Creates Mutual Bond (WISE):

Warm Insightful Sensitive Empathy

Resulting in mutual care and kindness, creative conflict resolution, balanced collaboration, relaxed comfort and contentment, fierce loyalty, mutual trust, openness, and authenticity in shared life.

The bond deepens and strengthens over time as each partner’s signals for creating closeness; asking for reassurance, need for support, etc. are met with an ongoing and consistent flow of positive responses.  In so doing, over time the tapestry of their shared life is tightly woven and smoothed out, with few loose or hanging threads. They share the common language of mutual loving trust.

WISE: A Magic Carpet Ride!

SCIENCE OF ATTACHMENT— SECURE VS. INSECURE—YOUR BRAIN ON FAMILY TRAUMA – PART III

Secure vs. Insecure Attachment – How do Secure and Insecure Attachment types perceive and deal with human closeness and intimacy, or handle the conditions of human interrelatedness?

How does Attachment style affect my intimate relationships with my spouse, partner, children, etc.?

Attachment is based on a simple yet profound touch and response neurobiological regulation system. We are in a constant loop of touch and response in every aspect of interrelatedness, even with animals.

Someone who has a Secure Attachment type is comfortable with closeness and all forms of intimacy, including emotional, physical, and temporal. A Secure communicates emotions, needs, and desires clearly and can identify and accurately interpret the emotions and needs of their partners as well {mentalization}. They are appropriately responsive to their partner’s bids for closeness, comfort and care.  Their belief structure is grounded in the concept of a ‘loving trust’ thinking model and common language.

Someone who has an Insecure Attachment type may consistently misread, miscommunicate, or act out contrary with the emotions, needs, or desires of themselves and of their partners. An Insecure may have an indirect communication style due to the underlying quality of a subconscious fear-based thinking model and imprinted language. Proneness to fear is the inclination to imagine future harm and whether real or imagined, this activates the body’s fight or flight response system and the disquiet that comes with it. The internal language of Insecure attachment is so uniquely individual, it can be like trying to whisper through a hurricane. An Insecure has difficulty interpreting and therefore understanding another’s verbal and body language due to uniquely different tones, facial expressions, meanings of words etc. that were imprinted within their personal familial experience.  The simple words of ‘I feel’ can mean, and therefore trigger, vastly different neurobiological outcomes in two unique individuals. One can experience a cascade of positive feelings promoting joy and deep connections of intimacy {Secure}, while in another {Insecure} those same innocuous words can trigger an episode of dread, resentment, blocked emotions of pain, etc. and a cascade of physical symptoms of distress such as rapid heartbeat, nausea, sweating etc.

A Secure type responds to and seeks to resolve conflict collaboratively, but an Insecure type may stir up and stew within conflict, rarely solving anything and instead rinsing and endlessly repeating problems.

Herein is the most critical difference between Secure and Insecure Attachment types: Their expectations about relationships and their partners. What does this mean? This is the internal, subconscious language— the paradigm and narrative in the hidden subconscious of our mind that underlies behavior within Attachment relationships. It is part of the hard-wired operating system of our brains, imprinted from birth and early childhood by family relatedness and what we experienced before our conscious memory. In other words, by toddlerhood, infants already have an interrelatedness map of what “loving” feels like imprinted within their entire being.

This is the map. A Secure Attachment type believes and expects that love lasts. They believe and know that they are worthy of love and loving well, and their partner is too. They possess an internal language and compass of belief in the win-win outcomes of enduring love, loving kindness, comfort, mutual care, safety, and personal exploration. Secure Attachment types are well regulated in relatedness. Do you have anyone in your life with these qualities? I hope so!

An Insecure map of internal belief in any number and combination of fear-based maladaptation manifests in several distinct and different ways, though each are grounded in fear-based expectations and internal language structure that triggers fight or flight responsivity. Without going into depth of the three different Insecure subtypes, I will summarize the outcomes. One subtype, Avoidant, may overtly believe they are worthy of loving and loving well, but their partner is not. Another subtype, Anxious, may believe they are not worthy of loving and loving well, but that their partner is. These two Insecure types are a common pair bond since their belief structure and imprinted language validate each other.  Even more heart wrenching, a third subtype, Disorganized/Anxious-Avoidant, may unwittingly believe that neither party is worthy of loving nor loving well, so they subconsciously, even overtly, sabotage interpersonal relationships. Whatever combination of Insecure Attachment style, the outcome is lose-lose—an eventual broken relationship and or unresolved conflict.

Subconscious expectations are part of a structural, internal language and thinking model, which are not accessed by our intelligence; but are the internal interpretation of what loving is between yourself and an ‘other’. Imagine this internal compass and interpretation as much like the symbolic arrangement of data, or set of instructions, that make up a computer program, which is executed by the computer. Computers can only execute the machine code instructions, which are part of their instruction set. In the same way, Attachment can only execute a certain pattern of relatedness...the familial experience.  Relatedness engenders a brand loyalty that booze companies would kill for: your own relationship style is intoxicating.

Most importantly, when there is inevitable hurt in relationships, a Secure Attachment style works immediately to repair damage and restore safety, unity and balance to the bond.

“Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.” —Meša Selimović

Real knowledge—True knowledge—Comes from and then asking: “Why?”

Now that you know a little about what an Attachment style is and how it plays a critical role in your life, take an Attachment Test yourself. Figure out your basic, go-to Attachment style.

https://www.attachedthebook.com/wordpress/compatibility-quiz/?step=1 is just one of many available on the Internet.

Works Cited

1 Fonagy, P., G. G. (2010). Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.

2 Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and lo ss. (OKS Print.) New York: Basic Books.

**A large-scale study using Artificial Intelligence to analyze 29 long-term studies determined this:

“The top relationship-specific predictors of relationship quality were perceived-partner commitment, appreciation, sexual satisfaction, perceived partner satisfaction, and conflict. The top individual-difference predictors were life satisfaction, negative affect (neuroticism), depression, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety.” —PNAS