Changing How We Relate Through Secure Attachment

Our early attachment experiences can play a huge role in our relationships. They can shape how we relate to others, how we seek closeness, manage distance, express our needs, or protect ourselves. These early patterns often form the blueprint for what we expect from others and how we navigate emotional connection. This blueprint is known as our attachment style. 

By gaining a deeper understanding of our attachment styles, we can begin to make sense of the relational challenges we face later in life. Recognising these patterns not only fosters compassion for ourselves and those close to us but also opens the door to meaningful and lasting change. 

While our attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful-avoidant) can often develop from our early relationships, they aren't set in stone. Attachment styles are constantly under construction, shaped by the interactions we have with others every day. If we experience genuine connection and can rely on others, it's possible to evolve into a secure attachment style as an adult, even if it wasn't modelled in childhood. 

Our attachment style plays a central role in how we experience closeness, manage conflict, and navigate emotional needs in relationships. It shapes how safe we feel with others, how well we communicate, and how much we trust that we’ll be met with care in our moments of need. 

That’s why understanding attachment isn’t just something therapists find interesting; it’s a powerful tool for creating healthier, more secure connections in everyday life. 

Why Attachment Matters 

John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory shows us we’re a bonding species, just as essential as air or food is the felt security that allows us to flourish. It explains how emotional bonds form between individuals, especially between a child and their primary caregiver. Bowlby’s evolutionary theory suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others to enhance survival. 

Bowlby argued that a child forms many attachments, but one of these is qualitatively different, the primary attachment, or monotropy. He suggested a critical period for developing attachment in the first 2.5 years, later extended to a sensitive period of up to five years. Failure to form a secure attachment during this window can lead to long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties. 

From an evolutionary perspective, infants and caregivers are biologically primed to maintain closeness and regular emotional contact. This two-way bonding process ensures the child's needs are met and the caregiver remains aware of potential threats. 

 Attachment can be defined by 3 components of security, including: 

• Accessibility - are you there? 

• Responsiveness - will you respond? 

• Engagement - will you engage? 

In babies, behaviours such as crying, smiling or clinging activate when the relationship is threatened, fostering emotional availability and engagement. When a caregiver is consistently responsive and sensitive to a child’s needs, the child develops an internal working model. This is a cognitive framework for understanding the world, self, and others and becomes the prototype for future social relationships and shapes how we predict and respond in interactions. 

Understanding the Styles 

Attachment styles reflect adaptive coping strategies formed in response to caregivers. Though the strategies vary, the core need for safe closeness and attuned care is universal. 

• Secure attachment: Positive views of self and others, trust in meeting needs, effective emotional regulation, and balance of closeness and independence. 

• Anxious attachment: Longing for connection mixed with fear of abandonment. A negative self-view and need for constant reassurance. 

• Avoidant attachment: Discomfort with closeness, preference for self-reliance. Maintains distance, often at the cost of a deeper connection. 

• Fearful-avoidant attachment: A push-pull between wanting intimacy and fearing it. Stemming from inconsistent or harmful early relationships. 

  
  

These styles are not flaws, they are survival strategies based on available care and a person's ability to manage with what they have experienced or access to. With new, secure experiences, these strategies can shift. 

Developing A Secure Attachment  

A secure base allows a child to explore the world with confidence, knowing they can return to their caregiver for comfort and support. This confidence builds independence and a sense of mastery. In distress, the caregiver provides a safe haven made up of a reliable source of comfort and reassurance. Over time, these experiences are internalised, reinforcing the belief: "I am safe and worthy of care." 

When this base is inconsistent, absent, or experienced as unsafe, children adapt their behaviour to best manage their emotional world. These adaptations form the foundation of insecure attachment styles: 

• Anxious attachment may develop when caregivers are inconsistently available. They might sometimes be attuned, but equally, sometimes may not. The child becomes hypervigilant, unsure when comfort will come, and begins to protest and be noticed, or cling to keep the connection close. 

• Avoidant attachment may arise when caregivers are emotionally unavailable or dismissive. The child learns that expressing needs may lead to rejection or disapproval, and so they suppress those needs or decide that navigating their challenges alone is a better option, valuing independence over closeness. 

• Fearful-avoidant attachment often stems from early experiences that were not only inconsistent but frightening, whereby caregivers may have been neglectful, abusive or unpredictable by providing both comfort and fear. This creates a deep conflict: craving closeness but fearing the vulnerability that comes with it. 

These concepts extend beyond infancy. Our attachment styles can develop over time, with each experience with a caring, emotionally available person updating our internal model.  

Even in adulthood, we still benefit from secure attachments with parents or mentors. Romantic partners and friendships can often act as secure bases for each other. In therapy, the therapist can become a temporary attachment figure, providing a safe, consistent presence that helps clients reorganise their internal models. 

What You Can Do in Your Relationship 

Changing your attachment style won’t just happen overnight; however, building awareness and implementing different responses can help to develop secure attachments for you and those around you. 

Outside of the therapy room, you could try: 

• Noticing your attachment style in action: Are you pulling away, pushing close, or fearing rejection? 

• Say what you need. Ask for engagement: "I’m feeling overwhelmed, can you hold me?" This allows you to build trust in someone’s accessibility, responsiveness and engagement with you.  

• Listen for your partner’s vulnerability. Instead of seeing this as a weakness, meet it with kindness and presence to get through challenges together.  

• Make mistakes and repair them together. Misattunements happen, and that’s okay. What deepens security is how you reconnect and respond to each other. 

• Create a new rhythm. Regular check-ins, affectionate touch, and collaborative problem-solving all support secure bonding. 

Your Attachment Journey 

At Experience Connection, we help couples recognise patterns by using an attachment-informed process to understand how they communicate, pull away, or seek closeness. Through this work, we help our clients build emotional safety by introducing a shared language to use. We also help them develop tangible tools that foster secure bonding and a steady, safe rhythm. Over time, old patterns lose grip, and new, secure ones take shape.  

In post-addiction recovery, attachment work is vital. Addiction often masks attempts to self-soothe unmet emotional needs. We help couples replace those coping mechanisms with genuine connection—learning to lean in, not numb out. Building a secure base in the relationship supports both sobriety and relational health. 

Whatever your current style, you can move toward secure attachment. Every moment of care and responsiveness rewires your attachment blueprint. With support, patience, and emotional safety, your relationships can become a source of comfort, not fear. 

Our work isn’t about avoiding conflict or glossing over differences. It’s about changing how you engage in those moments, so that struggles draw you closer rather than push you apart. This is the heart of attachment-informed EFT: emotional clarity, genuine connection, and a steady rhythm of secure bonding. 

To learn more about how we support couples in developing their attachment styles, visit our website. 

We offer couples therapy, group programmes, and specialist interventions designed to help you navigate relational challenges with greater understanding, safety, and care using our EC trauma-informed, attachment-focused approach. 

We welcome enquiries and referrals.