Blog Post
Anxious, Avoidant, or Just Human? Rethinking Attachment Theory
14th February 2026
Attachment theory has become part of everyday language. Scroll through social media and you'll find quizzes identifying your "attachment style," advice on healing your "attachment wounds," and a general assumption that anxious or avoidant patterns are signs of damage to be repaired. It's a framework that has clearly resonated — but it may also be quietly misleading people about what therapy is actually for.
The language of "attachment wounds" pathologises what are, in fact, structural adaptations. Bowlby did not describe damaged children but resourceful ones — each attachment style a pragmatic answer to the question: how close, or how independent, must I be to survive? An anxious child who monitors the caregiver
constantly, or an avoidant child who learns not to need, is not failing. They are succeeding, on the terms available to them.
Therapy is therefore less about repairing an injury than about loosening strategies that once protected the subject but have since become costly. Anxious and avoidant patterns are not marks of trauma so much as ways of negotiating the caregiver's presence and absence — and, crucially, the enigma of the caregiver's desire. The child who couldn't quite read what the parent wanted, and organised their whole personality around that uncertainty, is doing something remarkably sophisticated.
Contemporary somatic accounts of trauma often compound the problem by treating distress as something "stored in the body," borrowing the language of physical injury and blockage. The result is a subtle medicalisation of what is fundamentally a creative, adaptive function. It
misrepresents Bowlby's thinking and risks further stigmatising the very strategies that once enabled survival.
None of this means that anxious or avoidant patterns don't cause suffering — they often do, particularly in close relationships, where old strategies tend to be reactivated most forcefully. But understanding them as adaptations rather than wounds changes what becomes possible in therapy. The question shifts from "how do I fix this?" to "what was this for, and does it still serve me?" That is a more honest question, and usually a more productive one.
If you recognise yourself in these patterns and are curious about what they might mean, that is something therapy can help explore — without diagnosis, and without pathology.