4 Attachment Types Define Your Relationship with Your Partner

Our childhood experiences highly reflect on the way we interact with people and how we attach to them when we grow older. Our attachment to our parents and the relationship with them, when we are young, is also an important element which can predict the nature of our social life when we become adults. However, not everyone had a healthy relationship with their parents, and some may have witnessed their parents divorce, thus, would affect their love life in the future and the way they get attached to their partners.

Attachment is mutual affection and care that goes between two lovers, or friends, it is the need to feel that you are always close to this person because you feel comfortable with them. However, people can react differently when separated from someone they love and they’re attached to.  The pain of separation is what we call a broken heart. But not all of us are affected by separation or attachment in the same way, because each one of us has a particular style of attachment.

Let’s discover the characteristics of the 4 attachment relationship types. Do these characteristics describe you?

Autonomous Attachment

• Feels Comfortable in a warm, loving and emotionally close relationship.
• Depends on partner and allows partner to depend on them, she is available for partner when he needs her.
• Accepts partner’s need for privacy without feeling rejected or threatened
• Can be both close and independent
• Trust worthy, tolerant of differences, and forgiving.
• Can communicate emotions easily and openly
• Understands partner’s needs
• Does not avoid conflict.
• Manages emotions well without overly reacting to relationship issues.

Preoccupied Attachment

• Feels insecure in intimate relationships
• Constantly worried that her partner might reject or abandon her
•  Has overly attachment needs and behavior.
• Needy, requires ongoing reassurance which might scare the partner away.
• Has unresolved past issues, which are still affecting current relationships and perceptions, including feelings of fear, hurt, anger, rejection.
• Overly sensitive to partner’s actions and moods, and takes them too personally.
• Highly emotional, moody, angry and controlling.
• Communication is not collaborative and always blames others.

Dismissive Attachment

• Feels emotionally distant and rejecting in an intimate relationship
• Deactivates attachment needs, feelings and behaviors.
• For her, intimacy equals loss of independence
• Prefers autonomy more than team work.
• Not able to depend on partner or allow partner to lean on them;
• Independence is her priority.
• Not comfortable with communicating emotions, prefers intellectual communication is intellectual
• Avoids conflict, but when things get out of hand, she explodes.
• Cool, self-sufficient and prefers to be alone.
• Copes with crisis very well and takes charge.

Unresolved Attachment

• Unstable mindset and emotions
• Frightened by previous traumatic memories that were unresolved.
• Cannot deal with emotional closeness in a relationship
• Argumentative, unable to regulate emotions
• Antisocial, lacks of empathy
• Narcissistic, doesn’t follow the rules

Attachment style is transmitted from parents to their children, who also would transmit this attachment to their children in the future. This can be seen through their behavior with their partner and social life. So, the style of attachment is transferred from a generation to another, through how parents treat their children.

For people who have witnessed unresolved traumas in their childhood, they have to think of consulting a psychologist, not only for their psychological well-being but for the sake of their children.