Attachment Styles & Codependency — Big Therapy Buzzwords
It feels like everyone has taken an interest in learning about their attachment styles lately. Thanks to the popular book, Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller, the topic is less niche than it once was when I was a graduate student learning about the ways in which Freud’s psychodynamic principles had led to an evolution of important ideas like object relations theory, internal working models, and other psychoanalytic theories. Attachment theory, being one of those very important findings, had me glued to my desk chair when I first learned about it. It was one of those “aha” grad school moments, and I remember it felt like the theory instantly made sense to me.
I am the oldest child of four. I have two loving parents who did their best to handle the stressors of an intense emergency in their early parenting years. My brother was born 11 weeks premature shortly after my parents had moved into their new house in a small town 45 minutes outside of Boston. My brother (now 32 years old, 6’3” tall, and thriving in a happy marriage with two sons of his own) remained in the NICU for months to follow surviving his birth at 3 lbs. My mom to this day still recalls, “can you believe that when he was born, he was smaller than a lemon?!” As you can imagine, this was a major stressor in our family that I, only 16 months old at the time, actually have memories of.
When studying early childhood development in graduate school, I often thought about how my siblings and I differed in our temperaments, self-esteem, ability to handle stress, and other factors following this event and our relationship to it. Attachment theory provided a framework that helped me understand why I may crave more attention and love in adult relationships, despite my independent nature (to any clients reading this — yes, you caught me: I do lean more anxiously attached); whereas my youngest brother who did not witness my parents through this experience (because he wasn’t born yet), is and always has had a secure attachment. I won’t air out my other siblings’ attachment style laundry, but the dots connected thanks to my early childhood experiences, and I saw how they shaped my own attachment style and that of my siblings.
In adult relationships, this was playing out in what I had previously thought was just romantic misfortune. Attachment theory gave me a new framework of work I needed to do on myself: I had had enough boyfriends and breakups to recognize the spell that was cast upon me every time I felt a magnetic pull from a partner with an avoidant attachment style, even if I didn’t even like them that much. So it was then that my curiosity in how early childhood development impacts adulthood was born, a full two years before sitting in the “therapist chair” with clients, helping them unpack their own patterns in love and experiences with their caregivers.
Nowadays, attachment styles have become a big therapy-speech buzzword for people trying to better understand their tendencies in relationships. I see posts about attachment styles and what partners to be weary of all over my social media feed. It is also one of the most popular subjects clients will ask about in therapy. Most of the clients I’ve worked with come to therapy having done some research on their own attachment style — especially if they’re going through a break up (and in most cases, they have also done some research on their (ex-)partners’ attachment styles too).
To me, the labels are less important than looking at how the dynamics push and pull clients in healthy and unhealthy relationship patterns. This is where codependency, another therapy buzzword, interacts: why do some adults learn to overfunction for others at the expense of their own needs? Why is there a need to keep an unhealthy relationship intact, and how does it stem from an early childhood experience they may have had with a caregiver? How might someone be okay with losing their sense of self in order to keep another person and/or the relationship to that person afloat? Why do people subconsciously fear what may happen if a relationship crumbles and they have to face the world alone, even if that’s the way out of a pattern that continues to hurt them?
These are some of the questions I will help my clients explore in the therapy group I am launching next Monday 9/29/25, called “Healing Codependency & Attachment Wounds.” This group will take place in-person on Mondays from 6-7pm in Windham, Maine at the Emily Hope Counseling Office. This group will provide education around these two topics — Codependency and Attachment — and provide a space for those to process. In the upcoming week, I plan to provide more resources on my blog and website for folks looking to learn more about these two topics and how they intersect and show up in our adult lives and relationships. If interested in joining this group, you can learn more and/or register from now until September 28, 2025.
#Blog #codependency #attachment #attachmenttheory #grouptherapy #therapistsofmaine #windhammaine #portlandmaine #mainementalhealthresources
Photography by: Marissa Elise Photography
