Over the past year, I’ve noticed a shift in the therapy room. More and more, patients come in already fluent in the language of attachment styles. Within minutes, they’re telling me: “I have anxious attachment,” or “I think I’m avoidant.” These terms—once mainly used by therapists—are now part of everyday language. And they’re often used as labels that seem to explain everything.
I understand why. Attachment theory is one of the most meaningful frameworks we have in this field. I draw on it constantly. The work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth laid the foundation for our understanding of how early caregiving relationships influence adult relational patterns. Later contributions from clinicians like Jeremy Holmes helped integrate attachment into psychotherapy, where it continues to shape how we think about connection, loss, and vulnerability.
Attachment therapy is a powerful tool for understanding how we relate to others—and how we protect ourselves from being hurt. But lately, I’ve started to feel uneasy about how it’s being used.
When someone says they’re anxiously attached, it gives me something to work with—but it rarely tells the whole story. Take one example: a patient describes obsessive phone-checking, panic when her partner doesn’t come home, spiraling thoughts. It sounds like textbook anxious attachment. But digging deeper, it could become clear that her partner has been cheating, sending mixed signals, and avoiding commitment. Her anxiety therefore could be based on an internal pattern of relating, but it’s also a completely understandable reaction to an unstable situation.
That’s where these labels can be misleading. They often flatten the richness of someone’s experience. The same “attachment style” can show up very differently depending on someone’s history, temperament, or environment. Sometimes, avoidance is a way of managing deep grief. Sometimes it’s protection from past enmeshment. And sometimes it’s part of a broader personality structure developed over time.
That’s the part often missed in popular conversations about attachment: personality structure. I’ve worked with clients who came in identifying as anxious or avoidant, only to discover—together—that what they were really describing were deeply embedded ways of being. Strategies formed in childhood, reinforced in adulthood, sometimes overlapping with trauma, neurodivergence, or traits found in personality disorders. The label was a doorway, but not the room.
A recent ONS report found that nearly 50% of 14-year-olds in the UK are now living in single-parent households (Office for National Statistics, 2023). That’s a major shift in the social landscape. Family structures are changing. In many cases, there are fewer stable adult figures around—fewer aunties, uncles, grandparents, neighbours, mentors.
As Freya India recently pointed out in her conversation with Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom (2025), young people today are growing up without a strong community scaffold. When you lose that kind of emotional support, you start looking elsewhere. Often, that “elsewhere” is the internet—where quick diagnostics and therapy memes offer a sense of clarity and connection that may be missing in real life.
Online, there’s no shortage of content: reels, posts, quizzes, bite-sized therapy. The language of trauma, boundaries, attachment—it’s all there, ready to be adopted. And for some, that’s a lifeline. It makes pain legible. It provides a way to make sense of relational chaos.
But we have to be careful. When people latch on to a label too quickly, they might miss the deeper question: Where did this pattern come from? What is it protecting me from? What does it cost me? Does the current relationship I’m in play a role?
The work of therapy isn’t about diagnosing yourself with a style. It’s about exploring your life. It’s about noticing how you react to closeness, how you feel when someone turns away, what you learned about love, and when you learned it was dangerous to need others. These aren’t questions a quiz can answer. They take time, reflection, and someone who can walk alongside you as you figure it out.
And let’s not forget: the therapeutic relationship itself is an attachment relationship. Our consistency, our tone, how we handle silence, how we navigate endings—these aren’t just professional boundaries. They’re emotionally significant. For many clients, the therapist might be the first person to show up, stay present, and not leave when things get hard. That matters. Deeply.
Still, attachment is just one lens. We can’t forget the broader picture: trauma, culture, personality development, socioeconomic factors, mental health diagnoses. We need to be able to hold all of it—because that’s what makes someone who they are.
I get why people reach for these labels. Life feels uncertain, and sometimes naming things helps us feel more in control. There’s comfort in having a story that makes sense of the pain. But the goal can’t just be to name your style and stop there. The work is to stay curious. To move beyond the label and into your life.
So yes, let’s keep talking about attachment. But let’s not stop at anxious or avoidant. Let’s talk about grief, defense, longing, and hope. Let’s remember that people are more than patterns. They’re complex, unfinished, and capable of change.
And that’s what keeps this work alive.