By Yaldaz Sadakova
I love taking long walks in the evenings. On one of my recent walks, I noticed a door sign not too far from my place in Toronto. It says Who Taught You to Love.
The sign made me think of two things.
First, the writer in me noted that it’s missing a question mark.
Second, it made me think of how I would answer that question. Many people might think that the answer to this question is something romantic. That the person who taught us to love is the love of our lives or our first love.
My answer is far less romantic and more detailed. Here it is:
You got your first lesson about love from your primary caregivers. They caused you to develop a secure or insecure attachment style as an infant. Before you could barely speak, before you knew much about the world, your caregivers handed you a blueprint of how to bond with them and what to expect from a relationship.
If they were consistently responsive to your needs for food, shelter, attention, affection and validation—if they were your refuge in the world—you learned that you can trust them to be there for you. You learned that you are worthy and your needs deserve to be fulfilled.
How responsive your caregivers were impacts, at least to an extent, whether as an adult you see yourself as worthy, whether you trust others to be there for you—and whether intimacy is something you fear, crave anxiously or feel comfortable with.
This geeky answer is a function of the fact that I recently became obsessed with attachment theory.
The foundations of attachment theory were laid during the second half of the last century by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Numerous studies have built on their research over the years.
According to attachment theory, there are three main attachment styles. They determine how we bond with those closest to us and how we show up in relationships.
These styles, which can be observed both in children and adults, are secure, anxious and avoidant. A small percentage of the population falls into a fourth category, which is both anxious and avoidant. This style is also known as disorganized.
The attachment styles we developed as kids in response to how attentive our caregivers were can remain stable throughout our lives. They can feel hardwired. But they can also change under certain circumstances.
“Initially it was assumed that adult attachment styles were primarily a product of your upbringing. Thus, it was hypothesized that your current attachment style is determined by the way you were cared for as a baby: If your parents were sensitive, available, and responsive, you should have a secure attachment style; if they were inconsistently responsive, you should develop an anxious attachment style; and if they were distant, rigid, and unresponsive, you should develop an avoidant attachment style,” psychologists Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller note in their book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep— Love.
“Today, however, we know that attachment styles in adulthood are influenced by a variety of factors, one of which is the way our parents cared for us, but other factors also come into play, including our life experiences.”
Adult Attachment Styles
Adults with a secure attachment style have a balanced and resilient approach to relationships.
They don’t fear intimacy or abandonment, so they don’t feel the need to be emotionally distant or clingy. They trust that their partners will be there for them and they are able to be there for their partners. They believe in their self-worth.
They communicate their needs directly and respectfully. They’re good at reading their partners’ emotional cues and responding to them.
They manage conflict efficiently, without resorting to defensiveness, attacks, stonewalling or manipulation. They’re good at de-escalating emotionally charged situations.
People who have an avoidant attachment style fear intimacy and the vulnerability it requires. They often have a hard time opening up to their partners.
They prefer independence to intimacy because they don’t trust that their partners will be there for them—and because they’ve learned to suppress their needs for closeness in order to avoid rejection.
Avoidant people often worry about their partners trying to control them or to invade their space. They perceive their partners’ desire for closeness and attention as a threat or a burden, so they feel the need to distance themselves.
They expect their partners to be able to fulfill their own emotional needs. They’re often emotionally or physically unavailable. They have trouble reading their partners’ emotional cues. They don’t spend too much time thinking about their relationships. They respond to conflict by withdrawing and disengaging.
People with an anxious attachment style crave closeness and they have a great capacity for intimacy.
They have a deep fear of abandonment and rejection. Even the smallest sign of disengagement or withdrawal—such as their partner not returning their call soon enough—can cause them to panic that they will be abandoned. As a result, they need constant reassurance and validation. However, if they receive it, they’re able to feel secure.
Anxious people tend to be preoccupied with their relationships. They’re very attuned to the emotions and moods of their partners. They’re often people pleasers. They respond to conflict by clinging and seeking reassurance.
Adults with a disorganized attachment style have the characteristics of both anxious and avoidant people.
They crave closeness, but at the same time they distance themselves due to fear of rejection and abandonment. They’re afraid that their partners will not be there for them. They believe they’re not worthy of love.
Their relationship behavior is inconsistent, erratic and confusing. This often does lead to rejection and abandonment, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The disorganized attachment style is believed to result from abuse and trauma in childhood.
Self-Sufficiency Is Overrated
One of my big takeaways from learning about attachment bonds—rather belatedly, in my late 30s—is that self-sufficiency is overrated. And I say this as somebody who has always prided herself on her independence.
I’m now convinced that we’re not meant to fulfill every single one of our emotional needs by ourselves, the way modern culture teaches us.
As psychiatrist Jeremy Holmes says in his book John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, “Attachment research tells us that psychological health is not an inherent property of an individual; it arises out of the early parent-child matrix, and manifests itself, and is reinforced, or undermined, by subsequent and current relationships.”
It looks like there is some biological truth to this. “Numerous studies show that once we become attached to someone, the two of us form one physiological unit,” Levine and Heller note in Attached.
“Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the levels of hormones in our blood. We are no longer separate entities. The emphasis on differentiation that is held by most of today’s popular psychology approaches to adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective. Dependency is a fact; it is not a choice or a preference.”
I have also revised my view of love as this ineffable mysterious thing. Now I define love as the existence of an attachment bond. Loving someone means having an attachment bond with them, whether it’s secure or not.
As Bowlby himself noted in his 1970 paper Disruption of Affectional Bonds and Its Effects on Behavior, “Many of the most intense of all human emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption and the renewal of affectional bonds.”
He wrote that “the formation of a bond is described as falling in love, maintaining a bond as loving someone and losing a partner as grieving over someone. Similarly, threat of loss arouses anxiety and actual loss causes sorrow; whilst both situations are likely to arouse anger. Finally the unchallenged maintenance of a bond is expressed as a source of security, and the renewal of a bond as a source of joy.”
What Does Attachment Theory Have to Do With Immigration?
You might be wondering why I’m talking about attachment theory in a space devoted to immigration-related stories. What does any of this have to do with immigration and multilingualism?
A lot actually. The attachment style we have, as mentioned earlier, can remain stable throughout our lives. That’s because it’s associated with deep subconscious beliefs acquired in childhood about our worthiness and the reliability of those closest to us.
These subconscious beliefs are not easy to shed. They can be carried over even if we switch languages and countries.
This is why even when we move to new places and start new relationships with people from different cultures, we might still find ourselves repeating the same behavioral patterns and attracting the same types of partners and relationships. No matter where we go, we can’t escape ourselves.
For example, my attachment style is mostly anxious. I’m needy.
By the way, it feels so cathartic to declare that truth publicly after years of trying to hide it and to pretend that I don’t need the things I need. Because, of course, we’re socialized to see neediness as one of the worst, most uncool qualities.
I experienced neglect, abandonment and trauma as a kid. If you ask me to name one happy childhood memory, I won’t be able to. I can’t think of any. I do, however, have happy memories from my teens.
I was born and raised in Bulgaria, so this is the place where early on I developed the belief that neglect and abandonment is all I can expect.
That I am not worthy of love.
That my needs are unimportant.
That asserting myself or disagreeing will lead to punishment and rejection.
That my job is to be what others need me to be—rather than myself—in order to get approval and attention.
That I’m deeply flawed and inadequate in a way nobody else is.
Although I never consciously articulated these beliefs to myself in Bulgarian or in my mother tongue, Turkish, my mind just knew.
Years later and an ocean away from Bulgaria, these beliefs translate with disturbing accuracy to my current dominant language, English, and to my current context.
The fact that I have lived in several countries and changed languages, that I’ve started and ended relationships in different places, hasn’t eradicated these beliefs. They have remained intact. They still feel like unquestionable facts.
They continue to guide my behavior like an invisible hand. So, like clockwork, I keep getting triggered in certain situations in the exact same way I used to get triggered as a kid in Bulgaria.
But at least now I know why. ♦
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