How to Break Unhealthy Childhood Relationship Styles That Haunt Your Life

Your early childhood connections - good or bad - reverb across your adult relationships

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Years ago, when relationships got intense or awkward, I ran away then felt guilty about it.

It took me years of confusing social experiences, tension, and therapy to realise what was going on.

I was the cliché patient who changed her life after therapy, and fundamentally shifted how I saw myself, others and the world.

Before that, my social challenges were consistently anxiety-provoking and I was unsure about my relationships with people.

They still throw up the odd query or double-checking habit, but nowhere near the level across most of my life and into my 30s.

I was distracted trying to mind-read other people’s intentions. If they said X, did they really mean Y? Well they did A, so maybe they really wanted B.

Often, I’d conjure up ways I’d get rejected by others first:

• “They won’t turn up because I’m not cool enough”.

• They’ll find someone they’d rather hang out with because I’m boring”.

• “Let me duck out first so they don’t have to come up with an excuse”.

If someone had a legitimate excuse to change or delay a meeting or call, that’d wind the overthinking up again - it was a circular spiral mind f*ck!

Unhelpful Thoughts and Emotions Impact The Body

This constant whirring and winding-up of an overactive mind drove my chronic insomnia - it took me hours to get to sleep, running through scenarios about the future and rumination and regretting things from the past.

In the early hours, I’d wake up exhausted but stayed up late to make myself so tired that I’d somehow drift off before 2am.

It was exhausting constantly running through scenarios, questioning what was going on and if anyone meant what they said or did.

I thought I’d lost my mind at points, and was hypersensitive to people around me.

When in the office or out and about in public, I’d get nervous with people I didn’t know well or couldn’t predict well enough.

It drove an anxious response - shaking voice, trembling hands, fast breathing, burning up in the face, quieter and unsure voice. People who get to know me never understood or believed how socially anxious and shy I was.

I lived off hypervigilance which took it’s toll on my mind and body. I was tired and wired, making unhealthy food choices which affected my energy levels erratically through the day.

Eventually, I worked with an art therapist and had group therapy sessions which helped me understand how my unstable early childhood experiences and inconsistent relationships in those early years with my parents contributed to my confused expectations of others.

Using art therapy offered a great way to explore my experiences without driving my overthinking or analysis paralysis into overdrive.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve been training to become an art-based coach, so I can help others using a different, creative approach.

Seeing how much my life changed after therapy - and recognising that not everything was my fault - fundamentally shifted the direction of my life, and what I wanted to achieve.

I went back to further education, whilst working full-time, to study a psychology and neuroscience Masters, and we covered Bowlby-Ainsworth’s Attachment Theory.

This psychological theory has developed over the past 50 years and adapted for use in clinical settings for those who struggle in their relationships and response tendencies.

Attachment Theory builds on evolutionary and social theories, exploring how infants instinctively choose to be close to their caregivers, especially in times of distress, as a way to survive.

The experiences these infants encounter, from the caregivers and environments they grow up with, coupled with their innate personality characteristics, influences the attachment styles that develop in early childhood.

Attachment Styles Drive Our Responses To Self and Others

Attachment Theory identifies four primary attachment styles based on the quality of the caregiver-infant relationship.

Attachment styles are expectations people develop about relationships with others, and the first attachment is based on the relationship individuals had with their primary caregiver when they were infants.

Attachment styles comprise cognitions relating to both the self (‘Am I worthy of love’) and others (‘Can I depend on others during times of stress’).

Simply Psychology

This concept of how attachment styles develop reminds me of Philip Larkin’s poem, This Be The Verse.

In particular, the first four lines:

They f*ck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

Not that I want to bash parents if it seems harsh, but it happens even when people don’t mean it to.

Over the years, I’ve had to develop more compassion for my parents, their personal immigrant experience back in the 1970s, and what a challenge that must have been.

Still, it doesn’t make my own experiences, and the long-lasting impact of them, any less painful, important or difficult.

There is a combination of accountabilities that need to be taken on all sides across the course of our lives.

This can get lost in the modern world, but non-dual thinking is important to understand and explore.

Brad Stulberg, author and performance expert, describes non-dual thinking as “holding two seemingly competing ideas at once”.

It’s less ‘either-or’ and more ‘both-and’. To become more mentally and physically healthy, we need to recognise this state of people and the world, so we don’t box ourselves into a less flexible or adaptable way of responding.

It accepts the innate complexity that exists in the world, and that is OK.

Let’s dive back into the detail of attachment styles.

The matrix below gives an overview of the Four-Category Model attachment styles that develop in adults, described by Bartholomew and Horowitz:

Bartholomew and Horowitz Four-Category Model Attachment Styles from Simply Psychology

The four attachment styles suggest we interpret those early childhood experiences with our primary caregivers as internal belief models of ourselves and others.

We also vary in how anxious or avoidant our ideas and beliefs are about ourselves and others, which influences relationships and emotional regulation strategies throughout our lives.

This negatively impacts our ability to form healthy, secure attachments with others.

Recognise Your Attachment Style To Shift Behaviours

As a result, it’s useful to understand your attachment style, and how this impacts your daily life at home and work.

Once you have a structure to connect to, it’s easier to choose techniques that refresh how you think, feel and act with yourself and others.

So what are some of the characteristics of the four attachment styles?

Check out the list below to see which ones resonate:

1. Secure Attachment Style:

   1. Typically have positive views of themselves and others.

   2. Feel comfortable both relying on others and being relied upon.

   3. They are generally able to trust, express emotions openly, and seek support when needed.

   4. Securely attached individuals tend to have stable and satisfying relationships characterised by effective communication, empathy, and mutual respect.

2. Anxious (also known as Preoccupied) Attachment Style:

   1. Typically have a negative view of themselves but a positive view of others.

   2. They crave closeness and fear rejection, often seeking validation and reassurance from others to feel secure.

   3. May become overly dependent on relationships for their sense of self-worth, leading to clinginess, jealousy, and emotional volatility.

   4. Anxiously attached individuals may struggle with boundaries and have difficulty regulating their emotions, which can strain their relationships and contribute to interpersonal conflicts.

3. Avoidant (also known as Dismissive-Avoidant) Attachment Style:

   1. Often have a positive view of themselves but a negative view of others.

   2. They value independence and self-sufficiency, preferring to rely on themselves rather than seeking support from others.

   3. They may downplay the importance of close relationships, minimise emotional expression, and maintain emotional distance from others to avoid vulnerability.

   4. Despite their self-reliance, avoidant individuals may struggle with intimacy and have difficulty trusting others.

4. Fearful (also known as Disorganised) Attachment Style:

   1. Combines elements of both avoidant and anxious attachment styles, resulting in a conflicted and disorganised or fearful approach to relationships.

   2. Typically have negative views of both themselves and others.

   3. They desire closeness but are afraid of intimacy and vulnerability, leading to ambivalence and confusion in their relationships.

   4. Fearful-avoidant individuals may vacillate between seeking closeness and pushing others away, often due to unresolved trauma or unresolved issues from past relationships.

In my work as a Burnout Coach, it’s useful to recognise how my clients see themselves and their relationships with others.

Based on our conversations, I get a sense of what their attachment style could be.

Having a deeper understanding about the way people form emotional bonds in relationships and the impact on work or personal interactions, offers ideas for their burnout drivers or how they might respond to stress or burnout.

Our attachment style impacts our people-pleasing behaviours, or our fear of failure or rejection, which drives us into perfectionist tendencies.

We find it hard to maintain boundaries, and become overloaded, or lack the support from others to help us handle difficult experiences.

5 Options To Develop A More Secure Attachment Style

Now you’ve got a better sense of what attachment styles are, and which ones might show up in your relationships, you can do something about it.

The positive thing is that attachment styles can change with conscious effort and strategies.

If you want a more detailed assessment of your attachment style, this free quiz at The Attachment Project is a helpful start.

This leads directly into the first option of the 5 I’ve identified:

1. Self-awareness:

   1. Understand your attachment styles and emotional triggers. Use the descriptions above or try the free quiz to see which attachment styles influence your thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

   2. Try reframing or distancing yourself from your thoughts if they aren’t helpful.

   3. Do behavioural experiments along the lines of the list below to build new skills.

2. Emotional regulation:

   1. Learn to manage stress and difficult emotions effectively.

   2. You could look at in-the-moment stress relief techniques such as deep breathing, or focus more on the stressors that drive your stress.

   3. The latter approach will build longer-term solutions for your resilience to stress.

3. Healthy communication:

   1. Practice open, honest, and empathetic communication in relationships.

   2. This one can feel daunting but start with small changes, and then build up to more challenging topics.

   3. If you’re used to putting your partner’s needs before yours, pick a topic you want to disagree with.

   4. Of course, please do this if you’re in a safe relationship and not at risk of an unsafe response.

4. Boundaries:

   1. Set clear boundaries to maintain autonomy and self-respect.

   2. This could be an article in itself, and likely will be. But being assertive in a healthy way is a vital skill in life.

   3. Again, pick small boundaries to assert or maintain to get comfy with the approach. Then build.

5. Building positive relationships:

   1. Surround yourself with supportive individuals and invest in nurturing healthy relationships.

   2. We are who we hang out with. Over the years, I’ve had to switch up who I spend time with to more positive and helpful influences.

   3. It might take time and effort, but start looking at hobbies or places you want to try out and spend more of your time with.

Recognising the legacy of your early childhood experiences and how they reverb across all relationships in your life is so important for a healthier mind and body.

The brilliant thing is that you’re not tied down to the way you’ve adapted. This likely helped you get through life, but now gets in your way.

Discover your responses, and build new strategies that develop secure attachments with yourself and others to reduce stress and enjoy your life.🚀

---

Which options will you try out to shift your attachment styles?