Your attachment style and your eating style: part one.

Attachment Theory (Bowlby & Ainsworth) was one of the first things I ever learned about in my college psychology courses — right after Freud’s Oedipal Complex and Jung’s collective unconscious.

The theory was based on an experiment where a child is introduced to a new environment (with a stranger present) and the mother sticks around, leaves, then comes back, and the child is observed for how they respond. This classic attachment study is called “The Strange Situation.”

This study gave way to the identification of different attachment styles, and in this email series (this is part one of three), I want to talk about these attachment styles and how they can relate to our relationship with food.

But first — what is an attachment style?

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines attachment style as: “the way people relate to others in the context of relationships, which is heavily influenced by self-worth and interpersonal trust.Theoretically, the degree of attachment security in adults is related directly to how well they bonded to others as children.”

There are two styles of attachment: secure and insecure.

Secure attachment is kind of what it sounds like -- feeling safe and stable in relationships; having trust in the world and others, which supports feeling safe and having trust in oneself.

Insecure attachment is the opposite of secure attachment and is characterized by low trust in the world, others, and self. A child who grows up lacking a “safe base” (a stable & secure relationship with their parent) may develop attachments to people or things (like food, body size) to provide the sense of safety they are missing.

There are three types of insecure attachment:

• anxious

• avoidant

• disorganized

Each type develops from this insecure base, but manifests differently in behavior and emotional coping style.

• Anxious attachment is characterized by low self-esteem, fear of abandonment, “chasing” or clinging, constantly seeking reassurance.

• Avoidant attachment is characterized by withdrawal from emotional vulnerability, need for extreme independence, dismissive, detached.

• Disorganized attachment is characterized by inconsistent and unpredictable patterns of intimacy, push-pull dynamics, hot & cold.

A person’s attachment style can influence how they show up in relationships, and I propose that this can include their relationship with food.

The rest of this blog series explains how these attachment styles can show up in our relationship with food, with some anonymous client examples. This is part one of three: Anxious-Attachment.

Let’s look anxious-attachment first.

Anxiously attached folks are generally insecure, need lots of reassurance, feel threatened by space and distance, and move towards the object of perceived safety. There is a sense of scarcity at play here; in a relationship, their partners can never been too close, never be too connected, they can never spend too much time together. It’s almost like…well, it’s almost like they binge on the sense of connection.

See where I’m going here?

We speak about attachment mostly in terms of interpersonal relationships, but I do believe there is a case to be made for becoming attached to things or ideas that provide a sense of safety as well. Including food and body image ideals.

For the anxiously attached person, food can become the “filler-upper.” Food fills in for the sense of safety, the love, the comfort, the thing they NEED to feel whole. And this attachment style would most likely constantly seek out food and gather up as much of it as they could in order to feel there is enough of it — yet there never seems to be enough.

Case Study: Madelyn

An anxious-attached person isn’t always a binge-style client in my observation; sometimes they attach to restriction. However, the following example highlights how anxious attachment can show up through attaching to food through bingeing.

One of my anxiously attached clients named Madelyn (name changed for anonymity) was recently divorced from her partner John because, in her words, “we should never have gotten married in the first place.” They married young and Madelyn says that she felt swept off of her feet at the time, but always knew John was “a misogynistic asshole.”

When they met, John showered Madelyn with lots of praise and attention and she didn’t believe she deserved him, but was excited to be the object of his desire.

Madelyn has a lot of negative opinions of herself and feels guilty for anything that goes wrong in relationships; so when John’s misogynistic asshole tendencies made more and more of an appearance, she tended to blame herself for not being attractive enough, not being smart enough, not being “good” enough. Despite his condescending (and downright mean) behavior towards her, she did not feel herself defensible and kept apologizing and fawning to him.

In other words, she kept chasing security through John, and put his needs before her own in order to save the relationship, which felt safer to her than being independent and alone.

The same patterns have shown up in Madelyn’s relationship with food. Madelyn is a “permitter,” meaning that she does not consciously restrict but eats a lot of food because she finds it intolerable to be without it, even when the eating behavior feels harmful or destructive.

Her insecurity suggests to her that she is weak-willed and undisciplined, which makes her feel like she “deserves” her food issues, and if she just ate “better” she wouldn’t suffer so much.

But the idea that she should be “better” itself drives the shame that fuels the binge eating, and so the cycle continues. She at once hates the food and loves it, because she is attached to it as an object of safety, for better or worse. She cannot be independent of it because she counts on it to provide her with the safety of comfort/escape, but also to confirm her belief that she is actually not good enough. There is not enough of a sense of safety inside of Madelyn herself to stand alone; she needs John or food to orient herself to herself.

Stay tuned for the second part of this blog series: Avoidant-Attachment.