Attachment: How early development impacts your relationships

Galen Buckwalter, PhD

Imagine you wanted to do all that you could to understand how likely you are to form happy relationships. Of course you would want to understand how you function as an adult – what personality traits you show, what you value in life and in relationships and of course what attracts your fancy; your interests both in vocational and avocational pursuits.

But if you were to spend very much time contemplating the factors that impact you in forming relationships it probably wouldn’t be very long before you started thinking about your early life. The process you went through in developing your earliest relationships surely is a major player in how you form relationships now. In fact if you have ever taken so much as one course in psychology or even spent any time in free form discussion with your friends, the issues related to early development have inevitably come to the fore.

Freud – Psychosexual Stages

We have all likely heard about Sigmund Freud and even if we don’t fully comprehend the subtleties of his theories we understand his proposition that relationships with our parents were crucial to our development. Freud proposed that attachment was successful if we negotiated our way through several psychosexual stages he viewed as inherent in human development. He thought that if we received appropriate types of pleasure during each stage, we developed relatively happily but if we developed with either deprivation or over emphasis on a particular stage, we would forever be destined to try and correct the particular stage which we did not successfully negotiate.

As an example, Freud proposed that the first universal stage of human development was the oral stage which lasted from birth to 2 years of age. During this stage the infant is preoccupied with their mouths because the mouth is the source of nourishment and their emotional bond with the mother. So if the infant-mother bond is adequate, neither withheld nor forced upon the child, the stage will be resolved in a way that allows the infant some process toward individuation. The infant will feel a positive transference of emotions toward the mother and will transition normally to the next psychosexual stage. However, if the mother cannot successfully provide the infant with his/her oral needs, the child is likely to develop as an adult with strong oral desires; they may smoke or drink to excess and possibly be overly dependent in their relationships with others. Freud would also have held that people who had mothers who overemphasized nurturance would show tendencies toward verbal aggressiveness; expressing the hostility originally sensed toward one’s mother as an infant toward others as an adult.

While Freudian theories have not been supported by subsequent research, the contribution Freud made simply by focusing attention on the possible roles that early relationships had on the development of persons was a major contribution to western thought. While the specifics of his thinking have greatly evolved, attention to the role of early relationships continues to be foundational in the understanding of human behavior.

Bowlby – Attachment

Perhaps the person who has advanced our understanding of the role of early relationships in an empirically observable manner more than anyone else is the English psychoanalyst, John Bowlby. Bowlby’s interest in the impact of attachment began in a way that every parent can resonate with – he wanted to understand what infants went through when they were expressing the gut-wrenching distress of separation from their parents. While Freud may have interpreted such distress as an infant’s attempt to manipulate the parent, Bowlby noticed that many mammalian infants reacted in the same way when confronted with parental separation. Given the range of animals that display separation anxiety, Bowlby hypothesized that what he called the attachment behavioral system had been selected for by evolution to assure that the infant maintained proximity to their parent – a parent without whom the infant would have no chance of survival.

The effects of the attachment behavioral system are unique in humans due to the rapid development of the brain that accompanies birth. If the child perceives the parent to be generally within proximity she/he develops a sense of attachment of being loved and secure. And with the sense of security comes the confidence needed to play with others, to explore the environment and to engage in social activities. If the child does not sense such a secure attachment, they experience anxiety when separated from their parents. In addition to this anxiety, children who do not sense that safety is within proximity try to preclude any parent figure from leaving by crying. The child will do all he/she can to establish a physical attachment until a sense of helplessness pervades their experience. When this is the case, the child begins to experience sensations of depression and despair – the precursors to a level of emotional reactivity that can burden individuals throughout their lives.

The description of an emotionally distraught child desperately trying to find a secure attachment with his/her parent is one that sends chills through most everyone. And thinking about the possible long-term consequences of living through the first couple years of life without a secure source of attachment is also a distressful thought for most of us. But in thinking about the process of forming that initial bond, the need for the parent to supply a constant sense of proximity to the child is certainly not the entirety of the equation. If you have spent any time with children you know that they bring their own temperament as well – some who live with seemingly chaotic families seem calm and easygoing, others with very attentive parents seem to wail more than they sleep.

Ainsworth – the Strange Situation

This brings us to the work of Mary Ainsworth. Dr. Ainsworth developed a test called the strange situation, a laboratory test to study the parent-child interaction in more specific detail. In the strange situation, most children (60%) become upset when the parent leaves the room. When the parent returns, the child seeks the parent and is easily comforted. Just as Bowlby would predict – a secure attachment. Some children (about 20% or less) start out ill-at-ease, and become very distressed when separated. When these children are reunited with their parents, they are hard to sooth and often exhibit conflicting behaviors – wanting to be comforted, but also seeming to want to punish the parent for leaving. These children are often called anxious-resistant. The third pattern of attachment that Ainsworth identified is called avoidant. Avoidant children (about 20%) are not distressed by the separation, and, upon reunion, actively avoid seeking contact with their parent, sometimes turning their attention to play with objects on the floor.

Ainsworth went a long way in demonstrating the attachment behavioral system discussed by Bowlby. But she went further by demonstrating that children also show individual differences in their attachment patterns.

Hazan & Shaver – Attachment in Adults

The next issue we will address is the nature of attachment in adults. Much of the work on adult attachment has been done by Cindy Hazan and Phil Shaver. They developed a simple questionnaire to measure individual differences on adult attachment style, much as the separation situation was designed to measure individual differences in children’s attachment styles. In short, Hazan and Shaver asked research subjects to read the three paragraphs listed below, and indicate which paragraph best characterized the way they think, feel, and behave in close relationships:

• I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being.
• I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me.
• I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away.

Hazan and Shaver found that the distribution in these three categories was highly similar to that reported by Ainsworth among infants. That is about 60% of adults classified themselves as secure (paragraph B), 20% described themselves as avoidant (paragraph A), and the other 20% chose the paragraph describing an anxious-resistant type (paragraph C).

Brennan – Measures of Attachment

To further explore the nature of adult attachment Kelly Brennan and her colleagues collected a number of statements related to aspects of attachment and statistically evaluated the underlying constructs the statements measured. (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998). Brennan suggested that there are two fundamental constructs associated with adult attachment (see below Figure). One construct has been labeled attachment-related anxiety (An example of an item measuring this is “I worry about being abandoned”). People with high levels of attachment-related anxiety tend to constantly worry if their partner will be available, attentive and responsive. People who are low on this construct report feeling more secure in how they perceive their partners responsiveness. The other critical construct has been labeled attachment-related avoidance (An example item related to this would be, “I prefer not to show a partner how I feel deep down”). People who are high on this construct do not easily rely on others or open up to others. People who score low on this construct are more comfortable with intimacy and are more secure being in relationships where there is mutual dependence. A fully secure adult would score low on both of these constructs.

Changes in Attachment Patterns

The final issue we will address is the change we see in adults’ attachment patterns. In other words if we are avoidant children are we guaranteed to be, and stay, avoidant adults. In general attachment patterns are fairly stable and enduring. However, there is some evidence that they are not entirely rigid and can be responsive to dramatic changes in interactions. For example, if someone were to enter a new and highly stable marriage it appears they can become more stable in their attachment style. Further, things like parental separations or loss can also alter the nature of someone’s internalized attachment model.

The area of change in attachment style represents one of the most exciting aspects of social relationships that currently under study. If people can attain a more satisfying attachment style by engaging in more stable relationships the potential for individuals to be able to change in profoundly meaningful ways would seem to exist. This is an issue of particular interest to eHarmony Labs and one that you will see frequently mentioned on this site.