Polysecure

by Jessica Fern

Secure

  Secure

  50–60%

  Unavailable

  Unresponsive

  Imperceptive or mis-attuned

  Rejecting

  Insecure: Avoidant

  Dismissive

  20–30%

  Inconsistently responsive, available or attuned

  Intrusive

  Acting out of their needs for attention or affection over the child’s needs

  Insecure: Anxious

  Preoccupied

  15–20%

  Frightening

  Threatening

  Frightened

  Disorienting

  Alarming

  Insecure: Disorganized

  Fearful-Avoidant

  20–40%

  TABLE 1.1: The types of parental interactions that are related to the different attachment styles in childhood, and how the names of the insecure styles change in adulthood. The percentages of each style are also noted. These percentages do not neatly add up to 100 percent since they are more of a general range, with each study finding slightly different percentages for each style (since people with a fearful-avoidant style might initially test as being one of the other insecure styles). Gender differences have not been found between the different styles.

  An important takeaway from this overview of attachment theory is the importance of securely attaching to others who will care for us. This is our first survival strategy because without the loving and attentive presence from others we would die. Accordingly, emotional attunement and connection are wired into us as basic human needs that persist through life. Depending on the environment and circumstance that we were born into and how well our parents were able to meet our attachment needs (some conditions our parents had control of and others they did not) we will either develop a secure attachment style, where we feel safe to be with our caretakers and explore the world beyond them, or we will develop an insecure attachment style. Insecure attachment can take the form of overly pulling into ourselves to avoid and withdraw, overly turning outward to others to grasp and procure, or vacillating between the two. These insecure attachment styles are secondary survival strategies that make sense based on what we went through as a child and will continue to impact how we attach and bond in our adult romantic relationships. Here I invite you to reflect on your own personal attachment history, what style or styles you experienced with your different attachment figures and how this relates to the attachment behaviors you have exhibited in your adult romantic relationships.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF ATTACHMENT

  MOST ATTACHMENT RESEARCHERS base their work on the idea of categorizing people under one of four specific types: secure, preoccupied, dismissive or fearful-avoidant. More recently, however, some researchers have proposed that attachment is better described using the two dimensions of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, and looking at the different ways these dimensions can interact.29 They place each of these dimensions along an axis from high to low, and then cross the axes to form a diagram with four quadrants. While this model still produces the same four basic types (one per quadrant), it lets us see a few things in more nuanced ways based on how far along each axis we find ourselves. Not every person with a preoccupied attachment style is exactly the same, for instance. It also helps show the common ground between the different types; for example, both the fearful and the dismissive attachment styles share a higher level of emotional avoidance. This model can help us better understand how we might be able to move the needle on our own emotional tendencies when they’re not serving us well.

  Being high in the attachment anxiety dimension relates to increased fears of being rejected, neglected, abandoned or separated from an attachment figure. Being low in attachment anxiety relates to being less fearful or preoccupied that such things will occur. Attachment avoidance is the dimension that relates to how comfortable or uncomfortable a person feels when it comes to being close, intimate or reliant on a partner. Stated more positively, low attachment avoidance refers to being more comfortable with intimacy, closeness and reliance on a partner and being more likely to approach and engage with a partner.

  FIGURE 2.1: Attachment styles expressed using the two dimensions of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance.

  The four different attachment styles relate to where people land on these two dimensions.

  When someone is low in attachment anxiety and low in attachment avoidance, they are in the secure attachment zone.

  When a person has low avoidance but high anxiety, their attachment style is preoccupied.

  Dismissive attachment happens when a person’s anxiety is low, but their avoidance is high.

  When someone is high in both anxiety and avoidance, they have a fearful-avoidant style.

  These dimensions also influence each other. For example, both the secure and preoccupied styles are low in attachment avoidance, but their differences in attachment anxiety will alter the way a person expresses their attachment. Someone lower in attachment anxiety will approach a partner from a more secure stance, moving towards them with a sense of openness, flexibility and interdependence, whereas someone who is higher in anxiety is more likely to seek proximity to their partner in order to grasp at or control them, be overly dependent on them, or simply to alleviate their own fears and anxiety.

  On the flip side, the internal experience of being higher in attachment avoidance will be very different based on where someone is positioned on the attachment anxiety dimension. Someone who is high in avoidant behaviors but low in attachment anxiety might experience minimal internal conflict when there is increased distance from a partner—this person may not even recognize their own high avoidance. Someone who is equally high in avoidance but higher in anxiety can feel an enormous amount of internal conflict and distress. Their avoidance does not necessarily feel like a safe refuge for them, but can feel more like a freeze response. This person feels two things at once: desire for proximity to a partner but fear of what that closeness might bring.

  I also think that the ways someone might experience being low in attachment anxiety will vary greatly depending on where they lie in the attachment avoidance dimension. For example, both the secure and dismissive styles would be considered as being low in attachment anxiety, but I don’t think they are felt in the same way. Someone who is more secure and lower in attachment avoidance probably experiences little anxiety, whereas for someone who is more dismissive and higher in attachment avoidance, low anxiety is probably related to the repressing or evading of anxious feelings rather than not having them.

  Both personally and professionally I have experienced this four-quadrant model as more both more precise and more useful than simply talking about the four attachment styles as stand-alone concepts. When I present attachment in this way to workshop participants and clients, they express being able to better place themselves within these dimensions. We are then able to have much more nuanced and empowering conversations about approach/avoidance behaviors and low or high anxiety. With this model, people seem better able to reflect on how and why these dimensions play out (often differently) in their relationships. Clients often describe feeling less “pathologized” by this approach.

  Speaking for myself, before learning about these dimensions, I was often confused about exactly where I fit within the three insecure styles. From going through the Adult Attachment Interview (an interview and scoring system developed to assess adult attachment) with my own therapist, I knew I had earned secure attachment, but there were still times when my insecure strategies arose, especially when under relational stress. I could place some of my behaviors in the dismissive style (I was self-reliant to a fault) but not all of them (I’m extremely empathic, comfortable with intimacy and emotionally focused). I could definitely relate to several of the ways the preoccupied style internally experiences things, but externally I was not presenting as the anxious preoccupied type at all. Some of my childhood experiences un
doubtedly fall into the disorganized camp, but the initial descriptions of the fearful-avoidant style that I encountered were encumbered with much more volatility, toxicity and dysfunction than I had experienced in my adult life and relationships.

  When I came across Mikulincer and Shaver’s two-dimensional description of attachment I could immediately place myself as sometimes being high in anxiety and high in avoidance (fearful avoidance). Under certain circumstances, I experience internal anxiety, feel mentally preoccupied with relational dynamics and have emotional flare-ups in response to the slightest signal that a partner is withdrawing or low in their ability to be present and attuned. But externally, I was more likely to withdraw, play it cool and take the self-reliant route. My reaction could go unnoticed or be seen as me pulling in and withdrawing, but internally I was thrashing around, getting emotional whiplash from the “one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake” experience. The two-dimensional model offered more accuracy in understanding my own attachment style and helped me to identify the directions I still needed to focus on in my own healing.

  I’ve found that many of my clients also describe relating to this style. They too are not presenting in the more extreme ways that the fearful-avoidant style is typically depicted, where mental illness, violence, abuse and/or forms of self-abuse are at play, but nonetheless they are functioning from this style and still need support in the unresolved trauma and pains that it surfaces from. These less extreme or overt expressions of fearful-avoidance can easily go undetected by professionals, leaving people confused about how to understand and identify their own attachment experiences. For any psychological model, there will always be people who do not neatly fit into what the theory or diagnostic criteria state, and when a typology is too rigid it can easily leave people to fall through the cracks. It is important that we recognize the significance of these different attachment categories and acknowledge that they are shining a beneficial light on specific patterns that arise for people. But we also need to hold these categorical descriptions with some flexibility. Different attachment patterns can exist on a spectrum, such as in this case with fearful-avoidant showing up in mild, moderate or more extreme expressions.

  From Dysfunction to Desire

  Another way to conceive of the attachment dimensions is not through their “dysfunctions,” but through their strengths and desires. Defining the attachment styles through the dimensions of attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety can easily paint a bleak picture of dysfunction and leave people focusing on what’s “wrong” with them. Based on this two-dimensional model, even a secure attachment, which is revered as the desired goal, is just being framed as how low in attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance it is, instead of being presented in its fullness with all the positive strengths and capacities that this attachment style embodies.

  Let’s take a person with a dismissive style as an example and look at how negative framing works. Because they’re high on the avoidance axis and low on the anxiety axis, someone with a dismissive style is likely to use distancing and deactivating strategies when faced with relationship challenges. On the other end of the spectrum, someone in the preoccupied style sits low on the avoidance axis and high on the anxiety axis. Their strategies look more like hyperactivation and pursuing their partner in moments of relationship pain.

  But we don’t need to only use this negative framing of how these attachment-based emotional tendencies often play out. If instead of looking at how people with these insecure attachment styles jump to using either hyperactivating or deactivating strategies, we were to measure their levels of attachment avoidance or attachment anxiety, we can explore the positive aspects of these styles. Each of the different styles comes with its own strengths and values. The insecure attachment styles are not just survival strategies that kick into gear in response to attachment rupture or relationship distress. At their root, they can also be expressions of the essential human desires for autonomy and connection.

  On one hand we have the need for agency, independence and choice, and on the other hand we have the need for closeness, connection, support and union. Ken Wilber, creator of integral theory, sees the horizontal dimension, the “anxiety” axis on the diagram above, as relating to drives that we all share. The basic human drive for agency sits on one end of the spectrum, and the equally human drive for communion sits at the other. All people, regardless of sex or gender, share these internal energies, capacities and drives for both autonomy and connection.

  From this perspective, the dismissive style, which uses minimizing and dismissing strategies to dampen and cope with attachment distress, can also be seen as the strategy of someone who, when in less reactivity, is more aligned with their needs for autonomy and agency. In its healthier expression, people with a higher draw to autonomy can exhibit more highly developed abilities for self-sufficiency and competence in tending to the needs of the practical, logistical and material aspects of the world. They have the ability to compartmentalize emotions, which can be a very handy skill in certain circumstances. When these needs move too far outside of their healthy expressions, agency and autonomy can transform into feeling alienation and isolation, becoming emotionally unreachable, or refusing or even denying the need for connection or help from others. A person’s boundaries can get too rigid, and they may shut others out and shut themselves too far in. When this happens, the values of autonomy and agency distort into more of a reactive strategy than a skillful expression of a person’s needs.

  Here’s another example. The preoccupied style is based on hyperactivating strategies in response to attachment distress, and people with this style are often portrayed as being needy and codependent. But when someone is in the healthy range, this style can be reframed as being more aligned with the values of connection and togetherness. People with this style can have highly developed skills when it comes to identifying and attuning to the emotions of others, and they can be highly competent in tending to others’ needs and handling the responsibilities of interpersonal relationships. When this goes too far, straying from its healthy expression, a person’s communing drives can become unhealthy forms of enmeshment and fusion. They may lose themselves in a relationship and see a decreased ability to truly know themselves or even make up their own minds.

  FIGURE 2.2: How the values and drives for agency and communion can go beyond their healthier manifestations and turn into either self-alienation or self-abandonment.

  To navigate our relationships from a place of health and wholeness, we need to learn how to manage these seemingly contradictory drives. We need to find ways to feel sovereign without losing our connection to others, and to be in communion with others without losing our sense of self. The healthy range on this spectrum corresponds to the skills and abilities of the secure attachment style, where a person is able to embrace their autonomy without fear of abandonment, as well as dive deep into intimacy and connection without the concern of engulfment.

  Attachment researcher Mary Main posits that, in childhood, secure attachment arises when a parent responds in a sensitive way to their child’s need for both autonomous exploration and proximity and comfort.30 The dismissive attachment style results from parents who discourage their child’s proximity-seeking attachment behaviors, and the preoccupied attachment style develops from the experience of having parents who discourage autonomy. Being open and responsive to the full spectrum of our attachment needs is important for embodying the fullness of our emotional capacities as adults.

  A common predicament that arises in relationships is referred to as the distancer-pursuer dance. In this type of relationship, a person pairs up with their ostensible opposite from an attachment perspective, so one partner (the distancer) constantly seeks more space, while the other (the pursuer) constantly pursues more connection. As the distancer attempts to take physical or emotional space, the pursuer moves in closer to try to bridge the gap. The closer that the pursuer comes, the more the distancer pulls back, which then
provokes the pursuer to move in even more. The pursuer never catches up, while the distancer never fully gets the breathing room they need. The pursuer fears that they will be abandoned, while the distancer fears being engulfed.

  In this dance, both partners are left frustrated and unable to get their needs met, often missing that this archetypal pattern has more to do with their inner self than their partner, who is just serving as a mirror reflecting back the parts of them that have been exiled and disowned. The distancer has cast off the parts of their self that yearn for closeness and connection and that desperately fear being abandoned. They are drawn to the pursuer, who will act these needs and fears out for them so that the distancer doesn’t have to. The pursuer, in turn, has projected outward the parts of their self that crave autonomy and independence and that are actually afraid of truly being vulnerable, being seen and being close. The pursuer is drawn to the distancer, who will act out these needs and fears for them so that they don’t have to. They are both trying to achieve wholeness, which is what keeps them dancing, but it’s the dance itself that prevents them from taking responsibility for the parts of themselves they have disowned; they instead blame their partners for enacting these elements of themselves.

  When I began working with these aspects of autonomy and connection within myself, I came across the dilemma of how to bring these two poles together. Initially, when I conceived of these drives as existing on a spectrum, they often felt in opposition to each other, with only one need or drive being attainable at a time, usually at the expense of the other. How could I inch myself more towards communion without compromising my integrity, and how could I move more towards my independence without compromising my connections? So, when in doubt, I’ve learned it can be useful to switch metaphors. Instead of seeing these needs and attachment expressions as existing on a continuum, a two-dimensional space in which you can only occupy one position at a time, what if we conceive of the needs for autonomy and connection as the two reins of secure functioning? When riding a horse, we use two reins to control and direct the horse. If we want to turn left, we tighten our grip to tug on the left rein, simultaneously loosening the other rein. We do the opposite to move right. The terrain ahead is constantly changing, and so the reins in our hands are constantly readjusting. With time and practice, we gain the ability to simultaneously tighten and loosen the reins without tightening so hard that we hurt or jerk the horse, or loosening so much so that communication and direction are lost.