Speaking of Psychology - Attachment bonds: Understanding our closest relationships, with Ximena Arriaga, PhD

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

What makes us feel secure, safe and supported in our relationships with partners, friends and family? Ximena Arriaga, PhD, talks about how early and ongoing life experiences shape our bonds with others, why our “attachment style” isn’t fixed but can always change, and how partners can help each other thrive in their close relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. relationships are essential to our health and happiness. But what happens when people find it difficult to feel secure, safe, and supported in their closest relationships with partners, friends, or family? Today we're going to talk with the psychologist who studies attachment theory about how our early and ongoing life experiences shape our later bonds with others. Why do some people find it easier to navigate close relationships than others? If you or your partner tend to feel anxious or insecure in your relationship, what can you do to change that? And what happens when attachment goes awry as in abusive or violent relationships? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast

of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Jimena Ariaga, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. She studies close relationship bonds, how they help people thrive within and beyond their relationships, but also how some bonds can cause considerable pain and harm. She's published dozens of peer-reviewed studies, and her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and other organizations. Dr. Ariaga has been recognized for her research and teaching with awards from Purdue and from the Society for Personality and Social psychology. Dr. Ariaga, thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Kim. It's really a pleasure to be

here with you today. Let's start, as we often do with this podcast, with a definition. What is attachment or attachment style, and how many types of attachments are there? So an attachment orientation is simply a way of characterizing or describing how comfortable, how it ease, really how secure We are around others, especially in social contexts that will activate risk, will feel like they have red flags in them in terms of how we're going to be treated by others. So a classic example might be a child who's in the first day at a new school and they're going to enter the lunchroom. You know, we'd all feel pretty nervous about that, but there are going to be variations across people. people will differ in how they react to that situation. So in terms of styles, the popular media often will recognize four styles, a secure attachment,

an anxious or preoccupied attachment, a dismissive avoidant or somewhat detached attachment style, and a fearful avoidant or somewhat disorganized attachment style. But really what we're talking about here are signature responses that will reflect variations in two things. Attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. So we can place people in terms of where they are in those two dimensions. And certainly variations on those dimensions are useful for predicting a lot of things. What we think is going to happen, what we expect when we enter social situations. situations, what we pay attention to and what we perceive and how we make sense and interpret things

and certainly how we respond, how we react to them. What's the ideology of this? I mean, how do you learn an attachment style? Where does it come from in your life? Is it something that you learn as a child? Does it vary throughout your life? Are there any biological components? Yeah. Historically attachment theories have focused very much on the nurture side of it, nature, nurture debate. In the last 10 years, we're learning much more about biological underpinnings, especially with respect to attachment anxiety. But we can explain a lot of how people manifest a certain signature pattern, especially in their relationships, by just looking at their history. So we can go way back in history to their infancy, certainly attachment bonds begin from the moment we're born.

You know, so attachment bonds are something that we've evolved to have. Mammals need caregivers, mammals signal when they need something. And, you know, baby mammals tend to be pretty cute, so they also tend to evoke a lot of love and care. And, you know, all of that has the function of helping them survive. That is part of the attachment system that Bolby, John Bowlby, described. Now, as we fast forward, when we get into adulthood, there are traces of some stable tendencies. It could be stable ways of interpreting red flags, things like that. But it's our relationship history that's going to matter the most there.

How have we been treated by past partners? How we've been treated by close others? Do we feel generally loved or do we feel like we've got a lot of work to do? Do we feel like there are danger signs all over the place? And can you have different attachment styles depending on the person you're relating to? Absolutely. In terms of styles, when we talk about styles, you know, it's a secure style as someone who generally is very comfortable around their relationship partners.

They tend to expect, all things being equal, they don't expect. that they're going to be loved and valued, that they'll develop trust. They feel okay depending on that person, and they don't mind if that person depends on them. When there is a problem or a crisis or issue that comes up, they certainly respond with anger, with the things that most people respond with, but they don't overreact. They also don't underreact and shut down. So they hunker down and they work the problem. Now, that would be great if all our relationships were like that,

but not all of them are like that. If I'm paired with someone who frankly flirts a lot with other people where I'm constantly seeing these signs that maybe they're not as committed as I want them to be, that's going to start to set off these red flags, and that's going to reinforce a more anxious attachment orientation. And so when people feel a lot of attachment anxiety, they're worried. They're worried. And this really is what fits the classic thing that comes to mind when we say someone's insecure.

You know, they're overly worried. They seem like they're monitoring everything. Those are signs that in the past, that's what I had to do to protect myself. So I may have become pretty preoccupied with what was happening in my relationship because I want it to work. And yet my partner doesn't seem to be there with me at every step. I might become overly sensitive to problems. So even though in a new relationship, there's nothing to worry about, I may overinterpret signs that there's a problem and create mountains out of mole hills.

I might become very jealous easily and overly protective. And the other thing with attachment anxiety is that when a problem does arise, these are individuals who spiral in their negative emotions and catastrophes and really have trouble stepping back and being able to see the situation more objectively. They tend to interpret all of that strife and problem as being their own deficiency and a reflection of their own unworthiness or lack of value in some way.

So that's one type, and then another type is attachment avoidance. And here the key thing is where as anxiously attach people are visibly insecure, avoidantly attach people will mask their concerns. They suppress their negative emotions. They become quite uncomfortable when a partner wants more emotional intimacy. They don't want to depend on others. They don't want others to depend on them. That's this kind of a hassle. They bulk at neediness. They value self-reliance. And then when there's a problem, when there is a conflict of some kind, Whereas anxious people put their emotions into high gear, they have what's called a hyperactivated response.

Avoidant people will suppress and withdraw. They go into low gear and do what's called a deactivated response. So we see anxious people digging deeper into a problem, not letting go. We see avoiding people looking for the nearest exit running out and just assume never like, I never want to think about that again. Can we just move on to that? So the problem, as he just noted, is it's not necessarily the case that all relationships warrant insecurity. So if I had a series of relationships that made me pretty anxious,

but then I enter a relationship with a pretty secure partner and someone who is very trustworthy, it's going to take some time for me to overcome it. And I may not be able to overcome it. I'm going to carry that history with me. And I am probably going to cause some problems in that relationship. going to be demanding a lot about my partner's commitment and showing me that they're faithful and showing me these things. That, you know, that's kind of exhausting. Partners get a little bit tired of that. And then you could say the same for avoidance, how that becomes unadaptive in a relationship where your partner actually is quite trustworthy. Attachment theory has a fairly long history in psychology. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did this whole

theory arise? So I mentioned John Bulby very briefly before. And, you know, John Bolby was anithologist. So he was studying animal behavior. And his observations were based on those infant mammals, you know, the infant kittens. And he didn't study kittens. But, but, you know, those behaviors that are universal in mammals. So these attachment processes, this idea that, you know, we need others. We need others. This is, this is not some modern, you know, conception. This is not sort of like a popular. This is pretty foundational. And Bolby, well, was super at laying out these normative processes that mammals seem to undergo as they seek assistance and support from others and others develop caregiving systems to provide that support.

From mythology, we jump over to child development, where Mary Ainsworth took this a step further by saying, not all of us have the same experiences. So based on our personal histories, we're going to see some differences. And she identified very coherent signature patterns, individual differences that reflect insecurity. So it was Mary Ainsworth who really developed this idea of insecure types. From there we jump to social psychology, to the late 80s where Phil Schaber worked with Cindy Hazan and published several papers, but one particular one, very influential, that made a strong case for understanding. understanding romantic bonds in terms of these attachment processes.

And that launched thousands of studies. What I should say is Phil Schaeber actually met with personality psychologist Mario Mickelencer. So it was that pairing that launched, you know, the thousand studies that defined the field. I mean, they have arguably one of the most prolific partnerships in psychological science. I call them the Watson and Crick of Adult Social Bonds. Like, you know, they're the thing. right there. And then there have been others too. I mean, Chris Frailey studied with Phil Schaver and

Chris Fraley has been very influential in mapping these two adult attachment dimensions, anxiety and avoidance and what it means to vary on those two sides of it. That brings us up to about 2015. I would not necessarily put myself in this line of history among these luminaries, but what we did start doing in 2015 was asking, what about this? insecure still. Like, we know so much about insecurity. We know so much about what anxious individuals do, how they behave, what it means for their relationships, avoidance, and so forth. But can we change that? You know, can we help people become more secure? And that's what got us thinking about that. And what we're seeing is a lot of people actually want to answer that question.

So what got you interested in studying this particular aspect of psychology? When I entered graduate school, I picked the person not the topic, my late advisor. Carol Rusbold was a formidable, fabulous person, and I met her and said, I want to be like, like she is, you know, that's my model. And so that took me down the road of close relationships. We did not study attachment processes, but I did become very interested in this question of whether you can change stable tendencies. So I teamed up with another one of Carol Rusbold's students, Modoka Kumashiro. And early on, we actually had a whole great group. Eli Finkel was part of that group as well. And, you know, Medoka and I got very interested in this issue of how do people

become more secure. What really got me interested in this was being an instructor. You know, I would teach a course on close relationships, and I would go over everything we knew about attachment styles and, you know, how anxious individuals really struggle in their relationships. And, you know, Kim, I'd look out into my students and I'd see these faces suddenly look super concerned and just distraught. And I was like, okay, those are the anxious. individuals in my group. And then I describe avoidance and how people sort of detach and shut down. And sure enough, I'd look in the audience and some students would be turning away and wanting to look at their phone and not having any of this. And I'm like, they're my avoidance, you know. And invariably

some would come up to me after class and say, you know, am I due? Am I never going to have a decent relationship? And I thought, nah, come on, that can be, if it's situations, if it's certain moments, key moments that get people to turn to more security, that reinforce insecurity. Surely there must be moments, key salient moments that can reinforce more security. And that's what really got us studying that. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals

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and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. For some of our listeners who might be just starting a relationship with someone, how can they tell what that other person's attachment style is and whether it's going to be compatible with their own? Compatibility is an interesting issue.

I mean, they can tell where there are sensitive spots with their partner. You know, we all at times will feel anxious, and we all at times will probably feel avoidance. So in that pairing, it's figuring out what am I doing that might trigger anxiety for my partner or might trigger avoidance for my partner. Now, there are also signs when my partner's having a bad day at work and they refuse to talk about it, that's avoidance.

Or my partner's having a bad day at work and they just cannot let it go. That's anxiety. And so those would be the kinds of signs that, again, that's sort of hyperactivated, overreacting, or deactivated, underreacting to stressful situations. But I think compatibility often just comes. comes down to that moment where you really want to be committed to this person. And you're getting signs that that person really wants to be committed to you. So at that point, no relationship

is perfect. You have to work things out. And I think there are ways to alleviate some anxieties and alleviate some avoidant tendencies in relationships. And what are some of those ways? That's a big question. That's a load of question. When Medoka and I started to ask this question of how might people become more secure, we wanted to study relationship bonds, one, because we knew about how those bonds work, and two, because relationship partners are really important attachment figures in adulthood. They're not the only ones. I think that others might have a close friend, sometimes a neighbor. There are a lot of close others who can be that attachment figure. Attachment figures can be really important in reinforcing security in two ways. The first way is we know that insecurities wreak havoc with relationships. When the anxious person, just all they want is to get their partner's commitment, but they demand too much, that has the self-reinforcing effect of pushing a partner away. When the voidant person seems way too detached and can't seem to commit,

that has the self-reinforcing effect of having a partner also pull away because they're seeing this go nowhere. So those insecurities that the first part is trying to mitigate the negative effects that they can have on relationships. What people feel really anxious, we were really interested in what we call soft strategies. And there's no mystery here. It's actually, to me, rather obvious at least. So partners can do a lot to mitigate another person. anxiety by providing lots of reassurance, lots of emotional reassurance, being a calming, soothing influence to try to diffuse some of those spiraling negative emotions, communicating really

strong commitment. So a very effective response might be something like, I know this is really concerning. It makes sense that you're very worried. You don't want to belittle something. It makes sense that you're very worried. And hug, hug, kiss, kiss, touch, touch. And then at that point, you say something like, well, I'm with you 100%. Whatever you want to do, I will be right behind you. If you want help great, if you want to go solo, great. But we're going to get through this. And I don't want anything bad to happen to you. So we will work this problem. You know, that's a lot of reassurance right there. Now, note that there are two things about that response. The first thing, don't try that on an avoidant person. That's going to backfire. So they're very different strategies

to use with an avoidant insecurity, and that's not always obvious to people. The second thing is that even though that puts a band-aid on the moment, okay, we saved the relationship in the moment, those responses are not getting at a telltale feature of attachment anxiety. That's a relatively negative mental model of oneself. You know, we have these certain critical mental representations. Our mental representation of ourself is really elaborate. It's a lifetime of experiences. So our mental model of ourself for anxious individuals tends to be characterized by low self-esteem, low self-worth, low self-efficacy. That's the real issue in attach. That's what sustains attachment anxiety. So to really change this over the longer term, a partner can do a second.

type of thing. And that's to identify those situations that might revise that negative way of seeing oneself. Okay, so partner with an anxious individual might look for those confidence boosting moments. If their partner suddenly gets, and if their anxious person suddenly gets an award, a partner can capitalize on that. They could say, you know, I know you feel like anyone might have gotten this award because anxious individuals are notoriously bad at taking compliments, by the way. You can't just say, good job. You know, that's going to seem empty. But, you know, I know you feel like anyone could have gotten this award, but here's what I saw. I saw you work really hard every single weekend for this. I saw you be really dedicated to this. And sure, maybe others could have gotten

it, but you got it. And I think this is important. And I think this is the start of something. I think you're on to something really important. Okay, so it's amplifying the moment and trying to get them to internalize it in some way. You know, I'm reminded of a friend of mine who, when she first entered academics, she just felt like she didn't belong. And her advisor immediately could stop a brilliant scholar and said, this is a great idea. You know, this is a really important idea. The more reinforcement she got for her ability and for her efficacy as a researcher, the more the social anxiety, do I belong and not just melted away. She wasn't as preoccupied with it. So it's boosting that model of self for anxious individuals. But it sounds a little bit like imposter syndrome

might have been at play there as well, right? I mean, do these things relate to each other? Yes, they do. They do. And, you know, I think there's some lessons here. I've been in higher education now for 30 years. And, you know, before we talked about DEI, I was talking about inclusion. And the reason to talk about inclusion is because when people feel imposter syndrome in a work setting. If you can find what they're really good at and exploit that, like, you're really good at this. This is what you do really well. The other stuff will follow. The feeling excluded, all those things. Not always. There are some real barriers to feeling excluded. But a lot of that, the psychological feeling and not being included, it becomes secondary to the fact that, hey, I'm actually a rock star at

this and I can do pretty well at this. And it's a way of overcoming that imposter's. syndrome. Do people who form bonds or get into relationships tend to have the same kind of attachment style? I mean, does like mate with like, so to speak? I wish I could answer that question with confidence. So there are historically some data on this suggesting that, yes, we tend to see secures with secures and insecure with insecures. And when we look at that insecure, insecure pattern, it's not uncommon to see avoidance with anxiety. And so immediately you're asking, well, which came first? Was it that an anxious person made the other one more avoidant? Or did the voided person make the other one more anxious? You know, which one came first? And that historically was also confounded with some gender

patterns. So when you look at the clinical psych literature on marital dynamics, you know, the classic pattern of demand withdrawal, that has anxiety avoidance written all over it. Now, the reason I'm tentative in saying that's still true is because we are seeing a lot of attachment anxiety right now. Now, we're also seeing a lot of anxiety, period. And I think those two are related. So we're seeing many more couples where they're both anxiously attached, and it's hard to disambiguate whether the origins are these experiences with social bonds and how one was treated previously by important others versus just general anxiety from social media and all the things in life that are causing a lot of anxiety. You also study abusive and violent relationships. What role does

attachment play in these relationships, and what can that tell us about how to help people who are in those relationships? Yes, I think that violence and attachment can have an interplay of an association. So I think they can go both directions. There's some data from long ago that would look at how perpetrators who exhibited this anxiously attached style would be overly controlling and very jealous and lash out. there's still evidence of that, but perpetration is multiply determined. And so there are a lot of perpetrators that aren't at all anxiously attached. On the receiving end of violence, and I know

there are lots of data on how violence is by direction and so forth, I think there's a methodological artifact there and how we study violence. And I think that when you start tracing back to the origins of that relationship, you probably will see one person perpetrating violence a little bit more than the other one and the other one reciprocating. So when people are on the receiving end of violence, we just published a paper showing how those experiences with abuse will reinforce avoidance, how the adaptive, rational thing is to shut down emotionally because this is an untenable situation and it is too painful to remain engaged. So we do see these links between a person's attachment style or orientation and their experience

is either perpetrating or being on the receiving end of violence. But they're difficult that we need, when we think about them, we have to kind of go in and pick specific behaviors like when a partner is engaging in abusive, verbal abusive or is what we're likely to see. Or when a partner feels jealousy, probably that's being driven by their own attachment. in history and so forth. So we just need a little bit of precision in that literature. One of your studies had to do with how young people in abusive or controlling relationships felt after they broke up, what did you find and were some of those results surprising?

Yeah. I'm thinking of work that I've done with Win Goodfriend, and something that happens in abusive relationships when it tends to be more one-sided, or at least in its origins, it was more one-sided where a person was a victim of very abusive behavior. There's a loss of self. So there's a sense that I don't matter that much and people just forget about themselves. And let me give you an example of this. I remember being part of a support group at one point where there was an activity that involved, hey, let's talk about what you like to make for dinner. What's your favorite meal for dinner. And one person said, well, you know, my husband loves it when I'm a chicken catch a door. Like, that's great. We all have chicken catch a door. What do you like for dinner? What's your

favorite? Well, my kids love it when I blah, blah, blah. So there was this sense that I am not here. And that loss of self is a sign of having been controlled and belittled and humiliated repeatedly for a long time. That's a rational response. If I'm in an abusive relationship and I don't see a way out, and I don't mean just financial dependence, I mean emotional commitment as well, psychological dependence. So if I'm in a long time relationship, I may have a job, I may be able to make it fine on myself. We have a lifetime together. We've got kids together. We've got plans for the future. We have our entire networks together. I saw myself with this person. I know that when they're not abusive, they can be abused.

good person. So it's a very complicated thing to undo. And when a person's not ready to undo it, the rational response is to reinterpret the violence, to say, well, it's not so bad. There are reasons behind it. It's just defiable and so forth. All of that leads to one putting oneself in where I don't matter. I'm in the very back of the line. When people leave an abusive relationship, only then do they look back with a different lens. And then, they see, ah, I understand that when she was being abusive toward me, I was ignoring it. I was denying it. I was reinterpreting it. And I couldn't see that in the moment. No matter what my friends would say to me, I couldn't see it, which, by the way, that's why it's very difficult to intervene in this.

Very well-intentioned friends will say something, but it's falling on deaf years when a person is still very committed. Now I see it. That's the moment to start to bolster that sense of self again. That's the moment to start to build that sense and self-ful. So find a hobby. How did it go with your hobby? Wow, that's really cool what you did. How did you crochet that? Anything that starts to give that person a sense of self-agency, this is what I like.

This is what I want and this is what matters to me. What are you studying now and what are the big questions that still remain to be answered in this field? So I come back to the attachment work because I think that that is so universal. we haven't solved this issue of how do we help people become more secure. Now, I think any mental health experts, so counselors, anyone who's working in the mental health space has probably solved it and can work with someone carefully along the lines of the late Sue Johnson's work on emotion-focused therapy. But that's a very long process of trying to overcome insecurities.

And let's face it's very expensive process too. And not everyone can afford the time or money to do that kind of work. What I would love to do is to be able to provide people with information that might help. Here's the thing. Like if I want to change, like let's say, I'm really anxiously attached. I want to become more secure. Great. Now I'm going to set out to do it.

That's half the story. I may have the volition. I may have the will to do it. But I'm not sure what to do. I really don't know. You know, like I just said, the kind of responses for avoidant reactions are very different from the kinds of responses one might have for anxious reactions in terms of effective responses. So I'd love to have information that people can adapt to their own lives.

When we talk about safe strategies for anxious individuals or soft strategies for avoidant individuals, which I didn't get into that much, but we've written about that. It's not cut and dry, I do one, two, three. it's something that a person has to be ready to adapt and know how to adapt, have the skill to adapt to their own life and their own relationships. So I'm really interested in doing good science that provides an answer to that. How can people adapt these things to their own lives? We've done some experimental work, but it is really difficult work. Well, it sounds like there's still a lot to learn than in attachment theory.

I think there is. I think there is. It's an exciting field. I really respect the people who have been forerunners in this field. I think it's great work. And, you know, the thing Kim, about relationship science is I'm never sure if I should tell people I'm a relationship scientist. I mean, the first reaction I always get is like, oh, you must be analyzing my relationship. And I always joke back like, in fact, I am. You're not doing so well. I mean, I don't say that to them. But, you know, it sounds a little bit fluffy and light. And the reality is that relationship scientists have studied and identified some pretty core principles about getting along with others. And I think the lessons extrapolate to societal problems and societal issues and community problems.

And so I think there's a lot to learn there. And I think that there's a lot that we've learned that we can certainly apply to a lot of the issues and problems that we're confronting right now. Dr. Ariaga, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been really interesting. Thank you. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being here. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org

or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wyerman. Thank you for listening to the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle.

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