What’s Your Love and Relationship Blueprint?

Learning about attachment styles is the key to understanding how people view relationships.

Have you ever met someone obsessed with jumping from relationship to relationship? Or the person who loves to chase people but never commits? Or the one who always gets into arguments with their significant other, only to make up and be happy the next week?

Or of course, the lucky ones…the ones like Jack and Rebecca Pearson on This is Us, or Morticia and Gomez Adams who seem like they were made for each other.

Why does it seem like everyone has completely different views of relationships? Why do some people love love and some people hate it? Why do some people obsess with relationships and some people are afraid of them? And why do some people seem so freaking lucky with love?

Let’s unpack that in today’s post, which will explain where your love and relationship blueprint comes from. And yes, we’ll be discussing attachment styles.

What are attachment styles?

Coined by relationship expert Thais Gibson as “the number one predictor of relationships,” our attachment style is the primary way in which we view relationships.

Attachment theory is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory concerning relationships between humans. The most important tenet is that young children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development.

Source: VeryWellMind

Our attachment style is the way we learned to interact and connect to others, based on how we learned to connect to our caregivers growing up.

Children at a young age, have a drive to connect with their caregivers and receive unconditional love, care, and respect (LCR) from their primary attachment figures. Some children receive this LCR quite readily (or at least 50% of the time since no parent is perfect at attuning to their children all the time). Other children do not receive LCR consistently enough, hence three different types of insecure attachment styles occur for those children.

What are the four attachment styles?

In the event that a child is emotionally attuned to and their caregiver is present at least 50% of the time, the child likely develops a secure attachment. Secure attachment is the most common attachment style, and frankly the happiest one.

People who have developed a secure attachment are typically more social, warm, emotionally regulated, able to communicate, set boundaries, and find it easier to connect to others. They are aware of and able to express their feelings. They tend to build deep, meaningful, and long-lasting relationships.

Secure attachment styles are the ones who find it easier to connect in love. They saw or had positive relationship modeling. It’s not that their childhood was perfect, but still, their parents felt like a safe base for them to develop into psychologically and emotionally healthy adults.

For the other half of the population, they fall into one of three insecure attachment styles.

The other half of the population had attachment trauma that was often passed down generationally (or from a toxic romantic relationship), so if the following descriptions apply to you, I want to start by saying (1) it’s not your fault if you have this attachment style, but (2) it is both possible and your responsibility to heal your insecure attachment trauma. Otherwise, insecure attachment trauma is typically passed down from generation to generation.

The insecure attachment styles

Estimates suggest roughly 50 percent of the population is secure, 20 percent is anxious, 25 percent is avoidant and 5 percent is disorganzed/fearful-avoidant.

From Washington Post

Anxious-Preoccupied

• The Anxious Attachment Style is also known as the Preoccupied attachment style. An individual with this attachment style craves and loves relationships, love, and intimacy. They have a high desire for relationships and high anxiety around relationships. They love to be in relationships and have a harder time being alone. They like flirting and dating around part of relationships, but once they are in a relationship, they typically have a large fear of abandonment and rejection which leads to jealousy and distress that typically pushes people away from them.
• Usually, their attachment figure was inconsistent in their behaviors leading to a child’s feeling of perceived or real abandonment.

Dismissive Avoidant

• The Dismissive or Avoidant Attachment Style are for those who are known for their independence, assertiveness, and self-reliance. They have a low desire for relationships and little interest in wanting to rely on or want someone else. They have learned how to be good at being alone. Yes, they might be very sociable, popular, and friendly to their friends, but when it comes to the intimacy they are turned off. These individuals usually date many people (if at all), then lose interest when a romantic or sexual partner makes an attempt to connect with them on an intimate, emotional level.
• Usually, their attachment figure was detached and/or emotionally involved, leaving their inner child feeling emotionally neglected. As a result, they learn to rely on themselves and not on anyone else.

Fearful-Avoidant

• The Disorganized Attachment Style, is also referred to as Fearful Avoidant. This attachment style alternates between using the strategies of the Preoccupied and Dismissive styles. People with this attachment style have both a high level of avoidance and desire when it comes to relationships. They are usually good at connecting with others, especially in a one-sided manner where they are present with others but not vulnerable about their own life. They appear confident and self-assured. Yet, their fear of being betrayed and hurt by someone they trust makes it difficult to bond and open up with others.
• Usually, these individuals find the process of trusting someone and showing up scary as they felt betrayed by their caregivers growing up and/or grew up in chaotic and unpredictable homes.

So what are the different love and relationship blueprints?

Based on the four attachment styles, I’d say the four love and relationship blueprints summarize to this:

• Secure: “I feel comfortable being close, and it comes quite naturally!”
• Anxious-preoccupied: “I really crave emotional intimacy, but people don’t want that with me!”
• Dismissive-avoidant: “I’m good on my own and I don’t want people to depend on me or vice versa.”
• Fearful-avoidant: “I want a relationship, but I don’t want to get hurt!”

Why are attachment styles important?

As you can see, the three insecure attachment styles are all very different than the secure attachment style. The effects of an insecure attachment style can leave you with a lot of relationship challenges and pain. Luckily, you can solve this if you create a space for healing from your attachment trauma.

Our attachment style heavily impacts our love and relationship blueprint.

It creates the way we decide to interact with others and subsequently the type of love and relationships we attract and remain in.

Insecure attachment styles typically have insecure relationships, while secure attachment styles create secure relationships.

And like I mentioned earlier, our attachment style can change as were are adults. (They can even become more insecure as we are adults if we have a negative adult relationship). STILL! We can work to actively create a healthier attachment style.

A free quiz online to learn what yours might be is here or here (although I’d recommend reading the descriptions online to really learn and see which one resonates with you). Attachment styles and theory have risen in popularity recently as more people had time in COVID to reflect on their relationships, and because globally it seems like more people are trying to change their suffering and pain.

How can you change your love and relationship blueprint?

So let’s say you’re a part of the 50% of the population that has an insecure attachment style. You might wonder how can we change our love blueprint so that we create healthier relationships and have greater well-being and self-esteem. I mean, I am a big fan of healthier love.

You don’t have the same attachment style forever. Attachment styles can change when we begin to heal our attachment trauma. One, awareness of your attachment style can be empowering because it already can begin the process of change. Additionally…

1. Seek out a therapist who knows about attachment trauma. Work with them to look at your attachment style patterns and get support on healing your attachment trauma.
2. Read on attachment theory and watch videos online. Empower yourself with knowledge and ways to feel better. Popular books on attachment styles and how to heal are here and here. A great YouTuber I recommend is here, although there are many YouTubers for your needs.
3. Practice, practice, practice! Put yourself in growth situations where you are working on healthier ways to approach relationships. Hate vulnerable talks? Practice doing it with a close friend. Do you usually triple text someone when they don’t respond in 2 hours? Practice self-soothing and regulating instead of jumping to conclusions. Do you take everything someone says personally and get defensive? Practice questioning those stories and seeing how other people’s behaviors aren’t personal.

You got this!

What I love about healing into a secure attachment style after having an insecure one, is that you get to keep the strengths you developed from your insecure attachment style.

For example, you can keep that you learned how to be empathetic if maybe you were an anxious-attachment style, but when you get secure, you can now have empathy and set boundaries. Or if you were dismissive-avoidant, you can keep that you learned how to be self-sufficient, but now when you heal, you can also get comfortable asking others for help. Or if you were disorganized, you can keep that you were good at listening to others, but you can take up space in conservation too.

You can create a healthy love and relationship blueprint to attract relationships full of healthy love that you deserve.

Couples therapy and talking about this with your partner can be important for those already in relationships to create a more beneficial, more fulfilling relationship.

You deserve a great love! Feel free to share with anyone you think could benefit from this!

❤

N