Learn about attachment theory

By Meg Wilson, Director, Unison Mental Health

Discover how attachment styles shape your relationships. Improve your connections with expert insights and resources.

In this article

• Where This Pattern Comes From
• The Four Attachment Styles
• Recognising Your Own Pattern
• Recommended Further Resources

You've had this argument before. Maybe not with this partner, but the shape of it is familiar: one person wants more contact, more reassurance, more "where are we at"; the other feels crowded and needs room to breathe. Different faces, same choreography. That repetition usually isn't a compatibility problem. It's attachment showing its hand.

Where This Pattern Comes From

The theory comes from British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who spent the 1950s studying what happened to children separated from their caregivers, and psychologist Mary Ainsworth, who later ran the "Strange Situation" experiments — briefly leaving toddlers alone in an unfamiliar room to see how they responded when their caregiver came back. What she found is still the backbone of the theory: it's not whether a child gets upset when separated, it's what they do at reunion. Some settle quickly. Some can't settle at all. Some brace against the very person they need.

Those early patterns of trust, protest, and repair don't stay in the nursery. They become the working blueprint for how we read closeness and distance as adults — and they're not fixed. A style can shift depending on the relationship, the season of life, and what someone deliberately practises differently.

For clients doing couples or individual work here who are also navigating polyamory or open relationships, this pattern often shows up doubled: the same attachment habits playing out with more than one partner at a time, which is its own kind of stress test on the nervous system.

The Four Attachment Styles

This isn't a diagnostic exercise — think of it more like reading a weather pattern than filling in a label.

Secure attachment is the style everyone's aiming for, whether or not they'd use that word for it. In practice it's unremarkable: being able to say "I miss you" without it turning into a test, and being able to hear "I need some space tonight" without hearing it as rejection.

Anxious attachment often began as a smart response to a caregiver who was inconsistent — sometimes attuned, sometimes not — which trains a nervous system to stay alert for signs of disappearing. In adult relationships that can look like re-reading a text three times before replying, or feeling a partner's silence as evidence of something wrong long before there's any actual evidence.

Avoidant attachment usually developed the opposite way: closeness got met with a caregiver's discomfort or distance, so self-reliance became the safer bet. A partner saying "can we talk about us?" can trigger the urge to change the subject, or to suddenly remember something urgent that needs doing.

Disorganised attachment carries both instincts at once — wanting closeness and bracing against it in the same breath. This one often comes from a caregiving relationship that was itself a source of both comfort and fear, which leaves the nervous system without one clear strategy: pull a partner in close, then pick a fight the moment they arrive.

Recognising Your Own Pattern

Most people aren't a clean fit for one box — they show up anxious with one partner and avoidant with another, depending on the dynamic. If you read the avoidant description and felt both seen and a little irritated, that's a completely normal reaction. Nobody enjoys being accurately named.

The more useful question isn't "which one am I?" so much as "does this pattern get me what I actually want, or does it keep getting in the way?" That's a harder, more workable question — and one worth bringing into a session rather than trying to solve alone.

Recommended Further Resources

If you want to go deeper before or alongside therapy, here's where to start.

Books:

• Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find - and Keep - Love – by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. The most accessible entry point into the science, written for a general audience rather than clinicians.

• Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Build a Secure Relationship – by Stan Tatkin. Goes heavier on the neuroscience of why attachment styles clash the way they do.

• The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships – by Diane Poole Heller. Practical exercises for people working on this outside a therapy room.

• Attachment Theory in Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Individuals, Couples, and Families – by Susan M. Johnson. The clinical text, if you want to see how therapists actually apply the theory in the room.

Online Resources:

• The Attachment Project – articles and quizzes if you want a lower-effort starting point.

• PsychAlive – a deeper archive of articles on attachment and relationships.

YouTube Channels:

• Personal Development School - Thais Gibson

• The School of Life

• Therapy in a Nutshell

Podcasts:

• Attachment Theory in Action with Karen Doyle Buckwalter

• Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel – real couples, anonymised, recording sessions with a therapist; attachment dynamics come up constantly even when it's not the stated topic.

None of this replaces having someone trained to spot the pattern in the room with you, in real time. If you want a therapist matched to how you actually show up in relationships — not just what modality they practise — start here.

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