Couple Relationships and Attachment Styles
Couple Relationships
As a couple therapist, I find that lack of connection and disharmony for a couple are significantly worsened by the re-triggering of previous traumatic events.
In addition, stress caused by the pressures of modern living can make the early years of a relationship, particularly with young children, prone to conflict, blame, communication issues and resentments.
Essential to the understanding of the unique dynamics in your relationship is an understanding of Attachment Styles.
Successful relationships based on understanding, tolerance, emotional closeness and an ability to repair the inevitable challenges and disagreements that life brings, will most likely feature one or both partners having a secure parental attachment in the first 2 years of life.
Attachment Styles
A secure attachment is based on a ‘good enough’ parent providing for the essential needs of a child early in life. When a sense of safety, attunement and emotional presence of a loving caregiver, able to read and respond to a baby or toddler’s emotional needs with warmth and loving care is present, it will lead to curiosity and confidence in life, others and oneself. It is important to add that as human beings we can never provide perfect care, but ‘good enough’ parenting meeting a childs needs ‘more often than not’, will lead to a relatively secure attachment.
In fact if 100% of a child needs are met, it can be problematic, because the ‘rupture and repair’ that happens during the ups and downs of everyday parenting, help to build essential resilience to disappointment.
Around 50% of children in the UK have a predominantly secure attachment, with 23.5% having a predominantly disorganized attachment, 14.7% an avoidant attachment, and 10.2% an anxious preoccupied attachment (also known as resistant).
Of course, in reality, we tend to have a mixture of styles in different situations.
‘Psychology Today’ is a good source of further information on insecure attachment styles, and how they can impact on relationships.
If you have noticed a pattern of negative and emotionally challenging behaviors in your love life, you may be interested to explore the way you experience closeness in intimate relationships. You may for instance wonder why, for you, the same problems keep happening, even with different partners?
Perhaps your pattern is to withdraw from a relationship once it becomes too intimate? Perhaps you withdraw when your partner gets angry or frustrated? Or they do? Do you find yourself pulled in different directions emotionally with your partner? Fear or abandonment can also be a negative influence on a relationship, as can an aloof or excessively independent way of being.
Understanding attachment styles will be an important first step towards healing any attachment issues and understanding those of you partner.
For all couples, a process sometimes called 'transference' can also be a source of communication difficulties.
In transference the unwitting actions or words of a spouse can ‘re-trigger’ traumatic memories, for a partner, whereupon the past leaps unconsciously into the present, causing the historical feelings from the past to re-emerge and get projected towards the other person. In that moment of triggering, trauma is unconsciously re-evoked with either one of a couple in the firing line.
I find it sometimes useful to work one to one with each member of a couple in turn with the other present, so that the other can witness, understand and empathize with their partners traumatic past or problematic attachemt.
Once the underlying trauma can be processed by the brain, and in the work I do, an alternative to the earlier trauma can be felt and integrated, then transference is much reduced and care and communication improves.
Past that step of course we would continue on to explore together your attachment styles and work on the communication issues between you.
