What we get wrong about attachment styles

All In The Mind

ABC listen

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Attachment theory is a foundation of modern psychology — a framework for understanding human relationships and how we connect other people.

But has social media taken this concept — grounded in decades of research — too far?

Scroll through Instagram or TikTok for too long, and you might think that if you have a certain attachment style, you're fundamentally unlovable — or that you need to steer clear of people who are avoidant, anxious or not secure enough.

Today, what we get wrong about attachment styles. Plus, the experiments that helped discover them in the first place ... and how a better understanding of attachment could help us to heal.

If you liked this episode, you'll love our episode on when to trust your gut instinct and when to ignore it.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07.6	This kind of one-liner statement that if you're with an insecure person, your relationship is doomed, that is also a nonsense.
0:16.2	Right.
0:16.5	Like, I flatly refute that. That is idiocy at its finest. Yeah, the road is going to be a little more
0:22.7	rocky, but the road can also be made really rocky by random life events that occur,
0:27.9	that take two secure people down a path of relationship difficulty that had nothing to do
0:33.2	about what each of them brought to the relationship. You've heard of attachment styles, right?
0:38.3	If not, there are one of those theories from psychology that have busted through into popular awareness.
0:43.3	And just like love languages, which we covered in last week's episode,
0:47.3	certain corners of TikTok and Instagram love talking about them and analyzing them and dissecting them.
0:54.9	Today we're going to talk about the four major types of attachment.
0:58.0	Yes, I'm going to blame your parents. I'm a therapist. That's what we do.
1:00.8	I say this as an anxious attachment girlie myself that is putting in the work to fix it.
1:06.0	It literally aches you physically. You've probably got an anxious attachment style.
1:11.0	And the thing is, attachment styles really are one of the key foundational concepts of modern
1:15.9	psychology. Like they tell us a whole lot about how humans relate to each other and the world.
1:21.4	But a lot of the stuff you see on social media or read about is centered on how these styles
1:26.3	can impact your romantic relationships.
1:28.9	Let's talk about which attachment style would be the worst to be in a relationship with,
1:33.5	anxious or avoid it.
1:35.2	And this is where a theory that's backed by quite a lot of research can get twisted or misunderstood,
1:41.9	or, to borrow one psychologist's words, turned into nonsense.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -166 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ABC listen, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of ABC listen and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.