Why do I become someone else in an argument?

What is an attachment style?

An attachment style is a learned expectation about what happens when you need someone. It works like a reflex, in the half second before you speak, when your body has already decided whether reaching out is worth it. Attachment in John Bowlby’s sense is about what you do with that need, not how much of it you have.

• It forms from small moments. You were upset, you reached for someone, and they came, or did not, or came sometimes.
• It becomes a working model. Out of those moments you build an expectation of what other people do with your needs.
• It has 2 dimensions. How much you fear being left, and how uncomfortable you are depending on anybody.

I read the insecure patterns as adaptations: something early was unreliable or frightening, and the pattern was the best arrangement available to a child with no other options. That is my clinical view rather than a finding, and it cuts both ways. A difficult early life is a starting position, and it settles nothing about what you are capable of with another person now.

What does each attachment style do under pressure?

Each of the 4 patterns is a different move in the moment a relationship feels uncertain. Nobody is an avoidant. People act avoidantly, with particular people, under particular pressure.

• Secure. You expect that saying what is wrong will go reasonably well, so you say it earlier and more plainly, and you come back after a row sooner.
• Anxious, or preoccupied. A shorter reply or a turned back puts you on alert, and you pursue: you ask again, and you want it settled tonight.
• Avoidant, or dismissive. Needing someone cost you something early on, so you go quiet, change the subject, turn reasonable or leave the room.
• Fearful avoidant. You want closeness and expect it to hurt, so you move in and then back out, sometimes inside one conversation.

Avoidance gets read as not caring, and that is how it is read from the other side of it almost every time. My clinical view is close to the opposite: the feeling is too much rather than too little, and going flat is how it gets managed. Read more about being afraid of getting close.

What happens when 2 attachment styles meet in an argument?

One of you feels the distance and moves in. The other feels the pressure and moves out. Each move becomes the reason for the next one. Both of you are reading the room accurately and drawing the wrong conclusion from it.

The one moving in is right that contact has broken, and wrong that it means they are no longer wanted. So they ask again, slightly harder, and the asking is the very thing the other one is already swamped by: heart up, jaw tight, nothing within reach to say. Going quiet is the only move left that works, and it lands on the first one as a verdict rather than as somebody running out of capacity. 2 reasonable moves make each other worse, faster each round, and by the third round neither of you is arguing about what you started with.

Across many studies both of these patterns go with lower satisfaction in a relationship, and avoidance is the stronger of the 2¹. What stays with me from that work is a narrower point: your own pattern predicts your own satisfaction better than it predicts your partner’s, which puts the work closer to home than most couples arrive expecting. Those are associations across large numbers of people and not a forecast for you, and plenty of anxious and avoidant people are in good relationships. What I do see is that the load in this loop sits unevenly, and that the partner doing most of the reaching is also doing most of the repairing.

Can your attachment style change?

It changes partly, slowly, and more in adult life than the popular version allows.

The best estimate of how much carries over from the beginning is a correlation of about 0.39 between security at age one and security later on², which its author calls moderate: real, and nothing like a destiny. Stability also rises as you get older. Over roughly 10 years the figure sits near 0.30 in childhood against about 0.50 in adulthood³, so an adult pattern is firmer than a child’s and still some way from fixed.

What moves it is the ordinary weight of a life: a new relationship, a breakup, becoming a parent, long stretches of conflict or of support, the meaning you come to give what happened to you, and therapy³. One good conversation will not shift it. A year of being treated differently does more, and nobody can tell you in advance how much.

What can an attachment style not tell you?

It describes a tendency, and it hands down no verdict on you, your partner or the relationship.

• A quiz is a self-report. It records how you think you behave, which is not how you behave when it matters. It is an aid to understanding rather than a measure of you.
• A style is no diagnosis. On its own it carries no clinical meaning.
• A style excuses nothing. Understanding why someone withdraws explains the behaviour and leaves its cost to the other person exactly where it was.
• A style makes a poor label. Used in an argument it becomes a weapon, and people reach for it when they are least able to be fair.
• You cannot assign one from outside. A style you have decided your partner has is your theory about them, and it is worth saying so out loud.
• It was not built with you in mind. Whether these patterns read the same way if you grew up outside Europe or North America is not something this work settles, and it belongs in the room if it applies to you.

How do you change what your attachment style does?

Slow the sequence down until each of you can see your own first move in it.

• Watch the first move. For one week, note whether you go towards the other person or away in the seconds before an argument starts.
• Write it down. 3 or 4 entries tell you something about you, this relationship and this month, which no category does.
• Describe, never label. Say what just happened between the 2 of you, and keep the style names out of the room while you are angry.
• If you pursue, step back. When the pursuing partner steps back, I see the quieter one catch their breath and say more, and it rarely works the first time it is tried.
• If you withdraw, say one sentence. Name what is happening in you before you go quiet or leave, and say when you are coming back.
• Check the load around you. Moving country strips out the friends and family who used to absorb ordinary strain, so a pattern that was manageable at home looks extreme in Copenhagen with nothing else having changed.

Watching your own move while you are making it is harder than it reads here, and you can read more about why the same kind of partner keeps arriving. The steps are not enough when the loop runs faster than either of you can follow it, when one of you is carrying most of the repair and has stopped saying so, or when what looks like a pattern between the 2 of you turns out to be something older in one of you that this relationship keeps catching. What stays open for a while is how much of it belongs to the 2 of you and how much either of you brought in, and that is better taken slowly than settled early. You are welcome to book a session or the free 30-minute call.

Questions people ask

Should I bring attachment language into therapy, or leave it at the door?

Bring it, and expect a therapist to take it apart with you rather than confirm it. The language is useful for describing a pattern and poor at settling who is at fault.

Is couples therapy or individual therapy the better fit for this?

Couples therapy is the more direct route when the pattern shows up mainly between the 2 of you, and individual psychotherapy fits better when it runs through friendships and work as well. Some people do one and then the other, and there is no need to choose correctly before you start.

What will a therapist actually do with our pattern?

Slow a familiar sequence down in the room and ask each of you what happened in the seconds before you moved. Most of the work is in those seconds rather than in the argument you came in with.

Do I need to know my attachment style before I start therapy?

No, and arriving with a label can narrow the first few sessions more than it helps them. What you did in the last 3 arguments is more use to a therapist than the name of a category.

How will I know whether the work is doing anything?

The first sign is catching your own move a little earlier, before you have finished making it. Arguments ending sooner, rather than never starting, is the more realistic marker.

If you notice yourself changing shape in a row, I use attachment therapy to slow that down and find out what your system is protecting.

Sources

1. Candel and Turliuc, Insecure attachment and relationship satisfaction: a meta-analysis of actor and partner associations, Personality and Individual Differences, 2019
2. Fraley, Attachment stability from infancy to adulthood: meta-analysis and dynamic modeling of developmental mechanisms, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2002
3. Fraley and Hudson, The development of attachment styles, in Personality Development Across the Lifespan, 2017

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.