What is really going on with human attachment styles?

Years ago I remember feeling deeply moved by footage from the Romanian orphanages.

One thing stayed with me.

A reporter remarked on how quiet it was.

Surrounded by babies, what struck him was the silence.

Looking back now, I think that silence meant something very important.

Not peace.

Not security.

Procedure.

Even as babies, they had already begun learning an internal rule:

don’t ask for my needs to be met
don’t waste my energy crying
no one is coming for me
shut up and conserve energy

That is not just “an attachment style”.

That is procedural learning.

It is learning what to do with distress when no one reliably helps me.

What to do with my bodily activation.
What to do with my fear.
What to do with my longing.
What to do with my shame when my needs go unmet.

This is one reason I think attachment theory is both useful and, by itself, sometimes too simple.

Anxious.
Avoidant.
Disorganised.
Secure.

Helpful categories.

But real human beings are more complex than four boxes.

In practice, what I often see as a practitioner and researcher are different levels of development across many learnable skills:

body awareness
recovery and decompression
emotional processing
emotional resilience
healthy self-worth
self-efficacy
impulse control
relational boundaries
conflict repair
clear communication under pressure
self-reflection
reality-testing
moral courage
meaning-making

And each of these can develop unevenly.

So what gets called “avoidant attachment” may sometimes mean:

low somatic attunement
low emotional processing
low shame-free need expression
low trust in repair
high procedural shutting down

What gets called “anxious attachment” may sometimes mean:

high attachment activation
low self-soothing
low worth stability
low confidence that distress can be survived without another person restoring safety

That is a much richer and more hopeful picture.

Because if attachment is partly procedural, then change is not only about insight.

It is about practice.

New experiences.
New repetitions.
New skills.
New ways of staying with our body sensations, feelings, needs, closeness, and shame without automatically executing our old procedures.

So yes, attachment theory matters.

But perhaps the deeper question is not only:
which style is this?

It is:
what has this person learned to do with distress, need, closeness, and shame?

And what would they now need to practise for something more secure to become possible?

Therapy works when it helps a person build the capacities life is asking of them.

Therapists often argue about which therapy is best.

CBT.

Psychodynamic therapy.

Person-centred therapy.

EMDR.

Schema therapy.

IFS.

Somatic therapy.

Coaching psychology.

And of course, methods matter.

Bad therapy can harm.

Good training matters.

Some problems need specialist knowledge.

But after more than two decades of working with clients, researching therapy outcomes, and tracking change, I no longer think the most important question is:

“Which brand of therapy is best?”

A better question is:

“What is this person actually learning to do differently?”

Can they stay with emotion instead of shutting it down?

Can their body settle when threat has passed?

Can they stop organising their worth around approval, achievement or appearance?

Can they repair conflict instead of collapsing, attacking or disappearing?

Can they set boundaries without drowning in guilt?

Can they see reality more clearly?

Can they act from values rather than fear?

Can they recover after stress?

Can they become more themselves, not less?

This is why different therapies can sometimes produce similar outcomes.

Not because all therapy is the same.

It isn’t.

But because many effective therapies, often without naming it this way, help people develop the same underlying human capacities.

A CBT therapist may call it behavioural activation.

A psychodynamic therapist may call it working through.

A person-centred therapist may call it congruent empathy and unconditional positive regard.

A somatic therapist may call it nervous system regulation.

A trauma therapist may call it integration.

Different languages.

Different traditions.

Different maps.

But often, underneath the method, something very human is being built:

emotional processing  

body regulation  

healthy self-worth  

relational repair  

boundaries  

attention  

agency  

meaning  

wisdom under uncertainty

That is why I think we need to move beyond the question:

“Which therapy wins?”

Towards a more useful question:

“What capacities does this person need to build next?”

Because symptoms are often signals.

Not proof that a person is broken.

Signals that life is asking for skills, supports or capacities that have not yet been fully developed.

That shift changes everything.

It moves us from brand loyalty to human development.

From pathology to possibility.

From “what disorder do you have?” to “what is life asking you to grow?”

And for many people, that is where real change begins.

Strangely my thinking about AI is being shaped by a romance scam.

More precisely:

encountering counterfeit connection sharpened my understanding of genuine human connection.

That matters, because one of the biggest questions AI is forcing on the helping professions is this:

what can only a human being do?

I had been thinking about that through work with a founder-led start-up living under existential threat:

possible bankruptcy,

possible job losses,

money running out,

the fear of not being paid for work already done.

What the founder needed from me was not more information.

Not another framework.

Not a sharper prompt.

Not better bullet points about resilience.

What he needed was for another human being to look him in the eyes and see his terror.

To help him stay with it.

To help him feel it without being destroyed.

To help him discover, through co-regulation, he could experience fear, shame, and despair and still remain himself.

That one human nervous system can help another bear what feels unbearable until a new capacity comes online.

Then something else happened.

I found myself on the receiving end of a romance scam.

And strange as it may sound, that clarified something for me too.

What a scam reveals is not only deception.

It reveals how connection can be imitated.

Warmth can be imitated.

Attentiveness can be imitated.

Validation can be imitated.

Even intimacy can be imitated, at least for a while.

Alan Turing famously asked whether a machine could imitate a human convincingly enough that we could not reliably tell the difference.

I found myself wondering about a relational version of that question:

can someone imitate human connection convincingly enough that we feel met, even when something essential is missing?

Both AI and romance scams raise a similar question:

what is the difference between something that feels supportive, warm, or intimate…

and something that is actually relationally real?

One of the things I noticed in the scam exchange was not only what was there, but what was missing.

There was warmth.

Responsiveness.

A kind of facilitation.

But very little spontaneous selfhood.

Very little ordinary life.

Very little mutuality.

Very little initiative.

Very little practical reality.

And that led me to a thought I have not been able to shake:

pseudo-connection is often much better at facilitating depth than generating it.

It can draw you out.

Mirror you.

Reward your vulnerability.

But it struggles to create the textured, specific, reality-based presence of a real person with a self, a history, values, contradictions, and the capacity to meet you from within all that.

AI does many marvellous things.

It helps us think, structure, reflect, draft, and rehearse.

But some of the deepest human changes still happen in relationship.

That is why I think the future will belong not to those who vaguely defend “human touch”, but to those who can clearly say what a real human being can help another human being do.

When my eldest son was four, he said something I have never forgotten.

He did not say:

“We don’t know.”

He said:

“We can’t know.”

And he meant it.

There is a world of difference between those two phrases.

“We don’t know” can still carry the hope that, with enough effort, enough data, enough thinking, enough cleverness, enough control, certainty will eventually arrive.

“We can’t know” is different.

It recognises a boundary.

It says: from here, with this mind, at this point in time, from inside this human life, there are some things we cannot fully see.

That is not failure.

It is reality.

I think of this as part of our Reality Capacity: our human ability to stay in contact with what is actually true, rather than what we wish were true.

And one of the hardest truths for the human mind is uncertainty.

We often suffer not only because we do not know, but because we demand a kind of knowing life cannot give us.

Will this work out?

What will they think?

Was that the right decision?

What would have happened if I had chosen differently?

Who would I have become?

Sometimes wisdom begins when we stop trying to force certainty out of a situation that cannot provide it.

Not passivity.

Not helplessness.

Not giving up.

But a more mature relationship with reality.

The capacity to say:

I will look carefully.

I will think clearly.

I will listen deeply.

I will act responsibly.

And still, some things I cannot know from here.

That small sentence from a four-year-old has stayed with me because it points to something many adults spend decades trying to learn.

There is humility in it.

There is freedom in it.

There is also grief in it.

Because to accept what we cannot know is also to let go of the fantasy that life can be made completely safe through thought alone.

Where in your life are you still trying to turn uncertainty into certainty?

And what might change if the wiser sentence was not “I don’t know yet,” but “I can’t fully know from here”?

One episode in a series I call: A coffee conversation worth having.

When a feeling rises in us, many of us do one of four things.

We suppress it.
We distract ourselves from it.
We act it out.
Or we get stuck in it.

That is why adaptive emotional processing matters.

Adaptive emotional processing is our ability to stay with a feeling long enough to understand it, metabolise it, and move it through us, rather than instantly shutting it down or becoming overwhelmed by it.

A simple practice I often offer my clients goes like this:

Notice → Name → Allow → Inquire → Stay → Check

Before you begin, rate the intensity of what you are feeling from 0 to 10.

0 = no emotional charge
10 = highly intense or overwhelming

Pause.

Take three slower breaths.

Then ask yourself:

What am I feeling right now?

Not what am I thinking.
Not what is the story.

What am I actually feeling?

Try to name one feeling simply.

Maybe it is:
sadness
fear
anger
hurt
shame
disappointment
loneliness
envy
grief

Then see where you feel it in our body.

A tight chest.
A lump in our throat.
Heat in our face.
A heavy belly.
Pressure behind our eyes.

Then say, quietly:

This feeling is here. I do not need to get rid of it immediately.

That matters.

Because many of us never learned that a feeling can be felt without it taking us over.

Then ask:

What is this feeling about?
What is it trying to tell me?

Do not force an answer.

Then stay with it for just a little longer.

Not forever.

Just long enough to let it move, soften, or become clearer.

Then rate it again.

What changed, if anything?

Did the feeling shift by even five per cent?
Did it become clearer?
Did it soften?
Did another feeling appear underneath it?

That matters.

Because adaptive emotional processing is not about wallowing.

It is about learning that feelings are signals, and that with enough skill, they can be processed rather than feared, avoided, or discharged into impulsive action.

When this skill is weak, we often see:
suppression,
overthinking,
emotional flooding,
numbness,
misdirected anger,
panic about feeling,
or symptoms that carry what we have not yet processed.

As this skill grows, we often become more emotionally clear, less frightened of our own inner life, and more able to respond rather than react.

Feeling is not the problem.

Getting stuck, cut off, or overwhelmed is the problem.

And for many of us, this is a missing skill.

But it is also a learnable one.

Sometimes the next step in growth is not to think harder.

It is to feel more accurately, and stay long enough for the feeling to move.

Note: In the developmental sequence I use, adaptive emotional processing is one of the foundational skills. Many of us struggle to grow well because we have not yet learned how to feel something without either shutting down or being taken over by it.