Why two scales and not four boxes
The four styles are not categories that people fall into. They are the four corners of a field, and almost everyone sits somewhere in between.
- Attachment anxietyHow much it occupies you whether the other person will stay. A high value means the alarm goes off early.
- Attachment avoidanceHow much you create distance when things get close. A high value means you handle strain by yourself.
Both values can shift. Your style says where you stand today.
The four fields
Each has its own page: six situations to recognise yourself in, the mechanism behind it, what is not true, and what helps first.
Securely attached
Asking for help and being alone are both possible. Conflict is uncomfortable but not threatening. The underlying assumption is: I am allowed to need something, and the other person stays anyway. The most common of the four styles.
Anxiety low · Avoidance low
Anxiously attached
Ambiguity is hard to sit with, so you ask and you check. From outside it looks like too much. From inside it is an attempt to get the ground back under your feet. The mechanism behind it has four steps, and one of them can be changed quickly.
Anxiety high · Avoidance low
Avoidantly attached
Strain gets handled alone. That reads as cool, and measurements on the body show something else: tension rises while the account stays calm. So the feelings are not missing. They are kept out of awareness, because that is cheaper than disappointment.
Anxiety low · Avoidance high
Anxious and avoidant
Closeness is a wish and a warning at the same time, and both are strong. Move closer to be safe, and move away to be safe: each strategy sets off the other. This style is more often connected with neglect and violence than the other three.
Anxiety high · Avoidance high
What the model does not do
It says nothing about how a relationship turns out. That takes two patterns and everything else that happens between two people.
It is not a diagnosis. Attachment style appears in no diagnostic manual, not in the ICD and not in the DSM. Anyone who needs a diagnosis needs a professional.
It is not fixed. There is a stable core, and the values move above it. The same person shows different amounts of it in different relationships, anxious with a partner and relaxed with friends. Under strain a test result comes out differently than in a calm phase.
And it does not answer the question of blame, because it was not built for that. The model describes interactions: temperament, the load on the parents in particular years, the surroundings, events nobody had control over.
If it is acute,
do not wait for
a test result
If you are in a very bad place right now, a questionnaire is the wrong tool. These Swiss numbers are staffed around the clock.