九羽鳥庵

Attachment Styles & Labels

I should be cleaning my room, but instead I'm sitting here listening to music and thinking about attachment psychology. I think, unfortunately, there is an allure in categorization to most people. Labels are useful for conveying your life experience in shorthand to people or communicating a part of your identity. That's why thousands upon hundred thousands of little microlabels and identifiers exist on Tumblr, but I think this comes at a bit of a cost--the ability to recognize oneself as a fluid and multifaceted individual who can change and grow.

The Poison of Typology

If sports teams, astrology signs, "Hogwarts Houses", and D&D races aren't enough of a sign that human beings are fundamentally obsessed with labels and "belonging" to a specific group that is united by arbitrary traits, I think the evidence is further demonstrated by the general obsession with typology. Perhaps the most notable typologies are things like Enneagram and MBTI, where you can determine your personality and even have a quick little acronyms to tell people just what kind of person you are! Unfortunately I have very little compassion or love for personality psychology, primarily due to their removal from context, inter-relational behaviors, the racist and eugenicist origins of the MBTI and the significant amount of statistical evidence against it as a psychological test1, and the bias towards "Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, and Democratic societies.2

The love of these little shorthand "this is me" identifiers has, in my opinion, been more detrimental than beneficial, as people think of these labels as "who they are" with almost no flexibility. And we see the obsession with labels in practically every facet of society--and I think that there are obviously good uses for labels, but they're hardly useful for encompassing a complex human being with a whole galaxy of experiences stored in your memory. Attachment labels have become a new form of psychology that many relationship counselors and psychologists are capitalizing on and they often unintentionally villainize specific attachment styles.

My Problem With Attachment Styles

Most of my criticism comes from this article.

There are 4 accepted "attachment styles"

  1. Preoccupied attachment or anxious attachment
  2. Avoidant attachment
  3. Disorganized attachment
  4. Secure attachment

There's no problem with these on the surface, but the actual research behind most of these are predicated upon a study by one John Bowlby. I won't bother resummarizing the article, but the issue with attachment styles,to me is that there is often a misunderstanding that these cannot be changed or that these attachment styles are not contextual. I've been doing quite a bit of reading on this topic as I felt this might help me with some personal goings on in my life, but I felt that at different phases of my life I was identifying with different attachment styles. The same goes for how I had different attachment styles for different people. I am much more avoidantly attached with acquaintances and distant friends than I am with my closer friends and (ex)-partner. I am more anxiously attached to my closer circle,especially about how those people perceive me, but I am attempting to remedy this by simply being more open about my appreciation for people's presence in my life.

I think that these do have some use, and they've certainly helped enlighten me to gaps in my communication and dysfunction with my (ex)-partner, but the actual validity as something to concentrate on in therapy is just a bit...off to me. I feel that especially in relationships where people might have conflicting "attachment styles", it is unhelpful to categorize sometimes. Avoidants and anxiously attached individuals are both labelled as "evil" by different groups, and perpetuating this stereotype the same way narcissists and borderline individuals have gotten a bad rap frankly does not help anyone in these situations. Frequently, you just have two people who are traumatized that continue triggering each other because of incompatible needs, but I think reducing people to one label or another actually dehumanizes them a bit and makes it harder to empathize. The idea that an anxiously attached individual could never relate to or understand an avoidant's coping mechanisms doesn't really track,especially when on the surface, both of their bids for "attention" end up reading the same way.

This whole post was a bit off the cuff, but maybe on one of my other professional blogs that are far less personal I can actually write more in-depth about this. I feel that with personality disorders and attachment styles, therapists are more frequently dealing with people with (C-)PTSD and should address relationship problems in context rather than whatever represents the quickest "profile" of a client or patient.

Footnotes

  1. The Utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator by David J. Pittenger↩

  2. Critique of Personality Profiling (Myers-Briggs, DISC, Predictive Index, Tilt, etc) by Tom Geraghty↩

#entry #psych