Untangling Love: An Attachment-Based Guide to Consensual Non-monogamy, 4-Part Series

Part 1: Attachment Styles in Non-monogamous Relationships: Navigating Intimacy Through the Lens of Security

In the realm of relationships, one size certainly does not fit all. Although we live in a mononormative society, for many individuals, the traditional model of monogamy may not align with their values, desires, or needs. Enter non-monogamy, an umbrella term that encompasses various relationship structures, including open relationships, polyamory, and other forms of consensual non-monogamous (CNM) arrangements, sometimes also referred to as ethical non-monogamy (ENM). 

As a therapist specializing in attachment-based approaches, I’ve seen how navigating non-monogamous relationships can be both exciting and challenging. Among the various factors that can contribute to creating and maintaining healthy relationships, understanding attachment styles provides deeper insight into how we experience the complexities of intimate relationships.

In this 4-part series, I'll also review the intricacies of communicating expectations, negotiating boundaries, and preventing attachment injuries within non-monogamous relationships through an attachment-based lens. Let’s begin this first installment by diving into the foundational aspects of attachment styles within the realm of non-monogamous relationships. 

Understanding Attachment Styles

Attachment theory, a concept pioneered by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, suggests that the way we bond with primary caregivers in our early years shapes our attachment styles. These styles, such as secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant, play a crucial role in how we form and maintain relationships throughout our lives. In non-monogamous relationships, understanding these attachment styles becomes particularly important as they can significantly impact how individuals navigate intimacy and connection in multiple relationships. Throughout years of research and as noted by Jessica Fern in her book, “Polysecure”, it’s been determined that attachment styles aren't fixed and can actually vary within different relationships. You might exhibit one attachment style with one partner and a different one with another, indicating areas of distress and security within those relationships.

Secure Strategies of Relating

Consider someone with a secure attachment style. They tend to feel at ease with intimacy, trust more readily, and communicate openly in their relationships. While they may still experience moments of anxiety or jealousy, these feelings typically don't threaten the bond they share with their partners. Unlike individuals with other attachment styles, who may have more extreme reactions to closeness and distance, securely attached individuals can manage emotional discomfort and vulnerability with greater flexibility.

Insecure Attachment Styles

On the flip side, individuals with anxious or avoidant attachment styles often struggle with intensified emotions like jealousy and shame, heightened insecurities, and fear of abandonment. These attachment styles tend to exhibit more rigid and reactive responses to actual or perceived threats to intimacy and the possibility of rejection by a partner. 

For instance, someone with a fearful-avoidant attachment style, which combines anxious and avoidant traits, might interpret their partner's unresponsiveness as a personal rejection. In response, they may lash out with yelling and criticism, hoping to reestablish closeness. However, paradoxically, they may then reject their partner's attempts to reconnect due to a lack of trust and a deep-seated fear of experiencing emotional pain triggered by their partner's actions. This internal conflict underscores the complexities inherent in fearful-avoidant attachment, where the individual oscillates between craving intimacy and pushing it away out of self-preservation. Similarly polarized, individuals with an anxious attachment style might resort to persistent pursuits to seek closeness and reassurance from their partner. However, these efforts may not effectively convey their need for closeness and reassurance. Whereas, partners with an avoidant attachment style may perceive the aforementioned behaviors as suffocating or controlling, prompting them to withdraw as a means of coping with attachment distress often to meet their own attachment needs for agency and independence.

Attachment Strategies are not Fixed

While striving for a secure attachment is commonly seen as the ultimate objective, it's crucial not to label other attachment styles as inherently flawed when compared to secure attachment. From the standpoint of attachment theory, all human behavior is viewed as serving a function, primarily aimed at meeting our needs in the most adaptive manner available to us. Each attachment style, whether secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful-avoidant, represents a unique adaptation to early relational experiences and serves as a strategy for coping with intimacy,  connection, and distance. Therefore, instead of viewing non-secure attachment styles as deficiencies, it's more constructive to understand them as adaptive responses to past experiences, which can be worked through and transformed with awareness and effort. Understanding these dynamics can empower individuals in non-monogamous relationships to navigate challenges and foster healthier connections with their partners.

Approaching non-monogamous relationships from an attachment perspective can help foster security, trust, and intimacy among partners. Be sure to pay attention to how your attachment styles influence your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors within the relationship dynamics. Practice emotional attunement by tuning into your partners' needs and emotions with empathy and understanding. Offer reassurance and support when your partners are experiencing distress or insecurity, and encourage them to do the same for you. In the second part of this 4-part series on navigating CNM, we'll talk about crucial aspects of transparency and communicating expectations

Understanding Where You & Your Partner Get Stuck in Conflict

When couples struggle with conflict resolution or communication issues, they tend to find themselves getting “stuck” - the conversation doesn’t go anywhere and the same things get said over and over again. It’s not uncommon for couples to find themselves here. Usually, couples get stuck because each partner has learned to cope with emotions or stress in a way that unintentionally exacerbates conflict.

The conflict pattern with your partner likely repeats no matter the topic. You might find yourselves talking about plans for the weekend, chores, or family, and the conversation escalates in a similar way each time. 

The solution to getting unstuck isn’t simply learning each other's love languages or communicating more clearly - the solution is changing the pattern when conflict arises. This can be difficult for couples without intervention by a professional, but even just having an awareness of your pattern can help create change.

How to Identify Your Negative Cycle 

There are multiple parts to every couple’s negative conflict cycle:

• the “alarm bell”

• Primary emotions

• Reactive emotions

• The story you tell yourself

• How you cope

These parts of a negative cycle are often hard to identify in the moment, but if you take a step back, you might be able to see each part more clearly. 

Picture a figure 8 - the “alarm bell” is the center - the trigger that sends you or your partner into the cycle. When you or your partner react to the trigger, you feel “reactive” emotions and then tell yourself a story about yourself, your partner, and your relationship. After internalizing this story, you react with certain behaviors to cope with the feelings, triggering your partner’s own side of the cycle. This pattern continues until one or both of you do something to change it. 

Let’s Take a Deeper Look at the Parts of a Cycle

Alarm bell

The “alarm bell” or the trigger is what sends you and your partner into your cycle - it can look different for both of you. Maybe a trigger for you is when your partner feels distant and inaccessible - you’ve had a rough day at work and you want your partner to take an interest in your low mood. Instead, your partner only seems concerned with what is on their phone.

In the moment, you are looking for connection, closeness, and a sense of emotional safety with your partner and it doesn’t feel available. This can trigger fear - thoughts of “I need you right now, where are you? Do you care that I am upset?”. However, we have a hard time understanding and expressing that fear the moment we feel it. Instead, the fear triggers our “fight or flight” response. Our mind and body read the situation as being dangerous which triggers primary and then reactive emotions

Primary Emotions

Primary emotions are the initial emotions we feel when we encounter a trigger, and they include sadness, fear, surprise, joy, disgust, and sometimes anger. Typically when our “alarm bell” goes off in relation to a loved one, the primary emotion triggered is either fear or hurt / sadness. This person matters to us, so when we sense a threat to the relationship, we become scared or sad. As we will explore more in the section about changing the negative cycle, learning to recognize and communicate primary emotions is key to interrupting a negative cycle. However, often primary emotions can be replaced so quickly by reactive emotions, that we hardly recognize they are there.

Reactive Emotions

Reactive emotions are the feelings that tend to cover up the hurt or fear that was triggered by the “alarm bell”. Primary emotions like hurt and sadness are vulnerable, and when we are caught in conflict, even with someone we love, it is a natural reaction to want to protect ourself. Some reactive emotions are anger, frustration, resentment, anxiety, helplessness, or hopelessness. These emotions are the reaction to the thought “Do you care that I’m upset?”. It’s likely that anger, frustration, resentment, etc. take over and they are the emotions that get expressed to your partner. 

The Story

Reactive emotions are often fueled by the story that you tell yourself. When you’re caught in a negative cycle, what thoughts do you have about yourself, your partner, and your relationship? You might have thoughts like:

“My emotional experience doesn’t matter.”

“I have too many emotions.”

“I am unworthy of love.”

“My partner doesn’t care about me or my emotions.”

“My partner is never there for me.”

“My partner doesn’t think I can do anything right.”

“Our relationship is bound to fail.”

“This is what always happens in our relationship.”

“If our relationship is always going to be like this, maybe we should break up.”

We all enter relationships with a narrative about ourselves and about others. The stories we tell ourselves usually come from previous relationships with a significant other, our relationship with our parents, and even what we believe society says about us and our identities.

How You Cope

Lastly, we try to cope - which is usually the protective, reactive, or defensive behavior that our partner sees. This could look like passive aggression, verbal insults, raised voices, using a certain tone of voice, reaching for your partner, and even withdrawing from your partner. These behaviors are used to protect or defend ourselves from the hurt we feel from our partners.

If you are searching for your partner’s support but they feel inaccessible, you might try to reach for them by making sarcastic comments about them “always being on their phone”. It could continue to escalate and eventually, you find yourself yelling at your partner about how they never do the chores you’ve asked them to do because they’re too busy on their phone.

The way you behave when you’re trying to cope with your emotions often triggers your partner’s own side of the cycle. And because both of your deeper, primary emotions (pain, hurt, fear) are going unacknowledged and unexpressed, the conflict continues to escalate and often goes unresolved when one or both of you decide to pull away.

So How Do We Change this Cycle?

The cycle can be difficult to identify and change. You and your partner may have years of experience with this cycle and it has become the only way you know how to handle conflict. Know that this will not change overnight - it takes awareness and practice. 

Sit down with your partner and try to identify each of your parts in the cycle. Some important things to consider are:

• What does my partner do that makes me feel they are emotionally unavailable? (When does the alarm bell go off for me?)

• When my alarm bell goes off, I feel _________.

• The story I tell myself is ____________.

• When I feel ________ and I’ve told myself __________, I cope by __________.

• I cope this way because my partner's emotional availability is so important to me.

• When I behave by _________ it triggers my partner to feel ________.

Once you have an idea of the cycle, try to become aware of it when it happens in the moment. Call attention to it when you know it’s happening and attempt to try something different: take a step back, take a deep breath, and notice what is happening for you emotionally. See if you can notice the primary emotion like fear or sadness that is being triggered, and share this with your partner. Remember that the reason we feel scared or sad in a negative cycle is because our partner and the relationship matter to us. When you can step out of reactive emotions and sharing your stories, and speak directly about your more vulnerable emotional experience, it helps both you and your partner to get out of “fight or flight,” and sends a signal to your partner that you are looking for closeness, not attacking.

If this feels impossible in your relationship, a professional can help you in identifying your cycle and creating change. Our therapists at Colorado Therapy Collective specialize in understanding negative conflict patterns and helping couples find emotional security with one another. If you’re interested in our services, reach out to one of our therapists today for more information! We offer a complimentary 20-minute consultation for you and your partner to learn more about our services and make sure you find a therapist that feels like a good fit for you. Click here to schedule a consultation or initial session today!

The Connection between Attachment, Depression, and Anxiety

Attachment Theory, first developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, has gained increasing attention on social media and has people questioning their attachment style and what they can do about it. 

But first things first - what is attachment and why should I care about it?

Attachment theory is the idea that humans innately desire not only social contact, but a sense of emotional closeness & connection. Humans want to know they have close people they can rely on to “see” them emotionally. From the moment we are born, we long to feel understood by the most important people in our lives - we want to know they will be there when we need them and that they will understand us if we share our vulnerabilities.

Attachment theory helps us understand the different ways that people act out this innate desire for connection and acceptance, depending on the different life experiences they have had. Bowlby and Ainsworth found that the young children they studied generally fell into one of four attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful-avoidant, sometimes called disorganized. Later researchers discovered that adults actually tend to fall into these same categories in their primary relationships later in life. 

To have a secure attachment style is to have a sense of security about yourself, your emotions, and your relationships - you feel comfortable and safe opening up to people in your life and you are attuned to their emotions and needs as well. 

You may, however, relate more to an anxious or avoidant attachment style. In these ways of relating, you can become so preoccupied with your own distress that it’s hard to see other people’s emotions or perspectives (anxious) or dismiss yours and other peoples’ emotions altogether (avoidant). A disorganized attachment style can develop when caregivers are unsafe or abusive, and can manifest in a mix of anxious and avoidant strategies in relationships. 

How do attachment styles relate to depression and anxiety? 

A good majority of people seek therapy services for either depression or anxiety, so why do we care about attachment?

Secure attachment has been found to be related to a number of positive mental health and well-being outcomes: resilience, optimism, high self-esteem, confidence, a sense of belonging, the ability to regulate emotions, sensitive attunement to others, compassion, empathic responsiveness…the list goes on and on. When an individual sees a loved one as a “safe and secure base”, they become better adjusted humans who have healthier relationships with others.

Anxious and avoidant attachment styles have been associated with vulnerability to depression and other stress related disorders like anxiety.

Many times anxiety and depression can manifest in relationships - an anxious attachment style can be related to feeling a sense of loss, abandonment, loneliness, and helplessness interpersonally. On the other hand, avoidant attachment has been associated with achievement-related depression - perfectionism, self-criticism, and hyper self-reliance. 

Here’s where Attachment-based and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT and EFIT) come in.

Emotionally Focused Therapy is one of the few therapy modalities proven to help people shift into more secure ways of relating to themselves and their partner. 

We can learn to become securely attached when we challenge the narratives we have about our own emotions and how our loved ones will react to them. A therapist becomes your “safe space” where you can explore your pattern of reacting to emotions and they can help you navigate understanding them better. In doing so, we become more open to emotional connection and vulnerability and less concerned with feelings of abandonment or hyper self-reliance. When we learn more secure ways of relating to ourselves and others, we create positive feedback loops that can counteract some of the most painful aspects of depression and anxiety. 

In EFT couples therapy, a therapist helps to facilitate communication with you and your partner about how your attachment narratives contribute to a pattern of conflict that you and your partner might get into, time and time again. Change happens when you and your partner are able to identify these narratives and patterns and become a “safe space” for one another to share emotions openly. This secure connection allows for growth and enhances both a stronger sense of self and resilience to stress.

Healing Addiction Through Relationship: A Conversation with Jim Thomas

Author's note: I wrote this article last year for Sandstone Care, a Denver and Boulder-based substance abuse program. It was a joy to write and is too important not to also share here. 

The first time I saw Jim Thomas speak I was brought to tears by his tenderness and authenticity, and the simple beauty of his message: that we are born to be in relationship and to yearn for connection.  

As one of just a handful of trainers in the world for the popular EFT model (Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, developed by Dr. Sue Johnson), Jim trains hundreds of therapists around the country each year. In his private practice, he works with some of Colorado’s highest-profile couples and families.

While the fields of mental health, family therapy, and substance abuse can seem like separate camps, Jim has a foot in each of these worlds. He combines a background in systemic family work with a focus on attachment-based therapy.

Jim uses his 25 years of personal experience in recovery and the 12-Step community to bring a relational, attachment-based approach to addressing substance abuse. In his treatment approach, he honors traditional approaches to recovery but also builds on them.

Jim and I got together for lunch near his Lakewood office on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Between bites of Indian food, we talked about three interesting topics:

1. How his understanding of addiction has evolved

2. His advice for loved ones of people struggling with addiction

3. His dreams for the treatment community

WE ALL NEED CONTACT, COMFORT, AND CONNECTION

Jim’s understanding of addiction has evolved and been informed by both his own recovery journey and being a student of various leaders in the fields of human development, addiction, and family therapy.

He explained, “When I first was trying to learn about addiction for myself, so that I could go to a clean and sober place and take my emotional life back, mostly they were talking about it being a biological disorder – it’s that your brain is predisposed.” He continued, “but as I was clean, part of what happened to me was my heart came back to life. I could feel what I knew as a little kid, which was how important human connection was.”

Jim was influenced at the time by John Bradshaw’s work on shame, and was also going to a lot of Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings. He started to realize that while perhaps it was true that he was biologically predisposed to addiction (as he had learned in AA), but that his brain had also learned to wire in a certain way based on his family dynamics—it was not only genetics but also environment that predisposed him to seek comfort through substances.

He described stumbling upon the attachment work of John Bowlby, saying, “It organized what I was feeling – that I was born to be met as a person, and the first instinct of the human is to reach for contact, comfort, and connection.”

HOW DRUGS HIJACK THE HUMAN ATTACHMENT SYSTEM

Substances of abuse act on the same opioid receptors that are activated when we are in close connection. This makes them an alluring substitute – if we are wired to be in close connection, and a substance can provide many of the same benefits as relationship, why not choose a substance over the risk and difficulty of a relationship? This is even more true for people who did not grow up learning that relationships are safe and they can count on others to get their needs met.  

Of course, the promise of substances to replace these close connections is ultimately empty. Jim references Phillip Flores’ work on addiction as an attachment disorder, saying, “…drugs are literally hijacking parts of the brain that nature put there so we could connect with other humans. The opioid receptors are getting hijacked. And instead of balancing the seeking behaviors with connection, we never get that connection. We just stay in the seeking mode. They did a study on alcohol recently and found that it mimics all the chemical experience of closeness except for the oxytocin release, which is why long-term alcoholism can feel so lonely.”  

Oxytocin, also called the cuddle hormone, is a feel-good chemical released organically by the brain when triggered by positive interactions with other people. Drugs come close to approximating the experience of closeness with others, but always leave users wanting more. This is partly a product of physical dependence, but also speaks to the deeper need for attachment left unfulfilled.  

Jim says, “Addiction in a lot of ways is a love failure. I don’t know how to live in a world of love, so I go elsewhere.”

ADDICTION IMPEDES HUMAN CONNECTION

As Jim sees it, the tragedy of addiction is that although the need for connection may drive people toward substances, as they either try to suppress or meet that need through substances, addiction sooner or later impedes connection.

“As we get lost in a substance and start to rely on it, we become unpredictable to the people around us. We do hurtful things or disappear. That disorders our attachment or our emotional bond with the people around us, which further complicates the situation. If I become unreliable, or selfish, or hurtful, or I just disappear, it’s very tentative for me to reach out to you for human contact. Nobody did that for me. And so I don’t reach, and you don’t reach, and we get farther and farther apart.”

He continues, “We watch loved ones get lost in heroin, coke, meth, alcohol, and it’s almost as if these substances are taking over their brain and saying, ‘look, I can give you a lot of the feelings you’re looking for, and I won’t tell you off, I won’t argue with you, I won’t hurt your feelings.’”

 RECOVERY IS A HUMAN THING

The antidote to the disconnection of addiction, Jim believes, is secure attachment, the kind of relationship in which you feel that you can count on another person, be seen by them, and feel safe in their presence.

Jim explains, “ We do best when we live in a world where we have at least one really close, vulnerable connection with another person. That’s also how we can be most autonomous and successful in the world, when we have that bond. And how many people struggling with addiction are mentally saying, ‘I have to do this myself, I have to willpower my way through this?’ And not just people in recovery—also at work and in their personal life.”

Jim wants people in recovery to talk more about their emotional life. “Are people talking about the loneliness of long-term addiction in their recovery? Are they telling someone, ‘it’s been so lonely in here this whole time. I’ve been so focused on making amends and doing my personal inventory, but what about my emotional inventory?’”

Jim tells people who want to be a sponsor in the Twelve Step tradition to be not just a confrontational sponsor but a caring sponsor, “If all you do is confront you’re sending the message that the answer isn’t in intimate connection. That this recovery thing isn’t a human thing.”

HONORING CONNECTION AND INTERDEPENDENCE IN RECOVERY

Traditional approaches to family work in addiction often focus on eradicating “codependency” and creating better boundaries to counter what is considered unhealthy enmeshment. While Jim acknowledges the importance of boundaries, and that especially during times of crisis it is important to be able to take care of oneself in the face of a loved one’s addiction, he also notes that to focus exclusively on creating boundaries may mean we limit opportunities for nourishing connection.

While honoring the work of people like Melody Beattie, Jim regrets that the phenomenon of loved ones engaging in unhelpful care-taking behaviors has come to be described as codependency. He prefers the term “ineffective dependency.”

Jim explains that, divorced from the historical context and the meaning it has taken on in the field, “Codependence literally means that in an adult love relationship, ‘I depend on you, and you depend on me. You are a safe place for me to come when I need you to be wiser and stronger, when I need you to come visit my pain, my hurt, my fear. And in particular, if you can do that regarding us, then I can depend on you in a different way. I can just be human with you and I don’t have to be strong all the time. And I’ll return the favor.’”

He believes that treatment programs must recognize and honor the need for healthy dependence.

“If the professionals are just talking about autonomy, independence, and how parents need to get out of the way, then they’re missing that our loved ones need to know that they matter to you and can be connected to you, and we don’t outgrow that! We don’t go from dependence to interdependence to independence. What’s more accurate is that we go from dependence to healthy co-dependence.”

ADVICE FOR PARENTS

When asked what advice Jim had for parents of young people struggling with addiction and substance abuse, Jim offered a couple of tips.

BEYOND BOUNDARIES

One is that while setting boundaries with your teen or young adult is a very important part of a parent’s job, it’s not where parents have the most impact. “Where we have the most clout as parents is in letting our kids know, ‘I miss you.’ In letting them know we still like them and want to know them and be there for them.”

SECURE YOUR OWN AIR MASK BEFORE ASSISTING OTHERS

Jim knows from personal experience that the practice of showing up with love and acceptance for your kids is hard, and can unearth for parents their own unmet attachment needs. He urges parents to find their own support and help in meeting these needs, recalling the advice for airline passengers: “Secure your own air mask before assisting others.”

When parents attend to their own need to be seen, accepted and connected, their attachment system relaxes. Then their natural care-taking system can come out—the part of themselves that would do anything for their son or daughter, as long as they knew it was truly helpful.

MAKE SURE YOUR HELP IS HELPFUL

Enabling is another big no-no of the addiction recovery community, but Jim cautions that what is sometimes called enabling can actually be good hurdle help, pointing to one study which found that taking the extra step of calling a sponsor with someone in session yielded much greater follow-through than simply giving them the sponsor’s phone number. Treatment providers can help families to determine what is helpful vs. unhelpful helping.

When a young person can move into a secure attachment with a parent, it provides them a very important resource to counter the pull of addiction. Because we are wired to connect with others, a secure attachment with any safe adult is one of the most efficient and powerful resources a person can have.

WELCOMING HOME THOSE WHO STRUGGLE WITH ADDICTION

As our interview came to a close, I asked Jim about his dream for the field of addiction recovery, and he responded, “We’re Motel 6. We’re gonna leave a light on.”

He added that, “…we evolve so that what we’re doing is more an enterprise of the heart. It would be informed by things like neuroscience and diet, but the mind would be the heart’s soldier. Our treatment centers and programs and groups have a sign that says welcome home. This is a safe space. We’re glad you’re here, whether you’re a boy or a girl or gay or straight or however you identify yourself. And we know that something – whether addiction to a substance, or gambling, or overeating – something took you away from us.” Jim teared up. “And we missed you. And we want you to come home. And we’re all trying to come home too.”

Learn more about Jim