Attachment Styles: Why You Love the Way You Do

By Dr. Prerna Kohli, PhD & M.Phil · Clinical Psychologist, Gurugram  |  Published July 2026  ·  Last reviewed July 2026

In three decades of clinical practice, if I had to name the single idea that most often makes a person sit back and say "that explains everything," it is this one. Attachment theory answers the question underneath so many others people bring me: why do I keep doing this in love? Why do I need constant reassurance? Why do I pull away the moment someone gets close? Why do I chase people who can't commit? None of these are character flaws. They are attachment patterns — and once you can see yours, you can begin to change it.

What Are Attachment Styles?

An attachment style is the characteristic way you experience closeness and security in relationships. The idea comes from the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who proposed that human beings are wired from birth to seek a "secure base" — a caregiver whose reliable presence lets us feel safe enough to explore the world. His colleague Mary Ainsworth then watched how infants responded when briefly separated from their mothers, and found they sorted into distinct patterns depending on how consistently their needs had been met.

Out of that early experience, each of us builds what Bowlby called an internal working model — a template, formed before we had words, for what love is: whether people can be trusted to stay, whether our needs are welcome, whether we are worth returning to. We then carry that template into adulthood, where it shapes how we love, argue, and cope with distance long after we've forgotten where it came from.

Your attachment style is not a life sentence or a personality flaw. It is what you learned about love when you were too young to know you were learning — and anything learned can be relearned. — Dr. Prerna Kohli, PhD & M.Phil, Clinical Psychologist

The Four Attachment Styles

Ainsworth identified three patterns; researchers later added a fourth. Most people lean primarily toward one, though under stress you may recognise yourself in more than one. Here is the brief map — each links to its own in-depth guide.

Where Do Attachment Styles Come From?

Attachment is learned, not inherited as a fixed trait — which is precisely why it can change. A securely attached child tends to have had caregivers who were reliably responsive: not perfect, but "good enough," and consistent enough that the child learned closeness is safe. Insecure patterns tend to grow from care that was inconsistent (which breeds anxiety), emotionally unavailable (which breeds avoidance), or frightening as well as comforting (which breeds the disorganised pattern).

I want to be careful here, because this is where people reach for blame. The point is not that your parents failed you. Caregivers are shaped by their own attachment histories, their circumstances, their own unmet needs — and in the Indian context, by joint-family pressures and generational expectations that leave little room for the individual child's emotional world. Understanding where a pattern came from is not about indictment. It is about no longer being unconsciously run by it. Read more on how attachment styles form.

Can You Change Your Attachment Style?

Yes — and this is the most important sentence on this page. Attachment style is a learned pattern, not a permanent trait, and research supports what I see clinically every week: people move toward security. Psychologists call it earned secure attachment — the security you build in adulthood that you didn't get in childhood, through self-awareness, corrective relationships, and therapy. It is slower than we would like and faster than most people fear. An anxiously attached person can learn to self-soothe and trust; an avoidant person can learn that closeness is survivable and even good. Here is the science of changing your attachment style.

Attachment Through an Indian and NRI Lens

Almost everything written about attachment assumes a Western, nuclear-family, independence-prizing world — which is why so much of it doesn't quite fit the people I work with. In the Indian joint family, "secure" doesn't look like the textbook version. Interdependence is the cultural norm; a degree of enmeshment is expected; and stepping toward independence can be experienced by the family as betrayal rather than health. That changes what attachment security means here, and it is why I've written a dedicated set of guides for the Indian and diaspora experience.

For NRIs, there is a further layer that attachment theory explains better than anything else: migration is a rupture of the secure base. You physically leave the people you are bonded to. That single reframe is why "I have everything abroad and still feel empty" is not ingratitude — it is grief. And when an arranged marriage and migration happen close together, a person is asked to build a bond with a near-stranger while simultaneously losing their entire support network in a new country — two attachment ruptures at once. These are experiences no Western clinician writes about, and they are among the most important I address.

How Attachment Styles Show Up in Relationships

Attachment isn't an abstraction — it's the invisible logic behind your most repeated relationship moments. The pursuer-distancer cycle (the anxious-avoidant trap), the partner who withdraws just as things get close, why no-contact feels unbearable for some and strangely easy for others, the small triggers that set off outsized reactions — all of it is attachment in motion. Understanding your pattern doesn't just explain the past; it gives you a choice in the moment you'd normally react on autopilot.

Frequently Asked Questions