Can I Unf*ck My Attachment Style?

If our relationships are ultimately set by how we were treated in our childhood, is it even possible to reverse that? Or are we just set the way we're set? In a series of experiments, Lois Shearing tries to find out.

- Jess Ebsworth

My last relationship ended in a 37-second phone call. After almost a year of being in each other's lives, we angrily barked "I'm done!" down the line and never saw each other again. That Guinness World Records-worthy ending was followed by another personal record for me: I was single for two years the longest time I'd spent uncoupled since I started dating in my teens.

In that time, I swore off relationships entirely. It wasn't all as a result of that break-up. It just happened to be very closely followed and I'm talking like a week after by a traumatic family event that resulted in me becoming estranged from one of my parents.

For well over a year, the idea of being emotionally intimate with someone made me bristle with a mixture of anxiety and disgust.

"I don't even think most couples are happy," I'd confide to my other single friends, "I think they're just trying to convince themselves they are." Usually, this observation was met with a choir of non-committal "hmm's" or perhaps a collection of sympathetic head tilts.

As outwardly angry as I appeared to be at the idea of coupledom, there was still a part of me that desperately craved it. I wanted the stability that we're told romantic relationships offer us. I wanted to feel safe to be vulnerable with another person, but I knew on some level that I couldn't.

"Well, that's because of your disorganised attachment style," my then-therapist said while I relayed this inner tension to them. Like most people, I'd heard of attachment styles mostly through social media: TikTok skits about anxious/avoidant relationships being doomed to fail, Instagram infographics and, my personal post-break-up vice, the r/ attachment_theory subreddit.