Your Attachment Isn't a Style. It's a Strategy.

You might have taken one of those quizzes that tells you your attachment style.

Anxious. The one who reaches. Who texts again, smooths things over, gives a little more so they won’t leave. Or avoidant. The one who pulls back, who goes quiet when someone gets too close, who would rather handle it alone.

Maybe when you got that label, it fit so well and made so much sense that now it feels like you have it for life. Like that’s just who you are now.

I want to give you a different understanding.

Your attachment style was never a fixed type you got stamped with. It’s a strategy. And strategies can change. This is something you built, often at a very young age, to get your needs met when getting them met directly didn’t feel safe.

To understand the strategy, you have to start with the need. We all have the same two needs underneath. We need closeness, and we need to not lose ourselves in it. So we’re all afraid of two things. We’re afraid of being abandoned, and we’re afraid of being engulfed. Having both of these fears does not indicate that something is wrong with you. That’s just part of being a human.

What gets called an attachment problem is the strategy you built around those fears. Some of us learned to push people away before they could get too close. Some of us learned to pull people in and hold on so they couldn’t leave. Most of us did both, depending on the relationship. None of that is because you have a need. It’s the strategy you use when the fear of not getting the need met arises.

That’s where the styles come from. Anxious is built around the fear of being abandoned. So the strategy reaches, holds on, and works to keep people from leaving. Avoidant is built around the fear of being engulfed. So the strategy keeps distance, stays self-reliant, pulls back when people get too close. And disorganized is both fears at once, wanting closeness and being terrified of it in the same breath.

There’s a simple way to get these needs met. You ask. You say I need you closer, or I need some space, and a safe person hears you and meets you there.

But most of us never got to learn that. When you were little, and you asked for what you needed, what happened? Maybe you got punished for asking. Maybe your needs got ignored, no matter what you did. Maybe you got blamed for even having them. Maybe it just didn’t matter, because nobody was listening.

So you stopped asking. You found other ways to get your needs met, because asking directly wasn’t safe. When that happens early enough and often enough, it shapes you. There’s a name for this kind of wound. It’s relational, or developmental, trauma, and it’s the root of what we call CPTSD. We’ll go deeper into that in the next letter. For today, I just want you to hold onto the simple version. Your attachment didn’t come from nowhere. It came from what you learned about closeness in a relationship or many relationships.

You didn’t learn this only from your family

We talk a lot about the family of origin, and that matters. But your first relationships in life weren’t only with your parents. They were your siblings. Your teachers. The relative who watched you after school. A coach. A babysitter. The first friend with whom you formed a bond. Then later, your first crush, your first relationship, the friendships that broke your heart. Every one of them taught you something about what closeness costs, and whether your needs were welcome.

The culture taught us too. It hands all of us rules about what we’re allowed to need. Some of us were taught to be agreeable and easy, to never be too much, to put everyone else first. Some of us were taught the opposite, to never show fear or sadness, to handle everything alone, to never look weak. Different messages, same result. We all learned that some of our needs were not safe to show.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about seeing how wide the training really was, so you stop believing the problem is something broken in you. Your attachment style isn’t a defect. It’s what you absorbed, from a lot of places, about how to stay safe and stay connected at the same time.

These patterns change more easily than you think

Here’s the part that holds all the hope, and it’s the part people get wrong.

We’re told our attachment is a fixed type. Anxious. Avoidant. Like it’s stamped on us for good. That’s just not true. Your limbic system, the emotional center of your brain, was shaped in relationship, and it keeps being shaped in relationship. Every relationship rewires it.

This is exactly why therapy works. People think therapy helps because of the advice. It’s not really that. It’s the relationship. When you sit with someone safe, week after week, and you bring your guard, and they don’t hurt you, your limbic system learns something new. Oh. This can be different. That relationship is rewiring you.

But it isn’t only therapy. Every time you show up differently in any relationship, you’re rewiring your limbic system. Every time you ask for what you need directly instead of going underground for it. Every time you let a safe person stay close. Every time you set a boundary, and the world doesn’t end. You’re laying down new wiring, one experience at a time.

The strategies were built in a relationship. They get rebuilt there, too. That’s the whole work we’re doing together in these letters. We’re planting seeds. You won’t see all of them grow at once, and you don’t need to. You just need to start with the most important relationship you will ever have. The relationship with yourself.

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This week’s practice

This week, get curious about where your strategy came from. Not to dig up pain. Just to understand it, with some compassion for the kid who figured it out.

Find somewhere quiet and sit with two questions. Write the answers down if you can.

What did I fear more as a child, being abandoned or being engulfed? Most of us know in our body which one cut deeper. Did you most fear being left, forgotten, or not chosen? Or being controlled, taken over, given no room to be yourself?

How did I learn to handle that fear in a way that worked then but doesn’t now? Did you become the one who never needs anything? The one who gives everything so they won’t be left? The one who keeps people at a distance so they can’t get in? Name your strategy. And then thank it. It kept you safe once.

If this brings something up, go gently. Remember the tools from our Tools For Our Journey letter. You don’t have to finish it in one sitting. Noticing is the whole beginning.

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You built these strategies when you were small and had no other options. They were smart. They worked. And the same way you learned them, in relationship, is the same way you get to unlearn them now.

You are not stuck with what you were handed.

With you on the path,

Erin

✦ ✦ ✦

A note on care

These letters are a companion to healing, not a substitute for therapy or medical care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US), or your local emergency services. You deserve support that meets you in real time.

References

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Co