Speaking of Psychology: Attachment bonds: Understanding our closest relationships, with Ximena Arriaga, PhD

What makes us feel secure, safe, and supported in our relationships with partners, friends, and family? Ximena Arriaga, PhD, talks about how early and ongoing life experiences shape our bonds with others, why our “attachment style” isn’t fixed but can always change, and how partners can help each other thrive in their close relationships.

Ximena Arriaga, PhD, is a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. She studies close relational bonds—how they help people thrive within and beyond their relationships, but also how some bonds can cause considerable pain and harm. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, and other organizations, and it is widely recognized for its social impact and relevance, which she leverages in her work with community organizations.

Kim Mills: Close relationships are essential to our health and happiness. But what happens when people find it difficult to feel secure, safe, and supported in their closest relationships with partners, friends, or family? Today we’re going to talk with a psychologist who studies attachment theory about how our early and ongoing life experiences shape our later bonds with others.

Why do some people find it easier to navigate close relationships than others? If you or your partner tend to feel anxious or insecure in your relationship, what can you do to change that? And what happens when attachment goes awry, as in abusive or violent relationships?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Ximena Arriaga, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. She studies close relationship bonds—how they help people thrive within and beyond their relationships, but also how some bonds can cause considerable pain and harm. She’s published dozens of peer-reviewed studies and her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and other organizations. Dr. Arriaga has been recognized for her research and teaching with awards from Purdue and from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Dr. Arriaga, thank you for joining me today.

Ximena Arriaga, PhD: Thank you, Kim. It’s really a pleasure to be here with you today.

Mills: Let’s start as we often do with this podcast, with a definition. What is attachment or attachment style and how many types of attachments are there?

Arriaga: So an attachment orientation is simply a way of characterizing or describing how comfortable, how at ease—really, how secure we are around others, especially in social contexts that will activate risk, will feel like they have red flags in them in terms of how we’re going to be treated by others. So classic example might be a child who’s in the first day at a new school and they’re going to enter the lunchroom. We’d all feel pretty nervous about that, but there are going to be variations across people. People will differ in how they react to that situation.

So in terms of styles, the popular media often will recognize four styles, a secure attachment, an anxious or preoccupied attachment, a dismissive avoidant or somewhat detached attachment style and a fearful avoidant or somewhat disorganized attachment style. But really what we’re talking about here are signature responses that will reflect variations in two things, attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. So we can place people in terms of where they are in those two dimensions and certainly variations on those dimensions are useful for predicting a lot of things, what we think is going to happen, what we expect when we enter social situations, what we pay attention to and what we perceive and how we make sense and interpret things, and certainly how we respond, how we react to them.

Mills: What’s the etiology of this? I mean, how do you learn an attachment style? Where does it come from in your life? Is it something that you learn as a child? Does it vary throughout your life? Are there any biological components?

Arriaga: Yeah, historically attachment theories have focused very much on the nurture side of a nature nurture debate. In the last 10 years, we’re learning much more about biological underpinnings, especially with respect to attachment anxiety. But we can explain a lot of how people manifest a certain signature pattern, especially in their relationships by just looking at their history. So we can go way back in history to their infancy. Certainly attachment bonds begin from the moment we’re born. So attachment bonds are something that we’ve evolved to have. Mammals need caregivers, mammals signal when they need something, and baby mammals tend to be pretty cute. So they also tend to evoke a lot of love and care and all of that has the function of helping them survive. That is part of the attachment system that Bowlby described. Now as we fast forward when we get into adulthood, there are traces of some stable tendencies. It could be stable ways of interpreting red flags, things like that. But it’s our relationship history that’s going to matter the most there. How have we been treated by past partners? Have we been treated by close others? Do we feel generally loved or do we feel like we’ve got a lot of work to do? Do we feel like there are danger signs all over the place?

Mills: And can you have different attachment styles depending on the person you’re relating to?

Arriaga: Absolutely. In terms of styles, when we talk about styles, a secure style is someone who generally is very comfortable around their relationship partners. They tend to expect all things being well. They tend to expect that they’re going to be loved and valued, that they’ll develop trust. They feel okay depending on that person, and they don’t mind if that person depends on them. When there is a problem or a crisis or issue that comes up, they certainly respond with anger, with other things that most people respond with, but they don’t overreact. They also don’t underreact and shut down, so they hunker down and they work the problem. Now, that would be great if all our relationships were like that, but not all of them are like that. If I’m paired with someone who frankly flirts a lot with other people where I’m constantly seeing these signs that maybe they’re not as committed as I want them to be, that’s going to start to set off these red flags and that’s going to reinforce a more anxious attachment orientation.

And so when people feel a lot of attachment anxiety, they’re worried, they’re worried, and this really is what fits the classic thing that comes to mind when we say someone’s insecure, they’re overly worried. They seem like they’re monitoring everything. Those are signs that in the past, that’s what I had to do to protect myself. So I may have become pretty preoccupied with what was happening in my relationship because I want it to work, and yet my partner doesn’t seem to be there with me at every step. I might become overly sensitive to problems. So even though in a new relationship there’s nothing to worry about, I may over interpret signs that there’s a problem and create mountains out of molehill. I might become very jealous, easily and overly protective. And the other thing with attachment anxieties that when a problem does arise, these are individuals who spiral in their negative emotions and catastrophize and really have trouble stepping back and being able to see the situation more objectively.

They tend to interpret all of that strife and problem as being their own deficiency and a reflection of their own unworthiness or lack of value in some way. So that’s one type. And then another type is attachment avoidance. And here the key thing is whereas anxiously attached people are visibly insecure, avoidantly attached, people will mask their concerns. They suppress their negative emotions. They become quite uncomfortable when a partner wants more emotional intimacy. They don’t want to depend on others. They don’t want to others to depend on them. That’s this kind of a hassle. They balk at neediness, they value self-reliance. And then when there’s a problem, when there is a conflict of some kind, whereas anxious people put their emotions into high gear, they have what’s called a hyperactivated response, avoidant people will suppress and withdraw. They go into low gear and do what’s called a deactivated response.

So we see anxious people digging deeper into a problem, not letting go. We see avoidant people looking for the nearest exit running out and just assume never, I never want to think about that again. Can we just move on? So the problem is, we just noted is it’s not necessarily the case that all relationships warrant insecurity. So if I had a series of relationships that made me pretty anxious, but then I enter a relationship with pretty secure partner, someone who is very trustworthy, it’s going to take some time for me to overcome that, and I may not be able to overcome it. I’m going to carry that history with me, and I am probably going to cause some problems in that relationship because I’m going to be demanding a lot about my partner’s commitment and showing me that they’re faithful and showing me these things. That’s kind of exhausting. Partners get a little bit tired of that. And then you could say the same for avoidance, how that becomes in a relationship where your partner actually is quite trustworthy.

Mills: Attachment theory has a fairly long history in psychology. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did this whole theory arise?

Arriaga: So mentioned John Bowlby very briefly before, and John Bowlby was studying animal behavior, and his observations were based on those infant mammals, the infant kittens, and he didn’t study kittens, but those behaviors that are universal in mammals. So these attachment processes, this idea that we need others, we need others. This is not some modern conception and this is not—it’s pretty foundational. And Bowlby was super at laying out these normative processes that mammals seem to undergo as they seek assistance and support from others and others develop caregiving systems to provide that support from mythology.

We jump over to child development where Mary Ainsworth took this a step further by saying, not all of us have the same experiences, so based on our personal histories, we’re going to see some differences. And she identified very coherent signature patterns, individual differences that reflect insecurity. So it was Mary Ainsworth who really developed this idea of insecure types. From there, we jumped to social psychology to the late eighties where Phil Shaver worked with Cindy Hassan and published several papers, but one particular one very influential that made a strong case for understanding romantic bonds in terms of these attachment processes. And that launched thousands of studies.

What I should say is Phil Shaver actually met with personality psychologist Mario Mikulincer. So it was that pairing that launched the thousand studies that defined the field. I mean, they have arguably one of the most prolific partnerships in psychological science. I call them the Watson and Crick of adult social bonds. They’re the thing right there. And then there’ve been others too. I mean, Chris Fraley studied with Phil Shaver and Chris Fraley has been very influential in mapping these two adult attachment dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, and what it means to vary on those two sides of it. That brings us up to about 2015.

I would not necessarily put myself in this line of history among these luminaries, but what we did start doing in 2015 was asking, what about this insecure still, we know so much about insecurity, we know so much about what anxious individuals do, how they behave, what it means for their relationships, avoidance and so forth. But can we change that? Can we help people become more secure? And that’s what got us thinking about that. And what we’re seeing is a lot of people actually want to answer that question.

Mills: So what got you interested in studying this particular aspect of psychology?

Arriaga: When I entered graduate school, I picked the person, not the topic. My late advisor, Caryl Rusbult, was a formidable, fabulous person. And I met her and said, I want to be like she is. That’s my model. And so that took me down the road of close relationships. We did not study attachment processes, but I did become very interested in this question of whether you can change stable tendencies. And I got very interested in this issue of how do people become more secure? What really got me interested in this was being an instructor. I would teach a course on close relationships and I would go over everything we knew about attachment styles and how anxious individuals really struggle in their relationships.

And, Kim, I’d look out into my students and I’d see these faces suddenly look super concerned and just distraught. And I was like, okay, those are the anxious individuals in my group. And then I’d describe avoidance and how people sort of detach and shut down. And sure enough, I’d look in the audience and some students would be turning away and wanting to look at their phone and not having any of this. I’m like, they’re my avoidants. And invariably some would come up to me after class and say, Am I doomed? Am I never going to have a decent relationship? And I thought, Nah, come on. It could be—if it’s situations, if it’s certain moments, key moments that reinforce insecurity, surely there must be moments, key salient moments that can reinforce more security. And that’s what really got us studying that.

Mills: For some of our listeners who might be just starting a relationship with someone, how can they tell what that other person’s attachment style is and whether it’s going to be compatible with their own?

Arriaga: Compatibility is an interesting issue. I mean, they can tell where there are sensitive spots with their partner. We all at times will feel anxious and we all at times will probably feel avoidant. So in that pairing, it’s figuring out what am I doing that might trigger anxiety for my partner or might trigger avoidance for my partner. Now, there are also signs when my partner’s having a bad day at work and they refuse to talk about it, that’s avoidance. Or my partner’s having a bad day at work and they just cannot let it go. That’s anxiety. And so those would be the kinds of signs that, again, that sort of hyperactivated overreacting or deactivated underreacting to stressful situations. But I think compatibility often just comes down to that moment where you really want to be committed to this person and you’re getting signs that that person really wants to be committed to you. So at that point, no relationship is perfect. You have to work things out. And I think there are ways to alleviate some anxieties and alleviate some avoidant tendencies in relationships.

Mills: And what are some of those ways?

Arriaga: That’s a big question. That’s a loaded question. When Madoka and I started to ask this question of how might people become more secure, we wanted to study relationship bonds. One, because we knew about how those bonds work. And two, because relationship partners are really important attachment figures in adulthood. They’re not the only ones. I think that others might have a close friend, sometimes a neighbor. There are a lot of close others who can be that attachment figure. Attachment figures can be really important in reinforcing security in two ways. The first way is we know that insecurities wreak havoc with relationships when the anxious person just all they want is to get their partner’s commitment, but they demand too much. That has the self-reinforcing effect of pushing a partner away. When the avoidant person seems way too detached and can’t seem to commit that has the self-reinforcing effect of having a partner also pull away because they’re seeing this go nowhere.

So those insecurities that the first part is trying to mitigate the negative effects that they can have on relationships, what people feel really anxious, we were really interested in what we call soft strategies. And there’s no mystery here. It’s actually to me rather obvious at least. So partners can do a lot to mitigate another person’s anxiety by providing lots of reassurance, lots of emotional reassurance, being a calming, soothing influence to try to diffuse some of those spiraling negative emotions, communicating really strong commitment. So a very effective response might be something like, I know this is really concerning. It makes sense that you’re very worried. And you don’t want to belittle something. It makes sense that you’re very worried and hug, hug, kiss, kiss, touch, touch. And then at that point you say something like, well, I’m with you 100%. Whatever you want to do, I will be right behind you. If you want help, great. If you want to go solo, great, but we’re going to get through this and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, so we will work this problem. That’s a lot of reassurance right there.

Now note that there are two things about that response. The first thing is don’t try that on an avoidant person. That’s going to backfire. So there are very different strategies to use with an avoidant insecurity, and that’s not always obvious to people. The second thing is that even though that puts a band-aid on the moment, okay, we saved the relationship in the moment, those responses are not getting at a telltale feature of attachment anxiety. That’s a relatively negative mental model of oneself. We have these certain critical mental representations. Our mental representation of ourself is really elaborate. It’s a lifetime of experiences. So our mental model of ourself for anxious individuals tends to be characterized by low self-esteem, low self-worth, low self-efficacy. That’s the real issue in at. That’s what sustains attachment anxiety. So to really change this over the longer term, a partner can do a second type of thing, and that’s to identify those situations that might revise that negative way of seeing oneself. So partner with an anxious individual might look for those confidence boosting moments.

If their partner, their anxious person, suddenly gets an award, a partner can capitalize on that. They could say, I know you feel like anyone might’ve gotten this award—because anxious individuals are notoriously bad at taking compliments by the way. You can’t just say, good job, that’s going to seem empty. But I know you feel like anyone could have gotten this award, but here’s what I saw. I saw you work really hard every single weekend for this. I saw you be really dedicated to this. And sure, maybe others could have gotten it, but you got it. And I think this is important, and I think this is the start of something. I think you’re onto something really important. So it’s amplifying the moment and trying to get them to internalize it in some way.

I’m reminded of a friend of mine who when she first entered academics, she just felt like she didn’t belong. And our advisor immediately could stop a brilliant scholar and said, this is a great idea. This is a really important idea. The more reinforcement she got for her ability and for her efficacy as a researcher, the more the social anxiety, Do I belong?, just melted away. She wasn’t as preoccupied with it. So it’s boosting that model of self for anxious individuals.

Mills: But it sounds a little bit like imposter syndrome might’ve been at play there as well, right? I mean, do these things relate to each other?

Arriaga: Yes, they do. They do. And I think there’s some lessons here. I’ve been in higher education now for 30 years, and before we talked about DEI it was talking about inclusion. And the reason to talk about inclusion is because when people feel imposter syndrome in a work setting, if you can find what they’re really good at and exploit that you’re really good at this, this is what you do really well, the other stuff will follow—the feeling excluded, all those things. Not always. There are some real barriers to feeling included, but a lot of that, the psychological feeling and not being included, it becomes secondary to the fact that, Hey, I’m actually a rock star at this and I can do pretty well at this. And it’s a way of overcoming that imposter syndrome.

Mills: Do people who form bonds who get into relationships tend to have the same kind of attachment? I mean does mate with like so to speak?

Arriaga: I wish I could answer that question with confidence. So there are historically some data on this suggesting that yes, we tend to see secures with secures and insecures with insecures. And when we look at that insecure, insecure pattern, it’s not uncommon to see avoidance with anxiety. And so immediately you’re asking, well, which came first? Was it that an anxious person made the other one more avoidant? Or did the avoidant person make the other one more anxious? Which one came first? And that historically was also confounded with some gender patterns. So when you look at the clinical psych literature on marital dynamics, the classic pattern of demand-withdraw, that has anxiety avoidance written all over it.

Now, the reason I’m tentative in saying that’s still true is because we are seeing a lot of attachment anxiety right now. Now we’re also seeing a lot of anxiety period, and I think those two are related. So we’re seeing many more couples where they’re both anxiously attached, and it’s hard to disambiguate whether the origins are these experiences with social bonds and how one was treated previously by important others versus just general anxiety from social media and all those things in life that are causing a lot of anxiety.

Mills: You also study abusive and violent relationships. What role does attachment play in these relationships and what can that tell us about how to help people who are in those relationships?

Arriaga: Yes. I think that violence and attachment can have an interplay of an association. So I think they can go both directions. There’s some data from long ago that would look at how perpetrators who exhibited this anxiously attached style would be overly controlling and very jealous and lash out. There’s still evidence of that, but perpetration is multiply determined. And so there are a lot of perpetrators that aren’t at all anxiously attached on the receiving end of violence. And I know there are lots of data on how violence is bidirectional and so forth. I think there’s a methodological artifact there in how we study violence. And I think that when you start tracing back to the origins of that relationship, you probably will see one person perpetrating violence a little bit more than the other one, and the other one reciprocating. So when people are on the receiving end of violence, we just published a paper showing how those experiences with abuse will reinforce avoidance, how the adaptive rational thing is to shut down emotionally.

This is an untenable situation and it’s too painful to remain engaged. So we do see these links between a person’s attachment style or orientation and their experiences either perpetrating or being on the receiving end of violence, but they’re difficult that when we think about them, we have to kind of go in and pick specific behaviors, like when a partner is engaging, abusive, verbal, abusive is what we’re likely to see. Or when a partner feels jealousy, probably that’s being driven by their own attachment history and so forth. So we just need a little bit of precision in that literature.

Mills: One of your studies had to do with how young people in abusive or controlling relationships felt after they broke up. What did you find and were some of those results surprising?

Arriaga: Yeah. I’m thinking of work that I’ve done with and something that happens in abusive relationships when it tends to be more one-sided, or at least in its origins, it was more one-sided where a person was a victim of very abusive behavior. There’s a loss of self, so there’s a sense that I don’t matter that much, and people just forget about themselves. And let me give you an example of this. I remember being part of a support group at one point where there was an activity that involved, Hey, let’s talk about what you like to make for dinner. What’s your favorite meal for dinner? And one person said, Well, my husband loves it when I make chicken. Like, that’s great. We all love chicken. What do you like for dinner? What’s your favorite? Well, my kids love it when I blah, blah, blah. So there was this sense that I am not here.

And that loss of self is a sign of having been controlled and belittled and humiliated repeatedly for a long time. That’s a rational response. If I’m in an abusive relationship and I don’t see a way out, and I don’t mean just financial dependence, I mean emotional commitment as well, psychological dependence. So if I’m in a long time relationship, I may have a job. I may be able to make it fine on myself, but we have a lifetime together. We’ve got kids together, we’ve got plans for the future. We have our entire networks together. I saw myself with this person. I know that when they’re not abusive, they can be a good person. So it’s a very complicated thing to undo. And when a person’s not ready to undo it, the rational response is to reinterpret the violence to say, well, it’s not so bad. There are reasons behind it.

It’s justifiable and so forth. All of that leads to one, putting myself in mind where I don’t matter. I’m in the very back of the line. When people leave an abusive relationship, only then do they look back with a different lens and then they see, ah, I understand that when she was being abusive toward me, I was ignoring it. I was denying it. I was reinterpreting it, and I couldn’t see that in the moment. No matter what my friends would say to me, I couldn’t see it. Which by the way, that’s why it’s very difficult to intervene in this very well-intentioned friends will say something, but it’s falling on deaf ears when a person is still very committed. Now I see it. That’s the moment to start to bolster that sense of self again. That’s the moment to start to build that sense of self. So find a hobby. How did it go with your hobby? Wow, that’s really cool what you did. How did you crochet that? Anything that starts to give that person a sense of self agency: This is what I like. This is what I want, and this is what matters to me.

Mills: What are you studying now and what are the big questions that still remain to be answered in this field?

Arriaga: I come back to the attachment work because I think that that is so universal. We haven’t solved this issue of how do we help people become more secure. Now, I think any mental health experts, so counselors, anyone who’s working in the mental health space, has probably solved it and can work with someone carefully along the lines of—Sue, the late Sue Johnson’s work on emotion focused therapy. But that’s a very long process of trying to overcome insecurities and let’s face it’s very expensive process too, and not everyone can afford the time or money to do that kind of work. What I would love to do is to be able to provide people with information that might help.

Here’s the thing, if I want to change, let’s say I’m really anxiously attached. I want to become more secure. Great. Now I’m going to set out to do it. That’s half the story. I may have the volition. I may have the will to do it, but I’m not sure what to do. I really don’t know. Like I just said, the kind of responses for avoidant reactions are very different from the kinds of responses one might have for anxious reactions in terms of effective responses. So I’d love to have information that people can adapt to their own lives when we talk about safe strategies for anxious individuals or soft strategies for avoidant individuals, which I didn’t get into that much, but we’ve written about that it’s not cut and dry, do 1, 2, 3. It’s something that a person has to be ready to adapt and know how to adapt, have the skill to adapt to their own life and their own relationships. So I’m really interested in doing good science that provides an answer to that. How can people adapt these things to their own lives? We’ve done some experimental work, but it is really difficult work.

Mills: Well, it sounds like there’s still a lot to learn then in attachment theory.

Arriaga: I think there is. It’s an exciting field. I really respect the people who have been forerunners in this field. I think it’s great work. And the thing Kim, about relationship science is I’m never sure if I should tell people I’m a relationship scientist. I mean, the first reaction I always get is like, oh, you must be analyzing my relationship. I always joke back. In fact, I am. You’re not doing so well. I mean, I don’t say that to them, but it sounds a little bit fluffy and light. And the reality is that relationship scientists have studied and identified some pretty core principles about getting along with others, and I think the lessons extrapolate to societal problems and societal issues and community problems. And so I think there’s a lot to learn there. And I think that there’s a lot that we’ve learned that we can certainly apply to a lot of the issues and problems that we’re confronting right now.

Mills: Dr. Ariaga, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s been really interesting. Thank you.

Arriaga: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being here.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.