What Secure Attachment Can Learn from Other Attachment Styles
If you’ve looked into attachment theory at all, you’ve probably heard that secure attachment is the healthiest and most pleasant attachment style in relationships. And it’s true that a secure relationship feels wonderful and that secure traits do help make a relationship healthy. If someone is securely attached, they tend to have an easier time in relationship. They express love and caring easily, they communicate their needs clearly and believe that they can get them met — and that they deserve to have them met — and they also attune well to their partner and help their partner meet their own needs. So secure attachment is easier. Secure relating is also easier, when we take on a secure stance in a relationship. But sometimes…
Sometimes other attachment styles engage in behavior that might just have a valuable purpose.
That’s the topic of today’s post, and I hope you enjoy this somewhat unusual take on attachment style.
Attachment styles develop for a reason, and a very good one: We adapt to our environment in an intelligent way.
For example, if someone grew up in an environment where they were consistently rewarded for achievement and success but they didn’t get a lot of positive reward for talking about how they felt, they might develop an avoidant attachment style and focus on achievement and success as an adult but not put as much attention on romantic relationships.
In contrast, if they grew up with inconsistent attention from a parent, they had to focus on the relationship because it was unpredictable. So they tend to focus more on relationship stability as an adult and they develop more emotional attunement, because it was an intelligent way to guarantee survival as a child.
And if someone’s early environment was dangerous or chaotic — and that could include relational dysfunction, medical threat, injury or poverty — they might not have felt safe, and feeling unsafe became the norm as the adult. They would develop some Fearful attachment in order to feel more safe.
When someone feels unsafe, they don’t trust other people as easily. This makes sense, became people weren’t trustworthy in some way. So it’s not that the lack of trust is a problem — the original problem was the lack of trustworthiness.
Secure people don’t have that issue so much. Secure people tend to trust easily, and that’s usually a good thing in relationships. If you trust your partner, you’re more open and willing to collaborate with them. Society functions well when people are able to trust one another. If someone believes that their partner is cheating on them, for example, they aren’t going to feel as emotionally safe with them or want to collaborate with them. And collaboration is how we solve conflict. It’s the glue that keeps relationships together. Two people have different needs that are sometimes in conflict, but if we can collaborate together to meet one another’s needs, then everything works.
However, here’s where it gets tricky. Because sometimes secure people will over-trust. They tend to give the benefit of the doubt and then course-correct if the other person does something harmful. You see this in relationships where a secure person gets into a relationship with say a narcissistic leaning individual. At first, things seem great, but as the more self-focused person starts to lie or take advantage of their partner, the secure person will find themselves in a really unfortunate situation for having over-trusted in the beginning.
Of course, this can happen to a lot of people, since narcissistic folks tend to charm in the beginning. But a person with a more fearful attachment style, as we talked about, will have less trust at the beginning. Lack of trust can be a problem, since people are less willing to collaborate. But if they have learned to protect themselves from predatory behavior, they will steer clear of the self-focused narcissistic partner.
This doesn’t just happen in romantic relationships — we can see these trends globally. As people experience more abuse, they wake up to take a more discerning approach. So really what a Fearful Avoidant attachment style is teaching a Secure attachment style is discernment. We give our trust to those who have been trustworthy in the past, and to those who demonstrate trustworthy behavior.
This isn’t to say we should all aim to be Fearful Avoidants or be overly cautious with everyone. But discernment, the ability to determine whether a person, entity, situation or behavior is safe, is a very important skill to develop.
Now this is a skill we can all learn, and a skill that is essential!
If you’d like to learn about dating with discernment, my Secure Love Toolkit can help. It includes a Secure Partner Checklist to help you spot secure behavior in dating, saving you precious energy, time, and money.
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