You're Not "Just Anxiously Attached" - Why Attachment Theory Is Way More Complex Than the Internet Told You

by Mark Maxwell

If you haven't noticed, we love to categorize. We love to rank. We love to make things super simple and clear. Not such a bad thing… unless you're talking about understanding human behavior. On the internet.

Why We Love to Label Everything

Back in the day, you'd actually have to pay good money for a magazine that would give you the four simple steps to solve whatever your problem is, whether to find love, lose weight, or bring peace to the Middle East. Now you can click on it for free while you sit on the toilet.

Reductionism has always been a thing and it's not always bad. We often need to break things down to learn. Making things more simple gives us the sense of agency. I can do this! It can be empowering. Divorced from the bigger picture understanding of larger, dynamic forces, however, it can be misleading. Even harmful.

The greatest human behavior categorization project, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for the cool, in-the-know folk) can be helpful for organizing common symptomologies and human behaviors. But the third edition made quite a splash in 1980 when it became more widely known to the general public. Now we all had the ability to check boxes off the list and categorize someone! The ability to diagnose the partner in your struggling relationship as a narcissist was available to anyone. That's what we've been doing ever since, and now with great zeal in the digital online age. Helping us understand what's wrong with the other person. Or with ourselves, depending on our…

Attachment Styles (Cue the Online Quizzes)

Attachment styles are all the rage nowadays. The not-so-latest psycho-fad to run wild in the pop-culture world of keyboard psychology is attachment theory. John Bowlby broke off from his Freudian colleagues who owned all the rage back in the day explaining human behavior and he established attachment theory in the 50s, taking a more natural, ethological (animal behavior, y'all) approach.

It has since been expanded and used to help us understand human behavior in relationships, first with parent-child and then romantic partners, with the pinnacle of achievement in online dating evaluations. We have taken this groundbreaking work from Bowlby and his successors and reduced the ever-complex dynamics and marvel of the human being to two basic styles of being – anxious or avoidant.

Technically in this simple model there are four, but who cares about secure (unless you're super healthy or in love – barf) or disorganized* (unless you really want to label someone, but then you'd use the personality disorder labels in the DSM. Much more lethal).

* We in therapy world actually take “disorganized” very seriously.  Not so useful as a category but more an indicator of trauma that needs to be explored to really have a picture of what is happening.    

What Attachment Theory Actually Says

To be fair and honor our psychologist elders, attachment styles were not meant to be like personality types the way our culture has made them into. They were not meant to be static, unbendable ways of functioning. And despite my slightly caustic tone, they're not not helpful or even true. They're just way waaaaaay too simple to be using to explain things the way we often do.

And by "we", I'm not just referring to armchair internet experts and every client couple that sits on my couch after reading Attached.* Way too many therapists are included in the "we". Human behavior and relationships are just too complex to be explained by four, static personality-like styles.

So let's step back and re-ground ourselves in some theoretical principles.

*which doesn't, btw, describe styles as unchanging traits.

Strategies vs. Styles: A Better Framework

First, I prefer the term strategies to styles. Am I splitting hairs? Maybe, but we ruined styles. Instead, deep, proven, subconscious strategies. And strategies lead us to ask "for what?". What are you trying to do and why? What are you aiming for can be answered with security. Agency. Empowerment. But to get into that, you have to explore the why. What is triggering a person's need to strategize?

Patricia Crittenden has another model for attachment with a frame I find much more useful. It's called the Dynamic Maturation Model and it is a lot more complex and super difficult, worthy of human behavior. But we can take some key principles that come into play here.

First, the why is danger… and sex (don't pretend you're surprised). Our attachment system is actually an info processing supercomputer system to keep us alive and help us grow, which means prioritizing danger signals (and how to get laid. I know it's what you want to read about but we'll get there another day). The strategies are formed through our experiences which are primarily relational, meaning our primary strategies are around protection and comfort. Security.

The kicker here is that this is an ongoing, developmental process (hence "maturation" in the title). We stay alive to grow, evolve and make babies to hand the baton off to.

Plot Twist: You’re not broken

We learn and grow best when we feel safe. When we don't, the strategies kick in. As we learn and grow, our strategies become more complex along with our experiences of the world and relationships. We mature (there's that word again), adapt or survive with these strategies. They work for us.

So here's the Shyamalan twist: those anxious and avoidant styles you're screening and pathologizing in your dating app are actually signs of tried and true strategies that person has successfully used through their life. Functional. Protective. Even good!

Of course, the strategies, the environmental triggers, and their emotional expressions all are subcortical, underneath the surface. And yes you learned them through early age experiences with caregivers. They don't always work, but of course because the same strategies don't always fit new contexts and experiences but that's what you'll try first, dammit. But resist the urge to buy in to that common thrown around narrative of "my parents screwed me up". We learn. We adapt. We change. We grow. And this all works wonderfully well with our latest understandings of interpersonal neurobiology (the relational brain, y'all). Articles for another time.

The point here is that you are a complex human being that cannot be explained nicely in four quadrants. You are a dynamic, learning and evolving person, a unique, complex snowflake flowing through a multitude of contexts. Yeah there are commonalities and we can categorize, but only to better learn about your process. If you have tried and true strategies you use subconsciously over and over again, it may look like your style. Yes you may have had some rough even abusive conditions in childhood (adverse, as they say). Even abusive. You may have suffered the same as an adult. That makes you a survivor, not a screw up.

You may need to learn a new strategy when you're stuck in a new relationship or context.  The pain or anxiety or mildly irritated feeling that entices you to take that test or read a book on your attachment style is that stuck feeling.   

You need to grow. We can do that.

What This Means for You

So why do we reduce these complex behaviors? Why do we love static personality categories so much? Because they are predictable and give us a sense of agency or control. They make us feel more secure.

Your attachment system in action.

You’re not broken. Not screwed up.  Nor is this your personality.  This isn’t just “the way you are.”  Nor is he or she you’re desperately trying to connect with.  This is how you’ve learned relationships. Your emotional process. Maybe how you've survived.  Your adaption to life’s events that now requires exploring, learning both yourself and your partner.   

That's where the real growth happens. Not in the label, but in understanding the why behind your behavior and recognizing that both you and your partner have the capacity to adapt, learn, and develop new ways of connecting.

You're not a fixed category. You're a work in progress. And that's actually the good news.

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