Cultural Bias Counterpoint: Why I'm increasingly wary of attachment theory language, particularly as it's understood in popular culture.
"Yes, I have always thought it was strange that predominant method for understanding our current relationship should rely largely on our attachment styles from childhood or previous relationships. What about how the current one is conditioning us?… We keep coming up with softer and softer forms of 'hysteria' diagnosis."
— TikTok comment
Note: In this post, I'm going to make some gendered assumptions, not because they are always true, but because in my experience, this is often how things break down, and I think that examining them from a gendered point of view shines an important light on examining how biases shape behavior, tolerance for behavior, accountability for behavior, and therefore who is harmed and who is privileged in our world.¹
The Cultural Bias Counterpoint is an offering related not to its universal truth or application in all settings, relationships or people but as a reframe for examination and questioning of common patterns that I see underlying people's beliefs, relationship dynamics, and thoughts in areas where seeing the counter-point may help clinicians, friends and others to ensure we are not imposing or assuming dominant cultural norms in a way that can be detrimental, particularly to those in the non-dominant position in society.
The concept of attachment styles can be helpful and are evidence-based. Understanding attachment styles provides context and explanations for both how attachment forms, and also to help people understand why some of their behaviors and anxiety may be rooted in their early experiences. It gives a framework for something to work towards, that being a "secure" attachment.
This has, at times, been helpful to people individually, and in relationships, as well as to parents and to the kids they are raising.
And…
I have always struggled with the extent to which attachment research puts most of the blame and responsibility for the formation of attachment on the mother, often without acknowledging the challenging, often unsupported context in which mothers are expected to provide this perfect attachment experience.²
The concept of attachment styles can therefore be weaponized, if not approached with nuance, to pave a road of infinite tolerance for a lot of bad behavior and to place blame on individuals for things that are, in fact, systemic.
Additionally, calling something a "style" has led it to be associated with a fixed state inside of individuals, and formed only in response to parents—or, usually, Mom—rather than something also informed by our culture as a whole, peer relationships, extra-familial interactions, as well as the current relationships we are in now.
What I often observe in people who discuss attachment language is a very deterministic approach, i.e. "I'm an avoidant."
Attachment Vs Agency
It can also be used to give the idea that choices made within relationships are not executed with agency, or decision-making, but rather are the inevitable result of an inherent trait one can't change—leading to a lack of agency and accountability.
And it is important to note who is allowed to be the victim of their attachment style, and who is expected to shift or change their attachment style.
Related to this is the reality that emotional abuse or neglect often weaponizes fragility and "past trauma" to justify present-time bad behavior, i.e. "How can you ask me to do the dishes…you know you're triggering my trauma of having to make myself dinner every night because my mom was an alcoholic."
All of this comes together to form a bit of a race to the bottom effect, where the most victimized person "wins" and gets their needs met, while the other person doesn't.
It also creates a format, justified by "evidence," that assumes:
One person, the "anxious" person, does a lot of emotional work, due to their needing a more active, responsive relationship. They are tasked either with suppressing their needs or with reaching out to engage the avoidant partner in a way that will not make him want to be avoidant.
The "avoidant" doesn't seem to want an emotional relationship, or the inherent benefits wherein, but gets one anyway.
It's interesting how this often manifests:
Woman + effort = little to no reward.
Man + no effort = high reward.
Look at how it maps onto house work:
Woman = needs a clean house, is held to high standards for having a clean house, keeps cleaning.
Man = doesn't "care" about a clean house, isn't socially expected to have a clean house, doesn't clean, benefits from her cleaning.
It's a fun gig if you can get it.
Being the avoidant, I mean.
My concern is that, at times, attachment discourse and the way it can be discussed in popular culture and then actioned in therapy can normalize this, almost presenting it as an inevitable fact of life.
It's giving Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but dressed in research and blamed on failed mothers.
But attachment styles are actually rarely an unchangeable reality like blond hair or green eyes.
Upon exploration, what is often revealed is that the person is only anxious at certain times, or in response to certain behaviors, or in certain relationships.
She's anxious and needy with him, but somehow these things don't manifest in her friendships with women who respond to her in a timely fashion and treat her with mutual respect.
Same with avoidance.
A man who will avoid all emotional contact with his wife will seek it out a million times on an app or in affairs behind her back. Or put it into his work. Or hobbies.
Curious.
Please Teach Me to Need Less So I Can Get More
The other pattern I observe is that it is often women who frame themselves as "anxious" and the interpretation of this is that she needs to be taught to have fewer demands so that the "avoidant," often a man, can come closer, and give her what she needs.
She believes that if only she could have fewer needs and ask for less, then he would plan a date night.
What this says implicitly is "He is not giving you what you want because you want it" but without any inquiry into how that doesn't really reflect love or care.
Like, at all.
An additional concern is that part of coercive control is essentially training someone to have fewer and fewer needs over time so that the other person can get away with providing less and less in the relationship.
This occurs when a person states a problem, i.e. "Hey, I've planned all the date nights for the past six months" and the person deflects, defends or dismisses that with, "You're so needy and demanding. I can't possibly keep up. You know how much I have going on at work."
The original complaint is never addressed, and instead the person making the complaint is now defending their neediness and lack of empathy.
We've now mistaken an attachment dance for what is actually just a manifestation of internalized, self-inflicted DARVO.
In any case, now the "anxiously attached person" is primed to feel shame for having needs and encouraged to suppress them, while the other person is allowed to "behave" only if he gets what he wants first.
Woman = suppress needs and work harder for them to never be met.
Man = get all needs met while meeting none.
Again, great gig if you can get it.
How We Define the Problem is Extraordinarily Important
Because women, or the anxious individual, tends to be the one presenting to therapy, a reality can develop that then portends that the anxious person/woman is "the problem."
The sick one.
The one where the pathology lies.
As a therapist, I have learned it is very important to not succumb too quickly to this reality without careful exploration and examination.
Is this person anxious for a reason?
What is that reason?
What is their nervous system signaling to them about this relationship and its ability to provide what they need?
How is the partner contributing to this person's anxiety?
Is this person too needy, or is her partner unsuited to meeting her needs?
These questions tend to be more illuminating than the ones that follow, whether asked by therapists or well-meaning friends. Questions like those below can lead to a false conclusion that arrives not based on what is actually happening or what the real "problem" is, but rather from the assumptions we made at the outset:
How are you asking?
Can you ask differently?
Can you ask less?
Let's assess if your needs really are valid or "too much"?³
What in your past is making you so needy?
What in your past is making you so anxious?
What relationship in your past mirrors this one, and is therefore what you're really reacting to?
All of this keeps the woman's focus in the wrong place—on how to accommodate/fix/persuade/seduce/compel/control him, rather than to assess if the relationship meets her own standards and needs.
These questions may matter, but I strongly believe they should not matter first in most circumstances, and in many, based on how the initial set of questions goes, they often don't matter at all.
Privileging the Current Wound Over the Old One
Therapy and attachment theory can have a bias towards viewing the past as more of the source of the problem than the present.
I would suggest we reverse this, at least as an initial trial, and privilege the present instead of the past.
I find typically this suits women, or the anxious person's interests, much better.
When we assume that any anxiety in a relationship is "old stuff" or inherent within the anxious person, outside of the context of the current relationship, this can serve to train us to constantly look at ourselves as the source of their relationship issues, and to try to "fix" ourselves and "need less," which is code for "suppress your inner experience, feelings, and wisdom" and around and around the cycle continues.
Woman: Give everything, get nothing.
Man: Give nothing, get everything.
The other assumption is that these relationships—whether past or present—must be "worked through," when instead, often the "past relationship" that was an emotional dead end just needs to be abandoned altogether.
When therapists spend time with clients addressing how to speak to or address or persuade someone emotionally unavailable—whether a current partner or "past" parent—we tacitly encourage people (especially women) to continue to go to an empty well for a drink, instead of to discern when a well is empty and you need to walk past it to find one that's full of water.
When you add in patriarchy and gender to this mix, we end up with a very problematic soup that, if not accurately labeled, looks an awful lot like a woman being convinced that she's too much, and working to be less so, and a man working on absolutely nothing at all and benefitting from her emotional labor to make his life easier, via attention, accommodation, and domestic labor.
When this dynamic is a systematic pattern in a relationship, it isn't a "style," it's perpetually reinforced conditioning.
The Power of Translating Reality
It's also fair to wonder, out loud, to the client, if she's even in a "relationship" or if she's in a non-reciprocal, transactional dynamic that says when translated directly: "I don't like it when you have needs, and I will not ever meet them."
In couple's therapy, what would actually be healing to both individuals in this relationship would be not to legitimize this by labeling it as a clash of "styles" but to encourage, teach and, at times, require, the "avoidant" to translate their behavior into its direct meaning so that the person with the "anxious" attachment style can make an informed decision—devoid of future faking, confusion, and the possibility that her needs are "too much," about if that's the type of relationship that will work for her.
Doing so relieves the "avoidant" of constant pressure and nagging to be something he is not, which he will tell you feels terrible. And, it liberates the "anxious" person to make an informed decision about her situation and if she wants to work so hard to "earn" the attention and care that is clearly never going to come or just move on.
And yes, a possible outcome of this is that the couple will split up, and for a therapist trained into or just holding a bias that reconciliation and "working through" is always the more virtuous path, or whose livelihood is based on these two people "working it out" in therapy, there is a problematic incentive for the therapist to be enmeshed and aligned with the avoidant's future-faking and the anxious person's wish that if she can only act "just right," she'll finally be treated with kindness and love.
We can unknowingly participate in this minimization and distortion on both an interpersonal level in our relationships with clients, as well as on a macro level in the ways we structure and provide language that governs how our culture and society view relationships at large.
Consider the accepted wisdom and assumption that, "Marriage is hard. It requires a lot of work," and whose interests are served by that belief: the person not getting their needs met despite putting a lot of effort into the relationship, or the person who is benefitting from a relationship they are putting very little into?
If you aren't sure, imagine a world in which the cultural assumption was, "Marriage and relationships should feel reciprocal, vulnerable, intimate, loving, caring and kind. If they don't, they're not worth your effort. Run."
Think back to conversations you've had with the people in your life as they mulled over relationship dilemmas and decisions, and how the phrase, "Relationships are work" played into those decisions, and how the people involved were impacted by that.
Therapy, and particularly couple's therapy, play significantly into the concept of "fairness" or "neutrality" and "both sides are contributing to the issue," which is potentially harmful in a context of transactional, imbalanced, dishonest, or abusive relationships.
I often think we are much better off making direct translations of reality for clients, such as:
If his predominant orientation to a relationship is to want space, then what he wants isn't a relationship. He wants to be alone. One must ask then, why would he pretend to want a relationship? The most rational answer is that he wants the benefits of a relationship, i.e. your effort, attention and labor, but with the privilege of also being alone. In that case, it is worth seriously considering listening to the request for space, enacted in behavior, much more loudly than listening to the words claiming he wants closeness, eventually, somehow, one day, if you can give it the exact right way the exact right moment in the right tone. If the data supports him behaviorally wanting space much more than it supports him wanting a relationship, it's worth considering that you're best off giving him the space he desires, and more, instead of trying to convince him that you are worthy of closing the gap.
Notes
¹ If the gender roles described don't fit your situation, feel free to mentally adapt them and hopefully the information will still be helpful.
² See more about mom-blaming in psychology.
³ According to who?
Originally published on Lisa Kays's Substack on October 26, 2026.
