4 Attachment Styles You Need To Know To Create Healthy Relationships | The Mel Robbins Podcast

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Attachment style is the set of assumptions you bring into every relationship

  Dr. Franco, a psychologist at the University of Maryland and author of Platonic, explains that your style shapes how you give and receive love in friendships, families and at work, not just in romance. Your interpretation of events, filtered through that lens, often matters more than what actually happened. It's a spectrum: nobody is fully secure, anxious or avoidant.

• 02

  Secure people assume they're lovable and balance their needs with yours

  They give and receive love comfortably, raise conflict level-headedly and are vulnerable in a reciprocal way: they share, wait for you to share, then go deeper, and pull back if you don't respond. They accept your boundaries without pushing or withdrawing. They talk about exes with nuance ('it didn't work for this reason, but I liked them for that') rather than calling them evil.

• 03

  Anxious attachment centres on fear of abandonment

  Anxiously attached people see rejection where there is none, like a tired friend or a slow reply. She cites research that their amygdala is more reactive. They over-accommodate and self-sacrifice until they blow up, struggle with boundaries, over-apologise, give in order to be liked, and invalidate their own feelings, so they need others to soothe them. They tend to misremember events as more negative than they were and have the highest rates of mental health issues.

• 04

  Avoidant attachment is a defence against a need for connection that feels unsafe

  Avoidant people believe closeness leads to harm, so they initiate less, ghost more, minimise problems, stonewall and struggle to apologise. Underneath, she says, is deep shame and a core belief of 'I'm a failure, I'm deficient', so criticism hits hard. They often have a 'phantom ex', a relationship they miss only after leaving it once the urge for space fades.

• 05

  Disorganised attachment flips between craving and fearing closeness

  It usually follows extreme early experiences such as abuse. People with this style swing between anxious and avoidant behaviour, may escalate in anger or read negative intent into neutral actions, and can feel frozen about whether to move closer or pull away.

• 06

  Your style can differ from one relationship to the next

  A very anxious partner can make you feel avoidant, and a distant one can make you anxious. Franco also draws on internal family systems: younger selves, like a bullied sixth-grader, can take over in the moment, but everyone has a highest, adult self that is securely attached. Women skew slightly anxious and men slightly avoidant.

• 07

  Anxious people often mistake being triggered for being in love

  Hurt and excitement are both high-arousal states, so an inconsistent, hot-and-cold partner can feel thrilling. A secure person just leaves. The anxious person tries to earn the love and is put off when someone gives it freely. Franco says that when she was more anxious, she'd lose interest as soon as someone wanted her back.

• 08

  Falling in love can mask attachment styles for about a year

  The chemical cocktail of early love can make an avoidant partner comfortable with intimacy, until perhaps a year in, often after moving in together, when they suddenly feel suffocated and say their partner expects too much.

• 09

  Secure and insecure people express anger differently

  She draws on John Bowlby's 'anger of hope' versus 'anger of despair'. A girl left alone in hospital asked her mother 'where was you?', which is vulnerable anger aimed at repair. A boy named Reggie said of a returning caregiver, 'my very own Marianne, but I hate her', which is anger aimed at destroying. Anxious adults bottle up, then blow up, character-assassinate or collapse into self-blame. Avoidant adults go quiet, withdraw, and later call you too sensitive.

• 10

  Insecure attachment carries physical as well as emotional costs

  Both anxious and avoidant people are more likely than secure people to have mental health problems, with avoidant people falling between secure and anxious. She links avoidant emotional suppression to unexplained migraines, gut problems, ulcers and chronic pain, and says your ability to connect even predicts how long you live.