Mental Health Monday: Attachment Styles (Part 2)

Last Monday, we initiated a series on attachment styles. I want to continue that today and also next week. If you missed last week’s post, I’d love for you to start there. You can learn, what are attachment styles? And how do they impact our internal feelings and relationships?

To recap a little, there are four primary attachment styles. There is the secure attachment style, and three insecure attachment styles — 1) anxious preoccupied, 2) fearful avoidant (also sometimes called disorganized or anxious-avoidant), and 3) dismissive avoidant. There is a great deal of psychological research around these, first championed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, and a lot of interest in recent years.

Attachment styles develop very early in life from ages 0-2. It may be hard to believe that experiences in our youngest years can impact our experiences in adulthood on such a deep level, but if we think about it, we do learn in this period how to trust (or not), how to self-sooth (or not), and what we can expect from others (or not), and since our bodies hold these patterns, it’s not surprising that these imprints would continue to impact us at the subconscious level until we make them conscious and work to heal them.

And we can all work to heal them. We can do work to move toward a secure attachment style.

Today, I’ll invite us to learn again from Thais Gibson, a therapist who has done tremendous work in these areas: