ATTACHMENT
Style Assessment
Find out your attachment style and how you tend to bond with those closest to you—especially your romantic partner?
ATTACHMENT
STYLE Assessment
How you bond with your romantic partner
What Is Adult Attachment
Attachment refers to how you bond with those closest to you, particularly with your romantic partner. This Adult Attachment Style Quiz allows you to learn more about human connection in general and specifically allows you to identify your Attachment Style tendency. Research shows how you bonded with your primary care givers (often parents) largely in your first two years of life tends to impact how you bond in close relationships as and adult. The reason seems to be that the first couple years of life is the phase in which the part of your nervous system related to bonding and connection is developing. The good news is our brains have neuroplasticity and our nervous systems can release past trauma and rewire themselves for more secure attachment. However, for most people, unless you have done adult attachment style repair and healing work, your childhood bonding tends to be the same attachment style in which you currently bond with your romantic partner. If you have not already taken the Adult Attachment Style Quiz, please do so now before continuing to read the remainder of this article.
Why Adult Attachment Matters
Whether child or adult, having secure connections is like having a stable physical and emotionally supportive base from which to live life. As this Attachment Style Quiz is design to help you discover, the more securely attached you are, the more primed you are to thrive in both solitude and in connection. This allows you to be more confident and successful out in the world and more supportively love-filled in close connection. Your Adult Attachment style refers to the particular way that you relate and connect with loved ones, especially your romantic partner and your closest friends. Understanding your attachment style offers you insight and healing into your own childhood bonding history. This matters because your attachment style impacts how you bond in close relationships, the romantic partners you choose, how your relationships tend to progress, the depth of your close connections, how reliable you experience people to be, how emotionally open you can be, the strategies you use to get your needs met and even how openly connected you can be in meeting someone for the first time.
Attachment and Attraction to Partners
In a sense, you most often tend to unconsciously attract partners who feel familiar and confirm your models of how connect works. By taking this Attachment Style Quiz to discover your style, reading or watching resources on Attachment and doing body-based healing work (see resources at the bottom of the page), you can become more secure and free yourself from these unconscious bonding patterns. As you heal the attachment circuitry of your nervous system in your body and rewire your mental models of how secure close connection is in your life, you can more towards what is called Earned Secure Attachment Style. That means even if you developed one of the other attachment styles as a child and continued to bond in this same way into your relationships as a young adult, you can still rewire and become more securely attached
Evolutionary Origins of Attachment
Humans are social creatures and we have banded together in tribes and communities for hundreds of thousands of years to support each other in living. Bonding is not all touchy feely though; in some cases, it is a matter of survival. in modern times, atheletes, soldiers, warriors, firefighters, law enforcement, and even gang-members can developer incredibly strong bonds with each other having proven their trust and reliability through challenging and situations. They want to know they can count on and trust another person to have each other’s back in a tough time, a life-threatening circumstance or competition. Sue Johnson, a renowned relationship therapist and one of the foremost experts on adult bonding and connection, sites research in evolutionary biology and the latest neuroscience, stating the first and foremost instinct of humans is neither sex nor aggression; it is to seek contact and connection. In taking this Adult Attachment Style Quiz, you may have noticed certain questions relating to these instinctual drives for contact, connection and relying on those close to you for survival. Just as we are interdependent parts of life on Earth, in relationhip and community, we come together to bond, live. survive and experience life together.
How Connection Develops
Bonding and connection begins in the womb with our mother and is especially essential as we humans are born into the world, small and dependent on others for survival. Not only do we require feeding, nurturing and protecting as we grow but we literally require connection through eye contact, touch, emotional resonance and loving heart connection for our development. While some animals leave their newborn soon after birth-human adult mothers seem to have an innate drive to care for and connect with their young, which is enhanced by the precious infant’s reaching, gazing, crying, cuing, and smiling. When we in our human infant vulnerability reach out, even yet without words, it is our care-giver’s responsiveness, eye contact, emotional attunement and open heart that signals felt sense of connection. As a social organism, our brains and nervous systems are wired for integration within ourselves and relational connection to others our first couple years of bonding, attention, attunement, mirroring, emotional responsiveness, etc. with our primary care-giver lays the foundation in our developing nervous systems for a life of connectivity. You may have noticed some of the questions in this Adult Attachment Style Quiz ask about these very same connection behaviors which is still how you bond with your romantic partner as an adult.
Dan Siegel at UCLA emphasizes that in order for a child to feel securely attached to their parents or care-givers, “the child must feel safe, seen and soothed.” Our parents’ responsiveness to our physical and emotional needs, is largely based upon their own attachment orientation. However, this is a major factor in establishing oour view of self as well as wiring of emotional regulation and connection based on how interactions usually occur. This establishes the foundation for our patterns of bonding and working models of “how connection works” which help us anticipate
responsiveness and reliability from those closest to us. We humans are social organisms designed for connection and the architecture of our social engagement nervous system is in our face chest and abdomen. This is literally wired and built by the attuned connection, or not, with a primary attachment figure ideally someone who provides protection, support and care.
Secure in Connection & Independence
After the second year of life, children typically begin to use the adult as a secure base from which to explore the world and develop greater independence. The questions in this Attachment Quiz related to both connection and independence are associated with this latter phase of the bonding process. And as we continue to grow and develop, eventually becoming working professionals and perhaps even parents ourselves, these two polarities of independent exploration and secure bonding, freedom and love continue. As the founder of Attachment Theory, John Bowlby beautifully stated, “all of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”
4 Main Adult Attachment Styles
This Adult Attachment Style Quiz examines how you bond based upon the 4 primary Adult Attachment Style: Secure Attachment Style, Anxious Attachment Style, Ambivalent Attachment Style and Avoidant Attachment Style. If you have not yet taken the Adult Attachment Style Quiz you can do so by clicking this button below.
Secure Attachment Style
- RELYING ON EACH OTHER
- ABILITY TO CONNECT
- SECURE SOLO & TOGETHER
- SECURE RELATIONSHIP
The more securely attached you are the more you trust and rely on the people that are closest to you. This involves being able to count on them to be emotionally available to connect on the regular and to be there for you when you might need support in times of distress. Being securely attached allows you to feel comfortable with emotion, emotional closeness and disclosing your inner thoughts and feelings. The Secure Attachment Style tends to not fear commitment or losing their freedom by being in a committed romantic relationship. Instead, you enjoy feeling open, close and connected when together, while still being individuated and are secure on your own. You feel securely attached in your bond, knowing you love each other and waste little energy worrying about losing connection. Your romantic partnership probably feels like a loving secure base that allows you to thrive in life in togetherness and independence.
Anxious Attachment Style
- WORRY
- CLOSENESS
- ATTENTION
- SELF-ESTEEM
The more anxiously attached you are the more you probably worry about getting the level of attention, connection and reassurance that you need from your partner. If you scored more anxious on this Attachment Style Quiz, you probably spend a lot of time and energy worrying about your romantic relationship, losing connection or whether your partner loves you as much as you do. The Anxious Attachment Style tends to struggle with low self-esteem, be overly pleasing and view others positively, but can be insecure and self-critical with yourself. Lastly, if you have a more anxious style, there may be a part of you that has a difficulty being alone, can be clingy or that wants to be in constant proximity and communication with your partner.
Ambivalent Attachment Style
- AMBIVALENCE
- BONDING CAN BE UNSAFE
- EMOTIONALLY CLOSED
- MISALIGNED
Ambivalent Attachment can have elements of both Anxious Attachment and Avoidant Attachment Styles. They tend to have mixed feelings about connection and conflicted about what they want. The ambivalence shows up in having both fears of being abandoned and struggles with being too close. They can feel as though the bonding partner want to go towards for safety could be the same person that hurts or tries to control them. As a kid this Ambivalent Attachment Style may have felt afraid, unsafe, or harmed, so they learned to detach from feelings or limit emotional closeness to prevent getting hurt. If they are in a relationship, they can feel conflicted, hesitant or be ambivalently “half in”. In other cases the Ambivalent Attachment Style may avoid close connection altogether.
Avoidant Attachment Style
- FEAR OF COMMITMENT / LOSING FREEDOM
- AVOIDANCE OF EMOTION / VULNERABILITY
- DIFFICULTY TRUSTING
- LIMITING CLOSENESS
The avoidant attachment style tends to associate connection and relationship with the loss of freedom and thus are more likely to have a fear of commitment and difficulty being fully “in” relationship. While there are gradations of avoidant attachment, this style generally tends to be more uncomfortable with emotion and disclosing their inner thoughts and feelings. Thus, they have learned to more easily detach from people emotionally and protect their vulnerability by hiding their feelings, avoiding emotion or shutting down emotionally. People with a more avoidant attachment style tend to limit prolonged connection and minimize closeness, i.e. emotional intimacy. This is where being emotionally unavailable is most closely related to the avoidant style. When their partner is needy, tries to get too close or sometimes even just wants to connect in a natural healthy way, the avoidant style can find themselves repulsed, feeling like they have to “get away”, withdraw or do something to maintaining a certain distance. This style tends to highly value freedom and be proud of their non-needy “independence” when at a deeper level they have also disowned certain aspects of natural human connection, because of younger attachment wounds. As a result, they have learned it is better to take care of their own needs, so that they don’t have to rely on others.
ATTACHMENT
Tools & resources for Healing Attachment
Books
Love Sense presents new scientific evidence showing that humans are meant to mate for life. Dr. Johnson explains that romantic love is an attachment bond, just like that between mother and child, and shows us how to develop our “love sense” — our ability to develop long-lasting relationships.
Attached guides readers in determining what attachment style they and their mate (or potential mate) follow, offering a road map for building stronger, more fulfilling connections with the people they love.
Adult Attachment Repair
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
Emotionally focused couples therapy is a short-term structured approach to couples therapy that focuses on creating more secure attachment between partners. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is based on the theory of attachment and is an experiential, emotionally intelligent, person-centered therapy that focuses on developing real-time authentic communication and connection skills. The basic idea behind for couples: is that underneath your fights with your partner there is a desire to feel secure in your loving connection.
