What We’re Missing About Attachment

Attachment styles have become part of how we talk about relationships. We hear about anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, secure attachment, and often use those labels to explain why someone behaves the way they do.

But attachment is more complicated than a label or what happened between us and one primary caregiver. Our nervous systems learn how to find safety within much larger environments, and those adaptations can continue operating beneath our awareness, shaping not only how we move through relationships but what happens between us and the people we're in them with.

In this episode, we explore:

• What attachment styles are and how they operate at a nervous-system level.
• How our environments, experiences, social conditioning, and other influences can shape the way we learn to attach.
• How different attachment styles develop around what our nervous systems have learned about safety and connection.
• Why behaviors that look similar on the surface can come from very different places underneath.
• How different attachment patterns can interact with one another and create relational cycles that are difficult to recognize when we don't know what's happening.

Episode Thoughts to Sit With

“It's also about how the child receives it and what your nervous system learns is the easiest, fastest way to get to what feels safe for you. That doesn't mean that's what is safe. That is not the same thing as what, in a securely attached person, would deem as safe. It's saying what is safe for you.”

“There’s this really false binary narrative out there that says if your primary caregiver was horrible and critical and this and that, then you have this attachment style. And it’s not that simple. It’s not that black and white.”

“Many times what is happening is it's a cycle that something in their attachment style triggers something in your attachment style, which makes you escalate, which then makes them escalate to pulling back, and now it's this whole big thing where we just keep escalating. So it's playing off of each other.”

Resources / Further Reading

I don't usually include resources with episodes, but these are a few of the books that have informed some of the connections I'm making here. They explore different pieces of how our early experiences, environments, nervous systems, culture, shame, and other influences can shape us. They aren't necessarily talking about attachment in the same way I'm connecting these ideas here, but they offer more context for some of what I'm drawing from in this conversation.

• Decolonizing Therapy by Jennifer Mullan, PsyD
• The Orchid and the Dandelion by W. Thomas Boyce, MD
• Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw

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