Throughout my 22 years of life, I have always been fascinated by the human brain. I spent much of my youth dissecting the minds of my friends and peers,trying to understand why they did the things they did, observing how they reacted in times of fear, and questioning why people make certain decisions. Much of my free time, starting as young as middle school, was spent discussing various psychological and philosophical topics such as existentialism, the meaning of life, and the human brain with anyone who would listen (common topics of conversation for a 12-year-old, right?).

In my past four years as a Psychology major (this was clearly the most sensical path for me, considering my natural inclination), I have spent much of my time, in and out of school, fascinated by how attachment styles bleed into every relationship we as humans explore. Even minuscule things, such as bugging a professor for a grade because you need it NOW, tolerating a friend who constantly does things that bother you, avoiding certain genres of music or movies because they make you feel a certain way, or even sparking up a conversation with the barista you see every day, ALL have to do with attachment. The reality is (and don’t call me biased just because it is my major), you cannot escape psychology. We all have brains and we all have issues– you just have to work with them. The most liberating thing you can do as a human being
is taking strives to understand your own psyche– it makes your world a whole lot easier.

Throughout this past year, I have gone into a deep dive into my own psyche, asking myself questions like: “Why am I processing information this way?” “What is this specific event bringing up emotionally for me? How can this help me better understand myself?” and “How can I use difficult or vulnerable situations to learn my emotional system and better equip myself for the future?” (These are classic senior-year-of-college-existential-quarterlife-crisis thoughts, but when you have the backing of academic psychological knowledge, these internal conversations with yourself become far more interesting).

Of course, as life goes, I have only come across some of these answers. I don’t expect to find all of them, but the clarity I have found has been almost startling. Thoughts like “Wow, I didn’t know that one event 12 years ago affected me that much,” or “Okay, I am acting this way because I am scared or protecting myself, not because I am crazy or unreasonable,” started popping up much more frequently. Instead of beating myself up for feeling (which is innately human), I sought to understand why I was feeling– a grace I always tried to give to others, but never gave to myself.

I came to the realization that the biggest missing puzzle piece for me when analyzing my own behavior was understanding my own attachment style. The reality is, I really just didn’t want to think about it, so I didn’t. It can feel scary and overwhelming to trace your current behaviors all the way back to events in the past, and to piece together all of the little things that make up who you are, how you love, and how you connect with others. It is easier to avoid; to allow life to pass you by, and to psychoanalyze everyone but yourself. But there is only so much you can control about others. True growth is realizing the change you want to see needs to come from within you.

Research on Attachment
Attachment styles are classifications of how people tend to behave in romantic (and platonic) relationships. While attachment styles can change based on relationship dynamics, patterns of life events, or with unlearning/relearning certain behaviors, they are primarily dictated by the emotional connection formed between a child and their primary caregiver(s) in early development. The bond you experienced during these first relationships of your life can determine how you relate to others and respond to intimacy throughout your life.

There are two categories of attachment: Secure and insecure. Attachment theory posits that if a person feels safe, understood, and emotionally supported as an infant, they are likely to develop a secure attachment style. This means that caregivers were responsive to emotional and physical needs and accurately interpreted when those needs would inevitably shift. Secure attachment entails healthy boundaries, mutual trust, consistant support, and controlled conflict resolution. The securely attached individual is confident, trusting, and hopeful, with an ability to healthily navigate conflicts, respond to intimacy, and recognize that ups and downs in relationships are natural and inevitable. They can openly seek support and comfort from their partner/trusted loved ones, but do not get overly anxious when there is space being taken, whether it be literal space (travelling, time spent apart, etc.) or metaphorical space (taking a break, taking time to think, etc). About 60% of adults in the US are securely attached.

In the same vein, children who experienced frightening, confusing, or inconsistent emotional communication and validation from a caregiver are more likely develop an insecure attachment style in adulthood. Because their emotional needs were not responded to adequately– this can look like dismissal or diminishment of emotions, or even enmeshment from a parent, meaning the child feels unsafe sharing emotional concerns because they feel it will greatly emotionally impact the parent– those with insecure attachments grow into adults who have trouble understanding and healthily navigating their own emotions or feelings for others. They feel insecure and unsafe when intimacy and closeness arise, because the relationships that were supposed to be safe and consistent for them in their critical developmental years failed them in some way or another. The insecure attachment category holds 2 primary subtypes: 1) Anxious attachment, and 2) Avoidant attachment(which is made up of two further classifications, called dismissive and fearful). Around 40% of adults in the US are insecurely attached.

Anxiously attached individuals (making up around 11% of the insecurely attached), harbor a need for constant validation, and can tend to find themselves determining self-worth based on the actions or behaviors of their partner/loved ones. They are often labelled as overly “needy” or “clingy,”(especially by an avoidant counterpart), and as the label suggests, are often anxious and uncertain. They crave emotional intimacy deeply but are constantly worrying that others do not want to be with or around them. To soothe this feeling, they cling on even tighter. They fall into cycles of hyperfixation, stepping over boundaries and viewing space as a threat to intimacy. A guardian or parental figure was likely inconsistent with their parenting styles, sometimes engaging and responding to needs, and other times being unavailable to the anxiously attached. This push-and-pull in the early stages of development creates the uncertainty and “pushiness” that anxiously attached people display. The anxiously attached feels safest in togetherness– any threat to togetherness can cause intense spiraling.

Dismissive avoidant individuals (making up around 18-25% of the insecurely attached) tend to initially avoid intimacy and vulnerability, especially when the relationship feels “too heavy” or “too serious.” They are often labelled as fickle, cold, indecisive, and blamed for their commitment issues. The dismissive avoidant tends to view intimacy as a loss of personal autonomy. In the face of conflict, they compartmentalize, retreat, and–you guessed it– avoid. As you can imagine, this builds gradual resentment over time, as the avoidant partner feels less and less understood by their partner due to their own lack of communication. They struggle both to rely on others and to have others rely on them; personal freedom is of the highest importance to the dismissive avoidant. The caregiver of a dismissive avoidant in childhood was likely emotionally unavailable or disengaged when it came to the child’s needs. Since their needs were not met, they were forced to emotionally distance and self-soothe, often through keeping busy or finding an abundance of distractions to avoid confronting difficult emotional feelings. The dismissive avoidant feels safest in solitude. This is because to survive, they had to develop the survival instinct of taking care of their emotional, and sometimes physical needs from a young age.

Like the dismissive avoidant, fearfully avoidant individuals (also known as
disorganized attachment– percentage nationwide vary by studies), have a hard time trusting and relying on their partner. They represent a combination of fearful, anxious, and avoidant behaviors. Fearful avoidants struggle to self-soothe and emotionally regulate, meaning they often struggle to understand relationships and find even the mere thought of them confusing. They oscillate between extremes of love and emotional closeness, and resentment with forced space to process. While they crave security and safety, they also feel unworthy of love and are terrified of getting hurt. They engage in a vicious cycle of push and pull: Pushing forward, pulling away, pushing forward, pulling away, pushing forward, and pulling away. This can cause insecurity, confusion, and resentment in their relationship counterpart. They push forward, trusting their natural craving for connection; and they pull back when it feels too much. And then, they return when their nervous system is regulated and they feel safe again. And then, once it feels disregulated again, they pull away. Often, the relationship between a fearful avoidant and their parent in childhood was incredibly tumultuous. The caregiver‘s behavior was erratic, invoking both closeness and fear, causing a source of immense confusion as to what their role truly was. This translates to the insecurity, unpredictability, and incredible fluctuations that fearful avoidants bring into their relationships as adults.

Anxious and avoidant attachments are identical poles of two magnets; They stem from a deep-rooted fear of abandonment, solidified in childhood and enforced, comorbidly, by life events. When the anxiously attached feel rejected or the threat of abandonment, they do everything in their power to push themselves closer to their partner. When the avoidantly attached feel those same emotions, they retreat, pulling themselves back into the security blanket that is their personal autonomy. These two types quite literally repel eachother in terms of how they cope with confusing feelings; the more the anxiously attached pushes for closeness, the more the avoidant wants to run away. But ironically, this seems to be one of the most common relationship pairings. Where the anxious seeks connection in times of uncertainty, the avoidant seeks space. Where the anxious becomes more clingy, more desperate for answers and intimacy, the avoidant runs for the hills out of the fear of unfamiliarity and loss of personal autonomy. Both desperately desire intimacy and closeness, but both have unhealthy ways of responding to that need. And both have difficulty maintaining close, intimate relationships, even though that is what they want the most.

Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance is a psychological phenomenon used in Dialectical Behavioral
Therapy (DBT), defined as the ability to fully and completely accept reality as it is, without judgment, resistance, or attempts to fight it. It is the concept that reality will be reality– even if you don’t like it– and that everything has a cause– a reason for happening– including events that cause pain and suffering. Pain and discomfort cannot be avoided, as they are the most primitive signals that something is wrong, and rejecting reality will not, in any capacity, change its truth.

Episode 14 of “The Real Work with Maggie Sterling” Podcast, titled “Radical
Acceptance: What Finally Worked for My Chronic Anxiety,” (please give it a listen, it is phenomenal), discusses radical acceptance as the exact opposite of resistance, and how it differs from allowance. Acceptance is acknowledging and comprehending a situation at large. It is intentional; it is an action to accept. It is a release of mental blocks put in place by your mind to protect you from getting hurt. It is simply saying: “This is where we are right now. Let’s sit in the discomfort. I refuse to continue to resist where I am at.” The catalyst of acceptance is support; The catalyst of resistance is compulsive “fixing.”

Allowance, unlike acceptance, is passive in nature. It is a non-action state of being. It is saying, “I know where I am, and I am just going to let this be.” Oftentimes, allowance is the first step to radical acceptance; however, allowance in and of itself is not fuel for change. It simply enables one to recognize the situation they may be in. It is Step One.

Finally, resistance is most often unintentional in its primary form– it is a knee-jerk reaction, a protection mechanism even, to unfamiliarity and discomfort. Resistance is saying, “I can’t deal with this, and I won’t deal with this. I need to make this go away as quickly as possible. What do I do, what do I do, what do I do? How do I doctor this?” Resistance is your nervous system in full panic mode, trying everything it can to protect itself from ever feeling this way again. But, paradoxically, resistance only causes more pain in the future; it is incredibly counter-productive.

Acceptance and resistance, similar to the avoidantly and the anxiously attached, are like two identical poles of magnets: They repel each other. When one cannot accept, they are often resisting; and when one cannot resist, they are often allowing or accepting. One cannot exist in its full form when the other is present.

A Lesson About the Ocean
Let’s take a mock scenario to make sense of all of this. Imagine two people standing at the shoreline next to each other; we’ll call them Andy and Ava.

Since arriving at the beach, Andy hasn’t been able to think about anything except getting in the water. He isn’t concerned by how cold it is, if the tide is too strong, the waves are too big, or whether there are sharks nearby. He craves the ocean absolutely and compulsively, in whatever form it comes. As soon as the water brushes his feet, he runs straight into the waves, pummeling in at a full sprint. He falls and lands in the water hard. He feels the water rush over his head and the tide pull him under, and suddenly, he remembers that he has not swum in quite a long time. The water feels unfamiliar, the tide starts to shift, and he starts to feel himself losing his footing.

Instead of taking a moment to breathe and think through what to do next, Andy moves deeper and deeper into the water, fighting with the waves and the tide. His hands are flailing, his feet can no longer feel the sand, and he is losing complete and utter control over his body. He feels the only thing he can do is fight; after all, he wanted to be in the water so badly, and he fears that this may be the last time in a long time (or ever) that he gets to visit the beach.

Every sign that the ocean gave Andy to swim back to shore is ignored. “Keep pushing, keep pushing, you’ll get to calm waters eventually,” he thinks to himself. But the more he pushes, the more the ocean seems to be spitting him out. He cannot accept that the water is unsteady and unsafe for him, because his compulsive need to swim feels bigger than his own personal safety.

Similar to Andy, Ava also craves the ocean– maybe even more than Andy does. However, she had a negative experience earlier in her life where she nearly drowned, so the water can seem scary to her. She feels safest on the shore, where she has complete control of where her feet and body move and where she has the option to freely explore the boardwalk, tan, or really do whatever she pleases. She likes having control over her options. And of course, she likes that the ocean is there, just in case she wants to dive in. In fact, she wants to dive in more than anything, but because of her experience, she is incredibly wary.

As Ava gets closer to the water, she thinks she may be able to do it. She sees where the boats dip into the ever-expanding horizon, and part of her appreciates the vastness of the ocean. She feels the coldness of the wet sand on her feet, and she almost turns back, but she keeps trekking on. “Okay, just one step at a time,” she says to herself. But as the water hits her feet, she freezes. Suddenly, the waves look a little too big, the tide a little too strong, and the vastness of the ocean, which she once appreciated, now looks threatening. She retreats to the shore to sit back on her towel; she needs space away from the ocean to think about how she wants to proceed. And maybe, she thinks, I’ll head over to the boardwalk and explore some more.

After some careful consideration, Ava walks back over to the water. Because her feet are already wet and covered in sticky sand, she has no problem dipping them back into the water. It actually feels nice, she thinks. Step by step, she moves deeper and deeper into the ocean and starts to remember why she craved it so badly in the first place. But as she’s standing, knee-deep, a small wave splashes at her waistline, hitting her stomach (we all know this feeling– it’s not great, especially as you’re getting acclimated to colder temperatures). “Nope, I’m done. I can’t do this.” Ava says. She once again retreats to her towel, almost certain this time that she will never return to the water.

She leaves the beach, and for her whole drive home, she regrets not swimming,
reminiscing on what it would have been like if she could have just adjusted to the temperature. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t just be braver, be more daring like Andy, and just jump right in. Ava had trouble accepting the fact that, if she went into the ocean, she felt that the other safer options such as laying on her towel or exploring the boardwalk may disappear. And, even though it does not appear to be, the ocean may be dangerous. And, on top of all of this, the water was too cold anyways. To avoid thinking about it, she blasts her favorite song and begins to sing along.

A Lesson About Attachment
Think of Andy as anxious attachment. He craves the ocean so badly that nothing, even internal alarm bells reminding him that he is not the most efficient swimmer, even the dangerous waves and tide, and the fact that he cannot find his footing, will stop him from pursuing his swim. He had his mind set on it, so he is going to do it. Shit, even if a fin popped up out of nowhere, there is no telling whether he would retreat or just start flailing towards it.

The anxiously attached crave intimacy and closeness just as Andy craves the ocean. And once they get a taste of it, they will do anything to keep it. They’ll fight, beg, push forward, even when they know it is not right or logical, because their fear of abandonment dictates their decisions. They cannot accept space, emotional distance, or attempts to pull away because it feels unsafe to them. When they feel a push backward from their partner, they lean further in; they fight resistance with more resistance.

Think of Ava as avoidant attachment. She also craves the ocean– if not more than Andy– but she cannot physically let herself submerge past her waist because 1. The water is too cold, 2. The sand offers more personal autonomy and choices, and 3. Her past encounter with the ocean ignites fear within her. Ava already half-retreated once simply because the wet sand was too cold. As soon as the water splashed her stomach, even though the waves posed no real threat, she fully retreated, feeling as though that were the safer option. But clearly, her retreat did not protect her from regret, which she may have still had if she had swum in the ocean. She still regretted not swimming the entire way home.

The avoidantly attached crave intimacy, deceptively, sometimes more than the anxiously attached. But once they feel the intimacy is getting too real, they pull back to protect themselves due to their finely tuned skill of self-soothing in times of emotional distress. When an avoidant feels a pull forward from their partner, they retreat; their form of emotional resistance is pulling away from their feelings and distracting themself from them. They cannot accept emotional closeness– especially because it feels unfamiliar, or cold at first. They struggle with feeling as though others are emotionally dependent on them, just as they struggle with being emotionally dependent on others.

Now, imagine there is a third person on the beach; let’s call her Serena. Serena likes the ocean, but she likes the mountains, the city, and the countryside just as much. She recognizes the beauty in all things and is just happy to be where she is in the present moment.

If the water is too dangerous, Serena accepts the situation, and maybe decides to take action by exploring the boardwalk instead. If the water is safe, even if it is cold, if she desires to swim, she will submerge herself slowly, making sure her body is acclimating at a speed that works for her.

Say Serena gets in the water, which appeared safe at first, but the waves become
tumultuous quickly. Serena recognizes and accepts that the situation is unsafe for her, and she would exit the water. And if she were to get stuck in a riptide, she is level-headed enough to understand that the best and only way to escape a rip tide is to float along until it stops pulling you, and then swim diagonally to shore.

Think of Serena as secure attachment; she can read the situation at hand, and even if she is wrong, she stays calm and true to herself which helps her to figure her way out. She responds appropriately to the behaviors of the ocean, but immediately becomes uninterested in remaining in the ocean once it is too chaotic or tumultuous. And, even in the midst of a riptide, she radically accepts the fact that the only thing she can do is float until she is no longer being pulled, and then she takes appropriate action by escorting herself to safety.

The Intersection: Radical Acceptance Meets Attachment
We can use radical acceptance as an instrument to understand, heal, and change
insecure attachment. The way we always have been does not need to be the way we always will be!

You might be at this point in this article, saying, “Okay, Sadie, we know all of this. It is FAR easier said than done to radically accept. If we could all just radically accept, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Wouldn’t love be easier?” And to that, I say: True, Yes, and Yes.

Just like anything else in this life, radical acceptance takes work, discipline, and practice. While the brain is not a muscle (it is an organ, yes I know), the mind is. It works the same way as any other muscle in your body: The fibers need to tear and rebuild, tear and rebuild, tear and rebuild, and do it ten times over to see true growth. Yes, this is painful, and you will be sore and tired, just as you are when you are hitting legs in the gym and then cannot walk for the next week and a half (if you are a gym go-er– this analogy can be extended to anything, such as achy hands after learning a new instrument, or the frustration that comes with learning a new hobby). But just as you feel progress in the gym, you’ll feel progress in your mind the more and more you unlearn and relearn psychological constructs like attachment, and in turn, unlearn and relearn difficult things about yourself.

You might think this is complete BS– it even may seem unintuitive– since many of us have trained ourselves to believe that the mind does not need exercise. We fill it with short-form social media content, music all throughout the day, podcasts in times where there is even a little bit of empty space, and TV in the background to do homework or to go to sleep. In reality, our brains are never left alone. They are the most overused pieces of machinery in our body– besides our hearts, of course. They are constantly on and constantly working, yet not regularly being challenged to think deeper and to learn quietly.

It sounds so straightforward: Just practice accepting and then you’ll accept. But at the same time, it feels so hard. But just as working out, or playing an instrument, or doing just about anything feels hard at first, one day, you look back and realize that this week, you are doing what you struggled so hard to do two weeks ago with ease. You will realize radical acceptance feels easier the more you flex the muscle.

When you are in a situation you cannot control–say your partner needs space and all you want to do is talk to them, or you feel overwhelmed by attempts from your partner to get closer to you– take a step back and remind yourself: “Right now, the only thing I can do is accept the situation. Once I accept the situation in its true form, with all of its good, bad, and ugly, THAT is when I can strive toward figuring out an appropriate course of action.”

To conclude
I am not coming at you with this information from a “holier-than-thou” or professional perspective. My word is not bible–I am a senior studying psychology, and these are simply my opinions based on my research thusfar.

My research into attachment has helped me tremendously through navigating my own personal relationships, both platonic and romantic. I’ve realized that in the past, some of the things I have done have been me acting in my disorganized, anxious-avoidant attachment style. There are times where I cringe thinking about how I begged and pleaded for people to communicate with me, or just to let me fix one thing and it would all be better when it was clear that the situation or relationship had reached a dead-end. And there are times where I deeply regret pushing people away simply because I was afraid of the vulnerability that came with the relationship, or because it felt too hard and too emotional to do the work to maintain them.

I am taking big strides toward secure attachment, and the biggest agent in that, for me, was radical acceptance. Accepting that–even though I’d really really really like to– I cannot control others nor can I control situations or unforeseen events. I can only control my interpretation of those events, and my course of action after I take time to interpret and accept.

Like I said, this is not easy. I work on this every single day with things extending far past just relationships, from small things, like when my coffee order is wrong, to larger things like waiting to hear back from a job opportunity. But the more and more I practice, the easier it gets. Let me be living proof that exercise of the mind, exercising radical acceptance, really does work.

Psychology is an ever-growing, ever-changing discipline, and who knows, someone within the next year or next 10 could completely disprove everything I’ve just written. Psychology itself is like the ocean– It would be inaccurate, incorrect, if it was not constantly changing. It ebbs and flows with culture, time, and with people as they evolve, grow, and change as a function of the latter two.

Just as the discipline of psychology is constantly changing, like the ocean, so are YOU. You have the power to start the change now. Begin with radical acceptance.

Sources to check out: (They helped me A LOT while writing this)
What Are The Estimated Percentages of Attachment Styles in Adults?
Attachment Styles and How They Affect Adult Relationships
Marsha Linehan on Radical Acceptance
How to Practice Radical Acceptance– DBT Resource
Episode 14: The Real Work with Maggie Sterling: Radical Acceptance: What Finally Worked for my Chronic Anxiety

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Sadie Kim is a Senior at GW studying Psychology and Criminal Justice. She has a particular interest in attachment styles and developmental psychology, and in her free time, she writes, draws, plays guitar, and sings!