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)
“The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)