Secure Attachment: What It Is and Why It Matters

The word “attachment” means different things to different people. As an adult you want to have healthy relationships, but your ability to do so is shaped by the attachment patterns formed in your childhood.

So, what is healthy attachment? Why does it make such a difference in the well-being of a child? And what are some ways to practice healthy, secure attachment within family systems?

We asked therapist, mother, and author Eli Harwood, MA, LPC (aka AttachmentNerd) to dig into attachment theory on our podcast Mental Note. She walked us through practical ways to parent securely attached children, and how to heal our own patterns so we can nurture healthy attachment in adult relationships. Here are some key takeaways from that conversation.

What is attachment?

Attachment is about how a child’s relationship with a parent or caregiver allows for that child to feel secure, safe and protected. From this kind of relationship, a child can confidently explore the world and return to the parent for comfort and safety. We all experience some form of attachment with our caregivers, even if it isn’t secure and safe.

Whom you attach to as a child and how healthy that attachment is continues to shape how securely and confidently you engage the world as an adult. There are attachment patterns that we carry as defaults from our childhood that can change and shift depending on our current relationships.

Attachment patterns vs attachment styles

There is a significant difference between attachment patterns (defined by years of research by developmental psychologists) and attachment styles (developed by social psychologists). Let’s examine both.

Attachment patterns

Attachment patterns are about relational dynamics – what is happening between two people, in this case caregiver and child.

This doesn’t mean your pattern can’t be different in a different relationship. Attachment patterns can be altered by other people’s patterns. If you had one primary caregiver that you were attached to, you will likely have a more singular attachment pattern. The majority of people grow up experiencing multiple attachment figures and thus have multiple attachment patterns. The primary caregivers are the attachment figures that shape your pattern the most.

Attachment styles

Attachment style is more about how adults relate to others. Your attachment style refers to how you, as an adult, go about engaging the world. Stated simply, an attachment style is akin to taking a personality quiz that says your style is like a golden retriever or a honey badger when you engage in the world.

“Although this is interesting and helpful, it's a little more helpful to talk about attachment in patterns instead of styles,” explains Harwood. “This is because we know that a child can have multiple attachment figures, and in those relationships the quality of connection can be different.”

That’s why, in this piece, we’ll focus on attachment patterns.

Types of attachment

There are four different attachment patterns, but they are fluid and vary depending on the relationship. So a child may have one kind of attachment pattern with one parent or caregiver and a different attachment pattern with another. Here, Harwood helps us unpack each one.

Secure attachment

Secure attachment happens when the caregiver is always responsive to the child (the ideal), allowing them to feel all the feelings that come their way, especially when they are distressed.

“When a child has a secure attachment pattern, they reach for their caregiver when they are in distress and maintain contact with the caregiver until they soothe,” Harwood explains. “And that soothing happens fairly quickly. That means that this caregiver is predictably warm, responsive and effective at helping to co-regulate with the child. So the child's brain has internalized, ‘When I'm upset, I can go to this caregiver and I will feel safe and soothed.’"

Insecure-resistant attachment

Insecure-resistant attachment develops when a caregiver’s response is inconsistent, and the child’s response is to organize around this as best as they can.

“This is what happens when a caregiver only responds intermittently,” shares Harwood. “So sometimes the caregiver is warm and attuned and feels safe and supportive, but sometimes they are unavailable. What happens to the child is they reach, just like the secure kid, but instead of soothing, they protest. Instead of going, ‘You're here, I feel better.’ They go, ‘You're here. I hate that you left me. Why did you leave me? Don't leave me again.’ And that's adaptive because if you are a kid with a caregiver who is not able to show up consistently (not perfectly, but consistently) then you have to keep your eye on them, keep watch on them, make sure that they are paying attention to you because your survival is built on your proximity to them.”

Insecure-avoidant attachment

Insecure-avoidant attachment develops when a caregiver is consistently unable to soothe a child, so the child learns to distract with other things to avoid big feelings.

“That might be as a result of the caregiver not knowing how to notice and articulate emotions, so they are not adept at picking up on feelings or they ignore feelings,” shares Harwood. “Or it might be a caregiver who is so anxious that when the child is upset, they add anxiety to the moment. So either a child is upset and the parent ignores them, shuts them down, doesn't know what to say, gets awkward and uncomfortable, or the parent hovers and intensely reacts to the child's emotions.

“What the child learns is there is no reason to reach. Reaching will not lead to feeling more soothed, settled and safe. So instead of reaching, they avoid and distract. When emotions come into the room, when needs come into the room in their body or someone else’s, they shut down and find something else to focus on to endure the moment without exposing their emotional state to somebody else.”

Disorganized attachment

Disorganized attachment typically develops in extreme cases of abuse in which a child is often frightened and unable to organize a response.

“Disorganized attachment happens when a child is unable to cultivate a pattern. These kiddos are growing up with caregivers who are so unwell that the child is often frightened. The caregiver might have an abusive attitude or come from a legacy of abuse, and so they scare and threaten and even hurt their child. The child then enters a primal survival state when they're in distress. So think blowing up, shutting down, fight, flight, freeze, fawn. They act in ways that feel like an ‘am I going to die?’ response.”

How does attachment change as a child grows up?

Secure attachment looks different from infancy through to adulthood, and the role of the parents and caregivers changes over time.

“Attachment evolves,” explains Harwood. “A very young child seeks the parent more as a safe haven than as a secure base. The attachment relationship is designed to be a place where kids can get that regulation and support when they're in distress, but it's also designed to bolster them with confidence to go out and explore the world.”

Imagine a child has a secure base camp from which they get the confidence to go out and explore, take risks, discover, and come back. When they are toddlers and throughout their grade school years, this is the experience a secure attachment provides.

It is when they become teenagers that things shift.

“Teens begin to transfer their attachment in terms of who is primary in their life,” explains Harwood. “In adolescence, it evens out to being a little more 50-50. Caregivers are still in that secure base camp role, especially in high-stress moments for teens, but peers are becoming core primary attachment figures as well.”

When teens grow up and move out of the house, their primary relationships become others – peers, mentors, roommates or partners. Parents and caregivers are still a support network, but young adults are less likely to seek out a parent for their needs than a significant other.

This is the best outcome in a secure attachment experience for children. Our own attachment pattern will influence this process, and it won’t always go smoothly.

What is healthy attachment in an adult?

Often it takes intentional work to reflect on and heal our own childhood experiences to provide a secure attachment for children.

Harwood notes, “The data says that what happens in childhood doesn't just stay in childhood; it gets wired into our nervous system, our ways of thinking, our beliefs about emotions and needs, and our relational patterns. Do we reach and receive? Do we reach and protest? Do we avoid and distract? Do we blow up and shut down?”

The good news is that attachment patterns can be changed and healed regardless of age. You can learn a secure pattern of relating. “Your first step toward cultivating a secure attachment relationship is cultivating a secure attachment narrative in yourself,” says Harwood.

How to cultivate a secure attachment relationship

Do the work on yourself

Get help, take the time, and find what works for you to heal. Attachment patterns impact our relationships and overall mental health. If you are feeling stuck, come as you are and we’ll match you with the exact support you need.

Allow yourself to grieve

We are not good at grief, and it’s even harder when it’s not a clearly defined thing that we are grieving. However, if you grew up without a secure attachment experience, it is worth processing this grief and the ripple effect it might have created in your life.

Feel the unfelt experiences

There may be numerous experiences that never were allowed to be felt all the way through. Even considering the possibility of letting those feelings come may overwhelm but take your time. Give them the air to breathe and move forward.

“The most effective way to move into a secure pattern is to reflect on the impacts of our childhood attachment relationships and allow ourselves to feel the emotion connected to those impacts. We can't just say, ‘Okay, yeah, yeah, this is what happened,’ and kind of sit with it at a distance. We have to allow ourselves to feel the tenderness around having an avoidant experience or a resistant experience, as well as the sorrow and pain that came with having insecure patterns,” concludes Harwood.

Disorganized attachment and people pleasing

People pleasing in relationships is very likely an outcome of a disorganized attachment pattern, akin to a trauma response. When the primary attachment figure doesn’t always feel like a safe space, the child adapts to reduce friction and tension.

“The child is learning, ‘My needs are a problem. Your needs are the focus.’ And they enter into other relationships with that same pattern,” says Harwood. “If you grow up with a people pleasing pattern with your caregiver that was adaptive and wise, it was the only way to get through that childhood without being psychologically annihilated. But now you're vulnerable to forming close relationships with other people who cannot meet your needs.”

Our need to be seen and heard by the people who were supposed to care for us is natural, real and essential. Our needs are not the problem. But learning to survive by putting our needs aside to keep the peace doesn’t automatically stop when we get older.

“What I often see is that the child’s needs have to come out sideways,” continues Hardwood. “The child may think, ‘Okay, I can't actually have a need so I'm going to fixate on having a perfect body. Or I'm going to fixate on clean eating, which we see with orthorexia. I'm going to find ways to have control in my life that are unrelated to my actual needs. And therefore I'm going to sabotage my own health and my own well-being while I try to maintain other people's wants, needs and wishes.’”

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Tips for parents and caregivers

Parents and caregivers are doing their best with what they know and what shaped them. It’s not easy to be a parent or caregiver, and it takes work to do it in such a way that a child feels secure, safe and confident.

So what are some of the best ways to cultivate secure attachment patterns in our children, even as we might be building them in ourselves?

Be present

According to Harwood, the key to parenting a kid is to offer presence when they are feeling distressed.

“It really is driven by, 'Is there someone, at least one person in my life, who is able to be deeply attuned and connected with me?’ If a kid has that, their brain will shape around it.”

High nurture, high structure

Harwood also notes that kids thrive in environments of “high nurture, high structure.” What does this mean exactly?

“Our job as parents is to be an emotional support. We are emotional scaffolding. We're also literal scaffolding for them on tasks such as learning to walk; we stand around them, let them use our hands and arms until eventually they don't need that, and they evolve in the growth process. It's the same thing with their emotional needs.”

Help kids move through their pain

This brings us to the third tip, which is to help children work through their emotions – the joys and the sorrows, the excitements and the pains.

“Often parents think that supporting their children means preventing them from feeling pain or facing consequences. That actually is problematic for a child's development because they don't get to learn that they can handle and move through the pain. Your goal is to teach them that you are there for them when they are in pain and you will help them learn how to move through it. The idea is not to eliminate or rescue from pain but to offer presence when a child is experiencing tenderness, distress of any kind, because it helps their brain feel safe. And when their brain feels safe, it allocates resources to parts of the brain that help them have a less reactive nervous system, which will allow them to process pain.”

We understand that reading this might feel overwhelming for anyone who didn’t have a secure attachment experience growing up. Don't get discouraged – there’s hope.

You can listen to our full conversation with Eli Harwood on this episode of our Mental Note podcast.

Clinically reviewed by Maggie Moore, MA, LMFT, in April 2024.