Styles of Attachment
Johnson & Sims describe four attachment styles.
- 1. People who are secure and trusting perceive themselves as loveable, able to trust others and themselves in relationship. They give clear emotional signals, and are engaged, resourceful and flexible in unclear relationships. Secure partners express feelings, articulate needs, and allow their own vulnerability to show.
- 2. People who have a diminished ability to articulate feelings, tend to not acknowledge their need for attachment, and struggle to name their needs in a relationship. They tend to adopt a safe position and solve problems dispassionately without understanding the effect that their safe distance has on their partners.
- 3. People who are psychologically reactive and who exhibit anxious attachment. They tend to demand reassurance in an aggressive way, demand their partner's attachment and tend to use blame strategies (including emotional blackmail) in order to engage their partner.
- 4. People who have been traumatized and who vacillate between attachment and hostility.
Read more about this topic: Emotionally Focused Therapy
Famous quotes containing the words styles of, styles and/or attachment:
“There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Can we love our children when they are homely, awkward, unkempt, flaunting the styles and friendships we don’t approve of, when they fail to be the best, the brightest, the most accomplished at school or even at home? Can we be there when their world has fallen apart and only we can restore their faith and confidence in life?”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)