February, 14th, Valentine's Day. The global spotlight on love and romantic relationships. Everywhere you go, you are surrounded by heart shaped boxes, balloons and chocolates.
Is this day really one of celebration?
Is the Valentine's Day message really impacting that positively on our societal messages around relationships?
Recent years have seen an exponential increase in relationship advice accounts on social media. A few seconds into opening any of the social media platforms and you are bombarded with pseudo-psychology accounts claiming to offer psychology advice about healthy relationships. This is even more stark on day like Valentine's Day, when there is a global spotlight on relationships and the societal messages that surround us.
The result? Unfortunately, more and more people are misusing "psychology/therapy speak" as a way of either negatively labelling someone or as a justification for poor behaviour. Terms like "gaslighting", "narcissist", "triggers", "boundaries" and "attachment styles" are clinical terms that are now widely used on social media and this creates a really detrimental narrative about relationships and love, whilst at the same time taking away from the real meaning of these terms in clinical contexts.
Don't take me wrong, the fact that social media is facilitating conversations about mental health and that people are more familiar with certain terms, is really helpful and can be a way to destigmatise mental health as a whole. However, as with everything, sometimes this goes too far and without the proper checks about what is accurate and helpful advice and what is detrimental advice for singletons and couples alike, this can have very unhelpful consequences.
An honest overview of relationships
So let's maybe begin with putting a spotlight on what is perhaps the most widespread problematic concept. Attachment styles. There are hundreds and hundreds of articles on attachment and attachment styles. Some really helpfully written, most of the others, less so.
What I have seen as a consistently unhelpful message, from the perspective of a Clinical Psychologist who spent years studying human development, attachment and relationships, is the use of attachment styles as a "condition/pathology" that you "catch" and can never be rid of. This can have catastrophic consequences, especially for people who might be more vulnerable and in the context of abusive dynamics, where attachment labels can be mistakenly used to either pathologize normal behaviour or to excuse/justify poor or abusive behaviour.
What is important to understand is that when we label someone with little understanding of what that label actually means, our brain engages in a process called confirmation bias, which causes us to pay attention to every small piece of evidence that confirms our "diagnosis" and disregard any signs that our "diagnosis" may actually be inaccurate. Taking this process to the extreme, we could label everyone as pathological and thus unable to be in a relationship.
Labels can also be a defence mechanism we adopt to protect ourselves from feeling vulnerable. Moments when we feel hurt or rejected by our partners are some of the most painful moments we can experience in relationships. It can be scary to name that we are feeling hurt, rejected or worried for the relationship. Labelling our partners as "avoidant" can be a way of not naming what is actually going on underneath the surface - i.e. that our partner's change in behaviour is really frightening and we are feeling hurt and scared.
What can be a more helpful starting point is an acknowledgment that relationships are hard. This is not just a cliché. Everyone in a long term partnership can attest to this. A relationship requires work at the best of times and then there are moments when things can feel very distressing and difficult and we may not be our best selves. This doesn't mean anyone has developed a pathology but it is just an acknowledgment that we are all capable of acting in ways that we are not proud of and that, most of the times, are not representative of our whole personality or attachment style.
Something else that I also feel I should probably name here is that conflict is normal. Arguments are not necessarily a sign of an unhealthy relationship. They are a normal part of what can happen between two people. It is not the quantity of arguments we have with our partners that symbolises the strength of our relationship but our ability to resolve conflict and communicate.
Returning to attachment styles, it can be helpful to understand these as a way of gaining a better understanding of what feelings, thoughts or behaviours might be more likely to be activated in the face of conflict, rather than to stick a firm label on ourselves or our partners.
I like to think of attachment as happening on a continuum along two dimensions: avoidance (low or high) and anxiety (low or high). I tend to use the graph below as a visual representation of this. The four attachment styles are illustrated as a guide but it is more helpful to think about where on the axis we might find ourselves at any particular point in our lives - yes! Attachment styles can change and are not fixed in stone.
Generally speaking, as way of offering a guide, we can understand the four attachment styles as follows:
Secure attachment - characterised by low anxiety and low avoidance
Anxious (preoccupied) attachment - characterised by high anxiety and low avoidance
Avoidant (dismissive) attachment - characterised by high avoidance and low anxiety
Fearful (disorganised) attachment - characterised by high avoidance and high anxiety.
Now this does not mean that everyone falling into any of those 4 categories will act, think or feel the same. We are still individuals with our own detailed histories and ways of being in the world and with others. It is also important to know that an attachment dynamic between two people can also be heavily influenced by what is happening in that dynamic or relationship. To give you an example, let's say you are someone who is more likely to experience anxiety / fears of being left in a relationship for instance. We can say that you may sit somewhere on the continuum in the box of "anxious attachment". Now, if you and your partner have good communication and are able to establish a trusting and secure relationship together, it is likely that your attachment style will become less active and that, in time, you will begin to experience less anxieties / insecurities in the relationship.
What can be really helpful about understanding your attachment style is that it can usually point to your relationship needs. If you have a tendency to feel more anxious for instance, you may need more closeness / reassurance and clear communication from your partner and being able to ask for this and have this met by your partner can be a really reparative process that builds intimacy and closeness.
Of course there may be times when it is hard for you and your partner to communicate with each other or even have a sense of what might be happening. If this persists over time, this might be a good time to explore the possibility to access individual or couples therapy so that you can gain a better understanding of yourself and your relationship and build a stronger more fulfilling connection.
If you feel that this would be helpful for you, please do not hesitate to visit our couples therapy page.
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