Relationships

Attachment (or, what we learned before we knew we were learning

Most of us enter adult relationships carrying a set of assumptions so deeply embedded we barely notice them. We assume we know what love looks like, what it feels like to be cared for, what happens when things go wrong, and whether we can trust that someone will stay. These assumptions didn't come from nowhere, rather they were formed long before we had the language to question them, in the earliest relationships of our lives.

As babies, we were constantly scanning our environment looking for cues of safety from our Primary Caregivers. Whether our needs are welcome or inconvenient, whether distress brings comfort or distance, whether closeness is safe or something to be cautious about. These early experiences become a kind of internal blueprint, and we carry it into every significant relationship we have as adults, often without realising we're consulting it at all. Decades of research resulted in what we know as Attachment Theory and it offers a genuinely useful framework for understanding why we show up in relationships the way we do.

As I always say to my clients: this isn't about blame because the people who raised us were working from their own blueprints, shaped by their own early experiences, and so it goes back through the generations. In most cases, they were doing the best they could with the tools they had. But understanding where our patterns come from can make an enormous difference to how we relate to the people closest to us now.

Imagine if you learned early on that expressing needs led to silence (a withdrawal of love) or irritation. As an adult, you may find it genuinely difficult to ask for help, admit you’re struggling, or to let a partner know you need more. You might interpret a reasonable boundary as rejection, or push people away before you can be left. None of this is weakness or dysfunction; it's an adaptive behaviour to an early environment that is now maladaptive.

Or consider someone who grew up in an unpredictable emotional atmosphere, where a parent's mood could shift without warning. As an adult, they might find themselves hypervigilant in relationships, scanning for signs that something is wrong, managing the other person's feelings at the expense of their own, or feeling chronically unsettled even when things are actually fine.

These patterns show up in the ordinary texture of relationships: in how we argue, how we repair after a rupture, how much space we need, how we respond to a partner who's preoccupied or tired - or simply having a bad day. The point isn't to spend a lifetime excavating the past, but to develop enough awareness to make choices rather than simply repeat what we know. Relationships are where we have the greatest opportunity to be changed by another person, and that process becomes richer when we understand what we're actually bringing to the table.