Healthy Relationships Support Group
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Research has found that there are three different attachment types:
SECURE: You find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on them and having them depend on you. You don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to you.
AVOIDANT: You are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; you find it difficult to trust them, difficult to allow yourself to depend on them. You are nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want you to be more intimate than you feel comfortable being.
ANXIOUS: You find that others are reluctant to get as close to you as you would like, you often worry that your partner doesn't really love you or won't want to stay with you. You want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.
Attachment types tend to gravitate more to their like kind although secure types are more broad in choice, one in two will attract to same type with the other one in two attracting to one of the other two types.
Attachment type is established in infancy with the mother being primarily responsible for.
Now the big question is, what attachment type do you consider yourself to be?
SECURE: You find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on them and having them depend on you. You don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to you.
AVOIDANT: You are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; you find it difficult to trust them, difficult to allow yourself to depend on them. You are nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want you to be more intimate than you feel comfortable being.
ANXIOUS: You find that others are reluctant to get as close to you as you would like, you often worry that your partner doesn't really love you or won't want to stay with you. You want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.
Attachment types tend to gravitate more to their like kind although secure types are more broad in choice, one in two will attract to same type with the other one in two attracting to one of the other two types.
Attachment type is established in infancy with the mother being primarily responsible for.
Now the big question is, what attachment type do you consider yourself to be?
It has made romantic relationships incredibly stressful and unpleasant for me, and this is made worse by how difficult it is to explain my condition. It goes well beyond what is covered in the generalized descriptions of each attachment style.
After re-reading that definition, yeah, I'm definitely the "anxious" type. I can't help but being anxious (excited) when the person of my desires is right in front of me! My anxiety (excitement) scares THEM off! That anxiety (excitement) is crazy! Or I've yet to meet someone whose anxiety (excitement) for me matches mine for them!
In the case of the preoccupied attachment type it stems from the primary caregiver (typically the mother) being inconsistent in their behavior/actions/caregiving.
My mother was my primary caregiver, and has always been very inconsistent. She has a tendency to flip-flop between being happy with something and being angry over it. That meant that while I was growing up she could switch between being very happy/satisfied with something and being very unhappy or angry about it.
One moment something I or a family member did for her could be getting praised as great or more than good enough by her, but at the drop of a hat she would change her view and that very same thing would be aggravating to her and nowhere near "good enough". Sometimes something a person does for her can even be more than good enough AND far from good enough for her simultaneously.
Now try to imagine how it would be to have how living with that type of behavior makes you feel be applied to how you feel in a relationship as an adult. That's basically what the preoccupied attachment style is like.
Instead of being anxious because you wonder if your actions in a relationship are good enough or not you end up feeling anxious because you feel that they are both at the exact same time (despite the logical part of your brain knowing this isn't the case and frantically trying to reassure you that it's either one or the other). Even something as mundane as walking around with a girlfriend/boyfriend sends your anxiety levels through the roof as you are bombarded with feelings that you are somehow doing something wrong that will upset or annoy your partner (being too clingy; talking too much; talking too little; not holding them enough; calling them too often or too little; etc) while simultaneously feeling like (or knowing) you are doing fine.
This happens partly because this expectation of how relationships go and how significant others will act has been hardwired into your brain from so much constant exposure to it during the critical time of brain development in childhood. As a result it can be very difficult to "fix" this type of issue once a person reaches adulthood. I've even read in some places that it is not believed to be something that can be "fixed" once reaching adulthood. That it's something that you can only learn to cope with and work around so that it doesn't impact your life as much. (However, I've heard that some therapy, like schema therapy, has amazing result in actually fixing the issue by undoing the harm that was done to the brain's development.)
Unlike with the avoidant attachment style though, people with the preoccupied attachment style have more of a craving for a close relationship with a significant other. However, as you can probably guess this is problematic for those of us with the preoccupied style due to the problems it causes for us in relationships.
That test put me pretty much exactly where I'd have guessed. In the "secure" quadrant, but inching toward the "high anxiety" direction. No big revelations there.