You can understand your childhood completely and still repeat the same old pattern on a Tuesday evening.
That is the part people find most baffling. You have read the books. You know what happened and roughly why. And then somebody does not reply to a message, and you are seven years old again.
Why insight on its own does not shift it
Most of what you learned about closeness, you learned before you could speak.
There is an odd gap in the timings, and a surprising amount of what is difficult about being human sits inside it.
A baby’s rules for closeness, what we later call an attachment style, have settled into a recognisable pattern by the end of their first year. Ainsworth’s classic test is run at twelve months, and the behaviour it measures organises somewhere between nine and eighteen months.
The kind of memory you can actually retrieve arrives years later. Most adults’ earliest one sits around three and a half, and the machinery for filing experience as a story is still being built until four or five.
So the rules were already running before there was anyone there to remember writing them.
That does not mean the baby remembered nothing. It means the baby remembered in a different system. Memories in the ordinary sense need words, and a sense of yourself moving through time, and neither of those existed yet. What was learned was procedural. What to do with distress. Whether crying brings somebody. Whether it is safer to get louder or to go quiet. Whether a face that has gone blank comes back. Whether asking for something you need brings satisfaction, or shame.
It was learned the way you learned to walk. By repetition, in a body, below conscious awareness, from the conditions that happened to be there.
Nobody chose it, and nobody was asked. Nobody goes around trying to remember to avoid intimacy, or to shut down a difficult feeling, or that a late reply means abandonment. For those of us affected this way, we just know. This is what the Boston Change Process Study Group called implicit relational knowing: what you know how to do with another person, without ever having been told it. To most of us this feels like personality. It is not. It is something learned, in relationship.
And no amount of changing the soundtrack will change us.
My own therapist can get me to look around the room and name what is there, and I can agree out loud that I am safe, and I still feel the terror in my body when the text does not arrive on Tuesday evening.
The body does not agree with the face
One piece of research makes this uncomfortably concrete. Infants who have learned to go quiet when a parent leaves them can look calm. Sroufe and Waters measured their heart rates: every infant’s rose at separation, but the secure ones settled within about a minute of being picked up, while the quiet ones stayed elevated through the separation and on into the reunion. Spangler and Grossmann measured stress hormones afterwards and found them higher in the quiet infants than in the ones who had cried.
The body is not calm. The reading of it is switched off.
That was a solution, and at the time it was a good one. Going quiet is what you do when getting louder does not work, or makes things worse. It is also why an adult can be perfectly clear about their own history and still find their hands shaking for no reason they can name.
None of this is fixed
Here is the part people are usually not told. The evidence for lifelong stability is much thinner than the popular version suggests. Followed from infancy into early adulthood, the continuity is weak, and attachment turns out to be more stable in adulthood than in childhood, not less. People also come out in different places for different relationships. Secure with a friend, anxious with a partner, avoidant with a parent. Reviews of people in therapy find security going up and anxiety coming down, with avoidance less clear.
So it moves. It just does not move through the channel most people try first, which is insight, and thinking differently.
What does move it
Noticing. Not analysing. Repeatedly, in the moment, three things.
- What your body is doing, before you know that you are upset.
- What you are actually feeling, underneath the first feeling.
- What your shame will and will not let you do.
It is unglamorous and it is slow. It works because it is the same channel the original learning came in on. You are not arguing with the pattern. You are giving it new information, in the only language it speaks.
This is the part of the work I care most about, and it is what Rogers called constructive personality change.
There is nothing to remember here except to practise. And then to keep practising.
Where to start
There is a free worksheet on the worksheets page with a grid you can plot several of your own relationships on, and plain-language descriptions of what sits underneath each corner. More about how this works, and the difficulties it shows up in, is on the attachment styles page.
References
Ainsworth, M D S, Blehar, M, Waters, E and Wall, S (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation.
Sroufe, L A and Waters, E (1977). Attachment as an organizational construct. Child Development, 48, 1184–1199.
Spangler, G and Grossmann, K E (1993). Biobehavioral organization in securely and insecurely attached infants. Child Development, 64(5), 1439–1450.
Fraley, R C (2002). Attachment stability from infancy to adulthood: meta-analysis and dynamic modeling of developmental mechanisms. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 123–151.
Taylor, P, Rietzschel, J, Danquah, A and Berry, K (2015). Changes in attachment representations during psychological therapy. Psychotherapy Research, 25, 222–238.
Rogers, C R (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21, 95–103.