What Are Attachment Styles?
Attachment styles are ways people connect and relate to others based on their early experiences with caregivers…These patterns often continue into adulthood and influence romantic relationships. People tend to form relationships with partners who have similar attachment styles to one or both of their parents.
Attachment styles are ways people connect and relate to others based on their early experiences with caregivers. John Bowlby, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, developed Attachment Theory, sometimes called the science of love, after studying relationships between mothers and troubled teenagers. He wanted to understand how early relationships influenced later behavior. Along with his colleague Mary Ainsworth, who studied interactions between parents and young children, they identified different attachment styles based on how children responded to connection, separation, and reconnection with their caregivers.
Ainsworth's research led to the creation of "The Strange Situation," a study that helped categorize four main attachment styles.* These styles are learned behaviors developed in response to early experiences of distress and are not meant to label someone as good or bad. Instead, they show how a child felt they needed to behave to feel emotionally safe with their caregiver. These unconscious patterns often continue into adulthood and influence romantic relationships, parenting, friendships and professional life. People tend to form relationships with bosses, co-workers, friends and partners who have similar attachment styles to one or both of their parents.
The Four Attachment Styles
1. Secure Attachment
Children with secure attachment felt listened to and trusted that their feelings would be respected. They grow up with a healthy ability to handle emotions and feel good about themselves.
2. Anxious/Ambivalent (Preoccupied) Attachment
These children experienced inconsistent attention from their parents, leading to prolonged anxiety. They learned to keep their parents' attention by being pleasing or entertaining, but this created a sense of low trust and a need to control. As adults, they might seem clingy, angry, controlling, or critical, stemming from a deep fear of abandonment and insecurity. Often they have to dissociate negative emotions like anger for fear it would cost them the relationship.
3. Dismissive/Avoidant Attachment
Children with this attachment style learned that expressing big emotions would be ignored, so they turned down their anxiety and disconnected from their feelings. They often come off as self-sufficient, preferring solo activities over team or emotional ones. They might appear uninterested in close relationships, masking low self-esteem with an inflated sense of independence.
4. Anxious/Avoidant (Fearful Avoidant) Attachment
These children experienced both pain and comfort from their parents, often due to abusive relationships. They couldn't develop a stable coping strategy, leading to a mix of needy and avoidant behaviors. This "come here/get away" approach causes high anxiety and difficulty regulating emotions, resulting in low self-esteem and low trust in others.
Understanding Attachment Styles
Attachment styles are patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving around emotions and conflict. They can change over time with effort and can vary with different caregivers. Recognizing your attachment style can help you understand your behaviors in relationships and work towards healthier connections.
I like this free Attachment Style assessment outside of an officially administrated test: https://www.attachmentproject.com/blog/four-attachment-styles/
*There are good critics that these initial assessments were not done with a broad enough sample size. There have been many follow up studies to work to validate the categories across cultures. However, I think it is still a working theory (as most things are) and worth holding in tension with diverse norms. People want to grab these studies and use them to dictate health/unhealthy and I think that can be tricky at best and dangerous at worst. I find this especially happens when religion or morals are superimposed onto them.
What Counseling Isn’t: Clearing Up Common Misunderstandings
It might seem odd to write about what counseling isn’t, but there's a lot of confusion about effective therapy. So, let’s clear up some misconceptions.
It might seem odd to write about what counseling isn’t, but there's a lot of confusion about effective therapy. So, let’s clear up some misconceptions.
Counseling is Not Giving Advice
A friend once mentioned they were unsure if their loved one’s therapist was giving good advice. This is a common misunderstanding. People often think therapy is about being told what to do. But, imagine a therapist as an archeologist. They dig in areas where they believe they might find significant artifacts. When they find something, they carefully uncover and study it to understand the bigger picture.
Similarly, therapists help you explore your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories. They work with you to understand these elements and how they fit into the bigger picture of your life, often uncovering connections to past traumas. The goal isn’t to give advice, but to help you understand yourself better and develop strategies to create meaningful change in your life.
Counseling is Not Quick or Easy
Many people are surprised by how long therapy can take, as well as the time, effort, and cost involved. Changing your brain and breaking old habits is a delicate, slow process. While there are aids like medication or alternative methods that can support therapy, the core work is often gradual and requires patience.
Counseling is Not a Regular Conversation or Relationship
Therapy conversations are unique. They aim to access parts of you that don't typically come up in everyday interactions. This means the topics and the way you talk about them are different. You might be encouraged to express your true feelings, which can be challenging and make you feel vulnerable. Therapists aren’t interested in being politically correct or sticking to societal norms—they focus on what truly is. There’s no right or wrong, just what exists.
Moreover, the therapist-client relationship is different from a regular friendship. It’s a unique bond with emotional intimacy, where the therapist knows a lot about you, but you know less about them. This imbalance, however, creates a powerful connection essential for making progress. You might feel younger, more empowered, or different in other ways compared to your daily relationships. As trust builds, you’ll become more open to feelings you’ve previously hidden, allowing them to surface and be addressed, whether they stem from developmental stages or trauma.
Understanding these distinctions helps in appreciating what therapy is truly about: a journey of self-discovery, healing, and growth, rather than a quick fix or a series of friendly chats.
What does a first session look like at analog?
What does a first session of therapy look like? Glad you asked.
Once you’ve been met in the waiting area you’ll be guided back to our office. There you’ll find two chairs and a loveseat. We don’t have a special chair. One of the first parts of therapy actually happens in choosing where to sit. Not because we’re analyzing what does your choice mean but because we are encouraging you to engage your sense of agency and boundaries. We look to you and your nervous system to identify which space feels most comfortable to you. Additionally, we look to see where your nervous system feels best about where we sit as the threrapist. We might ask you if this feels okay for us to sit here. We are hoping you will track yourself and really speak your opinion. We might ask you how you know it feels okay. We are looking for you to check in with your viscera and sense whether you feel uncomfortable or at ease. There are no secret readings of the moment, you are the one who supplies us with the information.
After sitting down we’ll go over the paperwork you have already read and signed digitally. We’ll highlight key features like HIPAA, office policies, and how therapy works with us.
Then you’ll be invited to let us know what brings you to therapy. You can say as much or as little as feels right to you.
While we listen we will also be tracking your non-verbals, looking for cues of stress or trauma or places of activation (repetitive motions, shaking legs, wincing, pulling body or face away suddenly, etc.). Again, this is not to gain secret knowledge of you, if we notice something we’ll bring it up and wonder about it with you. You’ll be the one to determine whether it feels meaningful to that moment or not.
We might learn a couple of techniques like orienting, and SIBAM tracking (tools you’ll use throughout the therapy and beyond) and the therapist will work to give you a summary of what you’ve said and identify what a course of therapy might look like based on what you’re experiencing.
Finally, scheduling and frequency are determined together.
Payment is normally done by the clinician later on using the card you’ve put on file. Of course if you prefer other types of payment then that is used instead.
So there you go, a simple overview of a first appointment! The main thing we want to emphasize is that you aren’t being judged or secretly analyzed or read. We are collaborative and start with a paradigm of seeing you as a good person and seeing emotional struggles not signs of corruptness or flaws but as normal ways the body and mind work to cope.
The Hidden Impact of Unresolved Fight, Flight, or Freeze Responses
When our natural threat response cycle is interrupted, it can easily be mistaken for other issues. By understanding the threat response cycle that all mammals experience, we can gain better insight into our reactions and overall mental health.
What is the Threat Response Cycle?
Imagine you're out for a walk and you hear a twig snap, or you see an unexpected movement out of the corner of your eye. Maybe you’re at work and you get an alert for an impromptu meeting, etc. These instances kick off a process known as the threat response cycle:
Notice Something New: This could be any sudden change in your environment—sounds, smells, sights, or even digital notifications.
Orient to the Novelty: Your attention shifts to this new stimulus.
Assess for Danger: Instinctively and automatically, your brain evaluates whether this new thing poses a threat.
Activate Response: If it’s deemed dangerous (this is not a conscious decision), your body kicks into one of the three F’s: fight, flight, or freeze.
Return to Normal: If it’s not a threat (like realizing that "snake" is actually just a garden hose), your body relaxes, and you return to your normal state.
But what happens if your response to a threat gets interrupted? Say, you feel intense anger but can't express it, or you're scared but can’t escape. If your fight, flight, or freeze response isn’t completed, that energy gets stuck in your system.
Why Does This Matter?
Unresolved fight, flight, or freeze responses can cause various issues. They might be mistaken for problems with self-control, personality flaws, or even physical ailments. For instance, feeling inexplicably anxious or irritable could be the result of a stuck fight or flight response, not a personal failing.
Understanding this cycle is crucial for mental health. It helps us recognize that these reactions are natural and part of our biology. Completing these responses, even if it's after the fact through therapeutic practices, can help us return to a state of balance. Somatic Experiencing is an effective way to do this.
Final Thoughts
Recognizing and addressing stuck fight, flight, or freeze responses is essential for mental and physical well-being. By understanding this natural cycle, we can better navigate our reactions to stress and create more room for healing and growth. If you think unresolved responses might be affecting you, talking to a counselor can be a great step toward resolving these issues and finding peace.
Rethinking Mental Health: Embracing the "Choose Your Own Adventure" Metaphor
In my last post, I touched on how viewing mental health through a strict medical lens can hold back progress. The medical model labels things as healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, and this binary thinking just doesn’t fit when it comes to mental health. (And yes, even the term "mental health" has its issues, but let’s tackle one thing at a time.) Today, I want to introduce a different metaphor: think of mental health as a "choose your own adventure" story.
Everything Tells a Story
Everything we do, feel, and think carries meaning. It might be a small detail or something significant, but it all contributes to the story we're living. It can be exhausting to stay on top of everything, and it’s tempting to dismiss some things as meaningless. But here’s the good news: we’re not trying to write a story or determine its meaning; we’re here to listen to the story being told.
The words we use, the tension in our muscles, the way we look or avoid looking, the emotions we feel or suppress, the intensity of those emotions, our behaviors, our thoughts, our levels of engagement—they all tell a story. Often, the real story isn’t just what's on the surface. In therapy, we’re trained to listen to everything, not just the spoken narrative. We call this "process vs. content." For example, you might say one thing, but your hand gestures might reveal something different.
Moving Beyond the Medical Model
Using the medical model can increase the risk of shame. Why? Because getting curious about something can trigger a fear that we’ll find something "faulty" or "unhealthy." But if we approach it like a psychotherapy model—where we listen for the story without judgment and assume everything that surfaces is normal given the context—there is no right or wrong. This frees us to remain curious and keep listening.
In Somatic Experiencing work, this might lead to noticing imagery, movements, or sensations. In psychotherapy, it might bring greater insight and clarity.
The Therapist as a Curious Companion
This isn’t a “gotcha” approach. The therapist isn’t an expert who sees what you can’t. They are a curious companion who might notice something and wonder about it with you. By listening to the story your body-mind is telling, without trying to force it into a specific framework, we can follow the adventure your system chooses. This is what ultimately leads to feeling better.
So, let’s ditch the rigid medical model and embrace the idea that mental health is like a choose your own adventure story. By listening to our stories and staying curious, we open up the path to genuine understanding and healing.