In my previous article, Attachment: What Is It?, I defined attachment and explained it develops. The attachment system is a proximity-seeking system that evolved to ensure the survival of the human infant. It operates like a home heating and cooling system: if everything is fine you don’t see the system operate; when things get out of bounds, the heating or cooling system starts to operate. Likewise, when a person feels threatened, the attachment system activates, evoking attachment behaviors. As attachment behaviors are proximity-seeking behaviors, the person is drawn closer toward a preferred caregiver. The proximity creates, renews, or recreates a secure base, a sense of safety, security, and comfort from which the person, once settled, can begin exploring the world.
In my article The Four Patterns of Attachment in Children I described patterns of attachment in children, as suggested by the title. These patterns—secure, avoidant, resistant or ambivalent, and disorganized—developed in response to the type of caring the child experiences.
In contrast, the patterns of attachment in adults are: secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and disorganized. These are categories that have been refined and identified by extensive empirical research across cultures. A large body of research supports these categorizations. Research literature shows several subtypes within each category and two other categories this article will not address (earned secure and cannot classify).
The Adult Attachment Interview
An Adult Attachment Interview, a useful tool to assess adults, a powerful tool for clinical use, is the primary method for assessing an adult’s state of mind with respect to attachment. Extensive literature regards this semi-structured interview’s reliability and validity. In the Adult Attachment Interview, the person’s narrative is evaluated along two primary dimensions. The first dimension is coherence. Coherence refers to answers that which:
- provide a clear and convincing description
- are truthful, succinct, and complete
- are presented in a clear and orderly manner
The second dimension is the ability to reflect on the motives of others. In evaluating the adult’s narrative we also look at the following four criteria:
- Quality: truthful with evidence for what is said.
- Quantity: succinct and complete. Contributions are as informative as is required but no more so.
- Manner: clear and orderly. Obscurity of expression and ambiguity are avoided; discourse is brief and orderly.
Adults with a secure pattern of attachment have the capacity to view others with few distortions. They value relationships, emotions, and attachment. When they take the Adult Attachment Interview, their narratives are coherent, collaborative, concise, and comprehensive. They seem objective regarding any particular event/relationship. Descriptions and evaluations of attachment-related experiences are consistent, whether experiences are favorable or unfavorable.
The adult with a dismissing pattern of attachment has difficulty viewing others without distortions. As children, in order to have their needs met, they learned not to demand too much from their caregivers. These adults are dismissive of attachment-related experiences and relationships. Their narratives tend to be general and nonspecific. They often normalize without specific examples or evidence (“she was an excellent, normal mother”), with generalized representations of history, unsupported or actively contradicted by the episodes they recount. Their narratives are too brief and violate the criteria of quality. Transcripts also tend to be excessively brief, violating the criteria of quantity.
The adult with a preoccupied pattern of attachment has difficulty viewing others without distortions. As children they learned that to get their caregiver’s attention and to get their needs met, they had to be demanding. Their narratives lack coherence. These adults tend to be preoccupied with or by past attachment relationships and experiences. The speaker often appears angry, passive, or fearful. Their sentences are often long, grammatically tangled, or filled with vague usages (“dadada,” “and that”), thus violating the criteria of manner and the criteria of relevance. Additionally, they tend to ramble, going off on unrelated tangents, and bring in unnecessary details, violating the criteria of quantity.
The adult with a disorganized pattern of attachment has difficulty viewing others without significant distortions. As children they had parents who frightened them. Often they’ve experienced chronic early maltreatment within a caregiving relationship and may be described as having significant dysfunction in their capacity to form emotionally meaningful relationships and attachments. Many people with personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, have a disorganized state of mind with respect to attachment. During discussions of loss or abuse, these individuals show a striking lapse in the monitoring of reasoning or discourse. For example, the individual may briefly indicate a belief that a dead person is still alive in the physical sense or that this person was killed by a childhood thought. Individuals may lapse into prolonged silence or eulogistic speech. Their relationships tend to be volatile.
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