Patterns of Attachment in Adults

December 3rd, 2009
By Arthur Becker-Weidman, Ph.D., Attachment Topic Expert Contributor

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In a previous article I described what attachment is and how it develops. The attachment system is a proximity seeking system that evolved to ensure the survival of the human infant. It operates like your home heating and cooling system. If everything is fine (safe) you don’t see the system operating. When things get out of bounds, the heating or cooling system starts to operate. When a person feels some threat, the attachment system becomes activated and attachment behaviors are evoked. Attachment behaviors are proximity seeking behaviors that draw the person closer to a preferred caregiver. The proximity creates or renews or recreates a secure base; a sense of safety, security, and comfort from which the person, once settled, can begin exploring the world.

I then described patterns of attachment in children. These patterns develop in response to the sort of caring that the child experiences. In adults the patterns are: Secure, Preoccupied, Dismissing, and Disorganized. These are categories that have been refined and identified by extensive empirical research across cultures. There is a large body of research supporting these categorizations. In the research literature there are several subtypes within each category and two other categories that we won’t be concerned with in this article (Earned Secure and Cannot Classify).

The Adult Attachment Interview is the primary method for assessing an adult’s state of mind with respect to attachment. There is extensive literature regarding this semi-structured interview’s reliability and validity. It is a very useful tool for the assessment of adults and is a powerful tool for clinical use. 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:
• 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 look at four dimensions.

1. Quality. To be truthful and to have evidence for what is said.
2. Quantity. To be succinct and complete. Make your contribution as informative as is required but no more so.
3. Relevance. To be relevant.
4. Manner. To be clear and orderly. Avoid obscurity of expression, ambiguity, and be brief and orderly in discourse.

SECURE

The adult with a secure pattern of attachment has 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 value attachments, and seem objective regarding any particular event/relationship. Descriptions and evaluations of attachment-related experiences are consistent, whether experiences are favorable or unfavorable.

DISMISSING

The adult with a dismissing pattern of attachment has difficulty viewing others without distortions. As children they learned to not put too many demands on their careers in order to get their needs met. These adults are dismissing of attachment-related experiences and relationships. Their narratives tend to be very general and non-specific. They often normalize without specific examples or evidence (“excellent, very normal mother”), with generalized representations of history unsupported or actively contradicted by episodes recounted. Their narratives are much too brief, and violate the criteria of quality. Transcripts also tend to be excessively brief, violating the criteria of quantity.

PREOCCUPIED

The adult with a preoccupied pattern of attachment has difficulty viewing others without distortions. As children they learned that to get their carer’s attention and to get their needs met, they had to be very 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. Sentences are often long, grammatically tangled, were filled with vague usages (“dadada,” “and that”), thus violating the criteria of manner and the criteria of relevance. In addition, they tend to ramble on, going off on unrelated tangents and bring in unnecessary details violating the criteria of quantity.

DISORGANIZED

The adult with a disorganized pattern of attachment has difficulty viewing others without significant distortions. As children they had parents who were frightening. Often they have 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 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. Individual may lapse into prolonged silence or eulogistic speech. Their relationships tend to be volatile.

 

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©Copyright 2009 by Arthur Becker-Weidman, Ph.D., therapist in Williamsville, NY. All Rights Reserved.

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