Debunking Attachment Myths #1

Dr Kirk Honda reviews an article by Dr Pascal Vrticka that debunks myths about attachment theory.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/KIRK to get 10% off your first month.

00:00 Does disorganized attachment exist in adults?
08:12 How many types of attachment are there? 
53:27 Is attachment good or bad?

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October 31, 2025

The Psychology In Seattle Podcast ®

Trigger Warning: This episode may include topics such as assault, trauma, and discrimination. If necessary, listeners are encouraged to refrain from listening and care for their safety and well-being.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey deserve listeners. Today, I'm going to be reviewing a
bunch of myths about attachment theory and attachment styles, and
I'm going to evaluate each one, talk about the research
to some extent. There's a lot to get into. There's
a lot of myths to review, so I'm gonna take
my time on these. My name is doctor Kirkkonda. I'm

(00:22):
a therapist and a professor. So someone sent me this
website that is the website for doctor Pascal Vertika, Associate
Professor in Psychology at the University of Essex, UK, and
the website the u r L is p vr t
i c ka dot com, so p Vertika Pascalvertka dot com.

(00:47):
And there's a lot of really great stuff in here.
I didn't look all of it over, but it looked
very science based and easy to understand, at least as
easy as you could make it given some of the
conflict topics. But one of the pages on this website
addresses a few dozen myths about attachment theory and I

(01:12):
want to get into it. And I think someone sent
this to me because they thought that some of these
myths were actually contradicting some of the things that I
say so let's get into it. And I should also
say that this episode will probably be a little rambly
because I'm going to be reading from this website and

(01:33):
kind of reacting to it. I have a lot of
stuff in my head around the topics that I'm pretty
sure a lot of the myths have to do with.
But if you're looking for a more organized episode, maybe
this isn't the one for you anyway. Okay, so the
first myth that doctor Pascal Vertika wants to dispel is

(01:58):
dispelled by the following statement. There is no such thing
as insecure disorganized attachment style in adults. So he doesn't
provide the myth, he just provides the answer. And there's
a possibility that the reason why he does this is
because research shows that even if you tell people right
after or as you're saying the statement, that the statement

(02:19):
is wrong, our brains will sometimes retain or only hold
on to the false statement. So if I tell you
my middle name is Jonathan, and then right after I
say I just lied to you or it's not Jonathan,
then there's a chance that a bunch of people a

(02:43):
year from now tomorrow will be pretty sure that my
middle name is Jonathan, even though I just said right afterwards,
I just I just told you a false statement. So
sometimes when we're reporting on myths, it can actually backfire
because if we say the myth, if we frame it
as a myth, but we still say the statement. Like

(03:06):
the myth that they're trying that doctor Pascal is trying
to dispel is that there is such a thing as
insecure disorganized attachment style and adults. Okay, so let's get
into it. And this is maybe the main one that
people thought. Wait, I thought Kirk says the opposite. Okay,
so let's read it. These days, I see many social

(03:27):
media posts and blogs talking about insecure disorganized attachments adult
attachment style. This is a myth. Let's have a closer look.
What is disorganized attachment? Disorganized attachment is a classification derived
from observations of child behavior towards a caregiver, for example,
within the strained situation procedure. Just chiming and yeah, this

(03:47):
is all accurate. I talked about this in my deep
dive In other times, disorganized attachment behaviors and children indicate conflict, confusion,
and apprehension towards the caregiver when the child is distressed
just chiming in. Yeah, So that's a pretty concise way
of putting it. That when the child is faced with

(04:11):
a scenario in which calls upon their attachment system behavioral
and emotional to react to the caregiver, the child, usually
due to abuse, will react with conflict, with confusion and apprehension.
A part of them wants to run to their caregiver

(04:34):
and another part of them wants to run away, and
they don't know what to do. So we will call
that disorganized attachment because the child doesn't have any way
of organizing their attachment impulses. Whereas when you're secure, then
there's a way of organizing it. Obviously, when you're avoidant,
then the organization is to avoid. If you're preoccupied anxious,

(04:57):
then the solution or the orientation is towards preoccupation and
anxiety and clinging, right, Whereas disorganized there is no system,
it's just panic. Right, So going on disorganized attakment behaviors
and children also reflect a state of fright without solution.

(05:18):
This can be caused by frightened, by frightening or frightened, alarmed,
or inexplissible, inexplicable caregiver behavior and response to child distress
or by repeated major child separations from the caregiver. Okay, yeah,
as you know, it's a clinical way of putting it,
essentially abuse abandonment. But yeah, so caused by the child

(05:41):
being frightened, which is often due to Now I suppose
there are rare scenarios where their parents aren't being abusive,
but the child either misinterprets things or there's outside forces
causing the child to feel afraid. Right, so, you know,
certainly we can imagine war torn areas or refugee areas,

(06:02):
or oppression on a family that could result in the
child frequently feeling afraid, but it have to be kind
of specific. But the general rule is that a twelve
month old child a twenty four month old child, when
they are afraid, which they often are, especially in strange situations,

(06:24):
they immediately have an impulse to run to the secure base,
which is the caregiver. And if both the stimulus of
the fear and the secure base is the same person,
are the same person, then the child doesn't know what
to do. Right, So, disorganized attachment behaviors and children furthermore,

(06:47):
reflect some degree of systematic disruption and their attachment system
functioning the child is no longer able to coherently direct
their attention to either their caregiver or the environment. Rights
what is what is not disorganized attachment. Disorganized attachment is

(07:07):
not another insecure attachment style, nor is it a more
extreme form of insecure, anxious, or avoidant attachment style. Okay, right,
so this might contradict the way that I frame it.
And the thing is is that there's a lot of
authors in our field, but the concept is the same

(07:28):
across all the authors. There's different terms for this. There's
different acknowledgments for child, you know, attachment styles, but even
with child attachment style classifications, there's different ways of wording it,
but they're all referring to the same thing. You know.
There's also a different system when we're describing adults sometimes

(07:51):
but not always. And in my deep dive I go
over this. I go over all the various different terms
that you might see clinicians or researchers using, Like with disorganized,
you will I say disorganized. So okay, let's go over

(08:12):
the different names. So with secure another there's only really
one other term that you'll see in the literature, which
is autonomous. But you almost never see autonomous you almost
always see secure across not only clinical literature, research, but
also among lay people. So secure you can be secure
that that secure word is secure. Then if we talk

(08:35):
about my word of preoccupied, often that is not the
word that people use. They will say anxious, or they'll
say anxious resistant, or they'll say ambivalent. And I a
long time ago, years and year as a professor, decided
that with my students, I needed to use the same

(08:58):
word every time. And I just started using the word
preoccupied because although anxious does help in terms of describing it,
right like, ambivalent is not you know, it's it's not
descriptive right like preoccupied. Instantly it evokes a vision of

(09:21):
a person that is preoccupied with attachment. They're frequently talking
about it. Anxious is a good word too, But the
problem is is that sometimes this organized attachment is called fearful.
You will see systems of nomenclature where you'll have secure attachment,

(09:41):
anxious attachment, and fearful attachment. So what so I wanted
to get away from both the word fearful and anxious
because in a way, all insecure attachment styles are fearful
and anxious. They're afraid of loss of being abandoned. You know,

(10:01):
that's the definition of attachment in security. So I purposely said,
let's go with preoccupied, even though most you know, in
the literature and among lady people, you don't hear the
word preoccupied very often. Okay, So with avoidant, you'll see dismissive,

(10:22):
which is another pretty good word. Sometimes I'll use avoidant
dismissive or dismissive. Yeah, those are almost the same word, right,
It's a little bit different, but they evoke the same
vision for me. You know, someone that's avoiding that you
know you have preoccupied, which is someone that constantly think
about it. Someone who's avoiding who dismisses. There's a little

(10:44):
bit different there. Like avoidant is like trying to dodge
attachments scenarios because of the fear. Dismissive is more active
of like pushing something away but anyway, and more like
denying that you do have attachment needs. But I find,
you know, again, I just had to figure out what's

(11:05):
the word I'm going to use with my students, what's
the word I'm going to use with my listeners to
help people to keep things straight, And so I always
just use avoidant. A lot of literature a lot of
lay people will use the word avoidant, but you also
see the other terms. Sometimes you'll see anxious avoidance, which
is maybe my favorite term, but confusing if people don't understand,

(11:29):
because it's like, wait, are you talking about like combo
between anxious attachment and avoidant. So there's that. There's also
dismissive avoidant, which is pretty easy to understand. But I
just use avoidant because I want to be consistent across
different talks. But know that there are very different terms
that people will use, and I just hope that people
can transit. There's only four attachments tells, so it's not

(11:52):
hard to keep track, you know, sometimes by context you
can sort of tell what people are talking about. But anyway,
and then the fourth category, now whether or not we
call this an attachment style or not. So getting back
to this myth by doctor Pascal, he's saying this is
not an attachment style, even though a lot of people
claim that it is. So it's a myth that disorganized

(12:14):
or fearful avoidant is an attachment step. Okay, so the
different words for disorganized, and I landed on disorganized because
again I think that's the easiest to visualize. But You'll
also see a lot of people use the term fearful avoidant,
and I'm not a fan of that term because it

(12:42):
confuses people in that it can feel like, oh, so
they're like a combination of anxious and avoidant, Right, you
have fear anxiety, so that you have someone who's preoccupied
and avoidant. But no, and a lot of people lay
people and professors. I've heard professors at my university say this,

(13:06):
that disorganized attachment as a combo. Now, I will say
I don't blame people for being confused because it's complicated,
but it's that's just not the case. And I will
admit that in the beginning of my career, maybe even
the beginning of this podcast, I was confused about this
as well, so you know it is that. But by

(13:30):
the time I was becoming more expert in this area,
it's pretty clear anyway. So with disorganized, you'll see fearful avoidant,
you'll see fearful, you'll see unresolved, and you'll see disoriented.
So all of these terms are referring to the same thing,
you know, referring to the same observation among children and

(13:51):
maybe adults, which we'll get into in a second. So
disorganized is the same as fearful avoidant, which is the
same as fearful, which the same as onn a result
which the thame is disoriented. Now, some of you who
might know the difference might say that's not true. These
things are not the same thing. Some things are referring
to childhood, you know, categories, and some are referring to

(14:13):
adult which we'll get into in a second. But the
thing is is that when it comes to the linguistics
or the terms, I think about it in a more
simplified version and a more integrative version while acknowledging that

(14:33):
it's it's a bit of a it's not a I
was going to say, it's a bit of a stretch,
but it's a way. It's a model for understanding human behavior.
It's a model for understanding schemas. To some extent, it's
it's a model for understanding relationships, for why people are
the way that they are, Why we react the way

(14:53):
that we react, Why that, why relationships seem so different
across people. You know, for some people it's very easy.
For others, it's not. For some people, it's this, For
some people it's that, And it's a way of understanding
that and research informs it greatly. But it's hard to

(15:15):
research this because you're talking about, you know, trying to
encapsulate the entirety of an individual's relationship style and their
emotions and memory and trauma and schema and distortions and
the way they see the world, And how can you

(15:35):
measure that? You know, a lot of these measures are
self report. Right. We don't have the money or maybe
even the ability really to observe a human and scientifically,
in a concrete way, codify exactly how they are reacting,
you know, because we don't know what's going on inside
of them and everything. There's a lot of subjectivity here, right,

(15:57):
Like the security you feel in your long term romantic relationship.
You know, it's a very subjective thing. And if you
see someone freaking out, is it because they have distortions
or some kind of attachment insecurity that's playing a role,
or are they reacting the way that people quote unquote

(16:17):
should react. You know, these are impossible questions to answer,
but we need some way of or at least it
helps to have some model of understanding it. So when
we talk about childhood attachment styles versus adult adult attachment styles,
how connected are they, which I'll get into in a second.

(16:38):
You know, there's a lot of science around this, and
when people like doctor Pascal will say that, you know,
disorganized attachment is not an attachment style. It just kind
of depends on what you mean by attachment style if
we get into like the specifics. For certain writers that's

(16:59):
a true statement. For others it's not. You know, one
way of thinking about it with this organized attachment is
that it's the absence of a style. And I will
say that sometimes in that when you have secure attachment style,
your style of attaching, your style of reacting to attachment
threat your style of returning to your person or your

(17:23):
people when you are afraid or threatened. You know, like
you have a bad day at work, what do you
want to do? Well? You want to connect with someone
that you love, that you know trusts you and loves
you and take and will take care of you. And
if you have secure attachment style, then you have a
working model of self another that is generally positive and
so you believe that you're generally a good person and
that your people that you have built secure relationships with

(17:48):
can be depended on and you head towards them in
an uncomplicated generally speaking way, and if they are a
little distracted, you don't take it that person. But you
still can take it personally because there are some things
that are viable to take personally. And plus, even secure
people make mistakes sometimes, but generally speaking, there's a trust,

(18:11):
there's regulation, there's you know, the ability to build over
time a relationship. So that's secure. That's a style, that's
a tendency, that's a way of seeing the self. Another okay,
with preoccupied that this is a style of leading in,
of pursuing, of demanding, of noticing, of hypervigilance. Then you

(18:32):
have avoidance dismissive. This is a style of avoiding, a
style of dismissing, denying, pushing away, shutting down, turning off
emotions while still having them for the most part. Uh,
you know, being independent pathologically, it's a stat you know,
it's a way of dealing. Okay, I feel an attacked
you know, same scenario. You had a bad day at work,

(18:53):
and let's say the bad day at work made you
feel like you weren't a good person, or that you
aren't likable or something. You know, someone at work or
a customer or a boss just made you feel like
a little worthless, and you're worried that maybe you don't
have what it takes, maybe you're not a good person,
maybe you're maybe you're worthless, maybe you're bad at something,

(19:15):
maybe you're not lovable or not good or whatever. And
for the avoidant person, they tend not as a style
doesn't mean that they don't. It just means it's a style, right,
It's a tendency they tend to avoid, so they won't
reach out for help. They will convince themselves that everything's okay,

(19:37):
they don't need other people, and they might even avoid
scenarios at work that challenge that, or maybe get a
different job, or or just quit right because it's easier
to avoid and run. Those are severe things, but you know,
generally speaking, it would be shutting down, not going home

(19:58):
and asking for help, calling a friend, not telling your
boss at work, hey, that hurt my feelings or whatever,
and convince you the self that you're good on your own,
you don't need people, and that you're logical or whatever.
For the preoccupied person, the threat from the boss or
the customer of worthlessness would be very noticeable to that

(20:21):
individual and be very disruptive. They tend to have a
negative working model of self and so their style of
dealing with that, because you know, we heard the secure style,
we heard the avoidance style. Now we're hearing the preoccupied
style of These people tend to pursue to lean in,

(20:41):
to feel their emotions, to notice their emotions, maybe even
neurologically have bigger emotions as a way to alert them
that there's a danger. And therefore the emotions are more
noticeable and more motivating to the person to do something
about it. And so they might go home and you know,

(21:05):
in it because they're very just they're very stressed out.
They might seek solace from their spouse, and if their
spouse is perfect, then they will be mostly soothed, but
they still have to return to work, you know, depending
on the severity of the preoccupied attachment. But if the
spouse is a little distracted or or could be interpreted

(21:28):
as a little distracted, than the preoccupied person will downward
spiral because it's yet again, I'm being abandoned, no one
cares about me, and more feeling more alerting, more demanding,
more clinging, more anger, more. Hey, we you know you
need to change. And that's a different style. Okay, now,
the avoidant person and the preoccupied person are both not

(21:51):
getting their needs met in different ways, and one is
more tumultuous, you know, in the moment than the other.
But avoidant people can be very tumultuous, you know. They
can be very angry, They can be very sad in
very brief periods of time. They can be very confused.

(22:11):
They can tend to abuse alcohol and drugs as a
way to cope, and that can create a lot of
you know, chaos. Anyway, So when it comes to the
story disorganized people, you could say that that way of
reacting to attachment threat ye worthlessness at work and they

(22:34):
want to go home, or they had to fight with
their spouse the day before and they are returning home
from work and they're wondering how they're going to deal
with that, and they're worried about it, and they feel rejected,
they feel hurt. What's the tendency for that person? Do
we call that a style or do we just call
it disorganize attachment tendency or that there is no style

(22:58):
because they ever developed a way of coping, you know,
because the disorganized experience is one that doesn't have coping,
doesn't have some might say style, so you might hear
me saying disorganized attachment style or disorganized attachment is one

(23:20):
of the four attachment styles, whereas other people might say
that disorganized attachment is not a style. It lacks style,
it lacks an orientation, it lacks an organization, it lacks
a pattern. It's just you know, a lack of it's
you know it fund It's like starting at the fundamental

(23:43):
point of fear and panic. For the preoccupied person, there's
fear and panic, and then there's a tendency to lean
in and to feel and to demand and to be
hyper vigilant. For the avoidant person, there's a tendency to
avoid and downplay in this. For the secure person, there's
a tendency to reach out and to have a balance

(24:03):
of togetherness and separateness and and ask for help within reason. Right,
So that's a style, whereas disorganized people, you could argue
they don't have a style. That's that's why we call
it disorganized. There there's nothing there. It's not organized in
a particular orientation. They're just stuck in that initial phase
of fear and panic. So it's just a matter of

(24:25):
how you language it. And for me, you know, I'm
fine with either way of because we're describing the same thing. Right.
It's if one person says disorganized attachment style and then
proceeds to talk about disorder, you know, the observation of
childhood and adulthood disorganize attachment way, then it doesn't really

(24:48):
matter if we call it a style or not a style,
right Whereas you know, the next person could say it's
it's not you know, so I hope you get my point.
I always take a break, all right, back from the break.
So just getting back to doctor Pascal Vertika's right up here.
What he says is disorganized attachment is not another insecure

(25:12):
attachment style, nor is it a more extreme form of insecure,
anxious or avoidant attachment style. Okay, so this is in
line with what I was saying earlier, going on secure, insecure, avoidant,
and anxious attachment styles together. So he's using different terms.
But you know, so he's saying secure, avoidant, and preoccupied

(25:35):
attachment styles together belong to the organized attachment styles. This
organized attachment is a category on its own. So that's
in line with what I was saying earlier. So I
was predicting that that's what he was getting at, and
that's what he is getting at. But okay, fine, so

(25:55):
we call secure, preoccupied, and avoidant, we call them organized
attachment styles. So then do we call disorganize a disorganized
attachment style. Let's just call them all attachment styles. It
doesn't really, it's it seems a bit pedantic, you know,
but going on, and some clinical literature will refer to

(26:19):
them as the four attachment styles, so you know, anyway,
going on. Also, disorganized attachment in children is not the
same as fearful avoidant attachment style and adults fearful avoidant
and remember, so just show me and that fearful avoidant
attachment in my system or my way of talking about it,

(26:42):
is just another term for disorganized attachment. So well, let
me just say what he's getting at. Which is true
that when we look at the clinical literature and the
research and the different authors that have coined these different terms,
disorganized at tends to be used for children, most specifically,

(27:05):
when we're doing research regarding the strange situation and you're
watching a child as the parent comes back into the
lat into the lab room, the playroom. Listen to my
whole deep dive on this strange situation, has several steps,
but in a nutshell, in case you forgot or you
didn't listen to that episode or don't know the strange situation,

(27:26):
you present a strange situation or a stranger situation to
the child. So it's almost always the mother and the kid.
The mother and the kid eighteen months oldish comes into
this room. There's toys, there's a one way near with
researchers that are coding, or there's a video camera that's
recording the child that so you can code the behaviors later.

(27:48):
And the mother and the kid walk into the room.
And then the kid at first is in a strange situation.
Kid's never been in that room before. What does the
kid do? Almost all the time with securely attached kids,
the kids will cling to the mother for a portion
of time but kind of be looking at the toys

(28:08):
like ooh, and then will within a you know, a
certain set of time, we'll start venturing off and playing
with the toys. Now, the preoccupied kids will cling and
the avoidant kids will instantly run to the toys. This
is a generalization, but you catch my dress. The disorganized kids,
it's hard to say what they will do in a
situation like this, and this is not the key moment

(28:30):
of disorganized children observations. So then you have a lab,
a researcher, you know this, this other person, it's usually
a woman. She walks into the room and you code
the child's reaction. For the avoidant kids, they tend not
to care that a random person has walked into the room.

(28:51):
Now well no, actually, let me let me strike that
from the record. They care, but they don't. They don't
run to their caregiver. They don't run to their mother
because they don't, you know, because they avoid. They've learned,
they've had to avoid, because they've run into so many
situations where they feel attachment, fear or distress or fear

(29:12):
of something, and the parent hasn't either been there physically,
or hasn't been there emotionally, or is just generally not
or is very cold themselves or something. And so the
child learns, I'm on my own, so I'm afraid of
this random stranger, but there's no sense in running. And

(29:33):
this is all unconscious for the most part. For the
proaccupied kid. As soon as the stranger and enters the lab,
the child will cling to the parent, you know, very
very intensely for a longer period of time, might even start,
you know, having very visual or behavioral indicators of fear. Now,
the secure kid will also run to their caregiver, but

(29:55):
within a relatively short amount of time, the child will
slowly start to vent sure off maybe eye contact with
the new lab person or might you know, crawl back
to the toys and play with them, you know, a
little tentatively so the disorganized person. Again, this isn't the
key moment, Okay, Then the mom will leave the room

(30:17):
and leave the child with the stranger. And again, avoidant
kids tend to just continue playing with the toys. They
might kind of glance a little with some you know,
indicators of fear at the stranger, but they are just
trying to be independent. They're just trying to distract themselves.
This is generally this is a generalization you can have
Avoiding kids that will cry anyway, praccupy kid will freak out.

(30:42):
Generally speaking, the secure kid will also be afraid because
most eighteen year olds don't like to be left in
a room with a stranger and the But the secure
kids will react with less loudness, not always, but you know,
there's that there you know, because they're afraid. The disorganized

(31:04):
kids again, there's a there's a wide variety of behaviors
that you'll see from disorganized kids. But when the parent
comes back in, this is this is when you really
see the disorganized kids shine, if you will. In that
the chap, the parent, the mother comes back in, and
for the disorganized kids, they have they've had all this

(31:28):
fear that's been building up because the mom hasn't been
in the room and they've been left in this room
that they aren't familiar with, and they're with us stranger
they're not familiar with. So there's a fair amount of stress,
a fair amount of attachment, attachment triggering of like I
must return to the secure base. It's a compulsion, it's
a mandatory thing. Children don't make conscious decisions along these lines.

(31:52):
Other animals will do this too, right, particularly other primates.
We will witness this behavior. You know, it's ingrained in us,
were born with it. It's an evolved mechanism that clearly
assists in our survival and therefore our viability for procreation
and you know, sending our genes the next generation. So

(32:15):
for these children, for the disorganized kids, they have a
deep deep part of them that wants to run to
the mother like the other kids do. So let me
describe the other kids. The secure kids will run to
the mother. They might cry and say where were you,
you know, or indicate like, oh, you're back, But within
a relatively short amount of time they will regulate and

(32:36):
maybe go back to the toys. The preoccupied kids will
cling and might even punish the parents with maybe even violence,
but at the very least they will be very happy
ish that the parent has returned, but very distressed. They're
signaling how upset they are. They might not ever return

(32:57):
to the toys. The avoidant kid also run to the mother,
but it won't be as intense as this as the
secure and preoccupied on average, and on average, they're going
to return to the toys a lot quicker. The disorganized kid, though,
has no organization to their to their desire to return

(33:18):
to the secure base. So the avoidant kid, you know,
has some way of returning to the to the secure
base in a pinch, but their general organization is through
avoidance and avoidance and dismissiveness. Right, So they're just like,
I don't need attachments, I'm fine on my own. So
they're playing the toys. The secure person, the secure kid,

(33:41):
they have an organization around, well, when I'm afraid, I
run to my secure base, but I once I'm fulfilled
in that way, I can venture off into the world
again and play with the toys. For the preoccupied person,
they're organized around a strategy of you left me, and

(34:01):
I am going to make sure you never do that again.
And even though I want to go back and play
with the toys, I'm not going to do that because
that would risk you leaving me again or not learning
from your horrible behavior that you left me here. And
so I am going to cling to you out of panic,

(34:22):
but also out of a way of trying to train
you to never do this again. So this is an organization.
This is this is how we call these organize attachment styles.
In a way, whereas the disorganized kid, the mother comes
back into the room and you will see a variety
of behaviors and we are guessing as to what's going

(34:45):
on inside their mind and their emotion centers. We can't
know even if we do talk to eighteen month old children.
They don't articulate themselves very well. So we have to
infer and the the behavior we will see is there's
a variety. You will see some disorganized kids collapse. You

(35:07):
will see some scream. You will see some run to
the parent then run away. You will see some just
stand like as if their brain is glitching. They will
just be shaking. You will see that they're in distress.
You know, they're not avoidant. There are clearly upset, but
they don't know what to do. And they are different

(35:30):
in that they don't have any or if you know,
because the avoiding kids will also reconnect with their mothers,
but it will just be to a lesser extent, less
less intensity. They might not cry at the very least,
they will look at the mother just okay, she's back
in here. But with the disorganized kids, there doesn't seem

(35:55):
to be any soothing, so it's not there's no organization
to it. They're just in that panic mode right and
have no way of soothing themselves, and so they glitch,
they scream, they run in circles. They might hit themselves,
they might flop on the floor. They don't know what

(36:16):
to do. The reason for this typically is because the
mother is abusive, and so they have these equal and
opposite forces at play. The mother comes into the room,
and they have this force that is compelling them to
run to the secure base, to the person designated as
caregiver as mother. But they have this equal impulse to

(36:40):
run away from that monster. That's a monster that just
entered the room. I need to run away from that person.
And it's not an intellectual decision, it's a physiological, neurological,
evolutionary response. And the child just glitches. So that's what
we're talking about. We're talking about disorganized now now when

(37:00):
we're talking about fearful avoidant attachment, this label we are
talking about. How so when we started to observe attachment
style and children, it's pretty easy to do in this
lab experiment. Adults are more complicated because they have ways
of thinking, they have ways of remembering, they have ways

(37:22):
of masking. You know, children don't typically eighteen month old children,
they haven't learned how to mask their shameful behavior or
their emotions. You could say avoidant kids do have a
little bit of that, but they're not super conscious of it,
you know, if at all. So. Adults though, have a

(37:44):
lot of layers upon layers of coping consciously and unconsciously.
So if you saw an adult, you can't create a
lab scenario that will easily distinguish between the different attachment
styles for adults or different personality or whatever, so we
have to have much more elaborate ways of evaluating those.

(38:06):
And aside from having an invisible drone that follows the
individual around and reads their mind for a year and
then codes their behavior, and then you can start to
have a conceptualization of where this person is in terms
of whatever groups we would figure out. The much less expensive,

(38:29):
more viable way of assessing someone's attachment style or relationship
style or their emotion style is to ask them questions.
And some of the questions are very overt, like what
do you do when you feel rejected? But some of
the questions are more subtle and the answers are unless

(38:52):
the person knows the tests, they don't know how to
game the system, you know, like if you had an
adult who wanted to appear secure even though they have
preoccupied attachment style, if they knew enough about these attachment styles,
they could kind of detect some questions and gain the
system right. But some of the questions on some of
the measures don't have that, Like they'll ask questions about

(39:15):
tell me about your childhood and this kind of thing
and or your early childhood relationships. And there are certain
indicators like the avoidant person will tend to say everything's fine,
but they don't give much detail. The preoccupied person will have,
you know, if they're answering. Honestly, they'll have a lot
of detail because they they retain a lot of these things,
not only because they're paying attention and they're also not

(39:36):
paying attention to themselves. They're very other oriented, but they
also hold a lot of grudge grudges for the reasons
that I've talked about, and so they have a lot
of very specific memories, often negative, not all the time,
but often secure people tend to see the good with
a little bit of bad, you know, depending on how
in depth they go. So you know, there's different style,

(39:58):
and not everyone would know how to answer to gain
that system, you know what I mean, because it's just
an open ended question. Tell me about you childhood. So
I'm over simplifying here. But when we look at adults,
you know, these are twenty five forty five year old people,
and they act and behave and react in very different

(40:22):
ways in the way that we see in eighteen month
old children and we will categorize these adults as best
we can, and then we start correlating them to you know,
we match them theoretically or hypothetically to the different attachment
styles that children go through. So you will see an
adult that has the markers of adult style preoccupied attachment,

(40:47):
and it's very different from the eighteen month old behaviors
right that we coulde They're measured differently, and we say,
are those related? Do you have indi caters or can
you do logit tunal studies where you actually measure an
eighteen month old child's attachment style and then you check

(41:08):
it in with them when they're thirty. Do they have
the same attachment style but in an adult version? And
that's so the long short of it is, there's research
on this, and some of it's pretty robust, but it's
hard to be as robust as it needs to be,
and there's loose associations between these groups. And what people

(41:33):
will say is that they know there's not a lot
of science that links these things together and therefore they're
not the same thing, or that your early childhood attachment
style has nothing to do with what you will be
like later or what you are now has nothing to
do with what you were as a child, but it's

(41:55):
it's one more complicated in that. And two we just
don't know because we're talking about like I said earlier,
we're trying to codify and measure, you know, arguably the
largest aspect of human existence relationships and attachment and romance
and you know, the way you feel about things and

(42:18):
the decisions and culture plays a role right also, and
researchers will acknowledge this that you can change your attachment style.
So if you have preoccupied attachment style at eighteen months,
things can be given your environment and the way you
interpret things, things can be different. By the time you're
an adult. Have you been through a lot of therapy?
Did things go worse? Did things go better? Could you

(42:40):
have an eighteen month old child that was measured as
securely attached, very firmly securely attached, had a balance, right,
but went through horrific divorce and you know, their parents
go through a horrible thing, Dad abandons the family, The
kid has attachment injury from that develops of avoidant taskment
style and by the time they're thirty and they've had

(43:03):
some bad relationships and culture. You know, if it's a guy.
You know, he's had influence on like being stoic and stuff,
and he's listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson and
he's thirty years old, and when you measure his attachment
style at that point, he's avoidant. So you have secure
as a child and avoidant as an adult. And people
will say, well, therefore they're different things, or this is

(43:23):
all nonsense, and what we would say as well, life
is long, and there's a lot of influences, and of
course no one would think that the attachment style that
you had as a child will be fixed. We understand
that now when it comes to disorganized attachment, it's a
little different in that a lot of the times, at
least anecdotally, okay, when you have a disorganized attachment as

(43:47):
a young child, if especially if it's firmly measured, then
I would say the consensus is and I would argue
that this is very likely the case that for those
people it they're going to have some signs of disorganized
what we would call what I would call disorganized attachment
as adult, what I tend to call disorganized attachment as adults,

(44:09):
what others would call fearful avoidant as an adult. But
that's in a way just another term for disorganized. But
other people, including doctor Pascal, would say that they're not
the same thing. They're completely different terms. But it confuses
people when you say that, when you say that disorganized
attachment has nothing to do with fearful avoidant attachment style,
and so then you have lay people and students and

(44:31):
collinsions that are like, okay, so what's fearful avoidant and well,
it's a completely different thing. But to help people understand,
and I think it is a useful way of seeing
the world that the disorganized what we talk about when
we talk about disorganized attachment style as a child, it
seems likely, but we can't know. And there's some evidence

(44:55):
to support this, some evidence that we that doesn't support it,
but given how difficult it is to measure this, it's
hard to know. But there's in terms of what we
call fearful avoiding or what I and other people might
call it disorganized attachment as adult. You know, if you've
listened to the podcast with Me and Bob, I talk
a lot about this, that the same experience happens to

(45:19):
the adults. Like with Bob, he will talk about how
he is desperate for closeness. But the closer he gets,
the more fearfully gets, the more paranoid he gets, the
more convinced of foul play or just panic that he feels,
discomfort that he feels and it's hard, right, And as

(45:40):
he gains distance because of the fear he feels, as
he gets closer to someone, he feels a lot of
distress there too. There's no orientation, there's no system of
dealing with it. Preoccupied people will do you know, I've
already talked about that. Avoiding people will deal with like
secure people, disorganize people. They're stuck in this limbo of

(46:01):
fear and being unresolved, as they will use that word.
So they're fearful, they're avoidant, and you know, and I
don't know if you hear that airplane, but fearful avoidant,
you know, when you get more specific into the way
that adults will tend to enact disorganize attachment, fearful avoidant

(46:24):
does kind of fit right. They're fearful as they get closer,
and they also will avoid, but they also will pursue.
You know it, They're they're not oriented towards avoidant. But
if you understand what they mean by avoidant, then you
understand what they're referring to anyway. So I find it's
just easier to use the same word, even though technically speaking,

(46:49):
in the measures they will you know specifically or the
particularly the the main measures that are used, they don't
use this organized as a label for adults, you know,
generally speaking, but but they're talking about disorganize. Attachment is
the thing. But then you know, what doctor Pascal would

(47:12):
say is, well, why are you doing that. You're you know,
speaking unscientifically. There's no science to prove you know, blah
blah blah blah. Again, it's a model for understanding. It
tends to work out. It is hard to know if
this is accurate or not. In fifty years, maybe people

(47:33):
will hear me and say, wow, he was right about this,
he was wrong about that. I don't know. I try
to avoid getting into specific things that are more out
there in terms of their speculation. And I also try
to avoid becoming too pedantic about what the research has shown,

(47:59):
because is at some point each clinician has to make
a call. Right like science can only get you so far,
observate data can only get us clinicians so far, and
then at some point we as clinicians, I would argue,
as philosophers. We are philosophers of the human condition and

(48:21):
of change, and of morality and what's good in life
and how to see the world. Okay, there's no science
behind how one should see the world or how one
should live. Now, therapists, we're not here to tell people
how to live, but we do filter our especially if

(48:41):
you get into depth with clients, we end up having
a lot of thoughts on that. We have to question
our values, we have to question our culture, to question
our authority and our privilege. But I think to be
ultimately helpful to human being, we have to enter that realm.
We can't just be standoffish and say, well, there's no
science to tell me anything about this, so I'm just

(49:03):
gonna like stare at you because i don't know what
to do. I'm only going to reside within science. And
you know, for you know me, I'm I'm one of
the most annoying, pedantic scientific person people around. You know,
I'm constantly railing on people that don't follow the science.
And yet with therapy, with life, with myself, with helping

(49:26):
people with my marriage, science really barely gets us down
the road in terms of like how we're supposed to
navigate this. You know, therapists need wisdom, they need philosophy,
they need life, they need a way of understanding humans
and themselves, and science can inform that. So when it

(49:49):
comes to the pedantry of these terms and attachments and
attachment theory, I tend to, you know, be praical and
develop my way. But you know, if someone want to
criticize my my word usage, that's fine, but I would
be able to counter them by saying, yeah, yeah, you're right.

(50:13):
And I make while I acknowledge that I'm trying to
educate people, I'm trying to help clients, I'm trying to
even organize my own thoughts around this. And it just
helps to see it this way. And I think it
does pan out that kids that are observed to have
disorganized attachment pretty firmly when they're eighteen months old will

(50:35):
tend to have a because the other thing is like
disorganized adult, disorganized attached adults. They can have the look
of relationships that everything is fine. You know, like Bob,
for example, from the outside and from a lot of measures,
his relationships are fine. You know, he's not volatile, he's

(50:58):
not violent. He's been married for a long time, has
been with Colleen a really long time, and if you
ask them, they would say they're happy in their marriage,
and they wouldn't be lying. But when you know, if
you listen to the podcast with with Bob, you hear
his inner experience, it's it's it's you know, it's it's

(51:19):
different than the kinds of things you would see or
hear on a survey or you know, gather from. You know,
say Bob wasn't a therapist and he didn't have as
much self awareness, how would he respond to a survey right,
especially if it was like a short one online. Can
you be assured that it's measuring the actual thing? You know?

(51:40):
Same with preoccupied you know, same with avoidant people. It's
just hard to measure this in adults. That's the thing.
And that's why for myself, when I'm working with humans
or when I'm thinking about myself or my marriage, I
am using all the research and the data and the theory,

(52:00):
and I'm using it to inform my conceptualization of a situation.
But if you asked me to prove that my conceptualization
is accurate, I would say I actually have almost no
ability to do that. And then other people would say, well,
then you're just making up a story. And then I
would say, well, we have to because science can only

(52:23):
tell us extremely limited stories about people, and we have
to have some system. We shouldn't just make shit up,
but you know, we should try. And there's consens i
in the world. You know, the only thing we can
really say about personality is the Big Five. And that's
just five aspects, you know, openness and conscientiousness, you know,

(52:46):
all that whole stuff, and those are useful, but even
that has some question marks around, especially with individual measurement,
and they're only you know, loosely associated with certain observations
of behavior and life and stuff. And then and that's
just extremely limited, you know. Anyway, So let's take a break.

(53:11):
But there's a bunch of myths, and I was planning
and getting to all of them. I think there's yeah,
like like thirty four myths and I've only got to one.
So let's kind of race through the next thirty three.
All right, we're back from the break. Maybe I'll break
this up into two different episodes. But this next myth

(53:32):
by doctor Pascal Vertika, who I you know, I greatly
respect the way this is written, it is all true.
It just it's just a matter of how you apply this.
And him posting this on Instagram and online is a
really good thing, because there's a lot of bullshit on
Instagram and TikTok and you know, on the internet regarding

(53:55):
attachment theory banking. So this next statement is meant to
spell a myth, and the statement is attachment is not
good or bad, and it's not weak or strong. And yeah,
I think we understand what this one is getting at,
but let's read it. Attachment is our primary social survival strategy.

(54:18):
We cannot survive or thrive without it. Attachment shares our
access to coregulation or social atostasis. We therefore all must
be attached to at least one and ideally several attachment
figures across the lifespan. Yeah, Attachment theory above all asks
about our attachment quality. Attachment theory above all asks about

(54:38):
our attachment quality, how our attachment makes us feel and
think within our relationships, and whether it is useful and
helpful in everyday life. Just because some attachment patterns are
labeled as in secure or disorganized does not make them
bad or useless As such, right. So, I think what
he's getting at, which is something that I would get at,

(55:00):
is that the attachment style. And I'm just going to
continue referring to disorganized as one of the attachment styles.
You can argue that's not and you know, in his language,
he's like labeled insecure or disorganized, you know, meaning that
insecure styles are an organized insecure, and you have insecure disorganized. Anyway,

(55:25):
I don't find that actually the distinction particularly helpful. But anyway,
so what he's getting at, which I absolutely agree with,
is that the style is good. You know, disorganized and
preoccupied and avoidant are good in that they helped the

(55:47):
child and maybe even the adult cope with bad situations. Right,
if your parent is inconsistent and occasionally abandoning and or
occasionally abandoning, then it serves you and your attachment needs
and maybe even your survival to amp up your emotions

(56:07):
to cling, to demand, to alert, to focus on the parent,
to try to game the system. And if you're avoidant,
it makes sense, it's helpful, it's good, it's strong to
turn off your emotions as best you can, to turn away.
What's the point, You're not gonna get your needs met?

(56:28):
From that person. You're just going to be frustrated. You're
just going to be left alone. You're just going to
be neglected, ignored, unattuned to, and you're better off just
trying to make it on your own, maybe even building
up a narcissistic idea that you are stronger than everyone,
you're superior, you're better, and that way of dealing with

(56:49):
it is strong. It's good because it helps you. That's
why so many people around the planet. If we have
eight billion people on the planet, bistically one or two
billion of those people are avoidant, and another one or
two billion are preoccupied, and another, say half a billion
are disorganized. So you know, if so many people are

(57:13):
doing it, it can't and they're doing it automatically, it
can't be like a weak thing, and putting good or
bad to it is a little silly, right, So you know,
it's like saying that PTSD is weak and bad. Now,
what do we mean? Not bad? But I think what

(57:35):
they're getting at is like online, it's like you want
to avoid bad attached people or something, you know, and
that's just reductive and stigmatizing. All right, Actually, let's say
goodbye for now and tune in the next time, when
I continue reading these because I want to read all

(57:57):
of them, and everyone out there, please take care up
because you deserve it. You really, really do.