Letting Go of Your Attachment Style
Can Buddhist non-attachment and attachment style get along?
An essential tenet of Buddhism states that attachment is one of the Three Poisons that cause suffering, along with aversion and ignorance. What is meant by attachment? Is this love? Connection? A friend related the following story to me:
“In a recent beginner discussion at the dharma center, a new student asked about attachment vs attachment styles – the way they understood it, the Buddhist idea of attachment contradicted their own understanding of relationship attachment style. Upon posing the question, no less than half of their fellow new students chimed in that they, too, had been confused about how the practice non-attachment might affect their intimate connections, including one young man whose partner had rejected Buddhism outright based on the misunderstanding that the practice of ‘non-attachment’ might lead to the demise of their relationship.”
It is my hope to bring some clarity to these two very different concepts of attachment, and how they are completely compatible.
Attachment in Buddhism
Buddhist attachment is not love or connection. Attachment is one of the Three Poisons because it causes secondary suffering. Suffering is “my ice cream cone fell on the floor.” Secondary suffering is crying for hours: “Why me, what’s wrong with me? Why does my ice cream cone always fall on the floor? This always happens to me!”
In Daring Steps Towards Fearlessness, for which this blog is named, Lama Ringu Tulku describes attachment in this way: “Then, on the other hand, there are those things that are so nice. We think, ‘I want them. I want them so much. I must run after them! I have to get them! Once I have got them I cannot part with them!’ Through this way of thinking, first attraction and desire occur, then clinging, and finally strong attachment arises (p. 24).”
The Buddhism notion of attachment is about clinging, grasping, or longing. We get attached to so many things: outcomes, people’s behavior, ideas. I had a beautiful weekend a few weeks ago. I was camping in the temperate rainforest near Port Townsend Washington, the Northwest of the Northwest. I was with a group of brave, intense, vulnerable beings at a men’s retreat.
If I neglected all my duties beforehand, because I was obsessed with how wonderful this weekend would be, I might be suffering this attachment. If I was sad because the weekend was going to end, even while it was going on, I would suffer the attachment. If I spent the following days pining for my trip, depressed because it has ended, grasping to something that was over, sad because this special thing would never happen again, I would be suffering from my attachment to this trip. It’s possible to experience unhealthy attachments within romantic relationships, but Buddhist non-attachment is unconnected to attachment style.
What are Attachment Styles?
Attachment theory is an exploration of childhood development that was put forward by Bowlsby and Ainsworth in the 1950s and ‘60s (Siegel, p. 103). Infants’ ability to explore, self-regulate, form intimate attachment, and process emotions mirrors what was modeled by their primary caregiver. Over time, attachment theory was expanded to include our adult intimate attachment style. We develop a relationship style based on how we were soothed as babies, and that the adult style might show up as stable, clingy, aloof, or chaotic. You can understand your attachment style by how you handle conflict. Do you check out during conflicts? Do you follow your partner around in the relentless pursuit of their approval, or do you need to resolve things right now?
Secure Attachment
As a toddler you could go off, explore, get hurt, come running back to your parent and be soothed. When you get hurt and run to their lap, they will be there, without judgment. Babies with secure attachments have parents who appear to understand the baby’s internal states. This type of parent is not perfect. If they screw up, they will repair it. In adult relationships, this means you spend quality time together, and also quality, healthy time apart. You can soothe yourself in a positive way. After conflict, you make sure to repair. If your partner is hurt, you can be OK sitting with their distress, even if you were the source.
Ambivalent (Anxious) Attachment
This parent might not be OK when you attempt to run off. In fact, they are managing such high anxiety, you’re experiencing a lot more cortisol than oxytocin when you look into their eyes. If the parent is anxious, and cannot soothe you when you run off and explore, or prevents you from running off to explore, you might carry that same anxiety. In adult relationships, you’re likely to get upset when your partner is upset. Your partner comes home and they had a bad day at work: you are instantly affected, and upset that they’re upset, even though it was nothing between you. You have a hard time understanding yourself.
Avoidant Attachment
This parent might be checked out when you run off to explore as a toddler, and will be checked out when you return. When you get hurt, they might not have a lot to offer, other than “that’s what happens, I told you.” Or they will freeze you out, say nothing. Emotion is too much for them, so the parent will withdraw. As an adult in intimate partnership, you bolt at the first sign of conflict. You might not physically leave, but you disengage, often with numbing substances. People who show signs of avoidant attachment don’t spent a lot of time in relationships to find out if it’s safe, and may have a difficult time in relationship to themselves.
Disorganized Attachment
This one is rough. To a small child, a parent with disorganized attachment is unpredictable, unsafe. Some days there might be no lap to go back to, once you’ve gone off to explore, or they might be grandiose when you return: “how could you ever leave me! You’re the only good thing in my life!” Chronically abused kids, kids with violent parents, or parents with their own unresolved trauma, can develop disorganized attachment. Kids of parents with addiction: they have no idea which version of their parent will show up, so they are constantly guessing, and they are frequently punished for guessing the wrong way.
This attachment style is seen frequently with people with complex PTSD, or what is also called borderline personality. The disorganized person is fractured, and has a hard time regulating their emotions; they mold themselves to the person they attach to, mirroring them as completely as possible, with an effort not to have to guess at their partner’s internal states. They will love someone deeply and intensely, then if there is one small injury, with little ability to to self-regulate or experience repair, they will rage and then disappear from your life.
This is not mother-blaming.
A lot of the early work of attachment theory focused on mothers, but it is really about the child’s relationship with their primary caregiver. People experience addiction, their own mental illness, intergenerational trauma, sometimes all three. They are frequently doing the best they can. I speak as one of these parents: I have experienced active posttraumatic stress disorder due to an unstable parent situation, and a pretty high ACES score. We do the best we can, and sometimes it’s not enough. And we wake up and try again the next day. We fail better.
Attachment Style is not Set in Stone
Many of my clients tell me their attachment style as if it were a fixed part of their biology: I’m AB-negative and avoidant attached; or they will tell me what’s wrong with their partner because of their conflicting attachment styles. It’s just a label. It’s a way to make sense of the world, a helpful guide for certain modes of therapy, but it’s nothing more than that.
Although there is a nice evidence base for attachment theory, it’s not something you can see. There’s no blood test, you can’t get an MRI: attachment type is not a diagnosis, and as with much of psychology, there is wide disagreement. It would be unethical to replicate that Strange Situation experiment from which we developed the foundation of attachment theory. There is a consensus about it, at least in the family therapy community, but if I talked to a Freudian psychologist, a third wave behavioralist, or a transpersonal psychologist, they might have very little knowledge of Attachment Theory.
Accept that like most psychology concepts, it is socially constructed. That does not make it an undisputed fact, and it can change. Someone with a self-diagnosed Avoidant Attachment style might exhibit many different attachment styles. They might be avoidant with one parent, secure with a step-parent, ambivalent with one close friend and secure with another. Any adult with an attachment style challenge can grow to develop a secure attachment: it takes practice, mindfulness, cultivating strong self-regulation skills, distress tolerance, flexibility, some risk taking, and therapy.
A part of my job, in fact, the most elemental part of my job, is to help my clients create a secure attachment with me. They can be themselves, cry, stonewall, argue with me, disappear, show up high (pls don’t do this to your therapist FYI), ignore me, and all of it is OK: I can temporarily exist as that caring, nonjudgmental base for them to explore the world. If they can develop a secure attachment with their therapist, they can do so with other adults.
Do you have an unhealthy attachment to your attachment style?
If a client told me, “I cannot get into a relationship because I have an avoidant attachment,” we would work to understand the clinging to this attachment style. What makes you grasp for this concept? Clinging to this idea of attachment style causes unnecessary harm.
There is no inherent contradiction in practicing both non-attachment, and working toward a secure attachment style. How might you do this? One option is meditative practice with each of the Four Immeasurables: wishing loving kindness for yourself and all others, independent on how they respond; wishing compassion to yourself and others, independent of how they respond; experiencing joy for others’ joy, without jealousy; cultivating equanimity: maybe today I’m not securely attached, and that’s OK.
A secure attachment style is a wonderful base to cultivate love and compassion for all sentient beings. Be careful then not to concretize your own attachment style. If you’re not convinced, drop into a body scan. Can you feel your attachment style in your body? Where? Does it move, does it change in shape? If it’s useful to you, hold it lightly. Don’t suffer your attachment style by blaming your parents, or holding anger that it won’t change, or telling yourself stories about why you can’t be successful in love.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote this:
If romantic love has these four elements [joy, loving kindness, compassion, inclusion], it can bring a lot of happiness. The Buddha never said anything negative about true love. Romantic love, if you are successful, will cultivate a lot of loving kindness and compassion. And very soon, your love will be all embracing. The other person will no longer be the only object of your love because your love will continue to grow and embrace all of us. Happiness becomes limitless, and that is the love of the Buddha. If it is true love, it will continue to grow and include not only humans but also animals, plants, and minerals. That is great love, maha karuna or maha maitri. That is the love of the Buddha.
Sources
Dolores Mosquera et al. (2014) Early experience, structural dissociation, and emotional dysregulation in borderline personality disorder: the role of insecure and disorganized attachment https://bpded.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2051-6673-1-15
Ringu Tulku R., Daring steps toward fearlessness: the three vehicles of Buddhism
Dan Siegel . (2012) The Developing Mind
Dan Siegel (2010) Identifying Your Child’s Attachment Style https://www.psychalive.org/identifying-your-childs-attachment-style-2/
Thich Nhat Hanh Does Buddhism Support Romantic Love
https://thichnhathanhfoundation.org/blog/2018/2/7/does-buddhism-support-romantic-love