Attachment Style - Research Paper Example

My Attachment Style: Fearful-Avoidant? I am disappointed to know that my attachment style is fearful. Honestly, I was expecting much more sophisticated. The word “fear” or “fearful” does not really express or describe my “attachment style” or how I deal or feel towards my partner. Of course, I “fear” to lose my partner or to lose her love for me. But it fails to tell or show that I love my partner without necessarily being fearful. I mean, the question -- e.g., are you afraid to lose your partner’s love?

-- is irrelevant or misleading. Further, the Close Relationships Questionnaire, as I see it, is quantitative than qualitative. It attempts to measure the emotion or feeling of a person towards his/her beloved/lover. My attachment style has been calculated: 4.38 for anxiety and 4.50 for avoidance. With this data, it seems that I am pessimistic to my relationship; that is not sophisticated. I know myself more than what the Close Relationships Questionnaire tells me. I cannot agree to the “findings” set by such questionnaire.

It says that I am fearful-avoidant in relation to my attachment style. The questionnaire explains that “[t]hey [e.g., myself] tend to avoid becoming emotionally attached to others, and, even in cases in which they do enter a committed relationship.” Perhaps it is true, at certain extent that I tend to be emotionally unattached to my partner. By emotionally unattached, I mean I do not share or express explicitly to my partner what I feel to certain thing or event. Nevertheless, I am sensitive to the emotion or feeling of my partner.

If she shares something to me, I listen to her. In essence, I do not completely avoid emotional stuff between me and my partner. Sigmund Freud argues that the adult people’s character or behavior originates from, or is influenced by, his or her childhood years. Probably there is truth in that. My “attachment style” -- as a kind of character or attitude -- is shaped by the early years of my childhood. Meaning to say, my present adult ideas or concepts are derived from the set of ideas that was developed in my childhood days.

My relationship with my mother (and the culture that she had), for instance, somehow influenced my attachment style; Freud states that infants are “needy, clingy, and dependent” to parents (as cited in Waters, Crowell, Elliot, Corcoran, & Treboux, 2002, p. 4). Perhaps my “fear” and “avoidance” are molded within the context of my relationship to my parent. My lack of emotional attachment to my partner is arguably shaped by my mother’s absence of emotional attachment to me as her son -- what Waters (2004) calls “connecting thread” (p. 4). My attachment style -- here, attachment style is not what the questionnaire forces me to believe -- affects my social and emotional development.

Since I restrain myself from expressing to my partner what I feel, it has an impact to our relationship. That is to say, the openness or perhaps trust between us is limited, if not compromise. Cherniss (2000) notes that a person who knows how to handle his or her emotion “provides the basis for the kinds of social and emotional competences.” My absence of opening up to my partner on what I feel fails to create an expansion or development of my personality or identity as a man. Perhaps this has something to do with my perception (cognitive/cultural) of what a relationship should be and how a man should behave in that relationship.

References Cherniss, C. (2000). Emotional intelligence: What it is and why it matters. Retrieved from http://www.eiconsortium.org/reports/what_is_emotional_intelligence.html Waters, E., Crowell, J., Elliot, M., Corcoran, D., & Treboux, D. (2002). Bowlby’s secure base theory and the social/personality psychology of attachment styles: Works in progress. Attachment and Human Development, 4, 230-242. Waters, T. (2004). Learning to love: From your mother’s arms to your lover’s arms. Medium (Voice of the university of Toronto), 30 (19), n.pag.