We bring our histories with us, everywhere we go.

The wounds endured in childhood, when not addressed, challenged, or processed, remain with us, a silent GPS system guiding us into our adult relationships, accompanied by the same style of love that underscored our childhood.

In other words: We often attach ourselves to our romantic partners in adulthood, much like we had attached to our primary caregivers in childhood.

But we are not doomed to repeat the past unless, of course, we choose to, or we’re the lucky few who were and remain securely attached.

We are animals with primal, basic needs that never disappear. As infants, we depended on someone to feed, bathe, change, care, and tend to us. When we cried, we hoped someone would come to soothe us. When we needed someone else, we hoped they would arrive. This need for connection never goes away.

When we come of age, that primary need grows with us, like a shadow—even if you can’t see it right away, turn on the light and it’ll come into focus. As babies, we need nurturing and care from our primary guardians; as adults, we need nurturing from our romantic partners.

Children, who are more concrete than adults, don’t have the tools yet to call upon mental images of their loved ones to self-soothe. They need that support and reassurance in real-time from a physical presence.

Adults, on the other hand, can conjure the love and support they feel from their most trusted other (or from their family of origin and close friends). We have the tools to access the reassurance we need in the absence of another and can self-soothe.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Not every adult has these tools—there are plenty of concrete adults who don’t (Hello—it me!).

If you’re like me in this way, here’s an amazing Jack Kornfield meditation that can actually help you with this (in addition to a list of tools.)

While we all have our own definitions of love, some things are immutable: Love is a constant process of actions. It is a process of attention and presence, but also of rupture and repair. It’s like the dance between a newborn and its caregiver— connection, separation, connection, separation. There are always ruptures, but it’s during repair where love is easiest to identify.

Children, the psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth discovered connect in three ways, and this remains true for adults. A person’s basic attachment style is formed in childhood. Either their connection to their primary caregiver is anxious, avoidant, or secure. (Disorganized attachment was added later.)

When our attachment styles grow up and go out into the world, they become the framework for how we connect, for how we love, and for how we see ourselves and others.

Our attachment styles are like themes or motifs in a novel—they are the pattern that silently guides our romantic choices and relationships. The way we learned to interact in childhood becomes the template for how we interact as adults.

The meaning we made from our interactions, from our connections, from our ruptures and repairs with our caretakers, is now the meaning we assign to our partner’s behaviors and actions.

Our present-day emotional reflexes are like light from old stars—when we trace these reflexes back to their origin point, we realize just how far into the past we’ve traveled.

When we grow up with secure attachments, we are at an advantage when it comes to finding a healthy romantic relationship.

When your primary caretakers treated you well, showed and stated their love for you, were (on average) more consistent than not; if you felt seen, nurtured, heard, and valued, then you know what it feels and looks like to have a healthy attachment. This would be your template, and when you forge ahead in the world, looking for commitment or romance, it’s upon that early feeling you’re basing the match.

Not everyone is so lucky. If we constantly find ourselves in a different relationship with the same dynamics, or a person with the same set of traits, should we encounter, over and over again, a similar hurt, we can feel stuck and fated to unhealthy partnerships.

This is why it helps to metaphorically travel back and see if you can identify our attachment style. Once we know how we operate, we can begin to understand what we’re unconsciously seeking in a partner, and how and where our barometer for being treated was set, and we can work to course correct and change it.

The British psychologist D.W. Winnicott termed the experience a baby has of feeling safe and nurtured in the arms of their primary caretaker a “holding environment.”

The mutual gazing, the swaddling, shushing, humming, cooing, soft talk, and care that passes from caretaker to baby offers security.

The reflection and affection is focused on the child’s being, on their essence, not on what they are doing. It’s in this first year where a private language is being shaped and formed, that the infant develops an attachment style.

Should their caretaker be attentive enough, they will most likely feel secure.

But, should their caretaker be consistently unreliable, the infant will develop a sense of their own importance or unimportance. They will make meaning from the messages received from the care they experience.

We do that now, all the time, in our adult interactions.

A caretaker’s style of care can always be altered, and early attachment styles can also change, based on shifts of care—nothing is necessarily fixed or stuck in place.

The process between a primary caregiver and an infant is collaborative. Together they create a language, first unspoken, and then later, barring unforeseen developmental challenges, spoken.

When that secure base is created between the two, the infant will grow to feel secure to explore not just their external surroundings, but their internal world.

Winnicott believed that a caregiver really only needed to be “good enough.” They needn’t feel pressured to meet every single need. Nor should they punish themselves when they miss cues, or can’t understand what the infant wants..

Everything takes time, and that first year of life especially is so exhausting, painful, and difficult. There is no reason to believe you must be perfect. That’s simply not possible. The goal is to be “good enough,” to be available to the needs of your infant more often than not, and not to worry during the times when you’re simply unavailable or unreliable.

The “good enough” caregiver will raise a baby who develops a “true self.” The true self is the infant’s innate personality.

It’s only when a caregiver is consistently unreliable that things can go south. When things do go south (for not all of us grew up with “good enough” caregivers) that particular environment fosters a “false self.”

The false self emerges as a coping mechanism. If caregivers are emotionally absent or consistently unreliable, or if there are early traumatic ruptures that aren’t followed by attempts at repair, an infant might grow to take on identities that thwart or obscure their true self.

For instance: When a child grows up with an emotionally unstable parent who relies on their child to care for them, they are “parentifying” their child. This child isn’t afforded the freedom to develop their true self without the burden of a responsibility that shouldn’t be theirs. They step into a role that gets them the validation they need but don’t get when they are their authentic selves.

All people develop a false self to one degree or another (I mean, we’ve all been teenagers), but it’s the false self annihilating the true self that is important here. We can’t model behavior we don’t see. Instead, we internalize the framework of our relationship with our caregivers to create a working model of all our interpersonal relationships. And we form beliefs about ourselves and our expectations of others.

If we had caregivers who were attuned and attentive, or simply present and available when we needed them, we learn that relationships are give-and-take, a dance, or choreography of exchange.

When our caretakers are entirely absent or abusive, we learn to develop our false selves and seek the attention we craved from our caregivers but never received.

There appears to be a correlation between the way we attach to our primary caregivers as infants and how we later attach to people as adults in our romantic relationships: If we were anxiously attached as an infant, chances are we’ll attach anxiously as an adult.

The Anxiously Attached Adult

When one is anxiously attached in their adult romantic relationship, they often crave deep connection and intimacy.

Underneath the love that anxiously attached adults crave is a current of fear that whispers: I love them more than they love me. I care about them more than they care about me, which soon turns into: I am not as loved as I want to be. They don’t care about me as much as I need them to care about me.

This undercurrent of worry soon becomes a current and then it becomes a central, and loud ocean of concern, and our anxiously attached partner can become preoccupied with rejection and abandonment.

An anxiously attached partner will take most things personally and read into their partner’s actions and behavior. If this anxiously attached partner is lucky enough to find a securely attached mate who can meet their emotional needs, offer reassurance, security, and the vital sense of safety that anxiously attached adults need to thrive in partnership, then the anxiously attached partner should be better able to regulate their outsize fears and emotions.

An anxiously attached partner will frequently seek approval in order to get their need for connection met. They will also seek the reassurance they need that they are loved and safe, and not on the precipice of abandonment.

When you are anxiously attached, any romantic relationship presents itself as a huge risk. To love means to risk being left, and for anxious people, this radiates through the body like a physical and intolerable pain.

The Avoidantly Attached adult

Vulnerability is uncomfortable for most people, but for people with avoidant styles of attachment, connection can feel downright dangerous.

People with avoidant styles tend to fear that closeness to another precipitates the end of their independence and freedom. They are so self-reliant, and believe wholeheartedly that they don’t need others to be there for them. What’s really driving this behavior and this worldview is the belief that other people are inherently unreliable and untrustworthy.

They are simply not interested in being dependent on someone else, and so they work hard to keep others at an emotional distance. The fact is, they may actually WANT to be close, but they fear that too much closeness will threaten their sense of autonomy and independence.

Because avoidants value their independence above all else, they are not preoccupied, like anxiously attached people, with fears of being abandoned or left.

Should they be in partnership with an anxiously attached person, their emotional distance will likely trigger their partner’s anxiety, which will cause more need for connection, which the avoidant will read as controlling.

Intimacy to the avoidant equals fear and distrust. The closer someone wants to get, the more evasive the avoidant will become.

The Securely Attached Adult

Securely attached adults are adept at emotional regulation, and are confident in their value and worth. When they feel their partner pulling away, they don’t immediately jump to the worst-case scenario and ruminate for days over the threat of a break-up.

When you have a secure attachment style, you are capable of setting boundaries, and feeling happy and confident alone as well as in partnership. You have the ability to work through interpersonal conflict without resorting to gaslighting, defensiveness or personal attacks.

Securely attached partners are resilient and can face a breakup, mourn it, and then move on.

Basically, they are perfect.

Just kidding. I’m just envious.

The truth is, like emotions, while we all seem to have a primary attachment style, different relationships bring out different styles, depending on who we’re with.

It is incredibly hard to tune into another person’s calls for connection, and to respond with appropriate love and care. Mainly because we’re often caught up in our own thoughts, but more so, because we don’t know how to say what or how we feel.

We are terrible messengers of our feeling-states. We might say: “I can’t believe you didn’t invite me to your party,” but that’s not a feeling. A feeling is: “Being excluded from your party left me feeling ignored and unimportant.”

Because of this, we often don’t send clear messages about what we need or even how much we value and love someone.

The good news is that we can work our way toward a more secure attachment style.

If you truly want to change, you can work hard to become more conscious of your behavior and actions. You can pay attention to your subconscious behaviors. Do you say you want to be in a committed relationship, but reject every single potential partner?

Do you say that you want to be conscious and self-aware, yet find yourself being consistently passive-aggressive to those around you?

Behavior is information. If your words and your actions do not align, then you are misaligned and out of tune with yourself. You must understand WHY you do the things you do if you’re to work on changing them.

You must be able to face the truth about your inner demons, your bad manners, your poor treatment of people, or any other thing you’re doing that you know affects others, but you can’t quite pinpoint the reason.

1. Seek out a qualified therapist. Obviously, I’m a HUGE proponent of therapy. It's a great place to start to understand how our subconscious operates, and to identify the invisible frameworks and beliefs we’ve unconsciously been carrying with us. It’s also a great place to understand your family history and the frameworks inside which you were raised. You can’t push back against what you can’t identify or see.

Working to become more mindful of our patterns will lead to better relationships with yourself and others.

Being mindful can look like:

2. Watch and study. (Or, find a secret mentor-they don't have to know!) Identify the person or people in your life who seem to have healthy, secure relationships, and learn from them. Ask them questions about how they deal with ruptures and repairs. Watch them in action, identify the small connections they make with one another, and observe how they do it. Then, copy them. See how it feels.

3. Record and reflect. Take ten minutes to write out your feelings. It's nice to create a ritual around this. Maybe first thing in the morning over coffee, or right before you brush your teeth at night.

Ask yourself what you feel, and then write down the answer. Do you experience a nagging sense that you're not as loved by others as you want? Write that down. Stay with it when it gets uncomfortable. Your truth lives inside that discomfort. Open the door.

Falling in love is scary for many people, but if you’re ready, and you’re with a secure partner, it’s a great opportunity to reexamine your childhood and see if you are operating in love using an outdated model.

Don’t know what your attachment style is? Here’s a quiz.And here's another, from NPR.

And you? Does any of this resonate with you? Are you aware of how your attachment style shows up in your love relationships?

Until next week I remain…