4 Attachment Styles Every Mom MUST Know (For Yourself & Your Kids)

If you’ve ever been frustrated by or struggled to connect with someone you love, you’ve GOT to understand the four attachment styles that dictate all your relationships—especially marriage & motherhood. Today we’re diving into attachment theory: how it forms, how it presents as adults, & how dramatically it affects your parenting.

Your (and others’) attachment style isn’t a personality flaw. It’s the nervous system’s relational survival strategy. It affects how safe you feel with people, how you approach social connection, how you handle conflict, how you interpret silence or feedback, & what happens inside you when stress hits. EVERY mom needs to know this so you can cultivate the secure attachment your kids need to thrive—especially if it wasn’t modeled to you as a child.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• The four attachment styles that determine whether and how you connect with EVERYONE around you: anxious, avoidant, disorganized, & secure 
• The four biggest factors that shape a child’s attachment style (& how they’re forming in your kids right now) 
• Why a child’s nervous system will always prioritize attachment over authenticity
• The many ways insecure attachment manifests: people-pleasing, hypervigilance, emotional shutdown or reactivity, fear of vulnerability, unreliability, & more
• How neuroplasticity and nervous system healing make it possible to move toward secure attachment & repair relationships (especially with your kids) at ANY age—even if you didn’t grow up with it

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Check out these books on attachment theory:

• Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld & Dr. Gabor Mate
• The Attachment Parenting Book by Dr. William and Martha Sears
• Raising Securely Attached Kids by Eli Harwood
• Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

Book a free consult to learn more about healing your nervous system so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://tidycal.com/solutionsforsimplicity/free-consult)

Get on the waitlist for the next round of my 6-week program, Moms Made NewTM to learn the six most powerful life coaching tools EVERY mom needs so that you and your family can flourish: https://solutionsforsimplicity.myflodesk.com/mmn-waitlist

HOMEWORK:

Reflect on which of the four attachment styles best describes you and/or other people you know. If it's anything other than secure attachment, what do you think caused you to be that way? What fears do you have about moving towards more secure attachment in the future? Email me or DM me on Instagram @solutionsfo

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

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This is so, so crucial for every mom, every parent to know because we will never be able to provide emotional security for our children. They will never be able to develop secure attachment unless we take the time to become aware and heal from what was modeled to us. Welcome to More Time for Mom. where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. If you overthink everything, feel anxious, people please, avoid conflict, or get triggered by those you love, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about attachment theory and the four different attachment styles that govern how you show up and relate to everyone around you, especially your spouse and kids. Attachment, or lack thereof, is not a personality flaw. It's your nervous system's relational survival strategy. Your attachment style shapes how safe you feel with people, how you handle conflict, how you interpret silence or feedback, and how you love or parent under stress. Spoiler alert! Everyone has a pre-patterned attachment style, so if you've ever wondered why the person you love seems to pull away or you have mismatched needs and desires about what your relationship looks like, this will explain why. You can't afford not to know this, especially if you are a mom. I vividly remember when I first came across the idea of attachment theory in my 20s, a full decade before I had kids of my own. A family friend had asked my then boyfriend, now husband, to translate her ad for a nanny into Spanish. And in it, she underscored they practiced attachment parenting. And it would be very important for the qualified candidate to be supportive of that. We looked it up and found the basic idea is that children need attachment in order to thrive. Children innately bond with their caregivers, and the success of their health and development depends on knowing their caregivers are not only attuned to their needs, but will meet those needs all the time, that love is not conditional or withdrawn. On the surface, that made a lot of sense, but fast forward to when we had children and so many of these ideas really got brought to the surface and made us start to explore our own attachment styles and our experience as children and then led to a lot of conversations about how we can now cultivate secure attachment with our kids because it is so much easier said than done. As always, I want to offer a trigger warning A lot of the things I discuss on this podcast might be easier kept quiet, and yet I am on such a mission to expose them and bring them to light because most people have no idea how far-reaching the implications are or what an impact things like this are having on your current life. We might wish we could live under a rock or bury our head in the sand and not know what I am about to talk about, Because being made to remember parts of your childhood can cause painful memories to resurface or because it heightens awareness of things you are already struggling with as a wife and mom today. Take a deep breath. I promise we'll tread gently. This is so important to know. For context, attachment theory was originally proposed by John Bowlby starting in the 1950s and elaborated upon by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s. Several scholars have since promoted and further developed it, like pediatrician and parenting expert Dr. Bill Sears, developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, and trauma, ADHD, and addiction researcher Dr. Gabor Mate. I'll link some books in the description if you're interested, but I have now spent years delving into the research on this. Attachment is your brain and body's learned answer to the questions of, am I safe? Am I loved? Will I be abandoned? And do my needs matter? Your attachment style forms mostly in early childhood through four things. So if you are a parent, pay close attention because this is how your children's attachment style is developing now. Number one, consistency of caregiving. Were your parents present and available, both physically and emotionally? Did you know they were there for you? Was their care predictable and stable? This doesn't mean the child has to be with the parents 100% of the time, but research underscores that can be ideal provided the remaining three things are positive. Number two is emotional responsiveness. How did your parents respond when you cried or woke at night? Were you held and comforted or left alone to quote unquote self-soothe? Did they speak in soothing or angry or impatient tones? Could they tolerate the discomfort of your physical and emotional needs, even when it was inconvenient or frustrating for them, without making you feel like you were a problem? Factor number three is called repair after rupture. No parent is perfect. We all lose our cool. We are human. But what happened after the moment of disconnection? Did your parents apologize? Admit their failings? Ask for forgiveness? Underscore how much they love you? Or did they blame, shame, and ignore you? Or require you to make up for what had happened? The fourth element is how emotions are handled in the home. Did your parents know how to healthily express and regulate their emotions? Or did they dissociate, numb hardship with addiction, or explode in rage? Were you allowed to feel and share your feelings? Or were you made to repress your negative emotions because they triggered your parents? Did you subconsciously learn you had to change and adapt your mood or behavior in an attempt to keep your parents happy, maybe even around? Were you made to take on your parents' stress, left feeling responsible when they got upset or had a hard day? Were you belittled, sent away, deprived of love or attention? It's important to underscore that all these things can be very subtle and implicit. So many people would report they had a good childhood, and yet kids developing nervous systems are so perceptive. It's less what your parents explicitly did or said than what you sensed and picked up on in them. The bottom line is that there is a spectrum between authenticity, meaning your ability to be your own unique self, and attachment, feeling part of the tribe. All children's nervous systems are primed to prioritize attachment over authenticity because social survival is literally how we stay alive. We are helplessly dependent on our caregivers to protect and provide for us, so we learn to disconnect from who we are in order to maintain as much attachment and connection with our caregivers as possible. except our caregivers, and in fact most adults to this day, don't have well-regulated nervous systems and therefore struggle to be really attuned to their children in a way that enables a kid to grow up feeling not just physically but emotionally safe. These early life experiences have a profound impact on how your nervous system gets patterned to perceive threat, to respond to social interactions, and to engage with the world around you. The goal is not to label yourself or think that there's anything wrong with you if you have one of the insecure attachment styles I'm about to describe. From a neurological perspective, attachment styles are simply nervous system patterns, not life sentences. No matter where you're starting from now, you can shift towards security through greater awareness, nervous system regulation, healthier relationships, reparenting, and repairing old wounds. Thanks to neuroplasticity, it's never too late to change, to heal your nervous system, to break free of harmful patterns you may have developed earlier in life. That's exactly what my coaching helps you do, and you get a big taste of that here on this podcast. The goal is also not to point fingers and blame our parents, but rather to honor and validate our own felt experience. You can want to believe your parents were doing the best they could under the circumstances, or even be furious because you know they should have done so much better, and still move forward on your own healing journey regardless of what your present-day relationship with them looks like. That leads us to the four main overarching attachment styles. The first is called anxious attachment, where your core fear is that you will be abandoned. It's worrying your parents might not return or fearing that you will be unsafe in their absence. You might see this in your kids as separation anxiety when you go to drop them off for daycare or school or as stranger anxiety in the presence of new or particular people. Here's the kicker, though. As an adult, anxious attachment shows up as being hypervigilant to someone's vocal tone or texts, over-explaining, over-apologizing, fear of being too much, needing constant reassurance in order to feel safe, people-pleasing to a fault, not wanting to be alone and needing to be in a relationship in order to feel okay. As a mom, this can look like feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions and not being able to relax unless you know everyone else is okay. The second style is called avoidant attachment, where the core fear is that you'll be trapped or disappointed, so it's better to just refrain from connection altogether. As an adult, avoidant attachment shows up as needing a lot of space to yourself, withdrawing when you get stressed, being uncomfortable with emotional needs, whether yours or others, seeming fine but feeling detached, Basically, shutting down and closing yourself off to any kind of close, intimate relationship. You don't want to be seen or known. You don't want to let anyone in because vulnerability feels too unsafe. As a mom, this shows up as getting overwhelmed by clinginess or your kid's big emotions, preferring independence and quiet control. Obviously, there is a healthy balance between self-sufficiency on the one hand and good old responsibility that we want to instill in our children with our kids being left to fend for themselves. The third attachment style is disorganized attachment. where your core fear is that love is unsafe. You feel such inner conflict between craving connection and wanting to be loved but not being sure you can trust it. Your nervous system doesn't feel safe being attached to anyone because you got wounded from connection in the past. You learned you could only depend on yourself, that relationships were physically or emotionally painful and therefore not worth it. You might have moments where you really crave connection, but then as soon as someone starts to get too close, you pull away. As an adult, disorganized attachment shows up as desiring closeness, but then panicking and running away when it happens. You can swing between being anxious and avoidant. It looks like intense triggers, shutdowns, emotional whiplash. There's a lot of overthinking coupled with huge emotional reactivity. As a mom, this can look like getting so triggered, maybe shouting or acting out towards them, casting them away, but then feeling shame afterward and then saying, what's wrong with me? I really want to reiterate that for each attachment style, almost all these things happen at a subconscious level. They are rarely intentional and cognitive, even by the person doing them. For example, maybe you dated someone you felt a strong connection with, but then they never called you back. They likely had avoidant attachment. Maybe someone brought you gifts and flowers and said all kinds of flattering things, but then erupted in rage and blew up at you for no fault of your own. That's disorganized attachment. And, of course, a person who is super jealous and territorial, can't stand to see you spend time with anyone else, is hyper-controlling, demands access to all your emails and text messages to make sure you're not going to cheat on them, is classic anxious attachment. These are extreme generalizations, but you get the gist. The fourth attachment style, and the ultimate goal, is secure attachment. Secure doesn't mean perfect. It means flexible. It means connected. That you can be close without losing your authentic self. You can experience conflict without panicking that you are going to be cast out and left behind. You can ask for what you need, you trust repair is possible, and you don't abandon yourself to keep someone else happy. You feel so safe and secure in your own nervous system that you don't need anyone else's to feel safe. But then you have that much more to give to others and you desire to be in a mutually loving, giving, two-way relationship. Again, so important to emphasize, you can grow into this, even if you didn't start here. And no matter how you may have handled things with your own kids up to this point, no matter how old they are, you can still repair your relationship with them and offer that deep source of unconditional love and support, coupled with consistent boundaries and calm leadership. Attachment isn't just romantic relationships. It affects every kind of relationship out there, from your marriage to your friendships, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with authority figures like a boss, your teachers, church leaders. and then it is so essential for you as a mother and how you approach parenting your own children. Stay tuned for next episode where I'm going to share more of my experience with attachment parenting and specifically how my bond with one of my own kids got severed and the impact that has had on our relationship to this day along with how I am constantly trying to repair the rupture. I'll also give you a series of questions to better determine your own attachment style and some simple steps to start repairing your hidden attachment wounds so you can better connect with those you love, especially your kids. For now, your homework for this episode is to reflect on which of the four attachment styles best describes you and or other people you know. If it's anything other than secure attachment, what do you think caused you to be that way? And what fears do you have about moving towards more secure attachment in the future? This is so, so crucial for every mom, every parent to know because we will never be able to provide emotional security for our children. They will never be able to develop secure attachment unless we take the time to become aware and heal from what was modeled to us. Until next time, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.