awareness, to be worked through, integrated and healed. This helps you feel whole.
You get to explore not just what happened in your past, but how it lives in you today: in your reactions, beliefs, and in your body. This builds greater self-awareness and the ability to mentalize, which refers to the capacity to reflect on your own mental states and the mental states of others. This helps reframe the narrative, allowing you to disengage from overwhelming emotions that are often triggered by these relationship dynamics. Over time, a consistent, compassionate therapeutic relationship can offer a new experience — one that helps you slowly rewrite the old story.
What Healing Might Look Like
You begin to:
- Recognize patterns without blaming yourself
- Learn how to feel emotions without drowning in them or distancing yourself from them
- Understand your needs and express them more clearly
- Let go of relationships that no longer serve you
- Build deeper trust — in others and in yourself
These shifts don’t happen overnight. The good news? Your brain and your relationships are capable of change. What felt automatic can become a choice.
What About Culture, Race, and Identity?
Attachment theory has been incredibly useful — but it hasn’t always been inclusive.
Early research focused mostly on white, Western families, often ignoring cultural differences in parenting, community care, and emotional expression. In many cultures, raising a child is a shared effort, and closeness and dependence are valued more than independence. Emotional expression may also be valued differently.
You may have grown up navigating conflicting expectations — at home, in school, or in society. Therapy grounded in attachment can still be deeply helpful, but it’s important that it also honors your cultural experiences and values.
Final Reflections
Healing isn’t about blaming your parents or reliving the past. It’s about understanding the forces that shaped you — so you can move forward with more freedom, clarity, and self-compassion.
If you’ve ever felt stuck in patterns that don’t make sense or wondered why it’s so hard to trust or connect, attachment theory offers a way to understand yourself more deeply. It’s important to remember that we don’t each neatly fit into these categories, but they can be helpful lenses to apply. Therapy provides a space to begin changing the story.
You are not broken. You’re carrying strategies that once kept you safe. Now, you get to choose what still serves you — and what you’re ready to let go.
References:
Primary: Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. The Guilford Press.
Jordan, J. V. (2018). Relational–Cultural Therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.
Vicedo, M. (2017). Putting attachment in its place: Disciplinary and cultural contexts. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-14. DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2017.1289838
Neckoway, R., Brownlee, K., & Castellan, B. (2007). Is Attachment Theory Consistent with Aboriginal Parenting Realities? First Peoples Child & Family Review, 3(2), 65-74.