Attachment styles and the nervous system
89. Attachment styles and the nervous system
You have been many to ask me for an episode on attachment styles, a theory developed by John Bowlby and then Mary Ainsworth. What if attachment styles exactly reflected your default nervous system?
In episode 89 of my podcast S’ouvrir à l’Amour, we are going to talk about the 4 attachment styles, and the ones I encounter most in my clients after 8 years of practice.
Attachment styles and the nervous system
Following your many requests on this subject, I am going to talk to you about attachment styles.
What is this attachment theory again that was developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth ? What are the four attachment styles ? And how do these attachment styles reflect the default state of your autonomic nervous system ? And what can affect or impact your attachment styles ? For me, it is clearly not only the attachment figures (aka the parents) who create your attachment style.
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Attachment theory
The psychiatrist John Bowlby explains that the first experiences of attachment, of relationships you lived, mainly with the people who took care of you, will shape the way you interact with others in your relationships and that this will also have an impact on your self-confidence, your self-esteem and what you feel entitled, ultimately, to be, to do or not to do in a relationship. John Bowlby and then Mary Ainsworth, who continued the research work that John Bowlby had set up, identified four attachment styles.
I will try to describe them one by one and then see what may have happened in the past for each of these attachments and how it shows up in the person as an adult.
The secure attachment style
Secure attachment occurs when the child felt, and once again it is the child’s perception, so it is not necessarily 100% a reflection of reality, but it is when the child perceived a warm and loving bond between their parent(s) and themselves, when the child generally felt loved, when the child felt taken care of, when they were able to develop healthy bonds and relationships with those around them, when the child also felt able to say no, to disagree or to have uncomfortable emotions and not be excluded for having felt these emotions. When the child felt this ability to be totally themselves, even in their imperfect part and that it did not break the bond, that there was this security that the bond was always there, what does that do? It will develop a rather secure attachment and in adulthood, it will give people who have a certain ease in establishing relationships, whether with men or women, people who will have an ease in having long-term relationships because they will feel truly legitimate in being themselves in a relationship, so who will not have this fear of being abandoned, this fear of being rejected, who will have a natural trust in the other, who will feel this benefit of being in a relationship, precisely because they experienced this secure attachment in the past.
The anxious-ambivalent attachment style
People with an anxious-ambivalent attachment style are not necessarily people who were rejected or neglected, but they rather had this feeling that the outside environment is insecure, that they were not sure they could count on their attachment figures.
It was not a constant bond, it could change from one minute to the next. And so, giving this feeling of not having enough emotional nourishment, security coming from the outside. We must not forget that a child, when small, does not have this capacity for co-regulation. So, if this co-regulation, this security, is not provided, it automatically generates inner insecurity.
Someone who experienced this in childhood, what will it do in adulthood?
Often, they will be in mistrust : I cannot count on the people who take care of me. The environment is worrying, can be a source of danger : it can also be in terms of behavior of people who will constantly seek the approval of others, who will look for signs of disconnection for fear of being abandoned. It will also be people who have this feeling of never having enough in terms of emotional nourishment, who need a lot of attention, affection because they lacked it in childhood. It will also be people who will have this feeling of being very dependent on the other, of needing the other or of having this difficulty functioning without the other.And at the same time, these are people who will have a hard time moving toward intimacy, expressing what they feel toward the other.
The avoidant attachment style
It is often the next level up. It is when children understood that, in the end, their emotional needs were not really taken into account, that there was a certain emotional neglect or when they really felt they were a bit too much in the family, that they were disturbing, either feeling poorly loved or feeling insignificant. It can happen in cases where, for example, the parents worked a lot, had no time or room to welcome a child, if the attachment figure, the father or the mother, was in their own personal problems such as depression, postpartum depression…. In fact, the parent was there, but was not there for the child. It can also be when a parent was somewhat disconnected from their own sensations. So the child, in fact, perceives that they cannot be in connection with others. They perceive that others do not feel what they feel. So the ultimate means of protection is to go into freeze, by cutting themselves off from others. The child is there because they cannot do otherwise, but they ask for as little as possible. They minimize the number of interactions to disturb as little as possible.
In adulthood, this can mean that we are afraid of relationships, that we are afraid, as soon as we sense the other wants a stronger bond, it can make us want to move away. It can show up as a difficulty expressing what we feel, understanding what we feel, understanding whether we are in love with others or not. It can make us enter into a relationship, but without wanting to enter into intimacy. So having this feeling of being a bit emotionally unavailable toward the person in front of us.
Disorganized attachment
And finally, the last type of attachment that Bowlby describes as disorganized attachment, is somewhat a combination of anxious-ambivalent attachment with avoidant attachment. So often, in fact, these are people who had a bit of a mix of both in their childhood. And what does that create? It creates enormous emotions, enormous emotional waves, whether in the highs or in the lows. This is what I call drama attachment, because it is really… The child no longer knows which way to turn. It is either everything or nothing.
Someone who had a disorganized attachment as a child, you often feel it, in fact, through these rather intense emotional waves, through these phases where they can behave really in a rage, full of anger and then, all of a sudden, avoid any relationship, any interaction and then retreat a little into their own world.
And in adulthood, it is somewhat the same thing that repeats. People who have this disorganized attachment can be in a power dynamic, power struggle with the other, go into battle, have this feeling that the relationship with others, necessarily, is difficult, is necessarily drama, is necessarily a power struggle and also have a lot of trouble entering into a relationship without exploding. So it will go through phases of no control over emotions : it explodes, it overflows and phases of coldness where everything is blocked : nothing comes out, but that does not mean the emotions inside are not there.
Attachment styles are a reflection of your autonomic nervous system
And finally the four types of attachment that Bowlby describes reflect exactly the default state of your autonomic nervous system. And that is not me saying it.
Polyvagal theory explains that when we are children, we do not have this ventral vagal connection that brings us this feeling of safety among others. It is something that is not yet created, it is something that will happen through connection with our attachment figures, with the people who mostly took care of us. And this is what we call your “primal wire”.
You will basically inherit the default autonomic nervous system state of your parents and your interactions with them will influence your default state too :
- There is a transgenerational aspect. You inherit their default autonomic nervous system state from your parents. It is passed on because at the start, the child did not have this ventral vagal connection by themselves, so they inherit that of their parents, who inherited that of their parents before them, etc. So this transgenerational aspect, you also find it in the default state of your autonomic nervous system.
- There is an experience aspect. The relational experiences you will have with your parent will also contribute to regulating or dysregulating your autonomic nervous system depending on whether your parent had the capacity to help you regulate (co-regulation) or not.
- Secure attachment is when your default autonomic nervous system is ventral vagal. Physiologically, you feel it : when you are in ventral vagal, you are often in this feeling of connection to others, you want to go toward the other, you have this feeling of being one with others, it is easy for you to enter into interaction with others. You feel safe interacting and being yourself with others.
- Someone who has anxious ambivalent attachment has the sympathetic as their default autonomic nervous system. When your default state is the sympathetic, it can lead to two actions :
- Either you go into the mode of “I flee people because I do not feel safe with people.”
- Or “I go into battle ”
- Avoidant attachment is the equivalent of dorsal vagal as the default autonomic nervous system, that is, this feeling of not being able to count on others, of being powerless in the face of the situation and so I cut myself off from others and from the world to survive. I stay a bit locked in my bubble.
- Finally, disorganized attachment would be a mix that would explain why sometimes you are more in a sympathetic state or in the step above at the dorsal vagal level, and that, in the end, you alternate between the two.
Why I do not identify attachment styles in my approach?
When people come into the program Opening up to love, I do not classify love patterns by attachment type, precisely because depending on what you experienced in your past, you can have, situationally, a rather avoidant attachment in certain situations, you can have an anxious-ambivalent attachment in others.
What we do in the assessment part is that we seek to understand mainly which patterns repeat the most in your love life. And once we have identified the patterns that repeat the most in your love life, during the Day of the Past we will go back through your different past experiences that will shed light on your different survival mechanisms, protection mechanisms. What is interesting in this process is to see the evolution of your survival processes because they also evolve over time. For example, if as a child you asked for love and despite your requests you did not receive it, after a while you will tell yourself “Do not even try anymore, it is useless. Stay alone, it is better than being in bad company or suffering from being in a relationship.” and go into avoidance.
The origin of your attachment styles
Now you tell yourself “I have identified my main attachment style, I know that means I have such and such default state of the autonomic nervous system, how do we go about finding the origin of all this? What made me have this attachment style? ”
I would like to remove the weight we give to parents regarding the fact that attachment styles are mainly transmitted by the people who took care of us, whether our parents, or our other attachment figures, our nanny, etc. :
- Yes, attachment figures, the parents or those who took care of us have a great impact. I no longer remember where I read this figure so do not ask me for the source but I had read that basically, if 30 to 40% of the connections we felt with our parent were relatively secure, we developed a rather secure attachment. So that means parents do not have to be perfect and are allowed to make mistakes.
- What impacts our perception of attachment is how the child perceived it. So there are also many cases where the parents were there, where the parents took good care of the children, where they tried to do their best according to their abilities, but the child’s perception was different. And these experiences also have an impact on what is recorded by default in the autonomic nervous system.
But there are not, at least in my view, ONLY the attachment figures or parents who influence our default autonomic nervous system. I wanted to name for you a somewhat summary list of what can impact the default state of your autonomic nervous system, I will refer you to other episodes of the podcast if you want to go deeper into one of the topics. If you need a general introduction on why your past experiences are recorded in the body you can listen to episode 56 of the podcast on why the body forgets nothing.
This list is more to give you a hint about the other things that may have influenced your default autonomic nervous system :
- In number 1, these are all the cases where the environment became uncontrollable and that had a negative consequence on the person. I talk about it in more detail in episode 53, How to free yourself from the need to control everything ? If you had past experiences that made you feel that the environment is uncontrollable and unsafe, inevitably, this will have an impact on your default autonomic nervous system and make us see the other or the environment as a source of danger rather than a source of safety.
- What will also have a big impact on your default autonomic nervous system is your birth and the whole in-utero period. I talk about it in more detail in episode 37. Basically, birth is our first trauma, it is our first experience of separation from the other and of our first experience of our dependence on the other. Because when the child is born, they have a certain dependence on the outside environment. They need to receive care, to eat, etc. Depending on whether the birth was more or less medicalized, whether the birth had an impact on the child, whether the birth involved a separation from the mother or had an impact on the mother, it will greatly have an impact on the child’s default autonomic nervous system.
- Also, all experiences of death or sudden disappearance of loved ones. I talk a little more about the impact of death in your love life in episode 38 of this podcast.
So there you go, I hope this episode has given you a good first summary of attachment styles, to also see that these attachment styles are not saved in your head but in your body and that also it is not only the parents who can affect your attachment style.
See you next week when I will talk to you about how to reconnect with your feminine and not necessarily the way you think.
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Going further
If you want to explore the topic further and identify your own love patterns, you have my book S’ouvrir à l’amour available in all bookstores.
And if you want to work on your love patterns through the body and transform your love life, you have the program Opening up to love. You can take the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: a psycho-corporal practice to deprogram the automatic patterns of the nervous system and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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