#30 Earning secure attachment.
Real-world remedies and hope for the self-identified insecure.
There has been an influx of new people joining me here, so I wanted to tell you a little about where I’m headed with The Psychoalchemist. If you’re new, welcome! If you’re a new paid subscriber, thank you so much - I’m touched every time someone feels this work is worth paying for. I’ve been enjoying being a little more active on here and have been hearing from lots of other clinicians who have a similar disillusionment with academic psychology and clinical training. I would like to devote more energy to this project, so my plan is to aim for 3-4 posts a month moving forward.
Around half of what I share is going to remain freely accessible to all, but I’m going to alternate free posts with a series I’m calling THERAPYCRAFT for paid subscribers. These posts will explore the practice of therapy in the era of “evidence-based practice”. I plan to share more about integrating spiritual and academic ideas, the hallmarks of effective therapy, specific psychoanalytic and psychological theories, clinical technique, and how I have built a sustainable clinical practice without going (too) crazy. If this sounds like it would help you with your own practice, or you’re just curious about these ideas in the context of your own self-development, the paid tier is currently US$8/month, or US$80/year. I hope I can support you to navigate these complex issues in our shared work, or engage your interest and imagination if you’re a curious non-therapist! You can scroll back through the archive to see if this might be for you.
Thanks again for being here. If you have any thoughts about any of this, or something you’d like me to write about, feel free to comment, or write to me at kate [at] kateemmaoconnor.com.
Hello friends,
The application of attachment theory to adult romantic relationships has its origins in a very cool body of research stemming from the late 1980s. While John Bowlby’s original writings did acknowledge attachment bonds as a fundamental source of wellbeing across the lifespan, Hazan and Shaver (1987) were the first to examine this empirically, in a study featuring a “love quiz” they published in a small Denver newspaper asking people to share details of their romantic relationships. I found the neat little design of this study so telling in terms of how easily translatable and highly relevant attachment theory can feel to the average person: the adult attachment styles have all the fixings of a personality-type-zodiac-sign-which-animal-are-you categorical system that lends itself perfectly to translation into the self help industry and pop psychology.
And so it has been. The BBC, TikTok comedians, and every love coach and break-up consultant in between has adopted these categories as a kind of shorthand to explain certain relationship dynamics and dating patterns. I think this is mostly a good thing: some hallmarks of a good theory are that it is explainable and applicable, and attachment theory has certainly provided many people with greater insights into their patterns of connection (and estrangement). Despite this, I have noticed some areas where simplification of this theory has translated into something less helpful. Specifically, it is easy for the mainstream discourse to become fixed on diagnosing attachment styles and using them as an explanation for why relationships aren’t working the way people want them to, but without a clear pathway to a remedy.
Anxious attachment girlies
I have most frequently seen this play out for heterosexual women who identify with having an anxious attachment style. They become fixated on this as an explanation for their propensity to attract emotionally unavailable men. Diagnosing themselves and their prospective partners becomes the main focus of their energy, and they become increasingly distressed when each new avoidant man becomes more evidence of their own brokenness and the inevitability of their aloneness.
The persistence of their longing for meaningful, devoted connection is a great sign of health and sanity, but for someone who has spent too long without the right kind of love, it can feel like torture. The need for connection, for encouragement, to be loved and treasured by people who know us to be a special person, is a lifelong necessity. But rather than knowing this part of themselves as healthy, too much absence can result in a lack of self-acceptance, a turning on one’s self, accompanied by a sense that the only solution is to learn how not to need.
In the women I have known and treated, this can look like expending a great deal of energy cultivating a mask of staunch independence that has them trying to win a competition with their prospective partners of who-can-give-the-least-fucks. This strategy is often sold to both men and women as a means of gaining power in relationships (a la Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction and the work of many alarming online influencers I don’t even want to link here).
In this mode, women often wind up with an immaculate routine, strict boundaries around their time and energy, a wardrobe of ethically made linen clothes, a meditation practice, and a perfect minimalist or dopamine-decor apartment that makes them start to wonder if there is even room for a man in their life. (I am sure there is a male equivalent of this too, but for some reason those guys aren’t showing up in my consulting room; they’re probably at the gym?) But underneath the beauty of all these efforts, they still feel very lonely, very scared, and very heartbroken. This is because their deepest longing is still for connection. These women have language for what is happening to them, but they do not have a solution for their desire.
The real remedy
So what is the answer?
I was lucky in my early career to be exposed to the teachings of the founders of the Circle of Security (COS), an internationally celebrated model of attachment-based parenting. Glen Cooper, Kent Hoffman, and Bert Powell are some of the world’s leading contemporary voices in attachment therapies for families and individuals, and they developed COS as an integration and continuation of their training under James Masterson. Having come from training that otherwise focussed on conditioning and discipline-oriented approaches to the treatment of children, their work felt like a loving embrace.
I was also lucky to do training on the Core Sensitivities (their model of adult attachment) with Kent Hoffman when he made a trip to Australia. I still refer to things I learned in this two-day workshop over a decade later. What has stayed with me all this time is his reverence for the struggle of each person, the space he created to be with the reality of our own pain and the pain of the people we help, and the way he succeeded in radiating such a loving presence, even in an auditorium of probably over 100 people. He was plainly a great preserver of the dignity and infinite worth of the highly vulnerable, and a man of great knowledge, humility, generosity, and many of the other traits I have come to associate with being a great therapist. I really recommend his Tedx Talk if you have a minute.
The Core Sensitivities model does not relegate the person with insecure attachment to a life of permanent relational suffering, nor does it sell handy strategies for developing security. Rather, it tells us that secure attachment forms through an experience of being-with. Being-with refers to an experience of being accompanied by another across the whole spectrum of feeling. It does not require particular behaviours, or even specific caring actions, only the felt sense that another person can take our experiences into their own mind and feeling-body, and reflect back to us that this is manageable.
In adult life, this is most often provided one of three ways: great therapy, great partnership, or great religion (or spiritual practice). We must be involved, cared for, witnessed, and known, either through:
The right kind of treatment - this needs to be a type of therapy underwritten by a theory of relational change, and that involves a sustained, immersive, empathic experience with another person. (This will not happen in 6-10 sessions.)
The right kind of loving relationship - with a loving, trustworthy partner on whom you can rely, and who sees and treats you as someone worthy of love and care.
The right kind of spirituality: characterised by a sense of connectedness to God, the Earth, or a universe in which we know ourselves to be a relevant, effective, and important participant.
We cannot heal in isolation, or through greater resilience, independence, or even insight. We owe it to ourselves to take seriously the requirements of real healing, and not worsen our feelings about ourselves by expecting solutions to come through more incessant hard work and self reflection.
How long does this take?
Mostly people will tell you its impossible to tell, but I usually suggest that you give it five years.
Earned security
There is one more thing that stayed with me from my training in this model that I want to share with you here. We normally hear about some variation on anxious, avoidant, disorganised, and secure attachment styles. But what people don’t speak of as much is what is special about the idea of the earned secure attachment: someone with an originally insecure attachment, or who had difficult childhood experiences, but who has nonetheless developed a secure attachment style over the course of their adult life.
What I was taught, and have found to be true, as that there is something special about people who develop security over time. There is something about people who have learned to trust, to believe in their own worth, to rely on others, from a place of having believed none of that to be safe, true, or possible. These people walk through the world with a special sensitivity, capacity for empathy, and unique knowledge of the workings of love and connection that cannot be learned intellectually.
I have shared this idea with patients over the years, and both they and I have found great personal solace in it. I hope if you are in the process of addressing your own attachment wounds, that the idea of earned security offers you hope on your difficult path. There is an intimate life waiting for you that has even more colour, sweetness, and joy, than if you had never had to recover from anything in the first place.
In love, and the pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,
Kate
P.S. If you are interested in attachment-based interventions and resources, either for yourself or in your clinical work, I wrote a piece a little while ago about some misconceptions of disorganised attachment (link below). I also highly recommend a now-obscure resource created by Kent Hoffman called 87 Minutes. The website is no longer live, but a copy can be downloaded with a free trial of this website here. (Get in touch with me if you want a copy and this doesn’t work for you.). He explains the concept of being-with and other related ideas in quite moving, accessible language. It is a lovely resource for anyone struggling with loneliness and feelings of unworthiness.
I love how you included formal treatment, relationships and spirituality as good avenues! Enjoyed the read
Fantastic read. I was unfamiliar with COS and the Core Sensitivities, but this is such a helpful clinical lens. Thank you for your generosity in sharing this.