What People Get Wrong About Attachment Theory

Attachment styles aren’t fixed labels—they’re learned patterns that can change.

Posted February 10, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley

It’s February, and for many, that’s a time for contemplating love, intimacy, and relationships . Inevitably, attachment theory may come up. While it’s a useful framework for understanding how humans interact and handle intimacy, like any framework, it hinders rather than helps when applied rigidly. First, some background on attachment theory.

Attachment theory was developed by psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby throughout the 1950s. He observed that children form an internal working model of relationships based on early attachment experiences with their primary caregiver and the latter’s availability and responsiveness. Bowlby theorized that attachment behaviors are instinctual and evolved to promote the survival of infants. Disruptions in early attachments (like separation, neglect, or abuse) can make it difficult for a child to feel safe, seen, or soothed in relationships. Over time, the child develops protective strategies such as shutting down emotionally, becoming overly vigilant to signs of rejection, or experiencing confusion and fear around intimacy. These internal working models and attachment systems then go on to potentially influence and be influenced by future relationships.

Psychologist Mary Ainsworth later expanded on Bowlby's work in the 1970s, introducing the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to identify attachment patterns through observing infant behavior in controlled environments. Based on research by Ainsworth and others, such as Mary Main 1 , there are four main attachment styles that refer to different patterns of emotional bonds and attachment processes that influence human development and future relationships. They are generally characterized in the following basic ways:

Those four categories have taken on a life of their own and are used to explain adult relationship dynamics, ranging from how attachment styles influence relationship functioning, emotional intimacy, and a person’s ability to form meaningful relationships and emotional connections within family, friendships, and romantic relationships .

When Attachment Styles Get Misused and Weaponized

So where do people go wrong? For starters, those labels have become weaponized. Scour the internet, and you’ll find millions of articles, memes , comments, and videos that vilify all the attachment styles other than secure. There’s often a hierarchy with avoidant and disorganized attachment at the bottom and secure at the top.

People with insecure attachment styles can be pathologized, criticized, and shamed. But all attachment styles are adaptations with their own strengths and weaknesses—even secure attachment. They are strategies people employ to cope with insecurity or unavailability. Some people learned it was safe to lean in emotionally, while others learned it was safer to lean out. To pillory specific attachment styles ignores that these patterns developed as adaptive responses to specific relational conditions. The key concept here is “learned,” meaning attachment is a learned behavior that can also be unlearned, even for someone with secure attachment.

Many pop psychologists or relationship coaches paint attachment styles as fixed, suggesting a lifelong determinism that is not borne out by clinical experience or attachment research. Moreover, this misunderstanding discounts research and clinical findings that affirm how temperament, personality organization, culture, human archetypes, and internal factors influence both the quality of caregiving and subsequent attachment patterns. 2,3

Attachment styles exist on a spectrum and can shift in response to circumstances and experiences. That means someone with avoidant attachment can become more secure, and conversely, someone with secure attachment can become more insecure.

Other Misconceptions About Attachment Styles

Another fallacy is that a person has one attachment style . While individuals tend to exhibit a general attachment orientation, they show domain-specific attachment patterns, that is, they exhibit styles that differ across different relational domains (family vs. friendships vs. romantic vs. work), and finally, there can be unique patterns with particular people, reflecting “relationship-specific attachment.” A person can be avoidant with their romantic partners, anxious with their siblings, and secure with their friends. These patterns are significantly shaped by past experiences and how their needs were met in those relationships. 4

Lastly, there’s a mistaken belief that people only need to find a secure relationship to heal attachment wounds. While it’s often true that “what is broken relationally must be healed relationally,” 5 seasoned mental health practitioners experience limits to this supposition. 6 Safe connection and relatedness can be tremendously healing, but there’s a shadowy arrogance underlying the belief that having a secure attachment style, and by extension, being in a secure relationship, can completely heal destructive wounds and patterns from other relationships, let alone rectify other challenges, relationship conflicts, or mental conditions.

We see this play out in the “just find someone who’s secure” narrative, as well as in the narrative that “your therapeutic relationship can heal all your previous relational wounds.” This belief can be enormously gratifying and seductive to therapist and patient alike. The experience of healing within a healthy, reparative, analytic, or therapeutic relationship is life-changing and core in effective psychotherapies; nevertheless, such relationships are not substitutes for real-world relationships, and experience has shown they cannot fully undo the effects of relationships that were previously destructive or absent.

Finally, I make room for the spiritual, a dimension of life that often emerges in treatment, which many people find profoundly meaningful, life-giving, and valuable, particularly when facing heartbreaking relational trauma . The healing that comes from engaging with divine sources of relationality can be especially transformative for those whose experience of human relationships has been so untrustworthy and wounding. The therapeutic relationship can often be a conduit for such spiritual experiences, yet it does not replicate the kind of healing that also comes from nonpersonal and spiritual forms of relationship.

Relational healing is complex and multifaceted. While attachment theory offers an accessible lens for describing common, human, relational patterns, we do ourselves a disservice when we simplify our relational experiences and the complexity of the relational unconscious into four categories, especially when those categories become fixed, dismissing, or pathologizing of other aspects of a person, such as temperament, genetic and biological influences, spirituality , human archetypes, culture, and more.

Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1986). Discovery of an insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern. In T. B. Brazelton & M. W. Yogman (Eds.), Affective development in infancy (pp. 95–124). Ablex Publishing.
Bosmans, G., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., Vervliet, B., Verhees, M.W.F.T., van IJzendoorn, M.H. (2020). A learning theory of attachment: Unraveling the black box of attachment development. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 113, 287-298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.03.014 .
Hong, Y. R., & Park, J. S. (2012). Impact of attachment, temperament and parenting on human development. Korean journal of pediatrics, 55(12), 449–454. https://doi.org/10.3345/kjp.2012.55.12.449
Oldeman, M. G., Cillessen, A. H. N., & van den Berg, Y. H. M. (2025). Friendships in Emerging Adulthood: The Role of Parental and Friendship Attachment Representations and Intimacy. Personality & social psychology bulletin, 51(4), 514–529. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231195339
Kalsched, D. (2013). Trauma and the soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption. Hove, England: Routledge.
Marlo, H. (2013). Between the worlds—Healing trauma, body, and soul: A conversation with Donald Kalsched. Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 7(3), 117–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2013.813280

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Helen Marlo, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Psychology at Notre Dame de Namur University, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a certified psychoanalyst (C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco).

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.