Attachment Theory proposes that early interactions with caregivers shape people's patterns of emotional and social development, influencing their ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. The early years are a critical period for brain development and if a child does not get their attachment needs adequately met it affects them profoundly and throughout life.

Growing up without a secure attachment base affects the nervous system's development, making it more prone to being triggered into dysregulation, which we experience as panic attacks, emotional spiralling or dissociation. An insecure attachment informs the core beliefs and assumptions that form the lens through which we see ourselves, other people, and the world, and it keeps us locked in a cycle of re-experiencing familiar old relational wounds.

Having an insight into your attachment trauma gives you a framework to examine your relational style, and see the patterns of power struggles and manipulation tactics that were learned at a young age as a desperate attempt to get your emotional needs met, and now just perpetuate unhealthy relationship dynamics.

Early Relationships

Working on your childhood trauma is not about blaming or finding fault with your parents. Mostly they were just coping the best they could with what they had at the time, and this includes their own unhealed wounds.

Sometimes an attachment figure is just abusive and there is no excusing or forgiving their actions, but still, it is important to know that they too were victims of intergenerational trauma and cultural norms.

The beauty of this work is that it gives you the gift of analytical insight and the power to break the cycle and heal that most core of core wounds; the belief that you were not given the love you craved because you were unworthy of it.

Secure Attachment Style

Having a secure emotional bond with a primary caregiver is a basic need, it is hardwired into us as an adaptive survival mechanism. For a helpless baby, rejection means abandonment, and abandonment means death. The fascinating Still Face experiment by Edward Tronick poignantly illustrates how alert babies are to shifts in their caregivers' mood and attention, and how much even a small rupture of attachment causes them distress. Small attachment ruptures are normal and healthy, the parent cannot give constant attention to the child and the very act of attachment repair builds resilience and an internal sense of security in the knowledge that the parent will return soon.

Children soak up everything and learn through observation and reinforcement, and as they learn and grow they develop sets of schema, unconscious rules or beliefs that make up their blueprint for understanding the world and their place in it, what relationships are and what to expect from them, and how to manage and express their needs and emotions. The child’s nervous system develops in response to their home environment, and characteristic patterns of emotional and physiological activation are wired in as a way for us to navigate and cope with stressors.

As highly social beings we have evolved mirror neurons that are primed to detect and align with the brain states of others, which give us the ability to co-regulate; to be soothed by an attachment bond. Co-regulation between a parent and child is particularly vital, as through attuned attention and emotional connection a child learns to process and express their internal experience in healthy ways. Growing up in a safe environment allows the brain to spend much of its time in optimal learning mode rather than in a state of survival or dysregulation, which creates a highly functional nervous system that can tolerate stressors and challenges. Having positive early experiences with intimate relationships makes for a secure adult with a strong sense of self-worth and healthy boundaries.

When the child's needs are not adequately met, emotional patterns develop based on whatever might best ensure survival given the circumstances and the child’s temperamental predispositions.

Insecure Attachment Patterns

Anxious/ambivalent: These children received unpredictable and inconsistent parenting; one or both caregivers could be at times smothering and micro-managing, invalidating and neglectful or volatile and punitive. Even as babies they respond to this treatment with confusion, they clamour for their parents’ attention while simultaneously resisting being soothed.

Growing up they had to be constantly alert to shifts in their parents’ mood as there could be severe consequences otherwise, so the nervous system developed predominantly in an anxious state of hyper-vigilance. They learned people-pleasing behaviours to navigate the difficult social terrain.

As adults they are prone to being hijacked by their fight/flight response and acting out in self-sabotaging ways. They crave love, attention and validation from their romantic partners, but have a deep fear of abandonment and rejection, which can make them exhibit clingy, possessive, jealous and manipulative behaviours. They are vulnerable to being trapped in abusive relationships due to their low self-esteem and capacity to set boundaries.

Avoidant/dismissive: These children may have been smothered and micro-managed to the point of having no privacy or autonomy over basic needs. For these people intimacy can feel oppressive and overwhelming, a threat to their sense of self. Or they might have been emotionally and/or physically neglected, frequently belittled or invalidated, and taught that displays of emotion and bids for attention will be ignored or punished. Or they might have had to play an inappropriate role in the family, caregivers to their siblings, or managing their parents’ emotional needs.

From an early age they learned to self-soothe by numbing and dissociating, they can often feel detached from their own bodies and emotions and instinctively withdraw from others in times of stress. As adults, they too fear abandonment but it presents as an aloofness that protects them from getting attached in the first place. They do want intimate relationships but someone getting too close too soon can trigger their brain into coming up with all sorts of stories and reasons why they need to push this person immediately away.

Disorganized/fearful-avoidant: These children did not have safe and consistent parenting and they experienced a range of other adverse and traumatic events with little emotional support. One or both parents might have been struggling with their mental health, and there may have been neglect, volatility, abuse, boundary violations, addiction and manipulation. The “disorganized” categorization comes from the fact that such children can show a freeze response in times of distress, as there is an internal struggle between wanting to reach out for comfort, but having no secure base with their caregiver.

This feeling persists into adulthood, which makes those with a fearful-avoidant attachment style behave in confusing ways in romantic relationships. Like with anxious attachment, there is a desperate need for love alongside a crippling fear of rejection and abandonment, but the fearful-avoidant can suddenly run cold, and once strong, almost obsessive feelings can suddenly turn to contempt as the protective avoidant part kicks in.

Fearful-avoidants tend to be highly independent and feel a lot more stable, if romantically lonely, when they are single. Being in a relationship, and especially beginning a new one, stirs up this tension between craving love and fearing it, so there may be a pattern of inconsistent behavior that is destabilizing for everyone involved.

How do insecure attachment patterns interact?

The most common relationship dynamic is that between anxious and avoidant, there is something magnetic about this attraction as they both perfectly play their parts in re-enacting their attachment trauma together.

Anxious: The anxious is hooked on the inconsistency of the avoidant, the nervous system recognizes the familiar old patterns of what it knows as love. Having their partner’s attention feels like the sweetest validation because they know it is conditional, and the times that it is withdrawn confirms the deep insidious belief that they were never really worthy of it anyway, and they must forever try to earn the approval they crave.

This is ever entwined with the urge to push their partner away, to test their commitment or to leave before they do, but the need for attachment always wins out. The push and pull dynamic inherent to the relationship brings all their wounds and insecurities to the surface and throws their nervous system into hyper-arousal, so the anxious can behave in insecure and self-sabotaging ways that continue to erode their already low self-esteem.

Avoidant: The avoidant might like the idea of a relationship, and they have someone more than willing to take the risks and do the vulnerability work of initiating intimacy, but the growing closeness feels uncomfortable and registers as a threat in the amygdala. The anxious has emotional needs that the avoidant feels they are unable to fulfill, and as they are so unused to having and expressing their own emotional needs, they struggle to set boundaries and develop a feeling of overwhelm and resentment. Our nervous systems are highly sensitive and responsive to each others’, the anxious can feel the avoidant pulling back and they become reactive, and the resulting clingy and possessive behaviours flood the avoidant into hypo-arousal to which they respond by detaching and withdrawing.

Disorganized: Someone with a disorganized attachment style might quickly become fond of an anxious type, finding nourishment in the intensity of their affection at first, but can soon find themselves grappling with confusing feelings of contempt for their partner, and can be very variable in their affections in return. Or there could be a feeling of suspicion, “it’s too good to be true”, or of imposter syndrome, “soon they will realize what I’m really like and leave me”, which prompts them to sabotage the relationship in a self-fulfilling prophecy.The anxious attachment style reacts to the disorganized’s inconsistency by needing constant reassurance, to which the disorganized responds by pulling away.

With an avoidant partner, a fearful-avoidant is likely to take on a more anxious style, becoming quickly infatuated and hyper-vigilant over whether their person intends to stay as the fear of abandonment takes hold. They feel an immense need for validation and reassurance from their partner, which feels incongruent with the layers of defenses they have built up against needing to need people, and they might find themselves battling conflicting urges to cling to their partner and push them away.

Power Dynamics

Core to this demand-withdrawal dynamic that exists across all insecure romantic relationships is the imbalance of power. In every intimate relationship there exists a power dynamic, a healthy balance of power is based on mutual respect, trust and healthy communication and is evenly shared, though it might shift a bit depending on the context through spoken and unspoken consent.

In an insecure relationship, the avoidant tends to hold more of the power, as their capacity to pull back and create emotional distance positions their partner as the chaser by default. In toxic relationships, it can be the anxiously attached that has dominance owing to their greater physical, financial and social advantages, ie. being the male and the main income earner in a cis/het relationship, or due to the intensity of mind games that they employ. Typically, however, the avoidant holds the ultimate threat of abandonment in their arsenal.

It’s worth noting that adults can’t actually abandon each other, but they can leave, because abandonment implies responsibility and grown-up humans are responsible for themselves. However, as far as your nervous system is concerned this is a matter of life and death, when the deeply instinctual fear of abandonment is overlaid by attachment trauma, the brain interprets it as critical to survival which is why heartbreak hurts so much.

Power is about control, and the relentless power struggle is at its core driven by the fear of abandonment, to put the other in a position where they feel the need or the obligation to stay. Being in a power deficit in a relationship triggers the fear of abandonment, which drives all kinds of conscious and unconscious behaviours to influence the balance of power. Those with an insecure attachment learned by necessity from an early age how to manipulate others into meeting their needs.

Manipulative Tactics

People-pleasing is perhaps a more benign manipulation tactic, although it can be harmless for the person on the receiving end it can be very harmful for the actor if they are trampling over their own boundaries and self-worth in the process. People-pleasers typically have an anxious attachment style, they learned to tread carefully around their volatile caregivers, and perhaps their role in the family demanded their service. The core belief that drives them is “if they need me, maybe they won’t leave me”. People-pleasing can also come from the fawn response, an act of submission in response to fear and intimidation.

The silent treatment tactic is typically used by those with an avoidant attachment style. It might not be their intention to be manipulative, they might just feel overwhelmed and shut down and not know how to process or communicate their feelings, but it still locks them into the power advantage as silence is a small form of abandonment. It also stems from an avoidance of vulnerability and intimacy. Someone with anxious or disorganized attachment might also use the silent treatment intentionally as a way to get back at their partner and get the upper hand.

Playing the victim is a common tactic to all attachment types, and it manifests in different ways. Its function is to elicit feelings of guilt and sympathy in the recipient, to turn the tables in a situation so that the person who was being held accountable for their behaviour is now the one who has been wronged. It can be as subtle as bursting into tears and becoming dysregulated during a discussion so that the person who was expressing being hurt by your harmful behaviour now needs to comfort you, or it can be the more pernicious “poor me” who somehow always manages to avoid taking responsibility for anything.

Guilt tripping is another highly nuanced tactic that people use a lot without realizing, it is essentially the sharing of information or the framing of it in a way designed to make the other person feel bad. Some micro-jabs may seem innocuous on the surface, like “I was really looking forward to spending time with you tonight, but it’s fine if you’re too busy”, which contrives to sound breezy on the surface but is loaded with the implication of disappointment that their partner prioritizes other things over the relationship.

Passive aggression is when people give vent to negative emotions without directly addressing the actual issue. Such behaviours include snide comments, cutting jokes, being obviously upset but claiming to be fine and refusing to talk about it, weaponizing sex and affection by with-holding it to punish their partner, sabotaging their partner's plans, and gaslighting them when confronted with their behaviour. It comes from an inability to have calm and direct communication about their needs and emotions, so they manufacture anger about something which puts their partner in the position of needing to appease and atone.

Many of our patterns of manipulation were learned directly from our parents, which is why it can be so hard to be aware of them - it’s how we were socialized, our normal. It’s still manipulation, however, even when there was no conscious intent. An important part of healing is to hold yourself accountable with great compassion. These manipulation strategies developed as a way for you to cope the best way you knew how and don’t make you a bad person, but if you want to have safe and loving relationships then you need to develop an awareness of these habits so you can unlearn them and replace them with healthy new ones.

Healing

Without informed self-awareness, relationships are just a cycle of finding people with compatible attachment wounds and re-enacting your trauma together. Having a framework to understand and communicate these relational dynamics is so powerful because then you have language and concepts to talk about the issues in a more objective and constructive way. It makes it easier to work together as a couple against the issue, rather than each seeing the other as the issue and tussling over power points.

Healing an insecure attachment is hard work but entirely possible. There is so much you can do on your own but the big healing takes place in the safe haven of a secure attachment, and with commitment and the right tools a deeply healing relationship can be built between two people with an insecure relationship style.

The first step is becoming aware of your own patterns of power struggle and manipulation, being curious and noticing all the direct and indirect ways you express your needs. Noticing when you have been manipulative, and asking yourself what is the need you were trying to meet, and then thinking about how you can better ask for it in the future.

When you notice yourself feeling emotionally activated and wanting to act out, ask yourself, what is the underlying need and will this behaviour help me get it met? Ususally the underlying need is just for connection, and the behaviours we feel compelled to act out will only serve to perpetuate the power struggle.

Learning to tune into and regulate your nervous system is a foundational skill in this work. Mindfully observing your internal state, your thoughts, emotions and physiological arousal, you will notice that the most persistent and compelling thoughts, the ones that come on repeat and are particularly emotionally "hot", are ususally not based in known fact, but rather in beliefs, interpretations and assumptions. We tend to believe in and identify with our thoughts very strongly, when in fact a lot of the time they are unhelpful and untrue, and they just amplify our physiological and emotional state. Detaching from patterns of activation gives the ability to respond from a place of calm, reason, and empathy, and creates safety in relationships.