How Attachment Permeates Into Our Relationships
90% of couples that I see in my office have already tried everything, they tried arguing differently, changing their tone, changing their words, adjusting their schedules, filling out and completing countless worksheets and couple activities, and yet nothing works. By the time they’ve tried everything, they come in exhausted and entirely disconnected from each other. Each initiation of a conversation explodes into a fight almost immediately. Many couples arrive seeking a last-minute save and at the edge of divorce or separation.
When I ask them about patterns, cycles, and loops whenever they fight, often I hear that they feel trapped in the same argument, repeating the same script, unable to reach each other. One partner is usually protesting the distance, often forcing the engagement, and feeling increasingly anxious whenever their partner goes quiet. The other partner often withdraws and is quiet, defensive, or physically walking away, often trying to keep the peace by shutting down and avoiding making things worse.
To the partner who is protesting, the silence feels like isolation, coldness, indifference, or abandonment. To the partner who is shutting down, the protest feels like an incoming barrage of criticism, failure, and judgement.
To understand why we get stuck fighting this way, we have to look at the history of how we understand human connection and how early childhood experiences affect us later in life. This is a brief history of how a mid-century scientific discovery on attachment in babies became the basis that led to the creation of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the gold standard of couples therapy.
The Beginning of Attachment Theory
Before John Bowlby’s groundbreaking work in the middle of the 20th century, most psychologists were focused on the learning theory of attachment-based behaviors. The belief at the time was that babies learned to bond with their mothers purely out of survival because their mothers were the source of food. Love was seen as a byproduct of this survival mechanism rather than something necessary for survival. When Bowlby argued something entirely different, he changed the status quo. Research on animal behaviors led him to believe that people are also biologically programmed with an innate system that makes them want to be close to a primary caregiver. And so instead of seeing attachment as something that can be learned, he saw it as a hardwired way for us to survive.
Post World War II, Bowlby and his social worker colleague, James Robertson, studied how upset children became when they were separated from their parents for short periods of time. They found that children react to separation in three unique stages, including protesting (crying and clinging,) despair (quiet, withdrawing), and detaching (suppressing feelings). This study revealed how children needed stable, secure, and safe haven environments that are biological necessities required for optimal human development .
It was Bowlby who proved that these early childhood interactions created an internal working model, which is a mental framework of expectations about oneself and others. If a person’s early attachment system was repeatedly met with criticism, judgement, abandonment, and isolation, they may internalize beliefs about themselves being not good enough, inadequate, and worthless, and they may internalize beliefs about others being dangerous, not dependable, and fleeting. This internal working model will then be used as a guide for all future relationships.
The Strange Situation and Four Attachment Styles
Developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, who was Bowlby’s close collaborator and colleague, created the well-known “Stranger Situation” experiment in the 1970s where she tested Bowlby’s theories by watching how babies reacted whenever their mothers left them in a room with a stranger and then returned after a short period. Based on how the babies handled their separation from their mothers, Ainsworth identified three main attachment styles:
- Secure attachment: the baby was upset about being separated, but they were quickly calmed, reassured, and resumed playing.
- Anxious-ambivalent attachment: the separation caused the baby to be visibly upset and they sought their mothers once their mother returned to the room. However, these babies were very difficult to calm, difficult to soothe, and remained angry and irritable.
- Anxious-avoidant attachment: the baby ignored the mother when she returned to the room, and although displaying minimal visible distress, their heart rates and stress levels were extremely high. They were calm on the outside, but were panicking on the inside.
Disorganized attachment was discovered by later researchers, and describes a child who is paralyzed because the parent is simultaneously a source of their fear and the source of their safety. In EFT terms, this is known as a Fearful-Avoidant attachment, and we use this term because it highlights the internal conflict of a yearning and longing for closeness and connection, but the intimacy itself causes extreme fear and panic. For adults who experience this, they may desperately want closeness, but as they get closer to their partner, their alarm system triggers and focuses them to retreat out of fear of being harmed or hurt. Therefore, they fear distance that could lead to abandonment, but also avoid closeness that could lead to attack, rejection, criticism, and judgment.
Attachment Beyond Childhood
For decades, attachment theory was thought to only apply to mothers and their children. It was believed that people became independent adults and outgrew the need for secure attachment figures once they became adults. That belief was changed in the late 1980s when researchers published a groundbreaking study showing how adult relationships followed the exact same attachment dynamics as when they were infants with their parents. As adults, romantic partners become the primary attachment figure, and so when we feel secure with our partner, we feel confident enough to explore the world, take risks, and handle difficult situations. However, when that connection becomes dangerous or is threatened, our childhood attachment styles resurface. What we learned to do in order to survive as children comes to the forefront and we become either anxiously attached (pursuing, protesting, prodding, poking) or avoidantly attached (shutting down, avoiding, withdrawing, isolating to protect ourselves from rejection, judgement, and criticism).
Why Traditional Therapies Fall Short
While working with distressed couples in the 1980s, Dr. Susan Johnson realized that traditional therapy that focused on teaching communication skills, active listening, compromising, and negotiating skills was not working to keep couples from repeatedly falling into the same patterns of conflict.
Traditional therapies fell short because they focused on relationship distress as more of a cognitive problem or a skills-related problem rather than an attachment issue. Whenever couples are in the middle of an attachment-related panic, where the emotional center of you brain hijacks your rational mind, you will have a very difficult time practicing calm I-statements or listen actively while your nervous system feels like it’s in a fight for it’s life.
And so drawing from Bowlby’s attachment theory and her own experience that couples need more than just better negotiation tactics, Dr. Susan Johnson created Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). She argued that couples need emotional safety and that common arguments are never really about what’s at face-value. Fights about dishes, car payments, children, parenting, finances, scheduling, cleaning, housing, in-laws, and everyday disagreements often result from an unmet, underlying, vulnerable emotional need for connection and safety. When put to the test, research revealed that EFT had an incredible 70%-75% success rate. Traditional models of couples therapy yield much lower success rates, and so EFT revolutionized the field by shifting away from cognitive, superficial, and above-the-surface-level communication skills and into the below-the-surface-level underlying emotional and attachment needs and bonds between partners. Clinical research behind the success rate demonstrated that 70% to 75% of couples moved from distressed to recovery.
The Adaptive Alarm System and Childhood Experiences
In order to understand your reactions, it is important to recognize that your brain is equipped with an adaptive alarm system. Over the course of your life, this adaptive system adjusts and gets shaped by experiences and will trigger a fight or flight response whenever you experience real or perceived danger. This alarm system is designed to keep you safe, and so if you experience childhood trauma, for example, growing up in a highly critical, competitive, judgmental, volatile, threatening environment, you learned that you were not good enough or important enough to have your needs met.
These childhood injuries do not simply disappear on their own, rather, they permeate into your adult relationships. For example, if you felt abandoned as a child, your alarm system will trigger any feeling or interpretation of being abandoned by your partner. And so whenever your partner goes silent, isolates, or stops responding, your alarm system goes off and tells you to fight and so you poke, prod, yell, scream, protest, and pursue them. If you are someone who tends to withdraw, you may have felt inadequate, not good enough, or unimportant through your parent’s harsh words, judgements, and criticisms, and so when your partner starts to get heightened or you feel them becoming anxious, you start to withdraw, isolate, brace, and defend yourself out of fear that letting your partner too close will be dangerous for the relationship. And so if one of you carries a wound of rejection and abandonment, while the other carries a wound of not being good or important enough, you both end up in an attack/pursue and defend/withdraw pattern. These reactions are logical and are survival-based strategies learned from years of protecting yourself from vulnerability.
The Negative Cycle: How Partners Misinterpret Each Other
In nearly every distressed couple I see, partners fall into either the pursuer side or the withdrawer side of the cycle. They experience a negative loop, where one person pursues to close the distance while the other withdraws to keep the distance. One person sees distance as danger while the other sees closeness as danger. One person sees closeness as safety while the other sees distance as safety. This is what we in EFT call a pursuer-withdrawer negative cycle. In order to understand the experiences of the other person and what is happening for them beneath the surface, we must also see how each partner misperceives the other.
The Outwardly Anxious Partner (Pursuer)
- Surface Behaviors: You criticize, complain, demand, push, prod, poke, or protest for a response because any response is better than no response. You might raise your voice, follow your partner from room to room, bring up past issues, continue the fight, and force interactions because the engagement feels like safety even if it is an argument
- The Internal Experience: You feel lonely, invisible, unimportant, and unloved whenever your partner goes quiet or shuts down
- How Your Partner Perceives You: Because your partner doesn’t see your pursuit as an attempt to connect, they misperceive your actions as being relentless, critical, angry, judgmental, and never satisfied. Because they do not experience your protest as a cry for help or a plea for connection, they misinterpret your pursuit as a reminder that they are constantly failing you.
- The Goal: You help yourself and your partner understand that your anger and protest is not meant to hurt or push them away, rather, these are desperate attempts to get any response from them to see if they still care
The Inwardly Anxious Partner (Withdrawer)
- Surface Behaviors: You go quiet, defend your actions, look away, isolate, shut down, or physically leave the room. You might tell your partner that you no longer want to engage or talk about things, or you may try to explain to your partner why they shouldn’t be upset.
- The Internal Experience: Often your internal experience is the biggest mystery for your partner. If you grew up in a household with highly critical or volatile parents, you learned that emotional closeness during conflict is dangerous and you learned the only way to stay safe is to keep the peace and retreat. You might think to yourself that you are inadequate, a failure to the person you love where everything you try just makes things worse, and you feel the relationship is hopeless because you don’t know how to fix it.
- How Your Partner Perceives You: To your partner, you seem cold, indifferent, shut down, withdrawn, checked out, but physiologically, you are overwhelmed, overthinking, and in a state of panic underneath the surface. When you retreat to try and keep the peace, your partner may misinterpret this as stonewalling or abandonment, and that you no longer care or value them or the relationship.
- The Goal: You help yourself and your partner understand that your withdrawing and going quiet is not meant to devalue or abandon, rather it is to try to keep fights from escalating by avoiding saying the wrong thing or making things worse.
The Most Difficult Reframe
Anytime I meet a new couple and learn that both partners felt undervalued in their own childhoods, I bring up what I call “the most difficult reframe.” The most challenging, yet the most transformative, part of EFT is accepting a profound truth: Your partner’s extreme reactions, whether pursuing or withdrawing, are happening because you are incredibly important to them. This is the attachment reframe and it is one that is difficult to incorporate, especially for those who grew up in families where they felt unimportant, not good enough, discardable, unprotected, and unsafe. Whenever a person’s early childhood experiences were built on neglect, criticism, judgment, abandonment, and isolation, it would feel incredibly uncomfortable, foreign, and almost unbelievable that you could actually be the most important person in your partner’s life. Your system has been hardwired through your early childhood experiences to expect rejection so when your partner reacts with intense emotion, your brain can misinterpret their panic as proof that you are either failing or unlovable. The same survival mechanisms that helped you survive your childhood are preventing you from realizing your partner is desperately crying for connection in the only way they know how.
When your partner protests, cries, pokes, prods, blames, questions, and engages you, it’s not because they hate you, it’s not because they think less of you, it’s not because they think you’re a failure; it’s because they’re terrified of being abandoned by you and losing you. When your partner is shutting down, walking away, closing off, going quiet, and avoiding conflict with you, it’s not because they don’t care about you anymore, it’s not because they want to abandon you, it’s not because they want to hurt you; it’s because your opinion of them matters so much that they cannot face the weight of your disappointment and they are terrified of failing you over and over again.
When you’re both invested in each other, the stakes can be incredibly high. Because you represent the most important person in your partner’s life, any threat of disconnection can trigger huge anxiety episodes causing tensions to spike during arguments. However, accepting how deeply you matter to your partner and realizing just how much impact you have on them is how you reach the ultimate reframe. When you reframe anger or shutting down as a reaction to how important you are in their life, the cycle becomes less destructive and more understanding, where the pursuit starts to soften and the withdrawal starts to reengage.
The Common Hopelessness at The Start
Couples frequently encounter a temporary decline in optimism when they start EFT. This is a typical experience because for years, many have employed survival strategies of pursuing and withdrawing to ensure safety between one another and so when beginning therapy, we are reducing that dynamic that kept us feeling safe. The goal is that the pursuer softens or tempers their approach while the withdrawer reengages. Of course, this can feel extremely vulnerable and risky, counterintuitive even. It may feel like you’re dropping your guard or shield in the middle of a battlefield. In the first few weeks of couples therapy, you may feel raw, vulnerable, and anxious, more so than you did before, for these reasons. I reassure couples that this initial phase of hopelessness is not a sign that therapy is failing, rather, it is a sign that you are stepping off the old familiar path and onto a path towards real emotional safety.
How EFT Works to Heal
EFT is not a model that teaches couples how to argue better. It’s not a model that dives deep into the cognitive space. EFT is processing what it’s like for each person to be in this relationship, how do we affect each other, what is it that we need from each other that’s left unsaid, what’s the vulnerable emotion underneath the surface that we’re too afraid to ask for, and how can we work together to regulate one another as a team. A trained EFT couples therapist can help you both take a step back and see that neither of you are the enemy while constantly reframing the negative cycle as the common enemy between you both. Throughout the EFT process, we work together to:
- Deescalate the Negative Cycle: We help you recognize when you are falling into the negative cycle. The pursuer learns to soften their approach while the withdrawer learn to recognize the urge to shut down and run
- Access Primary Emotions: We go underneath the surface to explore what is actually happening underneath the anger and numbness to help both partners feel in touch with their reality, vulnerabilities, and fears of abandonment and inadequacy
- Restructuring Bond: We create safe moments in session where the withdrawer can risk sharing their inner anxiety and the pursuer can risk sharing their loneliness. You will be guided and you will interact with each other by sharing these vulnerable experiences to rebuild the connection. You will learn how to validate each other and seek reassurance in a way that helps both of you. I often say, “validation rebuilds trust, reassurance rebuilds connection.”
When you can look at your partner and see how your reactions affect them. When you can understand how important you are to the person across from you, you can help them with a corrective experience, which is to be a safe haven or a secure place for them. When you see their reactions as a bid for connection, you start to move from a cycle of attack and defend to a cycle of safety, accessibility, and secure connection.
