Top Down or Bottom Up? How to Approach the Shift to Secure Attachment
Is it better to work on your attachment system by learning and thinking about attachment, and taking practical steps to change your behavior (a top down approach), or by accessing the felt sense/working with body sensations, working on calming the nervous system, and feeling what secure feels like in your body (a bottom up approach)?
We know that attachment has a physical component - there’s evidence that an insecure attachment style at a young age changes the nervous system and contributes to changes in the immune and digestive systems. We also know that people with secure attachment tend to be healthier in certain ways. (1)
There’s an ongoing debate about whether we should change thoughts to change the body, or change the body to change thoughts.
Truthfully, it’s both.
Some people focus on learning about attachment theory and focusing on their behavior. They talk through past relationships and notice patterns in current relationships. And for many people, this has some benefit. Being aware of a problem is the first step to changing it, and we can shift many life problems armed with a good dose of knowledge and willpower.
Some examples of top-down approaches to building secure relationships are:
Reading a blog about attachment
Making a list of your relationship wants/needs
Identifying your attachment style traits in your relationships
Thinking about your personal relationship triggers - ex. Anxious triggers or avoidant triggers
But as anyone knows who has ever tried to change a long-engrained habit by force of will, merely *wanting* to change and knowing the benefits of change aren’t always enough. There are times when we need to work on a deeper level.
Have you ever noticed that relationships are easier when you’re happier? Stress is a huge contributor to relationship problems, so when everyone is in a good mood, things go more smoothly. I suppose you could try to will yourself to be happy, but if you’ve ever tried to use willpower to get in a better mood, you know it’s not the easiest thing to do. People tend to have more success with mood boosting activities, such as exercise, because it shifts the body’s chemistry, giving us a healthy dose of feel-good endorphins.
Of course, we can’t just exercise our way to happy, satisfying relationships. But my point is that sometimes it is easier to solve a problem using a bottom-up approach.
Here’s a bottom up approach one could use to make relationships easier. Many couples have conflict in their relationships. During conflict, their heart rate increases, and they get a surge of adrenaline and other stress hormones. When people learn to calm down as well as help a partner calm down, conflict tends to be shorter and have a better outcome. For example, if someone takes some calming breaths, and imagines holding their inner child and feeling safe, this has a calming effect on their physiology. In fact, how a conversation goes in the first few minutes has a huge impact on how the rest of it will go (2), so doing a calming practice before having a high-stakes conversation can lead to a better result.
Other bottom-up approaches might be:
Imagining a secure moment in an existing relationship, and feeling the appreciation for it, noticing how that feels in the body
Noticing where an emotion shows up in the body
Naming five gratitudes and then feeling that gratitude in the body
What sort of top down or bottom up approaches have you used to help your attachment system?
Let me know in the comments below.
Guided meditation designed to help calm the nervous system from attachment related anxiety
(Note: This meditation is included in the Secure Attachment Rewire course)
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1 Pietromonaco PR, Beck LA. Adult attachment and physical health. Curr Opin Psychol. 2019 Feb;25:115-120. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.004. Epub 2018 Apr 16. PMID: 29734091; PMCID: PMC6191372.
2 Carrere, S., and Gottman, J.M., (1999). Predicting Divorce among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion, Family Process, Vol. 38(3), 293-301
