Explain Like I'm Five

Is this like the booked Attached? There’s Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant.

To put it basically:

Secure - someone who is secure in their feelings. They don’t usually second guess others and what they say. If someone’s wife says she has to work late tonight, they accept what that person says at face value.

Anxious - someone who deals with a lot of anxious feelings and responds to those feelings with behaviors. Like in the previous example, if someone’s wife says she has to work late, the anxious type of person may second guess this and their mind jumps to immediately thinking their wife is cheating on them. One of the behaviors they may exhibit is to now play games to test this like sending passive aggressive texts to get their wife’s attention back on them and help them reassure their feelings. They may do something like text “Okay, make sure to take a shower before coming home tonight. I don’t want his scent in our bed.”

Avoidant - someone who is more avoidant in how they interact with others. They usually are more likely to want space from others. This person may get annoyed with a partner who is seeking for reassurance. There was an example in the book of a man and his wife who were part of a game show. His wife was anxious and constantly wanting him to hold her hand. He, the avoidant type, preferred to not do this as he felt this was dumb to keep having to hold her hand and they should just focus on the games instead.

That is to say, you may have anxious or avoidant feelings inside, but the secure type is someone who manages them in a preferable way. They may have feelings about their wife staying longer at the office, but they will be more likely to address it appropriately with their partner and be calm and rational instead of being passive aggressive about it. The secure type is also one who can understand that something like holding their partner’s hand may be silly, but it’s what this person needs in this moment and it’s how they want to support their partner.

Edit: forgot to expand on the way it goes. The book addresses this and it says that scientists still aren’t sure how these develop. There are theories, but nothing definitive.

It all goes hand in hand with the “nature vs nurture” discussion in psychology. This tries to investigate whether you develop your personality traits because your parents were that way or is it because you developed it from your environment growing up? I remember my psychology textbook going over twins separated at birth and this being one of the most interesting cases for this. Even though they didn’t grow up together in the same environment, they still had very similar mannerisms into adulthood, things we would assume would develop as they grow up because of how their parents raised them.

It’s the same with attachments. It’s not entirely clear whether someone developed them from childhood environments or from biology.

Attachment styles was a theory developed to explain psychological disorders in children, by describing how they interacted with their parents.

The styles are: secure, anxious, avoidant, and anxious-avoidant.

These were developed to describe patterns of behavior seen in children to communicate with other psychologists in a clinical context.

In recent years, it has been popular to apply the terms to adult romantic relationships. This has about the same utility as using Meyers-Briggs personality types, or a horoscope. If it is useful to you in troubleshoot your issues, then great! But it isnt good science - which we can tell from the fact that it divides people up into distinct groups. These sorts of groupings can be useful for scientists to communicate about population-level issues - but they are far less useful for the individual. To the extent that they are useful for individual categorization, they would be useful in categorizing the extremes - maybe 1% of adults could each be said to have anxious and avoidant attachment styles, and 0.1% with anxious-avoidant. Because we only care if this is causing real, significant issues in peoples lives - not just normal relationship (or lack-of-relationship) issues that everyone deals with.

The problem is that if you give an average person this framework, they will do a little online questionnaire and think to themselves "Oh no! Sometimes I do question my own worth!! And sometimes I do think that other people suck! I'm anxious-avoidant - I'm the worst, and no one will ever love me!!!"

Humans, like mammals, like it when we belong. This is pre-verbal and pre-cultural, in the sense that all babies feel good when someone sees them with kind eyes and feel bad when they’re left alone.

However, on top of these pre-verbal drives, we learn about the world through our experience and our thoughts. If our guardians are kind and consistent, we learn to expect that and we ourselves become kind and consistent. If our parents are unkind and inconsistent, we learn that.

By the time we become adults, we bring many of those learnings into relationships. We may be kind and consistent with our partners. Or we may be unkind and inconsistent.

As with many things, we can change. In fact, you can have one attachment style in one context and another attachment style in another context. This depends on the specific schemas or thoughts and experiences that you have.

Attachment of what?

These?