By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
Most couples who come to therapy do not arrive talking about attachment. They arrive talking about the argument they had last Tuesday, or the affair they have just discovered, or the slow drift apart of the last three years. Underneath almost all of these surface presentations, though, is the same set of questions. Will you stay? Will you choose me when it counts? When I reach for you, will you be there? Attachment theory is the framework that lets us understand why those questions matter so much, why the answers we received in childhood still shape how we ask them in adulthood, and why the patterns we bring to love are far more changeable than most of us believe.
Where attachment theory came from
Attachment theory began with a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby in the late 1950s. Bowlby was working with children who had been separated from their parents during and after the Second World War, and he noticed something that the dominant theories of the time could not explain. The children's distress was not, as Freud's followers argued, a side effect of losing the person who fed them. The distress had its own logic. Children were biologically wired to seek closeness to a primary caregiver, to use that closeness as a base for exploring the world, and to feel a specific kind of terror when the closeness was threatened (Bowlby, 1969). Bowlby called this an attachment system, and he argued it was as fundamental to human survival as the systems that regulate hunger or sleep.
In the 1970s, an American psychologist named Mary Ainsworth designed a study called the Strange Situation that gave Bowlby's theory empirical legs. Toddlers were briefly separated from their mothers in a laboratory, and their behaviour on reunion was carefully observed. Most of the children, around two thirds, sought their mother on her return, were comforted by her, and quickly went back to playing. Ainsworth called this pattern secure. The remaining third fell into two patterns. Some children avoided the mother on her return, busying themselves with toys as if she had not been gone. Others approached her angrily, were difficult to soothe, and could not return to play. Ainsworth called these patterns avoidant and anxious ambivalent (Ainsworth et al., 1978). A small number of children later described as disorganised showed contradictory behaviours, freezing, or apparent fear of the parent.
For a long time, attachment was thought of as a children's theory. Then, in 1987, two American researchers named Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver published a paper that changed the field. They argued that adult romantic love operates on the same attachment system that Bowlby and Ainsworth had described in children. The styles look slightly different in adulthood, but the underlying architecture is the same. Their paper, Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process, became highly influential in the study of adult relationships (Hazan and Shaver, 1987). It is, in plain terms, a big part of the reason we now think about our adult relationships in the light of the relationships we had with the people who raised us.
Two dimensions, often described as four styles
Most descriptions of attachment in popular culture talk about three or four styles. Researchers who study adult attachment mostly measure it along two dimensions: anxiety, which is how much a person worries about being left or not being loved enough, and avoidance, which is how uncomfortable a person is with closeness and depending on others (Brennan et al., 1998). Combining the two gives the four styles people usually describe, which are secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganised, also called fearful avoidant. Four styles are a helpful way of talking about it, but they are a way of combining two dimensions, and not a research consensus that there are four separate types.
None of them are personality types or fixed identities. They are patterns of expectation, learned in the relationships we had earliest, that shape how we approach the question of whether other people can be relied on. They can shift over time. They can show up differently with different partners. And most of us carry a mix, with one style as a default and others appearing under specific kinds of pressure.
Secure attachment
Secure attachment is broadly low anxiety and low avoidance. It is not the absence of difficulty, and it is not the same as never feeling anxious or pulling away. It is a baseline assumption that close others are basically dependable, that conflict does not signal abandonment, and that needs can be expressed without disaster. Securely attached adults tend to find it relatively easy to say what they want, to apologise when they have hurt their partner, to tolerate distance without panicking, and to come back together after a rupture.
In the therapy room, securely attached couples are not the ones who never argue. They are the ones whose arguments come to a natural end. They reach for each other afterwards. The fight, however hot, does not threaten the relationship at its foundations. The disagreement was about whose turn it was to do something, not about whether the other person actually cares.
Secure attachment usually grows in a childhood where a caregiver was reliably available, reasonably responsive to distress, and capable of repair after their own mistakes. Worth saying clearly: it does not require a perfect childhood. Research on babies and their parents found that when mothers and infants played face to face, they were often out of step. In one study of 18 mother and infant pairs, for about 70 per cent of the time they weren't in a matching state (Tronick and Gianino, 1986), and later work found that pairs were coordinated 30 per cent of the time or less (Tronick and Cohn, 1989). What mattered was not avoiding those mismatches. It was what happened next. Babies and parents kept finding their way back to each other, and that process of repair is thought to be central to how children come to feel secure (Tronick and Gianino, 1986). This is research on infants, so I would not claim adult couples are the same, but the principle fits what I see. Mismatch is normal, and repair, again and again, is what builds security.
Anxious attachment
Anxious attachment, sometimes called anxious preoccupied, is higher on the anxiety dimension. It develops when a child's bid for connection was met inconsistently. Sometimes the caregiver was warm and present. Sometimes they were distracted, overwhelmed, or emotionally absent. The child cannot predict which version they will get, so they learn to monitor the caregiver closely, to amplify their bids for attention, and to keep the relationship as the central focus of their inner life.
In adulthood, anxious attachment often looks like a heightened sensitivity to any sign of distance in a partner. A delayed text reply, a slightly cooler tone, a partner who needs an evening alone, can all trigger a strong fear of abandonment. The internal experience is intense. The external behaviour is often protest behaviour, the adult version of a toddler reaching for the parent: calling repeatedly, sending more messages, becoming critical, sometimes provoking a fight just to get a response.
Anxiously attached partners are often described by themselves and by others as needy or clingy. Both labels are unkind and inaccurate. The need is not for too much love. The need is for predictable love. Once the partner becomes reliably available, the anxiety tends to settle. The work is partly individual, learning to self regulate around the fear, and partly relational, learning to ask for closeness in ways the partner can actually hear and respond to.
Avoidant attachment
Avoidant attachment, sometimes called dismissive avoidant, is higher on the avoidance dimension. It develops when a child's bids for connection were repeatedly dismissed, ignored, or shamed. Crying was met with irritation. Distress was treated as inconvenience. Over time, the child draws a sensible conclusion: closeness is unsafe, and self reliance is the better strategy. They turn down the volume on their own attachment needs, often so successfully that they lose contact with the needs altogether.
In adulthood, avoidant attachment often looks like an apparent preference for independence and emotional self sufficiency. Avoidantly attached adults are frequently the partners who say they don't really need anyone, who find emotional conversations exhausting, who pull back when a relationship becomes more committed, and who can name surprisingly little about what they are feeling. From the outside it can look like coldness. From the inside, it is usually overwhelm. The closeness their partner is offering activates an old, well defended fear that needing someone leads to being let down.
Avoidantly attached partners are often the ones who stonewall in conflict, not out of contempt, but because their nervous system experiences emotional intensity as a threat to be managed by retreat. The piece on what to do when one partner withdraws and shuts down covers this pattern in more detail.
Disorganised attachment
Disorganised attachment, sometimes called fearful avoidant, combines high anxiety and high avoidance. It develops when the caregiver who was meant to be the source of safety was also a source of fear or unpredictability. This happens most often in childhoods marked by neglect, abuse, severe parental mental illness, or the chronic disorientation of growing up around addiction. The child faces an impossible problem. The person they are biologically wired to reach for is also the person they need to protect themselves from. The result is a pattern that contains both the anxious longing and the avoidant retreat, often in rapid alternation.
In adulthood, disorganised attachment can look like a relationship that swings between intense closeness and sudden withdrawal. The partner wants love and fears it. They reach in and pull away. They want to be seen and find being seen unbearable. Disorganised attachment is the style most often associated with relational trauma, and it usually responds best to therapy that takes the trauma seriously, not just the relationship pattern.
These patterns aren’t “bad” — they’re creative survival strategies. But as adults, they can limit how we give and receive love.
Why your attachment style matters for your relationships now
Knowing your attachment style is not a personality quiz. It is a way of understanding why some situations are far harder for you than they look from the outside. The avoidant partner who goes quiet during a difficult conversation is not being cold. The anxious partner who sends three texts in twenty minutes is not being needy. Both are doing what their nervous system learned to do, decades ago, in a relationship that taught them what closeness costs.
Understanding this changes what happens in the relationship in two ways. First, you become a less mysterious problem to yourself. The intensity of your reactions has a history, and the history makes sense. Second, you become a less mysterious problem to your partner. The patterns that have probably driven both of you to despair are not signs that one of you is broken or that the relationship is wrong. They are signs that two attachment systems, with their own learned defences, are doing what they were taught to do.
A great deal of what happens in couples therapy is, at its core, attachment work. Slowing down a fight enough to see what is being protected. Helping each partner notice what their nervous system does when the other moves closer or pulls away. Naming the protest behaviour as a bid for connection, and the withdrawal as a defence against an old hurt. Once both partners can see the patterns rather than be inside them, something starts to shift.
Why some pairings are particularly painful
Some attachment combinations are particularly common in couples seeking therapy, and they create predictable patterns. The most discussed is the anxious avoidant pairing. One partner, often the more anxious one, pursues. The other, often the more avoidant one, withdraws. The more one pursues, the more the other withdraws. The more the other withdraws, the more the first pursues. Both partners experience the other as the cause of their pain, and both are partly right. Each is doing exactly what makes the other's worst fears come true.
This pattern is sometimes called the pursue and withdraw cycle, and it is one of the most widely studied cycles in couples research. It is also one of the patterns that many couples make progress with, because once both partners can see the cycle, the behaviour stops feeling personal. The pursuer is not unreasonable. The withdrawer is not uncaring. Both are caught in something neither of them invented. There is more on this dynamic in the article on how to stop arguing with your partner.
Two anxiously attached partners often create a different kind of distress, with frequent reassurance seeking on both sides and a relationship that can feel intense and exhausting in equal measure. Two avoidantly attached partners can create the opposite: a relationship that looks stable from the outside but is quietly emotionally distant, with little reaching across the gap. Disorganised attachment, particularly when paired with any of the others, tends to produce relationships with high volatility, where moments of profound connection alternate with sudden ruptures.
Earned security: why it is never too late
One of the most important findings in attachment research is that attachment styles are not fixed. Reviewing long term studies, Fraley and Roisman (2019) concluded that early experiences do not determine adult outcomes, and that attachment styles show moderate stability alongside real change. Researchers use the term earned security for a settled, secure way of relating developed in adulthood despite an insecure attachment history in childhood. Close relationships across the lifespan, including therapy itself, can change how the attachment system responds.
Earned security tends to develop through a few specific routes. One is a long term close relationship with a partner whose own attachment is broadly secure, where repeated experiences of being reached for and met begin to lay down new expectations. Another is a sustained therapeutic relationship in which the therapist is reliable, attuned, and capable of repair after the inevitable ruptures. A third is the slow integration of childhood experience that becomes possible when we can finally make sense of what happened to us, grieve what was missing, and stop unconsciously recruiting current partners into reenactments of old dramas.
Sue Johnson developed Emotionally Focused Therapy as a direct application of attachment theory to couples work (Johnson, 2004). In her model, the therapy room itself becomes the place where new attachment experiences are practised, in real time, with the partner who matters most. A review of the research on EFT concluded that it meets or exceeds the guidelines for classification as an evidence based couple therapy (Wiebe and Johnson, 2016), and a wider review of couple therapy research named it as one of two approaches with especially promising evidence (Lebow et al., 2012).
How attachment work happens in couples therapy
In practice, the attachment lens does a few specific things. It slows the work down. Most couples arrive wanting to fix a specific argument. The attachment approach asks a different question. Not what was that fight about, but what were you each trying to protect, and what were you each afraid would happen if you did not?
It also reframes blame. When a couple can see that the partner who withdraws is not punishing them but defending against an old fear of being overwhelmed, and the partner who pursues is not attacking but bidding for connection, the entire conversation changes. The fight is no longer two people trying to win against each other. It is two attachment systems, each doing what they learned to do, trying to find safety in the same room.
The work is rarely fast, but it is often genuinely transformative. The couples who do it well report not just better communication but a different felt sense of the relationship. The partner stops being the source of the threat. The relationship starts to feel like the secure base it was always meant to be. There is a separate article on what to expect from your first couples therapy session in London, which covers how the work begins.
Common questions briefly answered
Can my attachment style change?
Yes. Attachment styles are patterns of expectation built from experience, and experience continues throughout life. Research shows moderate stability alongside real change. The route is rarely quick, but it is genuinely possible, particularly through long term close relationships and through therapy.
What if my partner and I have very different styles?
Different styles are common, and not necessarily a problem. The anxious avoidant pairing in particular is one of the most discussed dynamics in couples work, and many couples make real progress with it in therapy. The work is not to make both partners the same. It is to help each partner understand the other's pattern and respond to it differently.
Is attachment work the same thing as couples therapy?
Not exactly. Couples therapy is a broad category. Within it, some approaches, particularly Emotionally Focused Therapy, are explicitly attachment based. Others draw on attachment less directly. In practice, most experienced couples therapists work with attachment patterns whether or not they use the language explicitly. If you would like to read more on choosing a therapist, there is a guide on how to choose a couples therapist in London.
A final word
Attachment theory offers something rare in psychology. It is decades old, it has a large research base, and it tells a story about love that most people, when they hear it, recognise immediately. The way you reach for the people who matter, and the way you defend against being hurt by them, is not a character flaw. It is a learned response to a question every human being has to answer in childhood: can I count on the people I need most? The good news, and it is the most important news the research has to offer, is that the answer is not fixed. New relationships can teach new answers. Therapy can teach new answers. And the patterns that have caused so much pain in your relationships are, with attention and care, genuinely changeable.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist based in London. He runs Rise and Grow Therapy, a private practice specialising in couples and relationship therapy, with consulting rooms in Kensington, Pimlico, and Angel, Islington. He works with couples of all backgrounds and configurations, with particular experience supporting LGBTQ+ relationships and sex-positive practice. His primary modalities include integrative relational psychotherapy and Imago Relationship Therapy.
To explore whether couples therapy might be right for your relationship, you can book a free thirty-minute consultation, in person or online.
References
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Volume 1, Attachment. Hogarth Press.
Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L., & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self report measurement of adult attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment theory and close relationships (pp. 46 to 76). Guilford Press.
Fraley, R. C., & Roisman, G. I. (2019). The development of adult attachment styles: Four lessons. Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 26 to 30.
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511 to 524.
Johnson, S. M. (2004). The practice of emotionally focused couple therapy: Creating connection (2nd ed.). Brunner Routledge.
Lebow, J. L., Chambers, A. L., Christensen, A., & Johnson, S. M. (2012). Research on the treatment of couple distress. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 38(1), 145 to 168.
Tronick, E. Z., & Cohn, J. F. (1989). Infant and mother face to face interaction: Age and gender differences in coordination and the occurrence of miscoordination. Child Development, 60(1), 85 to 92.
Tronick, E. Z., & Gianino, A. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair: Challenges to the coping infant. Zero to Three, 6(3), 1 to 6.
Wiebe, S. A., & Johnson, S. M. (2016). A review of the research in emotionally focused therapy for couples. Family Process, 55(3), 390 to 407.
