Recently I’ve been thinking about attachment theory, a framework first posed in the mid-1900s by British psychiatrist John Bowlby to define and discuss the importance of bonds between infants and their caregivers. In the 1980s, academics Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver extended the theory to include romantic relationships between adults, little knowing that the four adult attachment “styles” would become as ubiquitous as astrological signs in the queer community of the 21st century. Among my peers, your particular attachment style is seen as a stand-in for what kind of personality you have or what kind of person you are—something as fundamental and unchanging as your star sign.
Quite often I find people referring to their attachment style as though it’s an innate part of themselves rather than something that exists in relation to others. “I have an anxious attachment style so I stress when I don’t get a text back,” they say, or “She’s avoidant-attachment so she won’t give you a clear answer.” I’ve had well-meaning friends, even therapists, parrot conclusions like this when I’ve told them about issues in my own romantic life, and for a long time I was under the impression that my attachment style is something within myself that I needed to fix.
This leads to one of the bigger issues with the therapy I’ve had throughout my life. Sometimes, I think therapy advocates we look inward in response to a situation when often there is an outward environmental or situational cause. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was counselled on how to deal with my anxiety and depression, when both those things were natural responses to dealing with an abusive parent. Nor could any advice from a therapist help me when I was living under constant financial stress.
When I dated a gambling addict who tended to disappear for days at a time, and who I couldn’t trust not to pull our life out from underneath us, I was counselled on how to ease my anxiety and grapple with my own attachment style—as if anxiety wasn’t a rational reaction to the life I was living. When—after going through two extremely dysfunctional romantic relationships—I was reluctant to date for five years, my friends told me I had a fearful-avoidant attachment style. On reflection, all I was doing was making a healthy decision to pause and heal. I began to realise how silly this insistence on labelling and pathologising my behaviour had become.
Perhaps categorisation and analysis help when your life is mostly stable, yet you feel wrong within it—but when your life is chaotic and destructive due to outside forces (for example due to poverty, abuse or caring for an addict) you need immediate relief from those circumstances, not guidance on how to work on yourself. No conversation, with a friend or a paid professional, helped me as much as making more money or leaving a toxic relationship did.
At times, therapy has seemed to me both a middle-class aspiration and a sedative to the working class. No amount of money poured into mental health services is helpful when people’s base material needs aren’t being met, and it is meaningless lip service when governments subsidise therapy but don’t put a stop to rent increases or create more free housing. (Especially when abusive relationships are so tied to economics, such as not being able to afford to live alone or to leave a living arrangement.)
How are you supposed to use self-reflection to improve your relationship with someone who lies to you or steals from you, and how are you supposed to soothe yourself when you can’t afford to survive?
Of course, I don’t deny the usefulness of therapy, or even of theoretical frameworks such as attachment theory—particularly when they are used in tandem with recognising and addressing people’s material conditions. However, when used as cure-all with no bearing on reality—an attitude revealed by those who tell others to just “get therapy”—all it does is use introspection to defang and neutralise us into submission, making us accept circumstances we shouldn’t accept, making us believe the problem is ourselves rather than the world around us. As the famous saying goes: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I completely agree, and if that means I have a dismissive-avoidant attachment style, then so be it!
