Your Attachment Style Is Not Your Personality

Let me ask you something. When was the last time you described yourself in a relationship and the first thing you said was, I'm anxiously attached? Or maybe someone hurt you and your explanation was, he's just avoidant. Has always been like this.

We say these things to explain everything. Like it closes a case. And I understand why. It makes things so much easier. There is something deeply relieving about finally having a word for a thing you have been feeling your whole life.

The way you spiral, for example, when someone pulls away. The way closeness starts to feel like you're suffocating right when things get real. The push and pull that seems to follow from one relationship to the next. And when you find the framework that names it, we call them attachment styles, it feels like a huge exhale.

But here's where I think we have gone wrong. Somewhere between the research and the Instagram carousel, attachment styles stopped being about a lens for understanding yourself and it became a personality type. Almost like an identity, a fixed thing that you cannot unlearn or change.

And I think this is absolutely dangerous. That shift, unfortunately, might be keeping more people stuck than setting them free. Because here's the truth that doesn't fit in a carousel, an Instagram reel. Your attachment style is not who you are, it's what you learned in a relationship you were too young to choose, and it can be unlearned.

That's what we are getting into today. We're going back to what attachment theory actually says, how the internet got it wrong and what it actually takes to change it. Not to perform security, not to labor yourself and move on.

Actual change. Hello, I'm Iman Tohami, this is Said in Therapy, and let's just get into it.

Let's start at the beginning because I think context matters here. Attachment theory was developed by a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby in the mid-20th century. His core idea was human beings are wired from birth to seek proximity to caregivers when they feel threatened.

That's not a choice, it's biology, it's survival. The style of attachment you develop, secure, anxious or avoidant, isn't something you were born with, it's something you learned. And it's something that formed in response to how early caregivers responded to your needs.

Were they consistent, attuned, available, unpredictable? Your nervous system took notes. It built a model of what relationships are, what to expect from other people, and how to behave to get your needs met. That's all that attachment style is.

It's a strategy your nervous system developed in childhood to navigate the relationships you were in. It's not your personality, it's not your destiny, and it's not who you are. It's what you learned, and what you learned can be updated.

So how did we get from that nuanced research-based framework about relational development to I'm anxiously attached? That's just my thing. The internet happened unfortunately. Especially the wellness content internet. Here's the problem with translating psychology into content. Nuance doesn't perform.

A carousel that says attachment is a fluid context dependent response shaped by your relational history. Listen, I couldn't even get through the sentence. It gets 12 likes and people move on. A carousel that says four attachment styles, which one are you?

This is what gets the attention. So the framework got flattened. The categories became personality types, and the personality types, especially the ones that feel we need to explain the most, the ones that are in the most pain, are incredibly sticky.

Think about how people talk about it. I can't help it, I'm anxious. He's just avoidant. That's who he is. We were never going to work. Our attachment styles were incompatible. It becomes a way to explain everything and change nothing.

And that's where we are today. And the tips that we are getting around attachment theory are really not helpful anymore. When you make attachment style a part of your identity, part of who you are, and if this is a way you started to introduce yourself or talk about your relationships, a few things happen, and none of them are good.

First, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believe I'm anxiously attached, then yes, you will become anxiously attached because you're developing all the traits that come with a label. It just confirms a story, a story that you keep telling yourself.

It's not a response that I can examine and work with. It's just evidence of who I am. The label just closes the door on improvement and anything that makes you curious about understanding yourself a little bit more. Second, it removes agency, and this is really important.

There is a huge difference between I notice I get anxious when my partner doesn't text me back quickly, and I want to understand why, versus I'm anxiously attached and I don't know what to do. One is a person engaging with an experience, the other one is a person who is labeling himself or herself, and the experience is basically crushing them.

Third, and this is the most important, it can become a way to avoid the actual work. Knowing what you do is not the same as knowing what to do to stop doing it. I've seen it in my stereopatic work a lot.

Someone comes in, they have done a lot of reading, they almost certainly can name the attachment style, and they understand the patterns and they're actually quite impressive in that way because they have really done a lot of research.

They know they are anxiously attached, they can also tell you the reasons, and then they tell you they have a partner who is avoidant. They know why the dynamic is complicated, and they are still repeating it over and over and over again because the insight without intervention doesn't change behavior.

Here's something a quiz online will never tell you. Attachment isn't fixed across relationships. Research shows that people can display different attachment patterns with different people. You might be relatively secure with friends and anxiously attached in romantic relationships. You might be avoidant with an authority figure and completely open with a partner.

You might have been anxious in your past relationship and feel secure in your current one. Not because you did years of healing and work in between, but because the relational dynamic is different. Attachment style isn't a trait you carry around like an eye colour, for example.

It's a response to what gets activated or doesn't, depending on the relationship and the person you're with. Context matters. Safety levels matter. History matters. Which also means the question isn't just what is my attachment style. The more useful question is in which relationship do I feel most secure?

What's different about the relationship I feel secure in and the one that didn't make me feel safe? In which relationships do I activate anxious and avoidant patterns and what's happening there? Why is it happening? That's a much harder question to answer.

It can't be answered by a quiz, but it's a question that leads to somewhere real. I want to talk about what it actually means to shift attachment patterns. Because I think there is a myth about that too. The myth is that you do your inner work, you heal your childhood wounds, and then relationships become easy.

But this is not how it works. Earned security, which is a term researchers use for people who developed insecure attachment in their childhood but worked on it and moved towards security in adulthood. It doesn't mean that you will never get triggered again.

It doesn't mean all patterns will never surface again. It means that you have a different relationship with the patterns when they do emerge, almost like a different reaction that you can now use whenever you feel triggered. It means instead of texting your partner 17 times when they go quiet, you notice that you are anxious about it, you name it, and then you sit with it with yourself a little bit before you react.

It's not a transformation into a different person. It's a development of a slightly longer pause. And here's the thing about the gap. It doesn't come from knowing your attachment style. It comes from the experiences that teach you your nervous system is going to react a certain way.

You cannot think your way into a new attachment pattern. You have to feel your way there slowly and surely you will understand your reactions and based on that you will change them.

So hear me out. I'm not saying just throw the whole framework out because it's helpful. I am saying use it as a starting point, not an ending point. If you recognize anxious patterns in yourself, the useful question isn't how do I accept that I am the way I am?

It's when did I first learn this? What was the experience that taught me I had to work to be cut? If you recognize avoidant patterns, for example, the useful question isn't how do I find someone who will respect my need for space.

Instead, ask yourself, when did closeness start to feel like a threat? What happened when I needed someone and they weren't around? These questions will take you to somewhere real and it will take you to a place where you can really explore your pattern and find new reactions to them.

Here's what I want you to take out of this session. You are not your attachment style. You are a person who at a very young age learned in a relationship how to react. This is a relationship that you didn't choose.

You learned certain things about how love works, and your nervous system trying to protect you built a strategy around what you learned. That strategy made sense back then. It might not be serving you today. And it's not permanent.

You can work on it, you can gather new experiences and information and make a new strategy, a much more self-aware one. The label can be useful as a starting point for understanding yourself a little bit better. The moment it becomes a fixed identity, the moment you start saying this is who I am, it stops being a tool.

It starts being a prison. And you deserve to be outside of a prison, especially the mental ones. So this is what I have got today. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

It really helps out to get more reach and help more people. Thank you so much. I am Iman Tohami. This is Said in Therapy. Take care of yourself.