The Thermostat Theory of Attachment

Summary

The Thermostat Theory of Attachment explores the dynamics of insecure attachment in relationships, where anxious and avoidant partners struggle to balance their desires for closeness and independence, reflecting a deeper issue of fear and control in love.

Abstract

The article likens the push-and-pull of insecurely attached relationships to a thermostat, with anxious partners craving more togetherness and avoidant partners seeking distance. This dance is rooted in the shared fear that love cannot be trusted to be constant, leading to control-driven behaviors. The piece draws on Gabor Maté's analogy of secure attachment as gravity, a taken-for-granted force in a tribe, contrasting it with modern society's complexity in maintaining basic kindness. It suggests that while anxious individuals look outward to fill their emotional voids, avoidants retreat inward, yet these opposites attract to complete each other, teaching vulnerability and independence. However, these relationships can be draining as each partner tries to convert the other to their dysfunctional coping mechanism. The article concludes with a Dharma talk anecdote illustrating a harmonious resolution to differing needs, emphasizing the importance of accepting each other's differences to form a complete whole.

Opinions

Insecure attachment is characterized by a belief in the scarcity of love, with anxious partners seeking to be filled by their partners and avoidant partners desiring space despite their fear of abandonment.
The author posits that the tension between opposites in a relationship is necessary for personal growth and recognition of love, as per the Jungian concept of the psyche seeking its complement.
The article criticizes the modern human condition, where technological advancements coexist with a lack of basic kindness and understanding in relationships.
It is suggested that the ideal outcome in such relationships is not conversion but rather the acceptance and integration of differences, allowing each partner to become whole individually and together.
The author implies that the constant adjustments in a relationship, much like turning a thermostat, can be a symbol of enduring love and compromise, rather than conflict.

The Thermostat Theory of Attachment

I’m seeing phallic love.

I liken insecurely attached relationships to a thermostat in which the anxious partner is always turning the knob towards more time together while the avoidant partner turns the knob towards more time apart. What makes their dichotomy a point of connection is the shared belief that love needs to be controlled. We seek control where we live in fear. We live in fear where we disbelieve in love. Anything we love, we set free, including ourselves.

Yet we all sometimes wish we were closer to our partners — or closer to ourselves — so we cannot easily equate the alternating desires to dissolve into love — or to condense from love back into an individual — into an attachment style.

Can you tell I am an alien sent here to spread compassion?

Gabor Maté likens secure attachment in a tribe to gravity: it is ubiquitous, available to all, the basis of shared reality, and gratefully taken for granted. It is there. Love and its reliability are a constant equated to Nature, to order, to the connective tissue of movement that binds all things. Modern humans have complicated things to the point where we can put jeeps on Mars but have yet to figure out how to be kind to each other.

Insecure attachment is the belief that love is not always there. Those who compensate for love’s uncertainty by seeking outwards are anxious: they want their partner to fill their cup despite that cup’s having a hole in it called unresolved childhood issues.

Fill me up. If you love me, you will.

Those who compensate by shutting out others and instead turning inwards are avoidant: they want their partner to leave them alone while not leaving them alone. For opposites attract as surely as the Yin and the Yang become each other in their ten-thousand forms. Avoidants date anxious partners because both believe that there isn’t enough love: the one seeks, and the other hides in plain sight.

Ideally, the anxious partner teaches the avoidant partner to open up and become vulnerable while the avoidant teaches the anxious to be an individual and go to the movies alone. That is the theory. The practice involves failed attempts at assimilation in which the anxious tries to make the avoidant clingy or, that failing, tolerant of the anxious’s own clinginess. The avoidant meanwhile tries to teach the anxious how to be an individual which, to the anxious, sounds like being thrown from love into the abyss.

These relationships become exhausting because each partner attempts to convince their opposite to let go of the dysfunctional coping skill they spent their childhood forming…to take on the opposite dysfunctional coping skill. An avoidant Stoic and an anxious Burner are not going to convert each other any sooner than will Trump and Biden convince each other to vote for each other.

In truth, we date our opposite because we believe we need resistance to recognize love. We could otherwise follow the path of least resistance in which two anxiously attached partners could co-depenticize each other by becoming Siamese twins and identifying as each other. The two avoidants could then barely speak other than to thank each other for all that space.

But we need our opposites, for Jung was right: the psyche is forever seeking its complement, whether in the conscious seeking the unconscious, or in the self seeking the other, which is ultimately the same thing. We need our opposites to let them be who they are so that the relationship has its day and night without the Moon telling the Sun to shine in the night. We need to bond with our opposites to form a whole, but only once we ourselves are whole.

As for that thermostat, there’s a better way. On a Dharma talk, a teacher told us:

My wife and I have been happily married for 40 years. We only have one conflict, and it’s been happening from the day we began. My wife likes the house cold whereas I like it nice and hot. Whenever I’m comfortable, I realize that she has turned the thermostat up, so I turn it down. Sure enough, once I cool it down, she turns it right back up.

That kind of love.