Attachment styles

Given the inherent need humans have to feel connected and bonded to other people, your attachment experiences and style significantly influence how successful you are in forming strong and stable relationships with friends, family and lovers. Understanding your attachment style can help you to build strong foundations, stop you making the same relationship mistakes over again and help you to move forward into healthier and happier unions.

Attachment theory in psychology and social science is founded on a psychological model that attempts to describe the subtleties of the thinking and behaviour that influence your long- and short-term interpersonal relationships. It’s founded on the premise that your earliest experiences of relationships — primarily the parent–child relationship — colour the way in which you think about and behave in your relationships as you go through childhood and adolescence and into adulthood.

Originally developed by British psychotherapist John Bowlby, the theory of attachment evolved as he attempted to understand the distress experienced by very young children who had been separated from their parents. He observed that these children would often go to extraordinary lengths such as crying, clinging and frantically searching for their parent to either prevent separation from them occurring or to re-establish their closeness