I Know My Attachment Style, Now What?
Can therapy help me deal with the pain that my attachment style causes me?
3 min read
Understanding your attachment style is a significant step towards fostering healthier relationships and personal growth. But what if you know your attachment style, but that doesn’t help. What if your relationships aren’t working the way you’d like or you aren’t finding a relationship you want? Can therapy help with that?
Attachment theory, developed by psychologist John Bowlby, says that our early experiences with caregivers shape our attachment styles, which in turn influence how we interact with others throughout our lives. There are four primary attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Each style comes with its own set of behaviors and tendencies in relationships.
For many people, identifying their attachment style, whether it's secure or one of the three insecure styles, opens up room for self-reflection and personal development. It helps them better understand past behavior or how a relationship ran into trouble. It can also help open up new ways to communicate with a partner. And, if we’re lucky, knowing this information can help us work on behaviors such as open communication, empathy, trust and emotional regulation that are associated with a secure attachment.
But what if the knowledge doesn’t change anything? What if I have an anxious attachment style and just can’t regulate my emotions or can’t stop being scared about a partner abandoning me? Or if I have an avoidant attachment style and find myself feeling lonely and feel like nothing is working to fill that void?
That is totally normal, says Anne Heller, a psychotherapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy. Attachment styles are not fixed but it can be very hard to develop a more secure attachment style on one’s own. People can feel quite stuck in their relationships or relationship patterns. Psychotherapy is a wonderful way to address those stuck feelings and develop a more secure attachment style.
“Attachment styles are not fixed… And psychotherapy is a wonderful way to address those stuck feelings and develop a more secure attachment style.”
This work can be particularly rewarding for people in their twenties or thirties who may be frustrated with dating in New York City. Anne reports that she has many clients who come to therapy who know they are stuck, but don’t know what to do. And they often feel really lonely in a city as big and sometimes overwhelming as New York City.
So, how does therapy help and what does that look like? In essence, therapy is designed to help you develop a more secure attachment profile. Many of us have insecure attachment styles. Our attachment style developed in the earliest years when a parent unconsciously communicated that they weren’t comfortable with an emotion you were displaying.
Because our survival was dependent on our caregivers, we instinctively adapted patterns that worked for our parents, or at least made the best of what our parents had to offer. We all do this and it becomes ingrained in who we are. As adults, these patterns only become a problem if they get in the way of relationships or cause us to suffer from anxiety, depression or loneliness.
By engaging in therapy, you are entering a new relationship and that is a wonderful opportunity to work through what is getting in the way for you in your life. Often, clients who understand their attachment style intellectually, don’t recognize on a moment-to-moment basis what they are doing that gets in their way.
Therapy is a wonderful opportunity to have an objective person gently help you identify what is blocking you emotionally and then, help you experience what may not have felt safe to experience in the past. This is not an intellectual exercise, but one that clients experience in a deep way.
The therapy process gets beyond an intellectual understanding of what is happening for us. Clients become emotionally aware of their patterns and are able to process all the feelings that are associated with them in a trusting relationship.
When this happens, says Anne Heller, clients feel deeply understood and no longer feel alone with their struggles. And they come away with a greater sense of calm along with greater connectedness to the people around them.
If this deep work sounds appealing, please reach out to Downtown Somatic Therapy to schedule a free consultation with one of our talented therapists.