Attachment Styles and Why Your Relationship Keeps Repeating the Same Patterns
- Apr 14
- 5 min read
Attachment styles relationships | Anxious avoidant attachment therapy | Relational psychotherapy Chamonix
There is a particular frustration that brings many people to therapy — not a single crisis, but a pattern. The same argument, recurring across different relationships. The same feeling of not quite being able to reach the person they love, or of being reached for in ways that feel overwhelming. The same dynamic, playing out again, in a relationship that was supposed to be different.
Understanding why this happens — and what to do about it — is one of the most useful things therapy can offer. Attachment theory gives us a precise and compassionate framework for exactly this.
What attachment theory actually is
Attachment theory was developed by the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby in the mid-twentieth century, and later extended through the research of Mary Ainsworth and others. Its central insight is deceptively simple: the strategies we developed as infants and young children for staying emotionally close to our caregivers — for managing the anxiety of separation, for seeking comfort, for regulating our emotional states — become the templates through which we relate to the people we love as adults.
These templates are not conscious choices. They were formed before we had language for them, in the earliest relational experiences of our lives. And because they were formed that early, they operate largely outside our awareness — as automatic responses to closeness, distance, vulnerability, and the threat of loss.
This is why insight alone is often not enough to change relational patterns. You can understand intellectually that you tend to push people away under pressure, or that you become anxious when a partner needs space, and still find yourself doing exactly that, despite your best intentions. The pattern lives deeper than understanding.
The four main attachment styles
Researchers have identified four broad attachment patterns, though it is worth noting that these are not fixed categories — most people recognise themselves in more than one, and patterns can shift across different relationships and different life circumstances.
Secure attachment develops when a caregiver has been reliably responsive — not perfectly, but consistently enough that the child internalises a fundamental sense of safety in relationship. Adults with a predominantly secure attachment style tend to find intimacy relatively comfortable, to communicate needs without excessive anxiety, and to recover from relational ruptures without assuming the relationship is over.
Anxious attachment (sometimes called preoccupied attachment) tends to develop when caregiving has been inconsistent — loving and responsive at times, unavailable or distracted at others. The child learns that connection is possible but unreliable, and develops a heightened vigilance for signs of withdrawal. In adult relationships, this can show up as a strong need for reassurance, sensitivity to perceived distance, difficulty tolerating uncertainty about where you stand, and a tendency to interpret a partner's need for space as rejection.
Avoidant attachment (sometimes called dismissing attachment) often develops when emotional needs were consistently minimised or met with discomfort — when showing vulnerability led to withdrawal rather than comfort. The child learns to self-contain, to manage emotional distress alone, and to be cautious about depending on others. In adult relationships, this can manifest as discomfort with emotional closeness, a tendency to withdraw when a partner becomes emotionally demanding, and difficulty accessing or expressing vulnerability.
Disorganised attachment (sometimes called fearful-avoidant) tends to arise from early experiences in which the caregiver was also a source of fear — through trauma, abuse, or significant emotional dysregulation. The result is a fundamental conflict: the person who could offer safety is also frightening, which leaves no coherent strategy for managing distress. Adults with this attachment pattern may experience relationships as simultaneously deeply desired and deeply threatening.
The anxious-avoidant dynamic
One of the most common — and most painful — relational patterns that brings couples to therapy is what is often called the anxious-avoidant dynamic. One partner tends toward anxious attachment: they seek closeness, become distressed by distance, and pursue connection when they feel the relationship pulling away. The other tends toward avoidant attachment: they need space to feel comfortable, experience pursuit as pressure, and withdraw further under emotional intensity.
Each person's response activates the other's attachment anxiety. The more the anxious partner pursues, the more the avoidant partner withdraws. The more the avoidant partner withdraws, the more the anxious partner pursues. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing and escalating, and both people end up feeling misunderstood — the anxious partner experiencing abandonment, the avoidant partner experiencing engulfment.
Crucially, neither person is doing anything wrong. Each is responding from their own attachment history, in ways that once made sense. The tragedy is that the strategies each person uses to feel safer are precisely the ones that dysregulate the other.
Understanding this — really understanding it, not just intellectually but in the felt sense of a session where the pattern becomes visible — is often the beginning of something genuinely different.
How attachment connects to Transactional Analysis
In my work, I draw on relational Transactional Analysis alongside attachment theory, and the two frameworks illuminate each other in useful ways.
TA's concept of the life script — the early, largely unconscious decisions we make about ourselves, others, and the world — maps closely onto attachment patterns. The child who develops an anxious attachment style often carries script beliefs along the lines of: I am not enough to hold someone's interest; people I love will leave; I have to work hard to keep connection. The child who develops an avoidant style may carry: needing others is dangerous; showing vulnerability leads to rejection; I am safer alone.
These beliefs are not the truth. They are adaptations — strategies that made sense in a particular relational environment and that have been generalised, often unconsciously, to every subsequent relationship.
TA gives us a way to name these script beliefs precisely, to trace where they came from, and to begin — carefully and relationally — to update them. This is not simply a cognitive process. It happens in the therapeutic relationship itself, through the experience of being responded to differently than the script expects.
What this means in practice
If you recognise yourself in any of the patterns described above — whether in a current relationship, across multiple relationships, or in the way you relate to therapy itself — it is worth knowing that these patterns are not fixed. They were learned in relationship, and they can be revised in relationship.
Individual therapy offers a space to explore your attachment history with curiosity rather than judgement — to understand where your relational patterns came from, how they have served you, and where they are costing you more than they are protecting you.
Couples therapy offers something additional: the opportunity to explore these patterns together, in real time, with a third perspective. When both partners can begin to see the dynamic they are caught in — and recognise each other's behaviour as attachment responses rather than acts of hostility or indifference — the quality of the conversation changes.
Neither process is quick. But the change that comes from it tends to be durable, because it works at the level where the pattern actually lives.
If this resonates, I work with individuals and couples in Chamonix and online across France, drawing on relational Transactional Analysis and attachment-informed psychotherapy.
Fleur Jaworski-Richards Fleur is a UKCP-registered psychotherapeutic counsellor based in Les Houches, Chamonix valley. She works bilingually in English and French with individuals and couples in person and online across France, drawing on relational Transactional Analysis and attachment-informed psychotherapy.
