Our readers may remember, we are doing a series on attachment styles. While no one fits neatly into one category or the other, we all have one that is dominant over the others. Attachment styles form in childhood and impact us for the rest of our lives. That does not mean you cannot change how you respond to the world, but it does mean that whatever attachment style you form when a child lingers as your fallback style all your life.
A Short Recap of Attachment Style
John Bowlby was a psychoanalyst living in Britain who spent his life observing infants. He would separate young children from their mothers and observe how they responded.
Mary Ainsworth, a researcher who worked with Bowlby, took his research and expounded upon it by developing a laboratory experiment called the Strange Situation. In this new experiment, Ainsworth took 12-month old infants and studied them in several different scenarios where infants were separated from their mothers and then reunited.
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