Based on the Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment theory, a 40-question assessment precisely classifies your attachment style: secure, anxious, avoidant or disorganized. The analysis explains the origins of your style in early childhood, how it shapes your relationship behavior today, what partners you attract and why, and which patterns you repeat. The result includes therapeutic guidelines for developing more secure attachment.
Where it comes from
Attachment theory began with John Bowlby in the 1950s and was given its experimental form by Mary Ainsworth, whose Strange Situation procedure in 1970 sorted infants into secure, anxious and avoidant groups by watching how they responded when a parent left the room and returned. A fourth, disorganised, was added in the 1980s. Hazan and Shaver carried the model into adult romantic relationships in 1987, and that is the version used in relationship readings today. It is one of the better-supported ideas in psychology, though the adult categories are far less stable than the infant ones.
How the method works
The four styles describe what you do when a relationship becomes uncertain. Secure attachment tolerates distance without reading it as danger. Anxious attachment reads distance as abandonment and closes it by pursuing. Avoidant attachment reads closeness as pressure and creates distance to breathe. Disorganised alternates between the two. The common painful pairing is anxious with avoidant, where each partner's way of feeling safe is exactly what makes the other feel unsafe.
What a reading covers
A reading gives your dominant style, how it formed, what it looks like in an argument and in the quiet periods, and how it interacts with each of the other three. It covers the specific moves that escalate a conflict for your style and what tends to settle it.
Common questions
- Can a style change?
- Yes. Adult attachment is considerably more fluid than infant attachment, and a long relationship with a secure partner is the most commonly documented route.
- Is avoidant the same as not caring?
- No. Avoidant attachment is a strategy for managing feeling, not an absence of it. Physiological studies show avoidant partners register distress while showing less of it.
- Does my partner need to do this too?
- It helps but is not required. Most of the pattern is visible from one side, because each style provokes a predictable response in the other.