Êtes vous faits l'un pour l'autre ? : Les clés de l'attachement

If you are anxious or secure, you genuinely want to work out a relationship problem. However, the resolution itself often brings a couple closer together—this is a scenario that, however unconsciously, the avoidant partner wants to avoid. While people with an anxious or secure attachment style seek to resolve a disagreement to achieve greater emotional closeness, this outcome is uncomfortable for the avoidant who actually seeks to remain distant. In order to dodge the possibility of getting closer, avoidants tend to grow more hostile and distant as arguments progress. Unless there is recognition of the process involved in an anxious-avoidant conflict, the distancing during conflict tends to repeat itself and causes a lot of unhappiness. Without addressing the issue, the situation can go from bad to worse.

When your partner feels s/he has a secure base to fall back on (and doesn’t feel the need to work hard to get close), and when you don’t feel the need to distance yourself, you’ll both be better able to look outward and do your own thing. You’ll become more independent and your partner will be less needy.

Imagine if you were a parent and couldn’t for the life of you read your infant’s cues. You wouldn’t be able to tell whether your child was hungry or tired, wanting to be held or wanting to be left alone, wet or sick. How difficult life would be for both of you. Your child would have to work so much harder—and cry so much longer—to be understood. Having an avoidant attachment style can often make you feel like that parent. You’re not strong at translating the many verbal and nonverbal signals you receive during everyday interactions into a coherent understanding of your lover’s mental state. The problem is that, along with your self-reliant attitude, you also train yourself not to care about how the person closest to you is feeling. You figure that this is not your task; that they need to take care of their own emotional well-being. This lack of understanding leads partners of avoidants to complain about not receiving enough emotional support. It also leads to less connectedness, warmth, and satisfaction in the relationship.

True love, in the evolutionary sense, means peace of mind. “Still waters run deep” is a good way of characterizing it.

You now live in suspense, anticipating that next small remark or gesture that will reassure you. After living like this for a while, you start to do something interesting. You start to equate the anxiety, the preoccupation, the obsession, and those ever-so-short bursts of joy with love. What you’re really doing is equating an activated attachment system with passion. If you’ve been at it for a while, you become programmed to get attracted to those very individuals who are least likely to make you happy. Having a perpetually activated attachment system is the opposite of what nature had in mind for us in terms of gratifying love.love. As we’ve seen, one of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s most important insights is that in order to thrive and grow as human beings, we need a secure base from which to derive strength and comfort. For that to happen, our attachment system must be calm and secure.

The brains of people with an anxious attachment style react more strongly to thoughts of loss and at the same time under-recruit regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. This means that once your attachment system is activated, you will find it much harder to “turn it off” if you have an anxious attachment style.

But if you don’t get that reassurance [anxious attachement style], your worries about the relationship will quadruple, and it will take a lot more than a simple text to calm your attachment system. This is a very important insight for anyone in a relationship. The more attuned you are to your partner’s needs at the early stages—and he or she to yours—the less energy you will need to expend attending to him or her later.

These findings suggest that people with an anxious attachment style are indeed more vigilant to changes in others’ emotional expression and can have a higher degree of accuracy and sensitivity to other people’s cues. However, this finding comes with a caveat. The study showed that people with an anxious attachment style tend to jump to conclusions very quickly, and when they do, they tend to misinterpret people’s emotional state. Only when the experiment was designed in such a way that anxious participants had to wait a little longer—they couldn’t react immediately when they spotted a change, but had to wait a little longer—and get more information before making a judgment did they have an advantage over other participants. This is an important lesson for someone with an anxious attachment style: If you just wait a little longer before reacting and jumping to conclusions, you will have an uncanny ability to decipher the world around you and use it to your advantage. But shoot from the hip, and you’re all over the place making misjudgments and hurting yourself.

The attachment system is the mechanism in our brain responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety and availability of our attachment figures. If you have an anxious attachment style, you possess a unique ability to sense when your relationship is threatened. Even a slight hint that something may be wrong will activate your attachment system, and once it’s activated, you are unable to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that he or she is truly there for you and that the relationship is safe. People with other attachment styles also get activated, but they don’t pick up on subtle details.

Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs. When their emotional needs are met, and the earlier the better, they usually turn their attention outward. This is sometimes referred to in attachment literature as the “dependency paradox”: The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.