How Attachment Shows Up in Adult Relationships
Hazan and Shaver (1987) were the first to apply Bowlby’s framework systematically to adult romantic relationships. Their research demonstrated that the same patterns observed in infants: secure, anxious, avoidant manifested, in adult love.
The Anxious-Avoidant Trap
One of the most common and painful relationship dynamics occurs when an anxiously attached person partners with an avoidantly attached person. The anxious partner pursues closeness; the avoidant partner withdraws. The pursuit intensifies the withdrawal, and the withdrawal intensifies the pursuit. Both partners are in distress, but they are triggering each other’s core fears: abandonment for the anxious partner, engulfment for the avoidant.
This dynamic is not about compatibility. It is about two nervous systems locked in a feedback loop, each responding to the other’s defences rather than to the person beneath them.
Earned Security
Perhaps the most important finding in attachment research is the concept of “earned security” (Roisman, Padrón, Sroufe, & Egeland, 2002). Individuals who experienced insecure attachment in childhood can develop a secure attachment style in adulthood , through reflective relationships, therapeutic work, or partnerships with securely attached people.
Earned security looks and functions identically to innate security. The nervous system can learn new patterns. The template can be rewritten.
How Therapy Helps
Attachment-based therapy does not pathologise your attachment style. It helps you understand it: with compassion, and gradually build the internal and relational resources needed to move toward security.
The therapeutic relationship as a secure base
The relationship with the therapist itself is a form of attachment. A consistent, attuned, non-judgmental therapist provides the nervous system with a new experience of connection, one that is reliable, safe, and responsive. Over time, this experience begins to shift the internal working model.
Understanding triggers and patterns
Therapy helps identify the specific situations that activate your attachment system, and the automatic responses that follow. Recognising the pattern is the first step toward choosing a different response.
Processing early experiences
Through approaches like EMDR and IFS, therapy can address the original experiences that shaped the attachment pattern, reducing their emotional charge and loosening their grip on present-day relationships.
Building new skills
Learning to communicate needs without apologising, to tolerate uncertainty without spiralling, to self-soothe during relational distress, and to recognise the difference between past-based fear and present-day reality.
A Note on Attachment and Culture
Attachment patterns do not develop in a cultural vacuum. The meaning of closeness, independence, emotional expression, and relational obligation varies across cultures.
In collectivist cultures, what may appear as “anxious attachment” in a Western framework may reflect culturally normative interdependence. A therapist who is not culturally attuned may pathologise a client’s relational style when it is, in fact, an appropriate adaptation to their cultural context.
Culturally responsive attachment work requires understanding not just the individual’s history, but the cultural system within which that history unfolded.
A Final Thought
Your attachment style is not a life sentence. It is a map, a record of where you have been and what you learned about love along the way.
If what you learned was that love is unreliable, that vulnerability is dangerous, or that you must earn connection through performance, those lessons made sense at the time. They kept you safe when safety was scarce.
But you are not that child anymore. And the relationships available to you now can be different from the ones that shaped you, if you are willing to examine the map and, with support, begin to redraw it.
Nicole Lam, MA, RCC is a Registered Clinical Counsellor at Emergence Counselling & Wellness in Vancouver, BC. She specializes in attachment-based therapy, relationship anxiety, and culturally responsive counselling for BIPOC individuals. Nicole offers therapy in English and Cantonese.
Book a free consultation | Learn more about Nicole →
Sources:
- Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
- Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 2. Separation. Basic Books.
- Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 3. Loss. Basic Books.
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Erlbaum.
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524.
- Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents’ unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status. In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years. University of Chicago Press.
- Mickelson, K. D., Kessler, R. C., & Shaver, P. R. (1997). Adult attachment in a nationally representative sample. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(5), 1092–1106.
- Roisman, G. I., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204–1219.
This is educational content based on published clinical and neuroscience research. It is not medical advice or a substitute for professional therapeutic support.