Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

Introduction

Attachment styles illustrate emotional connections established between infants and their primary caregivers. The attachment theory identifies that the quality of bond experienced by an infant during their first relationship determines their relation with other people and their response to intimacy throughout life. After taking the attachment style quiz, I established my most substantial score was secure. However, after taking Dr. Diane Poole’s attachment test, my highest score was disorganized. Disorganized attachment, also feared-avoidant, comes from intense fear mainly because of childhood abuse, trauma, or neglect (Paetzold et al., 2015)Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion. Adults experiencing this type of attachment feel they don’t deserve love and close relationships.

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Challenges Presented by my Attachment Style

Establishing long and stable relationships is a significant challenge presented by individuals with disorganized attachment styles. This is because they don’t have a specific or consistence manner of engaging with other people. They can either show a push or pull energy, commitment, and love in relationships but with great fear of abandonment, making it difficult to have stable relationships (Paetzold et al., 2015). Another challenge is adults with this type of attachment are pessimists in relationships and are always waiting to be rejected. They find it difficult to trust their partners and perceive gestures of love emotions negatively since they cannot separate their childhood pain from present love expression. Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

Strategies to Address the Challenges

The most effective strategy to address the challenges is by choosing a therapist. Therapies will help heal any childhood trauma from the past that affects my present. Additionally, treatments will help establish safe relationships that help deal with new emotions in a manner that creates healthy attachments. Additionally, working with a therapist helps build consistency and stability as one identifies harmful patterns in their relationships and coping mechanisms. Therefore, therapy will help me cope with my attachment style. Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

References

Paetzold, R., Rholes, W., & Kohn, J. (2015). Disorganized Attachment in Adulthood: Theory, Measurement, and Implications for Romantic Relationships. Review Of General Psychology, 19(2), 146-156. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000042

See the attachment quiz result in order description. Take the Attachment Styles Quiz. Share your results. Discuss any relational/developmental challenges your attachment style presents (or that you are self-aware of if your attachment style is secure) as well as how you will make an effort to overcome these challenges. Support your ideas with at least one scholarly, peer-reviewed aritcle, cited in-text and as a reference listing at the bottom of your post in APA style. Respond, substantively, to the original post of at least two classmates. Substantive responses go beyond praise, agreement, or restating by sharing an experience, insight, or additional info (resources). Remember to: Organize your post with bold headings for each part of the prompt you are responding to. Answer all parts of the prompt. Cite any sources used in-text and as a reference listing at the end of your post (APA Style)Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion.

The result of the survey I took:
Attachment Styles Test
Dr. Diane Poole Heller’s
Attachment Styles Test
What’s your Attachment Style?
Your Attachment Style
Secure 20

Avoidant/Dismissiv 6

Ambivalent/Anxious 5

Disorganized 5
SecureAvoidant/DismissivAmbivalent/AnxiousDisorganized13.9%13.9%16.7%55.6%

Attachment Styles

Points

Secure

20

Avoidant/Dismissiv

6

Ambivalent/Anxious

5

Disorganized

5

About Attachment Styles
In the SATe (Adult Attachment Theory) training workshops we address four of the core Attachment Styles, their origin’s the way they reveal themselves in relationships, and methods for transforming attachment hurt into healing. I use the terms Secure, Avoidant, Ambivalent, and Disorganized Attachment. These are described below. Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

Secure
Secure attachment is the ideal attachment style needed to enjoy healthy boundaries, fluidity of intimacy and individuation, and social engagement. This is developed by the child having caregivers who are positively attuned to the child, provide a safe haven with consistency and “good enough” care, attention and affection. Children who experience this type of holding environment grow to feel safe to explore the world, interact with others with trust, and to have emotional resilience and regulation. As adults they will tend to have greater confidence, better balance and choices in relationships, and the ability to both give and receive love.

Avoidant
In the avoidant attachment style, caregivers’ emotionally unavailable, insensitive and even hostile responses to a child’s need for connection forms a coping strategy of disconnection in a child. Avoidantly attached people commonly find their greatest struggle to be a lack of emotion. Without intimate nurturance the limbic system is neurologically starved and does not receive the signals required for building social responses nor the frontal brain stimulation that develops bonding. Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

This disconnection extends first to the parents and then to all other relationships. Though some of our cultural models extol the virtues of this self-reliant lone-wolf behavior (think X man Wolverine, or the quintessential “Desperado” cowboy icon), actually living with such a lack of emotional attunement can be increasingly isolated. When working with Avoidant attachment, the intrepid task of the therapist is to nurture a transition to a fully embodied and participatory existence by creating a welcoming and contactful experience full of compassion “permission for existence.” DARe provide resources for ways Avoidants can cross the tenuous bridge to emotional connection.

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Ambivalent
Ambivalently attached people have had caregivers who were on again off again, inconsistently tending and attuning to the child. Because of the lack of consistency the child doubts whether their needs will be met and is on the constant look out for cues and clues to how their behavior may or may not influence the parent’s responses. Over time they find themselves on an emotional see saw of needs being met and not being met. Their object relation is “I can want, but cannot have.” Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

You may observe that in ambivalent attachment styles there is a tendency to be chronically dissatisfied. First, there is a tendency to project their own familial history onto their relationship. Secondly if the other person becomes available, they become unavailable! Unaccustomed to receiving love, having it available doesn’t fit their profile of “still wanting”. Over time partners of Ambivalent people can be discouraged by their love being dismissed and the loss of the relationship can be the both the feared and created outcome.

Disorganized Attachment
A Disorganized Attachment style results when caregivers present double-binding messages to children. This is sometimes called “paradoxical injunction.” An example of this is a, “Come here, go away. Come here, go away.” message. Parents create situations for the child that are unsolvable and un-win-able. For example a parent may ask a child to do a task such as sweep the floor. When the child begins to do so the parent criticizes how it is being done, or even when it is being done. The child may attempt to do the task again taking the direction but is criticized again. The parent may then deride the child for not doing what the parent has asked them to do and punish them for not doing the job. Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion

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When exposed to these impossible-to-resolve situations over and over again the child develops a pattern of not solving problems. When parents set up these interactions that are frightening, disorienting, inherently disorganizing, and which sometimes involve violence, the parents become the source of fear. The disorganized pattern arises in the child when there is a desire to be close to the parent as an object of safety conflicting with a drive to detach from a dangerous and confusing caregiver. For the Adult this may mean being held emotionally hostage by the conflict of the desire for intimacy as well as the fear of it Challenges of Attachment Styles And How To Address Them Discussion