Why attachment is my jam

It would be an understatement to say that I’ve had “attachment issues.”  More honestly, “attachment issues” have defined a lot of my life.  I know all too well the paralyzing fear of abandonment…the feeling that my needs are bigger than anyone can handle…the walls that rise up out of self-protection and shame.

Attachment theory pretty much puts us in two main categories — Those with “secure” attachment styles and “Insecure” attachment styles. But as a therapist for adopted kids and families, one of the first things I try to explain is that, more or less, we all have attachment issues. Or maybe better to say, tendencies.  We’ve all experienced a time when relationships weren’t what they should have been, when trust was broken, when people simply were not enough — sometimes to no fault of their own.  And out of that, we’ve developed fears and insecurities in relationships, and we’ve found ways to protect ourselves from the things we fear most.  It’s just that for some of us, those fears are bigger than for others.  When those fears are so big they get in the way of building healthy relationships, we find ourselves in that “insecure” attachment category.  (That was me.) But really, it’s a continuum.  More like this:

(Like my fancy drawing?)

Another misconception about “attachment” (such a buzz word these days), is that you either have secure relationships or you don’t.  But for most of us, it’s a mix.  In my case, for example, I had only one main category of people that really triggered my attachment problems.  It did affect my other close relationships, but on many levels I experienced relationships in a healthy way. This was good and bad for me, because it felt like no one really knew how much I was struggling. 

I could seriously talk all day about this stuff but the one last thing I want to say in this post is, there is hope.  It can be a little bit depressing reading about the consistency of attachment styles over time.  If you look it up, you will see that, statistically, many people that develop insecure attachments really struggle to ever feel secure in relationships.  And if you are stuck in these kinds of fears and relational patterns, it can really feel hopeless.  I believe I was a pretty extreme example of an insecure attachment style.  I was seriously obsessed — totally consumed — with a need for reassurance in certain relationships, and simply put, that’s not who I am anymore.  I know we’re all different — and it has certainly been a process — but I also know God redeems our stories for a reason bigger than ourselves.  It’s why I’m passionate about helping other people find that healing.  It’s why I have faith that even the deepest attachment fears and insecurities can be overcome.  

I’m so excited to share more with you — and to hear your thoughts too.  Maybe your experiences are really different, or maybe a lot the same. We’ll talk more about attachment stuff — how it affects our sense of identity, how it points us to the Gospel, and how healing happens in relationships.