The Problem With Attachment Therapy
Attachment theory is a psychology concept that proposes that the health of our attachment to our caregivers early on in life has an impact on the health of our relationships later on in life. It suggests that there are different stages of attachment that begin at infancy that impact how secure we feel in relationships.
When a caregiver responds to an infant’s needs, a very young infant reacts no differently whether the mother is meeting those needs or whether someone else is meeting those needs. But as the infant gets older, he/she can distinguish between caregivers and begins to show a preference for familiar caregivers over unfamiliar ones.
By the time children are a year old, they demonstrate a strong attachment to familiar caregivers and separation anxiety when in the care of those who are less familiar or unfamiliar. This lasts until the child learns that the primary caregiver can always be trusted to return for the child and that those with whom the primary caregiver leaves the child can also be trusted.
When infants go through these stages with an emotionally healthy adult, they develop a secure attachment to others and get the sense that the world is safe, that their needs will be met, and that people are generally reliable and trustworthy.
But when their relationship with their familiar caregivers is fraught with harm, uncertainty, abandonment, neglect, emotional upheaval, abuse, or inconsistency, children become anxious, avoidant, fearful, or ambivalent around others.
I write about the importance of a child developing a sense of strength, significance, and security in my playbook on Growing Up and touch on it in this article on helping children avoid becoming narcissists (even when they’re being raised by one).
Attachments in Adulthood
Children who grow up being uncertain about their strength, significance, and security are not able to develop healthy “attachments” (i.e. relationships) as adults. This creates conflict and tension in relationships and leads to all kinds of relationship problems: trust issues, looking to others to meet emotional or physical needs, manipulation, control, emotional upheaval, etc.
Attachment theory proposes that the solution to this is to learn how to create healthy attachments to the significant people in your life by learning how to address thoughts, feelings, communication, behaviors, and interpersonal dynamics that you had previously learned to suppress (don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel) or to overemphasize (over-talk, over-trust, over-feel) in early attachment relationships.
The therapy that stems from attachment theory is designed to help people form healthy attachments to the therapist and subsequently to others. People are encouraged to develop a secure, responsive, and open relationship around the issues that are difficult and troublesome for them (for example: trust, the need for validation, vulnerability, rejection, etc.).
This all sounds very healing, but there are some major problems with therapy based on attachment theory.
The Problem With Attachment Therapy
1. It puts someone in a parenting role
Once the early, unhealthy patterns of relating (“attachment”) are established and a person becomes an adult, the parent is no longer responsible for “raising” their adult child (they failed anyway), leaving the now-adult child to complete the process on their own. But what attachment-based therapy does is that it attempts to establish a surrogate parent of sorts (through the therapist and/or the person’s partner/spouse) in an effort to provide the safety, security, and significance that the parent failed to provide so that healthy attachment can be accomplished with the “surrogate” parent.
But as that statement implies, it puts the person they’re attaching to into the role of “parent.” If you’ve ever felt like you’re parenting your spouse, you know that’s not really the role you want. You want to be their companion, partner, and lover - not their parent.
And being their parent is not your role. Now that they are an adult, they alone are responsible for their emotional growth. If you take responsibility for it, it also puts you in a position to be blamed if they aren’t succeeding.
2. Co-dependency develops
When you become responsible for someone else’s sense of safety, significance, or security, that person becomes dependent on you. They expect that you will make them feel safe, and if they don’t feel safe, you need to do better. They will expect you to make them feel happy, and if they aren’t happy, you need to do better. They will expect you to make them feel important or loved or cared for or affirmed, and if they don’t feel that, then you need to do better.
And if you’re someone who cares deeply, wants to love well, and likes it when people are happy, you will try your hardest to play your part and be a safe person, and you will take the blame and try harder if it’s not “working.”
That’s co-dependency in a nutshell. If they’re happy, you’re happy. If they’re not happy, you feel like it’s your fault - and they are quick to validate that.
This is what creates the seemingly unbreakable cycles that happen in unhealthy relationships. It follows a predictable pattern: one person (who typically has the capacity for emotional health) willingly takes responsibility for making the other person feel safe and “helping” them to securely attach. This is a high-pressure situation and the feeling of wanting to get it right can be like walking on eggshells.
Meanwhile, the other person (who may not even have the capacity for emotional health) relies on you to do all the work (except that they may check the boxes they’re supposed to check), blaming you if things aren’t going well. It is not possible for you to be perfect enough to supply all that your partner needs, so the tension of trying (and failing, in your partner’s eyes) inevitably leads to a blow-up (because you weren’t doing enough) that can last hours or days. After some intense conflict, there’s a semblance of reconciliation, and the relationship returns to a calmer state.
What breaks the cycle is when you decide to step out, preferably at the “tension” stage, and stop walking on eggshells. You break out of the cycle, leaving the other person to deal with their emotions on their own like a grown adult. This is what it means to have healthy boundaries [get the guide to healthy boundaries].
3. You think you can help fix someone
When you partner with someone in attachment-based therapy, a sense of hope and empowerment can well up at the opportunity to help someone you love grow and heal. Unfortunately, the suspiciousness, mistrust, and fear that mark an insecure person’s early development results in strongly-established mechanisms designed to defend and protect the person’s weak sense of security. And defense mechanisms are very difficult to breach. You may be up for the task of proving your ability to be a safe person, but to those who have deep wounds, no human being will be perceived by them as trustworthy enough to allow those defenses to come down.
And that’s the way it should be. Putting that much faith in another human being is setting them up to play God. And when you think you can help fix someone, that is, in fact, what you are doing.
The truth is that we are all wounded and, while some of us are healing, no human being is perfect enough for another person to securely attach to after childhood. (As children, “good enough” parenting is all we need to have a secure attachment that helps us become adults who can figure out the rest on our own.) We all have our own ways of thinking and interacting with the world, and there are things that trigger our own insecurities - and emotionally unhealthy people are subconsciously experts at finding those and triggering those in others.
Only God is perfect enough to surrender to, to lean on, and to securely attach to. He always knows the exact right response to our struggles, insecurities, challenges, and successes. Attachment-based therapy overlooks this and attempts to form secure attachments between two imperfect people - a recipe for disaster.
4. Reasons for behavior become excuses for behavior
When you understand attachment theory, it can put words to what you see happening in your relationship and can help you understand why your spouse behaves the way they do. It’s so enlightening to understand this! The problem with understanding why your spouse behaves the way they do is that the reasons for their behavior can become excuses for their behavior. Here’s an example:
Your spouse might be in a tense mood and want sex to help them feel better. Having an understanding that sex makes them feel more connected, you might work past the un-intimate atmosphere of tension in order to help your spouse feel connected again. The reason for their behavior (they weren’t feeling connected) became an excuse for their behavior (they didn’t have to do their part to create intimacy, they just had to ask for it).
Another example might be that your spouse, recognizing that they have insecure attachment and they need a lot of validation or reassurance, might ask you for patience and understanding while they “work through” their issues, but they don’t ever actually “work through” their issues. They might check some boxes that make it look like they’re working through their issues, but for the most part, they just use their “issues” as an excuses for continuing to cause harm to the relationship.
When reasons for why we behave the way we do become excuses for our behavior, we are no longer working on our issues, we are just using them as excuses for continued harmful behavior. And this doesn’t further growth or improve relationships.
5. Unreasonable expectations develop
When your spouse understands that they aren’t securely attached, they may get desperate for you to be safe enough for them to securely attach to and may begin to expect and demand certain behavior from you in order to feel safe and secure. As someone who wants to help, you may try to meet all of their expectations while having no expectations of them since you’re giving them grace while they figure out how to grow.
Be mindful of what is reasonable for your spouse to expect of you so that you know where to draw the line between what is your responsibility and what is your spouse’s. [Get some insight about that in my article on 10 Biblical principles for relationships.] If you take on 100% of the responsibility for how things are going in the marriage because you see yourself as the one who is the more mature one (as you will hear many experts encourage you to be), it eliminates your spouse’s need to be responsible for their own growth, and you will find yourself feeling constant pressure to make things better.
6. Attaching to unsafe people
Attachment-based therapy does not take into account that not everyone is safe to attach to. If your spouse is stuck in early stages of emotional/moral development, is verbally or emotionally abusive, uses these tactics to get their way, or is unable to see other perspectives, to be encouraged to help them securely attach to you can utterly destroy you emotionally, mentally, and physically. In order to create a secure attachment, as person has to be vulnerable and humble. But unsafe people will use your honesty, vulnerability, and humility against you in order to control you to get their own needs met. They are not interested in attachment, they are interested in being a parasite because that is their only perceived means of survival. (This is why divorce is so threatening for them and will put many people with insecure attachment into a tailspin of control, anger, demands, guilt-tripping, and false attempts to change.)
Righting Attachment-based Therapy
The biggest flaw in attachment-based therapy is that it points insecurely attached people to other flawed people instead of to God. To make attachment-based therapy effective, then, the solution is to point the insecurely attached person toward God in order to develop a secure attachment to him. God is the only perfectly safe person to attach to. He knows perfectly how to respond to our insecurities, our manipulations, our desire for control, our needs, and all the other ways we have of interacting in relationships.
Let’s apply that concept to each of the problems with attachment-based therapy listed above.
Solution to problem 1. Commit to not parenting your spouse
God is our Father, and the perfect parent. We all had imperfect parents, so we all have more growing up to do. When we become adults there is no longer any person responsible for helping us continue our growing-up process. That means that, even if you know that your spouse has more growing up to do, you cannot step into that role to help them. You be the spouse, follow the natural laws of relationships, and leave the supernatural up to God. God is an infinitely better parent than you are. Your spouse may not respond to God’s parenting, but your job is to watch and see, not to step in.
Solution to problem 2. Allow dependence on God alone
Being dependent on another person isn’t healthy, but being dependent on God is. In fact, we are called to be dependent on God. Jesus says that “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Don’t be a willing participant in your spouse’s attempt to be dependent on you. Don’t take responsibility for their emotions, behavior, or emotional safety. Be a safe person, of course, but don’t let your spouse make you responsible for whether they feel safe or not - they alone are responsible for what they do to feel safe when they do not feel safe. You are responsible to be a safe person, but you are not responsible to make them feel safe.
Solution to problem 3. Leave the fixing to them and God
When you try to help someone grow, you are playing God. You form ideas of what will “work” for them and what they should do to get the insight they need to grow. You try to get them to read books like The 5 Love Languages with you or listen to sermons or do devotions or join an accountability group.
But the truth is that if they aren’t doing their own work, finding their own resources, connecting with what resonates with them, then you are preventing them from having the opportunity to experience the satisfaction of seeking their own personal growth. Give your spouse the freedom to pursue (or not pursue) their own growth and the honor of achieving their own success in the area of emotional health.
I know that you’ll be more comfortable if they grow, so there’s an ulterior motive for you to push them to grow, but you can’t make something happen. You can only observe their behavior and decide whether you can get on board with it or not.
Solution to problem 4. Have God’s heart of compassion but also his sense of justice
It is good to understand the reasons for your spouse’s behavior, but know that those reasons for why people behave the way they do are not excuses - a person doesn’t HAVE TO behave that way. Their behavior is not out of their control. It’s like this: if there’s someone who was sexually abused as a child and they grow up to be a pedophile themselves, you might be able to understand the REASON that they grew up to be a pedophile, and they might not even be CAPABLE of getting emotionally healthy, but no one would ever EXCUSE their behavior and, feeling bad for them and their unhealthy childhood, allow them to work at a daycare center. Reasons cannot be allowed to be excuses.
God has compassion on us. He knows that we live in a broken and sin-sick world. That’s why he offers the ONLY solution to our sin problem. His compassion does not over-ride his sense of justice in that he does not allow our sin to go unpunished. There is a consequence for sin. If you try to help your spouse skirt the consequences because you feel bad for their condition, you are depriving them of the justice that drives us toward the God of our salvation. So, have compassion, but also know that justice cannot be withheld. There’s nothing that excuses bad behavior or sin.
Solution to problem 5. Get to know the expectations that God establishes
Get clarity about what is realistic to expect and what is not realistic so that you can establish healthy boundaries. Don’t try to be better than God by allowing your spouse to get away with things that God does not allow us to get away with. You can’t be more forgiving, more kind, more gracious, or give more chances than God does. Learn about what God does when met with the kind of behavior you deal with from your spouse [get my free WWJD resource]. You will learn which expectations you need to have and what is not reasonable to expect.
Solution to problem 6. Have a healthy view of safe people versus unsafe people
Just because we need to securely attach to God alone, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t trust anybody. Being in relationship with people who are also humble and driven to be better can provide a sense of relief and camaraderie - two broken people loving each other. But not everything that is broken can be fixed - even for God. Be realistic about who you feel safe with and who you do not. And don’t try to make unsafe people be safe people. Accept and adapt to reality. When you get emotionally healthy, God will connect you to emotionally healthy, safe people.
And when you get a grasp of the importance of doing your own work and letting your spouse do their own work (or not, as the case may be), you start to realize that…..
…Hope isn’t found in our situation changing; it’s found in our situation….
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