Is your beloved an enigma, hard to get close to, yet occasionally endearing and wonderful? Does he or she turn on the emotional deep-freeze when you disagree? You could be dealing with avoidant attachment.
You could take an online questionnaire on the book’s website if it isn’t that easy to figure out: https://www.attachedthebook.com/compatibility-quiz/.
You could do some studying. Grad student Jenny Ogg, whose mother, Deborah Franke-Ogg is a therapist in West Shokan, learned about attachment theory at the Bank Street College of Education in New York, where she’s studying early childhood education.
“Our earliest relationships set the tone and develop pathways that determine how you relate to others. Those attachment styles change a little with subsequent relationships, but they’re basically set,” Ogg said. “However, those pathways can be healed with a strong partner, a caregiver or even a teacher.”
That’s good to know if you’re planning to be a teacher. You really can make a difference in a child’s life. It’s also good to know if you’re in a relationship.
According to Attached, choosing a good mate is a lot like matching blood types. Anxious types get along okay together. Avoidants tend to understand each other. And Secures are the universal donors — they get along well with everyone.
Dr. Glenn Geher, a professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz, said that might be oversimplifying the situation. “Research shows actually that people tend to prefer partners with secure attachment styles, regardless of their own attachment style,” he said. “I’d say there’s something to the idea that people are compatible with similar others, but I’d say that people are more likely to be compatible with secure others in general, regardless of their own attachment styles.”
The whole notion of behaviors and reactions being set before we’re old enough to understand why we’re setting them isn’t unique to attachment theory. Pathwork, a healing modality that had its headquarters in Ulster County, has encouraged adults to understand why they do what they do.
Pathwork was founded by Eva Pierrakos and her husband, psychiatrist John C. Pierrakos, who was also a co-founder of the bioenergetics and core energetics movement. Together, they opened the Pathwork Center in Phoenicia in the early 1970s. Pathwork combined energetic work with lectures given by Eva when she was in a trance: an inner voice she called the Pathwork Guide. Though the local center closed about ten years ago, Pathwork has spread around the world, and much of what the lectures, now free online, discuss is the importance of understanding patterns created long before we understood what patterns were.
Bobbi Lehrer, who studied for nine years to become a Pathwork “helper,” put it simply: “Pathwork brings the unconscious to the conscious. You are not a victim. You have power over your life.”
Lehrer, who lives in Rockland County, did much of her studying at the Phoenicia Pathwork Center. What she advises echoes the advice found in Levine and Heller’s Attached.
“First, you have to get information about yourself. Otherwise, you’re always surprised that you find yourself in the same situations,” she said. “But understand yourself, realize when you’re reacting to old patterns, not responding to your partner in the moment. When you understand yourself, you can change your life. And if two people in a relationship accept they both have wounds but are willing to meet it and own it, their relationship is going to work.”
