What Is a Healthy Attachment Style?

To understand whether your current difficulties with relationships, work, or life skills management stem from your family background, it’s crucial to define what a healthy attachment style is. Many of us come from backgrounds where emotional regulation, generous encouragement, or healthy communication practices were lacking or nonexistent. This article examines what a healthy attachment style entails from birth onward.

Attachment theory has been defined by multiple scholars, beginning with a British psychiatrist, John Bowlby. The theory explores how a person’s personality develops and what their capacity for close relationships is as they grow into adulthood.

Various researchers used experiments, some unethical, to learn more. The compiled research over time showed an interesting trend. Children develop warmer social skills, the ability to care for their own children when they’re adults, and are contributing members of society when they experience love in a caring, comforting, affectionate way–particularly from their mothers.

In essence, all human beings have an internal working model (IWM) in which they experience love through the way they’re treated in the first three to five years of life. Adults who experienced the soothing care of a parent or caregiver regularly during their childhood will be better able to care for themselves, adjust to change, and comfort their own children. This is called a healthy attachment.

While some scholars believed that the IWM couldn’t be changed, more modern research proves otherwise. While a person’s attachment can be resistant to change, it can be overcome if they didn’t experience a healthy attachment style when they were young. Romans 8:37 states, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

What is healthy attachment style?

Four defining factors influence a healthy attachment style:

• Security when a parent is absent
• Preference for a parent over a stranger
• Receiving a parent’s comfort in times of fear
• Recognizing a parent’s presence with joy.

Children with consistently warm attachments know they are safe because they believe that a parent will return to them. They also know that the parent will treat them with love and affection (which is why the child prefers the parent to a stranger).

When children’s fears and insecurities are taken seriously, they’re more likely to receive a parent’s desire to protect them and help them emotionally regulate. All of these tendencies combine to make a healthy attachment style as children grow into adolescence. However, attachment styles continue to develop in adolescence and adulthood.

Even a child with a healthy attachment style can develop an unhealthy one as a teenager or adult; this development depends on how that adolescent or adult experiences love throughout their life.

A healthy attachment style can be characterized by the following:

• A lack of overprotectiveness from the parent over the child/adolescent
• Genuine, mutual trust – whether parent to child, parent to adolescent, or adult to adult (particularly in a romantic relationship)
• Healthy boundaries that allow each person to be themselves without fear of rejection for being different than the parent (or in the case of adults, without being afraid of rejection for not living up to an expectation)
• Understanding of freedom (lack of possessiveness, jealousy, or tendency to cling too heavily) and willingness to provide it to the other person

 

If you grew up with two caring parents, or even one caring parent who made you feel safe, secure, loved without conditions, and who allowed you the freedom to explore at crucial junctions, you likely grew up with a secure parental attachment. Your ability to have a healthy attachment style in relationships or with your own children may be an advantage.

However, this doesn’t dismiss the opportunities we have to change our IWM. As we encounter caregivers, friends, or romantic partners who can provide some of the missing characteristics of a healthy attachment style, our childhood experiences can be overwritten.

A New Story

Writing a new story in the internal working model means a person has been open to a new way of acceptance that’s contrary to what he or she developed or believed possible because of their own childhood. This can happen in the case of children who experience neglect or trauma as children, but they grow up to be mature adults who provide a safe place for their own children to express their emotions, talk about what’s bothering them, and receive love.

Somewhere along the way, these children would have had to trust a caregiver – perhaps an adoptive parent or a teacher. Sometimes, that trust comes in a healthy attachment style through marriage.

Spouses who grew up in homes with a healthy attachment style can help rewrite the script that a spouse has believed to be true about themselves. However, the spouses must both agree and be in harmony that the former script needs rewriting.

When a spouse believes the unhealthy messages that love is based on performance or is easily swayed, that spouse may have a difficult time relating in a mature way to the spouse who grew up understanding that attachment isn’t based on performance. It’s even more crucial that adults recognize the patterns of unhealthy attachment as they become parents. If not, parents can unknowingly transfer unhealthy patterns to their children.

Healthy Attachment Style Vs. Unhealthy Attachment Style

Modern research generally agrees that there are multiple attachment styles, one being healthy and the others having unhealthy tendencies. Here’s a breakdown:

Healthy/Secure Attachment A healthy, secure attachment style is characterized by someone who can share his or her feelings easily, recognizes the importance of relational boundaries, communicates needs and receives the needs of others with acceptance, and understands that asking for help is normal and should be expected.

Insecure Attachment An insecure attachment style falls into avoidant, disorganized, or ambivalent attachment styles. Avoidant attachment looks different from a healthy attachment style because this person doesn’t feel accepted as they are, questions if they’re too much or too little (often struggling to express their emotions and opinions for fear of rejection), and may struggle to open up because intimacy is uncomfortable.

At the same time, these adults may find no particular sense of attachment to a spouse because they’re unable to connect emotionally. Because of this, they may struggle with monogamy and workaholism – anything to avoid healthy attachment to their spouse.

Disorganized Attachment This differs from a healthy attachment style because it lacks the foundation of trust in a friendship or relationship. A person who experienced healthy forms of love and acceptance may not struggle to believe the person they’re marrying is on their side, so to speak.

However, the person with a disorganized attachment experience craves their spouse’s love and affirmation, but wavers in their ability to believe they can depend on their spouse and may worry that some action on their part could lead to their partner abandoning them.

How to Grow Your Healthy Attachment Style

If you find that your attachment style doesn’t mirror a healthy one, there are ways to overcome your behaviors and thoughts. One recommendation is to start meeting with a licensed professional counselor. There are several therapies, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that can help you learn how to identify unhealthy thought patterns and beliefs that may be causing stress in your relationships.

Call one of our offices today, and we can assist you in finding a counselor who can help you form healthy attachments in your relationships with your spouse, friends, co-workers, and children.