Today I did the Attachment Styles and Close Relationships quiz at http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_disorder
I find that I have a tendency to withdraw from relationships, to serve the people in my life to the point of exhaustion (lots of give and no take), and there comes a point where my trust is betrayed by someone close to me and I immediately respond by fleeing from everyone I care about. Coming out of that isolation is hard because I’m always left with the sense that I’ve failed my loved ones, that I’ve caused them to worry and don’t deserve them, etc. Or just the fact that they’ve forgotten about me, or seem to have, anyway.
This questionnaire is designed to measure your attachment style–the way you relate to others in the context of intimate relationships. As you might suspect, people differ greatly in the ways in which they approach close relationships. For example, some people are comfortable opening up to others emotionally, whereas others are reluctant to allow themselves to depend on others.
According to attachment theory and research, there are two fundamental ways in which people differ from one another in the way they think about relationships. First, some people are more anxious than others. People who are high in attachment-related anxiety tend to worry about whether their partners really love them and often fear rejection. People low on this dimension are much less worried about such matters. Second, some people are more avoidant than others. People who are high in attachment-related avoidance are less comfortable depending on others and opening up to others.
According to your questionnaire responses, your attachment-related anxiety score is 6.00, on a scale ranging from 1 (low anxiety) to 7 (high anxiety). Your attachment-related avoidance score is 2.33, on a scale ranging from 1 (low avoidance) to 7 (high avoidance).
As you can see in this graph, the two dimensions of anxiety and avoidance can be combined to create interesting combinations of attachment styles. For example people who are low in both attachment-related anxiety and avoidance are generally considered secure because they don’t typically worry about whether their partner’s are going to reject them and they are comfortable being emotionally close to others.
Combining your anxiety and avoidance scores, you fall into the preoccupied quadrant. Previous research on attachment styles indicates that preoccupied people tend to have highly conflictual relationships. Although they are comfortable expressing their emotions, preoccupied individuals often experience a lot of negative emotions, which can often interfere with their relationships.Since the mid-1980’s, a lot of research has been conducted on attachment styles. To learn more about this research, please visit this link. Thank you again for visiting this site.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson