#235: What Attachment Theory Does (& Does Not) Explain
If you’ve spent any time in the world of personal growth or relationships lately, you’ve probably heard people talking about attachment theory. It’s everywhere — on social media, in therapy rooms, in dating conversations — and for good reason. It’s an incredibly helpful framework for understanding ourselves and the ways we show up in relationships.
But with its growing popularity, attachment theory also gets misused, oversimplified, and sometimes treated as the only explanation for why we are the way we are.
So today, I want to take it back to basics and talk about what attachment theory is actually designed to do — and just as importantly, what it isn’t.
Attachment Styles Aren’t Personalities — They’re Stress Responses
At its core, attachment theory describes two things:
What we experience as stressful in close relationships
The strategies we’ve learned to cope with that stress
That’s it.
Attachment styles aren’t labels that define who you are as a person. They’re patterns that describe how your system responds when something feels threatening in connection.
For someone with anxious patterns, the stressor tends to be disconnection, uncertainty, or emotional distance. The coping strategy is often to reach for closeness — to try harder, communicate more, seek reassurance, or work to preserve the bond.
For someone with avoidant patterns, the stressor is often the opposite: feeling overwhelmed, engulfed, or intruded upon. Their strategy tends to be creating space, maintaining independence, or limiting vulnerability.
For someone with fearful-avoidant patterns, the experience can be even more complex — wanting closeness deeply while also feeling unsafe in it, leading to push-pull dynamics that feel confusing both internally and relationally.
When we understand attachment this way, it stops being about “what type of person am I?” and becomes a much more useful question:
What fear is being activated here — and how have I learned to respond to it?
Attachment Styles Are Research Categories, Not Identities
Another important thing to remember is that attachment styles weren’t originally designed to capture the richness of human personality.
They came from lab research observing how infants responded to separation from caregivers. Researchers grouped patterns of behavior into categories so they could study them — not so that people could adopt them as identities decades later.
Labels can be useful. They can help us feel seen. They can point us toward tools that work.
But they are blunt instruments.
If you start to think of yourself as “just anxious” or someone else as “just avoidant,” the label stops being helpful and starts becoming reductive. It flattens nuance, complexity, and individual history into a single word.
Use the label to understand your patterns — not to define your identity.
Attachment Is Dynamic, Not Fixed
One of the biggest misconceptions about attachment styles is that they’re static.
They’re not.
Your attachment patterns are deeply influenced by context — the person you’re with, the emotional stakes of the relationship, and the environment you’re in.
You might feel relatively secure with one partner and much more anxious with another. You might feel calm when single but triggered in a relationship. You might lean avoidant with one person and anxious with someone else.
That’s not inconsistency — it’s responsiveness.
Attachment patterns show up most strongly in relationships that feel high-stakes to our nervous system, particularly romantic relationships. Those relationships mirror our early caregiving bonds in ways that friendships or work relationships usually don’t.
So rather than asking, “What attachment style am I?” it’s often more useful to ask:
What about this relationship is activating my fears — and how is my system trying to protect me?
Attachment Theory Is a Framework — Not the Whole Truth
Finally, and perhaps most importantly:
Attachment theory is a powerful lens. But it’s only one lens.
It’s not the sole explanation for your personality, your relationship patterns, or your emotional world. It’s not the only path to healing. And it’s certainly not something you need to force onto yourself or anyone else.
I often hear people worry that their partner isn’t interested in attachment theory and assume that means the relationship is doomed.
It doesn’t.
People have been building healthy, secure relationships long before anyone was talking about attachment on Instagram. Understanding attachment can accelerate growth, but it isn’t the only way to grow.
Like any framework, the invitation is simple:
Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t.
Using Attachment Theory Responsibly
Attachment theory can be illuminating. For many people, discovering it feels like a lightbulb moment. It helps us make sense of behaviors that once felt confusing or shameful. It gives us language, compassion, and direction.
But it works best when we use it with nuance.
Not as a rigid identity.
Not as a weapon against others.
Not as the explanation for everything.
Just as a tool — one that can help us understand our fears, our needs, and our patterns a little more clearly.
And from that place, we can choose something different.
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[00:00:00]:
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are taking it back to basics a little and talking about what attachment theory does and doesn't explain. So while today's episode is somewhat foundational in nature and will be familiar for some of you, I think it's a really important reminder of how to use attachment theory in the way that it's intended. Because I think that given the huge upswing in popularity of attachment, it really gets thrown around a lot.
[00:01:00]:
And that's wonderful because it's obviously a framework that can help us to really understand ourselves and the people that we are in relationship with. And it's ultimately a really hopeful framework because, as we'll talk about, attachment theory tells us that we can develop healthier blueprints and ultimately work our way towards secure attachment, even if that wasn't our starting point. I think it's equally important that we have a grounding in the nuances of the Attachment Framework, understanding what it's designed to do, what it isn't, and making sure that we're really engaging thoughtfully with this body of work. Before we get into today's conversation, I wanted to let you know that I have released a brand new attachment quiz on my website. I used to have one years and years ago, and then I took it down, and now I've created a brand new one along with a brand new free resource called The Ultimate Guide to Attachment, which is a 30-page document detailing a lot of what we'll talk about today— foundational principles of attachment theory, but also going into some depth around each attachment style, the origins, how it can manifest, and what the growth edge is for each of the 4 attachment styles. So it's a really great document, and you can get that by taking the short quiz. And obviously the quiz itself is designed to give you more insight into your own attachment patterns, and it'll give you not your primary attachment style, but a breakdown of your results. So you can see you might be 70% anxious attachment, 20% fearful avoidant attachment, and so on.
[00:02:34]:
So hopefully the quiz will be a useful tool for self-awareness alongside the new free Ultimate Guide to Attachment. So the link to take that short quiz— it should only take 3 or 4 minutes— is in the show notes, or you can go to stephanie-reeg.com/quiz. So let's talk about this: what attachment theory does and doesn't explain. So for anyone who's not familiar, attachment theory has been around for time. It was developed in the 1950s and originally looked at infant-caregiver relationships. It was not originally developed to look at adult romantic relationships. That came much later as an extension of, or an extrapolation from, the original body of work that was looking at those infant-caregiver bonds. So I think that's, that's also useful to know, even though most of what we all associate with attachment theory now is in the context of adult romantic relationships.
[00:03:24]:
That's not where it started. So the first point of clarification, and this is really— if you've done any of my programs, you will have heard me say this— is that attachment styles are fundamentally a description of what we experience as stressful in our closest relationships and the ways that we've habitually learned to respond to those stresses. Now, I really love and always come back to this distillation of what attachment styles are really describing because I think that for so many people, it really clicks everything into place. And it'll always be the thing that I'll say to someone when they ask, like, how can I be like this in this situation, but like that in that situation? What does that mean I am as an attachment style? And what I'll always respond with is, what are the things that you have learned to experience as stressful or scary, frightening in your relationships, as a source of tension or pressure? And what are the ways that you have habitually learned to respond to that? What are the strategies that you have historically leaned on in those moments of stress, pressure, fear, tension to try and keep yourself safe or get your needs met. That's all we're talking about. And typically people take a certain shape, and that's what we call attachment styles. It's a grouping of common patterns of fear and response. So for people with more anxious attachment patterns, the fear is around disconnection, withdrawal, uncertainty, feeling like connection is inherently unreliable and untrustworthy, and yet wanting it.
[00:04:57]:
So we reach for connection, we don't know if it's going to be there. That's the core fear. And then when we look at the response pattern, it tends to be hyperactivation of the attachment system, meaning I go into overdrive working so hard all the time to prevent disconnection, to keep you close, to make you love me so that I don't have to come into contact with those big fears around if I can't reach you, if you leave me, if I'm all alone, if I'm emotionally or physically abandoned, that feels so viscerally terrifying to my system because of those early experiences of inconsistent, unreliable, unpredictable connection. So that's what I've had imprinted as the really deep fear, and all of my strategies flow from that to try and prevent that from happening or keep myself safe by keeping you close. By contrast, someone with more dismissive avoidant patterns typically experiences as stressful or overwhelming in relationships feeling engulfed, feeling trapped, feeling like a failure, feeling emotionally intruded upon, feeling the weight of someone's expectations that they feel they can't meet. And so the strategies are to keep people at arm's length, to create a bit of a buffer there. Because if I feel like if I let you get too close, you're going to swallow me whole, or you're going to be kind of physically or figuratively looming over me, asking things of me that I can't give you, that feels so suffocating and overwhelming to my system. So I just have to keep you at arm's length and resist that degree of intimacy and vulnerability to make sure that I'm not put in that situation.
[00:06:32]:
To give another example, for someone with more fearful avoidant patterns or disorganised patterns, the fear imprint is around closeness and intimacy. And the fact that someone with fearful avoidant patterns really wants intimacy and feels like they need it, but they don't trust it when they get it. And so that can give rise to conflicting strategies, and it's often described as is the attachment system and the survival system being at odds with one another. The attachment system says go towards this person, and the survival system says pull back from them. It's sort of akin to having a foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. And someone with fearful avoidant patterns, their ways of protecting themselves tend to kind of flip-flop between more anxious and more avoidant strategies. So it can kind of go both ways. So the reason that I start here is because I think it is really, really helpful to understand and to keep coming back to when Whenever you are asking yourself like, why do I do this? Or why am I like this? Or why do I show up in this way in that kind of dynamic? But over here I can be more like that.
[00:07:36]:
Just ask yourself, what's the fear that's being activated? What am I experiencing as stressful about this situation? And how have I habitually learned to respond to that kind of fear? And it's that simple. And it's a really beautiful, like, universal, elegant principle that I think can explain so much and really does orient us and ground us in what are we talking about here. So what am I afraid of? What do I experience as stressful or as pressure or tension? And how have I habitually learned to respond to that to protect myself or get my needs met? The second point is attachment styles are essentially research categories. They are not meant to capture the fullness of your lived reality. So again, going back to the origin of this body of work, attachment styles were born out of lab experiments where they observed babies and separated them from their mothers for a short period of time. Time and looked at how the infants responded when they were reunited with their moms. And then they sort of grouped them into originally 3 and then 4 categories of response, and that's what we now have as attachment styles. So while again we can observe these broad trends in how people respond, that was never meant to describe everything about you and the nuances and crevices of who you are as a person.
[00:08:52]:
These labels, like all labels, are blunt instruments, and they can be helpful insofar as They can allow us to feel really seen and understood, and they can draw us towards a new way of seeing ourselves and understanding our patterns. And be mindful of over-attaching to— or over-associating with the label and letting that become who you are at a fundamental level and expecting it to describe everything about you. Similarly, um, projecting that label onto someone else and then saying that you are 'just avoidant,' which means all these things about you, and you're the same as all of the other people who sit in that bucket with you, that's very homogenising and very reductive, uh, and it tends not to be helpful whether we're doing that to ourselves or anyone else. So use those labels to the extent that they are helpful in identifying, like, 'Yes, I see parts of myself in that pattern, and what does that open up for me by way of greater self-understanding?' And to the extent that these things tend to help people who have that pattern, maybe those things could help me too. But at the same time, it is not who you are. And there is so much richness within you and within everyone else that will never be captured by a label or a category. So just be really responsible in how you engage with that. Okay.
[00:10:12]:
The third point is that attachment patterns are contextually responsive and dynamic, meaning you are not going to be the same when you are single as when you are in a relationship. And from one relationship to the next, your patterns could show up in very different ways. And again, if we go back to point 1 around what are the things that I've learned to experience as stressful and how do I habitually respond to that stress, the different types of stress that you encounter in different relational environments, in different dynamics, that's going to influence how acutely your attachment patterns are showing up. And this is really why our attachment styles are most pronounced in our romantic relationships, because our romantic relationships function neurobiologically very similarly to our original attachment relationships with our caregivers. Whereas friendships, although very meaningful and important, tend not to occupy that same level of primacy for us. Again, like colleagues, all of the things, we can certainly value those relationships and we can certainly see aspects of our attachment patterns showing up there, but oftentimes it's more downstream. It's because I have become so accustomed to being a people pleaser or having poor boundaries or not being very assertive in my communication or having low self-esteem and wanting everyone to like me. All of those things can certainly show up in our attachment patterns and be more pronounced there and be part of our attachment template.
[00:11:45]:
But typically our attachment will be at the height of its expression in the relationships that feel most high stakes, which tend to be with our caregivers and then later with our romantic partners. This also explains why if you are with a more secure partner, you might not experience a lot of anxiety or a lot of avoidance, as the case may be. But then if you are with someone who had a more opposing attachment style, so for example, if you were more anxious, they were more avoidant, then your anxiety is likely to be more activated by their avoidance because the things that you fear— inconsistency, withdrawal, uncertainty— are likely to come up in that dynamic in ways that they mightn't with someone who is more secure. Or to use another example, for someone who's more fearful avoidant, this explains why in relationship with someone who's more avoidant, you're likely to be more in your anxious expression, whereas with someone who's more anxious, you're likely to lean more avoidant. So all of that to say, attachment patterns are contextually responsive, they are dynamic, and you shouldn't expect yourself to show up in the exact same way all the time because it's really going to depend on the stakes, how significant this feels to my attachment system, but also the extent to which those underlying fears are being activated in that dynamic. And, you know, how much I need to rely on my protective strategies there. Okay. And the last piece that I want to leave you with is attachment is a really powerful, very illuminating framework for a lot of us.
[00:13:14]:
I know when I first discovered it, it felt like a huge light bulb and obviously underpins a lot of what I do and teach. And it is only one framework. It is not objectively true any more than any other framework is. And so I think, again, much like with what I was saying around labels, we wanna use it to the extent that it's helpful without letting it be the singular explanation for everything about us and everyone else. It is just one body of work. It is one way of looking at our relationships. And while, you know, it's been extensively researched and obviously resonates with so many people, we don't have to try and explain every single thing about us through the lens of Attachment theory. And as a side note, because I know a lot of anxious people will often say, my partner is so clearly avoidant, but you know, they're not interested in learning about attachment theory.
[00:14:04]:
So should I end the relationship? Are we doomed if they don't want to learn about attachment? Learning about attachment is not the only way to develop secure attachment, ironically enough. Again, it's a really helpful framework for people with whom it resonates, but it's not the only path to developing a more secure, healthy relationship with yourself and other people. So I think there can be a tendency to fall victim to the— if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We don't want to approach ourselves in that way. So I think it's important to certainly value the incredible insights that we can gain about ourselves and other people from attachment theory and leverage those in our favour to really grow and create more safety for ourselves and our relationships, more fulfilling relationships, while also recognising that it's not the be-all and end-all. It is not the only way of building healthy relationships. It's not the only way of understanding ourselves. So we don't have to use it to explain every little thing, and we don't have to force it upon someone if it's not really resonating with them.
[00:15:07]:
It is, as always, a case of take what works for you and leave what doesn't. Okay, I really hope that that's been a helpful reminder, or perhaps if that was new to you, that given you a helpful orientation around what attachment theory is and isn't, and you feel a little more confident in navigating this, my work, other people's work, you know, knowing what attachment theory is designed to do and how you can really use it to your advantage to understand your own patterns, uh, while still engaging thoughtfully and responsibly, because God knows there's a lot of really polarising and I would argue low-quality content out there. So I think it is important to have these reminders every so often to make sure that we are being, uh, nuanced and intentional about how we engage with all of this stuff. And make sure that you do try out that quiz, although I feel like in some ways the whole concept of a quiz is antithetical to what I've just been talking about around don't label, don't put people in categories. But nevertheless, it is again a tool, and you will get that more in-depth guide off the back of doing that quiz if that's of interest to you as well. Okay, sending you lots of love, guys. Look forward to seeing you again next time.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
attachment theory, attachment styles, secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, fearful avoidant attachment, disorganised attachment, infant-caregiver relationships, romantic relationships, attachment quiz, self-awareness, Ultimate Guide to Attachment, attachment framework, stress response, protective strategies, connection, disconnection, intimacy, vulnerability, emotional abandonment, people pleaser, boundaries, self-esteem, secure partner, relational dynamics, research categories, labels, self-understanding, growth edge, healthy relationships, quiz results