The impact of childhood trauma on attachment styles
It wasn’t until I learned about childhood trauma and how it affected my attachment style that I truly understood why I feel the way I do about my closest relationships, and it was a real eye-opener.
And although I’m still coming to terms with the impact of that realisation, understanding that has allowed me to function in my relationships so much better.
And I think it’s absolutely vital that you understand your attachment style, too.
So I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about attachment styles how childhood trauma shapes our attachment styles, the impact of our attachment styles over the course of our life, and some of the things that you can do to minimise any negative potential impacts of your attachment style.
I’m Nicola, and I’ve been working to understand myself and how I relate to the world for years so I can be the best possible version of myself and give my kids a happier home and a brighter future.
What are attachment styles?
So attachment theory was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and basically it describes how we relate to our self, to others, and to the world.
And it’s created by how our parents or our primary caregivers respond to our needs as babies.
Based on how they respond, we develop rules or blueprints or a template for how to build relationships with other people over the course of our life.
The types of attachment styles
And there are four main styles of attachment, broken into two categories.
The first category has one style, and that is secure attachment.
Secure attachment is when you are open, safe, trusting, flexible, adaptable, willing to be vulnerable, healthily connected in your relationships.
The second category is insecure attachment, and there are three types in here.
The first type is anxious attachment.
This is generally described as “clingy”.
They are very sensitive to the dynamics of the relationship.
They can be controlling or demanding in relationships and often have a fantasy about what that relationship will provide to them.
The second insecure type is avoidant, and these tend to be described as “aloof”.
They are very self-sufficient and independent, but they can be emotionally shut down and will pull away when intimacy comes along.
And the third type is disorganised, and this is a mix of the two and can be described as sort of “push-pull”.
Their behaviour is very erratic because they’re afraid of intimacy, but also simultaneously afraid of rejection.
What shapes our attachment style?
So the type of attachment style that we develop, seems to be primarily affected by the quality of maternal care.
So the response that our mother gives us as a baby is what mostly shapes our attachment style.
And when we have an insecure attachment style, it’s because we were unable to bond with a safe adult as a child.
We had unmet needs.
We were not able to connect with a primary caregiver of any kind and feel safe and secure in that relationship.
And having an insecure attachment style is actually a key symptom of complex PTSD or CPTSD, which arises from parental abuse or neglect.
And that can be physical and sexual, but can also be, possibly more so, emotional or verbal abuse or neglect or abandonment.
And so when we have that experience, it tends to trigger our fight or flight response.
And there are four strategies that we use to try and reconnect with our caregivers, and that is fight, flight, fawn, or freeze.
But regardless of the response that we choose to specialise in, at the underlying core of this is a lack of confidence in that relationship.
We feel like It’s not safe to be vulnerable.
We feel anxious about intimacy because there is this insecure attachment style.
And when we get close in relationships, it can actually trigger full on emotional flashbacks to those intense emotions of childhood.
And I have a video about emotional flashbacks that you might want to watch next to fully understand how these affect you.
Insecure attachment styles explained
So let’s dive into these three insecure attachment styles in more detail.
Anxious / preoccupied attachment
So the first type is anxious attachment.
And this tends to arise with inconsistent meeting of needs.
So as a baby, sometimes their needs were met, and sometimes they just didn’t get a response.
And this leads them to develop lack of confidence in themselves.
There’s a sense that there was something that they needed to do differently in order to get the response.
And they lack confidence that they can get that response in that relationship.
And the strategy here seems to be to under-regulate their emotions.
So their emotions are expressed more actively.
They are more impactful in that relationship.
They are more part of what’s happening in that dynamic in the relationship.
And as a baby, this was an attempt to get more attention.
But the genuinely anxious type is preoccupied with the connection, making sure that the connection is there, making sure the quality of the connection is right, that they’re getting the necessary responses out of that connection.
Avoidant / dismissive attachment
The second type is the avoidant type, and this tends to arise when there was either neglect or rejection of needs, or in some cases, intrusive parenting.
So these three kinds responses from the caregiver can create this avoidant attachment style.
And this is basically what happens is they develop a lack of confidence in other people in those relationships.
So they feel comfortable in their own place in that relationship, but they don’t really trust in the role of the other person in that relationship.
And so the strategy here is to over-regulate their emotions, to really damp them down, to minimise the emotions, because feeling those emotions in that relationship where they were rejected or used against them, can make it feel unsafe to have those emotions.
So they tamp them down, make them really inaccessible and very shut down and not very interested in intimacy.
Disorganised / fearful-avoidant attachment
The third type is the disorganised type, and this is a mix of the two.
And this tends to happen when the responses that the child gets are on both extremes.
So they get responses that induce fear or reassurance.
So they’ve got a mix of two.
So they’re never really sure what’s going to happen.
And so they feel very uncertain about relationships and how they work.
And they are very mixed.
They’re very erratic in the way they engage in relationships.
They simultaneously want that connection.
They have the desire for that connection, but they also have the desire to escape from that situation because they don’t trust that it’s going to be safe.
And so their motivations are very much conflicted and it’s very confusing situation to be in.
My own personal experience with attachment styles
It’s been really interesting learning about these attachment styles for myself and for my husband because I’ve realised that I’m avoidant and he’s anxious.
So understanding this has helped me to understand that I have a tendency to pull away, to be more independent, to not be so reliant on other people, and to need my own space, and to not be as dependent on being connected in order to feel okay.
Whereas he has a strong need for that connection.
It’s very It very much affects his emotional state, the quality of our connection.
And if he doesn’t have that, he gets very destabilised.
So it’s helped us to understand this because it means that I can be more aware of his need to feel connected.
I can make sure that I’m doing things that It’s helped to feel confident in the quality of our connection.
But it’s also helped him to understand that sometimes I just need space, and it’s not a reflection on him.
Having that understanding has really helped the quality of our relationship and how we interact and how we manage those situations situations where those attachment styles come into play.
The effect of having an insecure attachment style
So how does having an insecure attachment style affect our life generally?
Well, the research shows that our attachment style does tend to flow onto the rest of our life, and it affects many different aspects of our life.
Our emotions
First and foremost, it affects our emotional regulation.
Part of the strategy of the different insecure attachment styles is to change the way we regulate our emotions in order to create a certain effect.
But whether it’s under-regulated or over-regulated, in both cases, it’s not in balance.
It’s not the healthiest way to manage our emotions in those situations.
And I’ve got a guide with some quick ways to self-regulate that you might find helpful as you learn to manage your emotions in a more effective way.
Our relationships
But also it affects our intimate relationships very obviously.
This is the place where we feel the most vulnerable, where that fear of intimacy or that desire for intimacy is really triggered.
And so our intimate relationships are very much the place where our attachment style gets played out.
And so understanding this can be really important to making sure that if we do have incompatible, or at least styles that clash, that we can work to understand each other and make them work better together.
But of course, because it’s about how we relate to other people, it also flows onto our friendships.
So we see the way that our friends behave through this same filter.
We need to understand that we are perceiving the way our friends behave towards us through the filter of our attachment style.
And to understand that maybe when they do something, it’s less about what it means, and more about the filter that we’re passing it through.
And so that can be really useful to understand that as well.
And of course, it can flow on to affect our work life because in the workplace, we have bosses, we have colleagues, we have reports, we’re relating to all these different people.
And again, we may be filtering their behaviours through this attachment style.
So understanding that we are seeing all of our relationships through this attachment style is really important.
Our parenting approach
And of course, the most important, at least in my opinion, is the fact that it affects our parenting style, because not only do we experience our kids through our attachment style, we also teach them.
We teach them how to relate to other people, and so we can pass our attachment style onto them.
The research shows that a secure parent is three to four times more likely to have a secure child.
So having an insecure attachment style makes it highly likely we’re going to pass that insecure attachment style onto our kids.
So if we want to break the cycle of dysfunction and trauma, we need to understand our attachment style and find ways to manage that so that we’re less likely to teach our kids the same behaviour.
What can we do about our attachment style?
So once we understand our attachment style, what can we do about it?
Our attachment style can change
Well, the first thing to note is that our attachment style can change over time.
It is not set in stone from our experiences in child.
Yes, that shapes our initial attachment style, but the experiences over the course of our life can to move us either further away from, or closer to a more secure attachment style.
We need to build our self-awareness
The other important piece is that awareness is absolutely foundational in helping us to do something about our attachment style.
If we’re not aware of what our attachment style is, we’re not in a great place to be able to do anything differently about it.
And journaling can be a great way to understand ourselves better and our attachment style.
And I’ve got a guide with over 100 journaling prompts that you might find helpful as you try to develop that self-awareness of your attachment style and how it’s affecting your relationships and your life in general.
Learn to understand others’ states of mind
The research also shows that the ability to reflect about others’ mental and emotional states is actually really important in this process.
So our ability to understand that someone’s state of mind or their emotional state might be the explanation for how they’re behaving rather than us or our relationship is actually really important.
And if we can model this to our kids and help them develop the ability to understand other people’s emotional emotional states and mental states and understand that maybe the way that mum is behaving, is because she’s having a bad day, not because I’ve done something bad because I’m a terrible person.
That ability to understand that there is a difference between someone’s mental and emotional state and physical reality is actually really important and can be incredibly effective in helping us develop healthy attachment styles.
Build confidence in relationships
And if we want to go from an insecure attachment style to a more secure attachment style, what we need to do is build confidence and trust both ourselves and others in relationships.
So to build confidence in ourselves in relationships, we need to build our self-worth.
We need to understand who we are and the value that we bring to relationships.
We need to change how we see ourselves in those relationships.
We need to get better at setting boundaries, and we also need to get better at regulating our emotions.
And I’ve got guides on both of those that you might want to download.
But also just age and experience can help with this.
The more of life we live, the more we understand who we are, the value we bring and how we can effectively be in our relationships.
And to develop confidence in others in relationships, we need to change how we see others.
How to improve our attachment response in relationships
By understanding our current attachment style, we can see how we’re filtering other people’s behaviours through that and understand what their behaviours might actually represent in terms of maybe their state of mind rather than a reflection of us.
We also need to make sense of the past.
We need to look at what happened to us in the past and understand how those experiences have shaped how we relate to and the templates that we use to build relationships with other people in our lives.
And we also need to start taking small risks.
We need to start practising taking leaps of faith with other people so that we can build confidence and trust, so we can have reference experiences that show us that other people can be relied on, other people can be safe, other people can connect to us in effective ways.
And in order to build our confidence in relationships, generally, of course, it can really help if we have a secure partner because they can model to us what it is to be secure in the way that they attach.
But also we can find other alternative people to model that for us, whether that’s friends or family or a therapist.
If we can find someone that we can practise having those safe, secure, trustworthy, confident relationships with, that can help us also to build our confidence in relationships.
Improve our communication skills
And of course, building our communication skills is incredibly important in effective relating and improving security of our attachment styles.
And I’ve found nothing better for this than a technique called non-violent communication.
I’ve got a step-by-step guide on that that you might want to download as well.
The value of understanding our attachment style
So now you understand the different attachment styles and how our childhood traumas can impact the way that we relate to others, whether that is secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganised.
And you also have some strategies for improving the way that you build relationships with other people.
But you’re going to need self-awareness to do this most effectively and to understand why this is so important and the benefits it can provide.
So watch this video on building self-awareness next.
And may your relationships be stronger from now on. 
