'We need to talk more openly about the impact our upbringing has on us in later life'

Which parent did you feel closest to? Why? Did you ever feel rejected? Frightened? Were your parents ever threatening in any way? When you were upset as a child, what would you do? 

These aren't questions we often ask. You may not know how those closest to you would answer some of them. Maybe even all of them. And if someone started busting those questions out on a first date, you'd probably find them a bit intrusive. 

But these are just a handful of the questions I asked the people I interviewed for this book. They're not my questions - they're taken from the Adult Attachment Interview, or AAI, a one- to one-and-a-half-hour interview designed to surprise the unconscious. It's transcribed, with every breath, stumble and pause noted, before being coded for 6 to 10 hours by someone with at least two years' training. 

I conducted the AAI with seven strangers. I asked extraordinarily personal questions of these people, but without being able to respond in the way I usually would. There was no 'I'm sorry for your loss', no hugs when interviewees cried as they spoke about difficult things they'd suffered during childhood. Instead, I asked the required questions and followed the strict guidance. Did the beatings cause bruising? Okay, next question …

The unnatural nature of the interview is partly where its power lies. Not only do the piercing questions build over time, but without the usual patterns of normal conversation, the interview somehow dislodges us from the everyday, the familiar. It brings up experiences that may have lain dormant for decades in the locked boxes and cobwebbed corners of our minds. The people I interviewed said 'Wow, I'd totally forgotten about that', 'I'm not sure where that came from' or 'I've never told anyone that before'. And they very generously allowed me to share their stories with you. 

Why? Because they - and I - think we all need to talk more openly about the impact our upbringing has on us in later life, as well as the people along the way who can change the paths we find ourselves on. 

To do this, we need to understand attachment theory. Attachment theory tries to explain how and why we pay attention, manage our emotions, remember, think and reflect when it comes to close relationships. It's used by psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, teachers and nurses, by biological, foster and adoptive parents and in forensic work. But research suggests that while many professionals are familiar with the word 'attachment', they don't know all that much about what the theory and research say - even when they're claiming to base their work on it. 

To make matters worse, many, many people misunderstand it. I regularly meet people who have done a quick online quiz to figure out their attachment 'style' and then acted on this by questioning, blaming or ditching their partner accordingly. Meanwhile, when most people read words such as 'attachment', 'insecurity' and 'anxiety', they can't help but infuse them with their everyday understanding - even though in attachment theory they mean something different. 

This misunderstanding of attachment theory is partly down to its founder, John Bowlby. He was determined to change the lives of children and families, and in order to do this, he needed his theory to reach a wide audience. So he deliberately used everyday language in a simple and emotional way. He also built on stereotypes and prejudices from the 1950s, like the idea that women should be full-time mothers who are always available. He did this to make the theory fly - and it did. 

It became incredibly popular - and Bowlby succeeded in changing the lives of children and families. Thanks to his work, children were no longer separated from their parents when sent to hospital. But the downside of his marketing strategy was that many people came to understand attachment theory based solely on his early public writing or speaking - a simplified summary that overemphasised the role of mothers and used evocative words without clearly explaining what they meant.

Like the word 'attachment', for example. Bowlby used it to mean two things: the first was all and any intimate relationships. Nice and simple. But the second was a set of beliefs, desires and behaviours that help us ensure that Someone Important is there to care for us when we need help. Not so simple. And very, very different. The broader, simpler meaning (intimate relationships) made attachment theory seem more user-friendly, more intuitive, more appealing. But from the late 1960s, Bowlby switched to mainly using the second, more convoluted meaning. And this has led to endless confusion and miscommunication by and between academics. 

Meanwhile, people interested in attachment around the world relied - and still rely - on Bowlby's early scientific thinking, even though he changed his mind about a lot of important things (including the meaning of the word 'attachment' itself ). He came to regret some of his earlier thinking - in particular, implying that children needed their mothers to care for them 24/7. But Bowlby's later regrets and qualifications are often overlooked. 

This is not all Bowlby's fault. The researchers that followed him haven't always been brilliant at sharing new ideas with the public, so it's all too easy to rely on Bowlby's accessible early ideas. And he's not the only one to mislead by using everyday words that actually have technical meanings - other researchers have done the same. If that wasn't confusing enough, different groups of researchers use the same words to mean different things. Oh, and no other psychological theory has spawned more research in the past 30 years, making it very hard to get a handle on it all. So, is it any surprise that most people misunderstand attachment theory? 

When understood and used in the right way, the theory and research can transform lives for the better. Used in the wrong way, it can be misapplied in phenomenally important decisions - like taking children away from their parents. Attachment has become a buzzword but, given how easy (and dangerous) it is to misunderstand it, my aim is to put the nuance back in. 

So, that's the 'why' of the book. A bit more about the 'how'. Seven interviewees took part in this project. They weren't just generous enough to go through the AAI with me - they also allowed me to interview them over four years. In order to do this, I went through their AAI transcripts and codings, prepared pages and pages of questions, discussed them with world-leading thinkers in attachment, then spent up to 25 further hours with each interviewee, asking them about every detail of their lives. I took the 200,000 or so words from each person and condensed, shaped and organised them down into 7,000-word subchapters. 

Reading about seven different people can get a bit confusing at times, so I've given each interviewee a small summary. For example, I describe Ray as 'the boy who was sent away'. Being sent away was only a tiny part of Ray's life, but I've added this and other summaries to try to help you follow which of the interviewees is speaking or being discussed at any one time. 

There are seven chapters, and you will hear from every interviewee in each. The chapters may sound like fiction - but they're not. They're made up of the interviewees' own words. I occasionally needed to add a line or two, for example when merging things they'd said at different points in time. When I did this, I discussed these with the interviewees, who checked or reworded my changes. The interviewees had full editorial control at all times. 
I've tried to be as faithful to the interviewees' words as possible because language is very important when it comes to assessing adult attachment. As is silence. That's because silence might mean a person is pausing to remember, 

             for example, or               quietly 

                                                                                        reflecting. 

But if someone stops halfway through saying something, then starts a new sentence after a long silence as if nothing happened, this is important for AAI coding. It's seen in a similar way to a child physically freezing, which is part of the fear response in both humans and animals. Because of this, I've included silences and pauses wherever they've happened in interviews. So where there's blank space on the page, don't worry - it's deliberate. And the white space I've used is roughly equivalent to the amount of silence. 

As well as hearing from the interviewees in each chapter, you'll also hear from me as I discuss the theory and research and apply it to the lives of the interviewees. In order to do this, I joined the Child Health and Development Group at the University of Cambridge, where I am now Author-in-Residence at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care. 

For six years I attended regular reading groups, talks and conferences on child and family mental health, and read and read and read about attachment theory. (I'd also read extensively about attachment theory for my first book, and as part of my undergraduate degree in psychology and philosophy.) I also had regular meetings with three world-leading experts: Robbie Duschinsky, professor at CambridgeUniversity; Kate White, co-founder of the Bowlby Centre; and Linda Cundy, uber attachment psychotherapist. I'm HUGELY thankful for their input and research; there's zero way I could have written this without them. 

When describing the science, I've tried to keep the language simple  throughout. So I've used the phrase Someone Important or Important Person to refer to whoever is responsible for taking care of a child or who a child feels is important to them. This doesn't have to be, and often isn't, their birth parent. Occasionally I use the words 'parent' or 'mother' when this is specifically who was involved in research I'm discussing. But when I'm talking about one particular relationship, it's important to remember that attachment is about far more than our relationship with just one parent. Each Important Person plays a role. 

The combination of research and the interviewees' lives may not always be an easy read. It'll probably make you question, consider, explore and reflect on your own life - and the lives of those around you. That's a good thing. Reflection can help understanding and, if necessary, change. But in thinking about all of this, it's all too easy to jump to conclusions about what classification you might get (or your partner, parent, colleague or friend) if you were to undergo the AAI. As you will see throughout the book, it's just as easy to get it wrong. 

While putting people into boxes can help make sense of and organise the world, it can also lead to dubious judgements. So just because your life or the life of Someone Important echoes that of one of the interviewees, it doesn't mean you or they would be classified in the same way. On top of that, classifications can change over time. 

The interviewees have a variety of attachment patterns and are invaluable in bringing the theory to life - and the role of our upbringings more generally. But they aren't the exemplars of the classifications they've been given. Just as there are different ways to be funny or clever or kind, there are different ways to have different attachment patterns. Of course, there are similarities across people within each grouping, otherwise they wouldn't exist. And hopefully hearing from the interviewees will give you a flavour of what those different groupings might sound or feel like. So as you read, it's worth thinking about how the different ways interviewees speak about their lives make you feel. Do different people make you feel more or less engaged, smothered or disconnected? If so, why? And what impact do you think this might have on their lives?

A quick word about structure. I've organised the book to follow the interviewees' lives from early childhood to adulthood - and I follow the development of attachment theory in the same way (although I do occasionally jump back in time to revisit some of Bowlby's earlier ideas). Attachment theory has a lot to say about early childhood, so the first chapter has more research crammed into it than the rest of the book. This chills out in later chapters. 

All that's left to say is that I hope you'll find this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Attachment is a theory that can evoke strong feelings. It looks at human needs that aren't always met and experiences that aren't always easy to think about. It cuts through common assumptions about childhood and important relationships. It asks questions about these strong feelings, these human needs and how difficult it can be to think, really think, about our lives and the lives of others. But asking those questions can be invaluable. Delving into attachment research can help us understand how we and the Important People in our lives think, feel and behave in close relationships. In doing so, it can help us understand who we are, and make more conscious choices as a result.

• Laura Mucha is the author of Please Find Attached: How Attachment Theory Explains Our Relationships, published by Bloomsbury on 16^th January.

  What follows is from Chapter 5 of the book, 'Settling down'. 

Romantic relationships: a new theory of attachment 

By the mid-1980s, Ainsworth had done a vast amount of research using the Strange Situation, the Minnesota Study was well under way and Main had just begun to use her newly created AAI. But no onehad delved into the murky world of romantic relationships. So even though Bowlby believed that our early childhood influenced us throughout our lives, researchers still knew very little about how the relationship we have with our parents affects the one we have with a romantic partner. 

Until Phillip Shaver came along. 

Shaver was a social psychologist. Developmental psychologists like Main and Ainsworth study the way humans grow and develop over their lives, whereas social psychologists like Shaver focus on social interactions. And Shaver was specifically interested in romantic relationships because he'd noticed that, in his own, he'd always have a woman waiting 'in the wings' in case his main relationship didn't work out. 

Together with his student Cindy Hazan, Shaver argued that our romantic partners can provide us with a secure base and safe haven - much like our parents can. In order to explore their theory, Hazan and Shaver created a short questionnaire called the 'Love Quiz'. The quiz included three descriptions and asked people to decide which of them best matched their experiences in close relationships. 

The idea behind the Love Quiz was to work out which of three adult attachment 'styles' someone might have. They called these three styles secure, avoidant and anxious/ ambivalent (which I'll call anxious for short). 

According to the quiz, you had a secure attachment style if you found it easy to get close to others, felt comfortable being depended on and depending on a partner, and didn't often worry about being abandoned or someone getting too close. You had an avoidant attachment style if you were uncomfortable being close to others, found it difficult to trust them completely and allow yourself to depend on them, and found that romantic partners often wanted more intimacy than you were comfortable with. 

And finally, you had an anxious attachment style if you thought other people were reluctant to get as close as you'd like, if you often worried that your partner didn't really love you or didn't want to stay with you, if you wanted to merge completely with someone else, and if that sometimes scared others away. 

The three attachment styles were supposedly modelled on Ainsworth's Strange Situation classifications, but they didn't have a huge amount in common. 

Ainsworth defined security in terms of having access to a safe haven when needed. And she thought this happened when Someone Important understood and interpreted what you told them and then responded appropriately and without too much delay. In other words, when they were sensitive to your needs. However, instead of a positive definition, Shaver and Hazan defined it as the absence of two things: a discomfort about being close to someone and a worry about being abandoned. But worries about abandonment didn't feature in Ainsworth's classification at all. 

According to the Love Quiz, avoidance involved nervousness about being close to someone, but this didn't feature in Ainsworth's work either. Instead, Ainsworth thought avoidance involved distracting yourself from things that might make you upset and want Someone Important, because you weren't sure they'd be there if you needed them. And the definition of anxious attachment missed things that Ainsworth thought were hugely important - like being angry or passive. 

The Love Quiz, like other questionnaires, relies on how people choose to describe themselves. Social psychologists often used self-report measures like this, but they were controversial among attachment researchers. Ainsworth had tried using self-report but found that people who weren't secure still described themselves as such. 

She believed that self-report assessed our general, storytelling memory, which could consist of things that were told to us, rather than the memory that accesses specific events or moments in time. So if there was any discrepancy between these two types, Ainsworth thought self-report would only give you part of the picture - the distorted part. 

Take Amos, for example. When he relied on his storytelling memory, he described his mother as loving and present. But when asked for specifics to back that up, his 'episodic' memory couldn't provide anything. And when I asked if he remembered being rejected as a child, he said no - even though he'd described lots of specific examples of rejection shortly before. If Ainsworth was right, asking Amos todo a self-report would simply (and incorrectly) tell the story of an ideal childhood. Whereas observing him could capture both his memory systems plus the way they interacted.

Shaver knew that Ainsworth and other developmental psychologists didn't like self-report, so he tried to find ways to show that it could tap into our unconscious. He used a self- report measure before asking people to describe their dreams or interpret blots of ink on a page. And he worked with the incredibly inventive Mario Mikulincer on a variety of studies. My personal favourite involved using self-report before getting people to hold a snake and see how they coped with it. Despite the major differences between the Love Quiz and Ainsworth's Strange Situation classifications, the quiz led to some interesting results. People with different attachment styles reacted in different ways to what was going on around them, from coping with emergencies and illness to everyday interactions with their romantic partner. And despite the differences in measurement, these findings were aligned with Bowlby and Ainsworth's theories. 

But despite its success, Hazan and Shaver were clear that the Love Quiz was just a first attempt to assess attachment in this way. And throughout the 1990s, researchers created a bamboozling array of self-report attachment measures. 

There were so, so many that when Shaver and his colleagues went through them all, they were left with a colossal mound of more than 300 different questions or statements. They turned these all into one giant questionnaire, which they asked more than 1,000 very patient people to answer. They then used statistics to analyse the results and found two patterns. The first was avoidance, which involved being self-reliant and feeling uncomfortable with intimacy. The second was anxiety, which involved preoccupation and fear of abandonment and rejection. In other words, avoidance involves minimising the desire for closeness, and anxiety is a preoccupation with it. 

Shaver, Brennan and Clark chose 36 of the statements and created the Experiences of Close Relationships questionnaire (or ECR). Statements included 'I worry a fair amount about losing my partner', 'I resent it when my partner spends time away from me' and 'I tell my partner just about everything'. You can easily find it online if you want to read the whole thing. It soon became the industry standard for assessing attachment using self-report, and the two 'styles' of avoidance and anxiety became the main model. 

A few years later, Mikulincer and Shaver introduced a new category: fearful. You're classified as fearful if you have high scores of both avoidance and anxiety, which they essentially saw as opposites. So they interpreted high scores in both as a breakdown of attachment styles and the equivalent of disorganised attachment. Although they haven't come across many 'fearful' people in their research so far. 

As well as doing AAIs with each of the interviewees, I also carried out the ECR with them. 

Remember that Elija was unresolved in relation to childhood abuse in the AAI, with a secondary classification of preoccupied? Well, he couldn't have the equivalent of an unresolved classification because the ECR doesn't have one. And while it does have a fearful classification, Elija didn't meet the criteria for it. So we can't really compare Elija's ECR and AAI results.

Incidentally, the person who scored the highest for both anxiety and avoidance, and was therefore the closest to being classified as fearful, was Ray (the boy who was sent away). But his AAI was coded as secure. And Matt (the boy with the stiff upper lip), who was also secure in the AAI, had ECR scores that were moderately anxious and a bit avoidant. 

Whereas Amos (the boy who couldn't remember) was pretty secure in the ECR - even though he was dismissive in the AAI. 

The only person I interviewed who had the same classification in both assessments was Lily, who was secure in each. Every other interviewee had completely different classifications in the two measures - and this echoes research findings. 

It's tempting to think that an avoidant attachment style is the same as a dismissive attachment pattern, and that anxious is the same as preoccupied because they sound pretty similar. But a review of nearly a thousand people found nothing more than a 'trivial' link between attachment style measures and the AAI. And in another study, researchers found no link between the ECR and either the AAI or the Strange Situation. 

So, how can we make any sense of this? Is there a way to explain why the interviewees had totally different results in the two measures? 

Given that the aim of the ECR is to assess how someone is currently functioning in relationships, I suspect Ray's results were massively impacted by going through a divorce. This is not what the AAI is looking at at all. So it's no surprise his ECR and AAI results were different and he was insecure in one and secure in the other. I wonder what his ECR results would have been had he done one years earlier before divorce was on the cards. 

And what about Amos? Remember when I said that Ainsworth had found that people who were insecure described themselves as secure when using self-report? Amos's relatively secure ECR score echoes his glowing memories in the AAI. But these glowing memories were contradicted by his specific memories, memories that weren't picked up by the ECR. So, as Ainsworth predicted, when Amos used self-report, all he gave was the idealised picture without the contradictions. 

And how do we explain Matt (the boy with the stiff upper lip), who was secure in the AAI but moderately anxious and slightly avoidant on the ECR? Matt's relationship strategy throughout life had been to behave in 'avoidant' ways. His notes from his therapy sessions confirmed that he didn't show emotions, and that he held back and protected himself in relationships - all of which are avoidant in the ECR. It's also something Lily recognised in their relationship, saying that he still had a desire to be perfect and to present that to her. So, given that the aim of the ECR is to assess how someone is currently functioning in relationships, being a little bit avoidant makes sense in the context of Matt's life and marriage. 

As for anxiety, when Matt was filling out the ECR, he read one of the statements aloud. It said, 'I'm afraid that I will lose my partner's love.' He explained that being in a relationship where he was emotionally vulnerable made him worry - he worried that something might go wrong and he worrie about what he would do without Lily. Without access to a safe haven for much of his childhood, he'd learned not to show vulnerability. So it makes sense that he might worry about losing the one person he'd learned to share it with and turn to when he needed comfort and support. 

None of this is assessed in the AAI. Matt's AAI score doesn't tell you how his current relationships are going or how he behaves in them. It explores how he processes information about Important People. Getting a secure classification in the AAI means he could freely think, talk about and remember things to do with his childhood relationships. And that was my experience of interviewing him. 

So, sometimes the differences in the interviewees' ECR and AAI results did make sense. But that didn't take away from the fact that, other than Lily, no one I interviewed had the same classification in both. 

What are we measuring? 

So in light of all this, can we really say the ECR and AAI are measuring the same things? And if not, does that mean there are two different attachment theories? 

Social psychologists often see attachment as two styles - avoidant and anxious - that can be measured by asking people to describe themselves. They see security as the lack of avoidance or anxiety and don't usually delve into the impact of adversity. 

Most developmental psychologists, on the other hand, see attachment as three patterns plus a fourth category or status that they call unresolved or disorganised. They usually avoid self-report and are keen to explore the impact of adversity. 

These two groups have differed big time. And that makes talking about attachment theory in a neat and straightforward way incredibly difficult because they're essentially measuring different things. Yet much of what's written about attachment theory conflates the two and treats them as if they're the same group of people measuring the same thing, when they're not. 

Social psychologists have carried out research that delves into adult relationships and how people with an avoidant style are more likely todo one thing, while those with anxious attachment will probably do another. 

But given that people often have totally different results in the ECR and AAI, it's tricky to apply those findings to the version of attachment theory we've been learning about in the book so far. But despite the differences between the two measures, and as contradictory as this sounds … they might still be measuring different aspects of the same thing. Mikulincer, Shaver and their colleague Omri Gillath asked people to read a string of letters an dfigure out whether those letters made a word or not. Some of them spelt names of their Important People- people whose job it was to provide a safe haven, and who it would be stressful to be separated from. Some letters spelt out names of other (less important) people, and some letters spelt the names of strangers. 

Before being shown the letter strings, a neutral word ('hat') or a threatening word (like 'failure' or 'separation') flashed on a screen for 20 milliseconds - long enough to have an effect but not long enough for people to consciously clock it. 

Seeing the word 'hat' had no impact on how quick people were at spotting their Important People's names. But when anxious people were subliminally primed with the word 'separation', they were faster at spotting the names of the people they would find it very stressful to be separated from. And when avoidant people were subliminally primed with the same word, they were slower. This reminds me of the avoidant child in the Strange Situation who turns not to their Important Person after being separated but to the toys in an attempt to avoid getting upset. 

Mikulincer, Shaver and Gillath argued that the only way to explain their findings was the attachment system in action in adulthood. And this is what the ECR measures. 

If Mikulincer, Shaver and Gillath are right, perhaps the ECR and the AAI are actually measuring the same thing - namely, whether or not we feel we have a safe haven when we need it. And how we feel about that might impact how we process information (as measured by the AAI), but also how we see ourselves and how we operate in romantic relationships (as measured by the ECR). 

So, despite their differences, perhaps the two camps do actually agree on something fundamental - namely that, as humans, we all need a safe haven in times of stress. And that's the case all the way from the cradle to the grave.