Secure attachment style: traits, causes and how to build it

Secure attachment style (also called secure attachment) is a relationship tendency with low attachment anxiety and low attachment avoidance: you do not worry much about being left, and you are not afraid of closeness or depending on people. Secure people still feel uneasy and still argue. The difference research finds is that when unease shows up, they tend to say so, ask their partner for help, and recover after a fight. The popular phrase “secure personality” is not a personality type. Research also shows what secure people actually do under stress, whether a secure partner can help an anxious or avoidant one, and how “earned security” comes about, and the lines and practices below come from it.

What is a secure attachment style? Low on both anxiety and avoidance

A secure attachment style means scoring in the low range on both attachment anxiety (how much you fear being abandoned) and attachment avoidance (how much you resist closeness and dependence), with a default belief of “I am worth loving, and the people I care about can mostly be counted on.”

Adult attachment research usually describes people on these two axes, and the four types are four regions of one map. The overview of attachment styles covers the full background. Secure sits in the lower left corner, with both scores low.

The same corner has several names. Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) call this category secure in their four-category adult model, and it is also written “secure attachment” or “securely attached.” In this site’s Attachment Style Quiz, the result is called Secure Attachment, nicknamed “The Steady Oak”: they are busy, and you don’t panic; they get close, and you don’t flinch. The quiz uses 14 scenario questions to tally an anxiety score and an avoidance score (each converted to 0-100), and you land in secure when both are below the cutoff. The cutoffs come from the question weights: they are the theoretical average if someone answered every question at random, about 43 for anxiety and 48 for avoidance, and a score exactly at the cutoff counts as high. Both lines are also marked on the chart on your result page. So the two numbers on the result page are worth more than the type name: among secure people, an anxiety score of 40 and one of 10 can feel very different day to day.

Secure is not rare either. In a nationally representative American survey it was the largest group, with about 59% of people describing themselves as secure (Mickelson et al., 1997). If it feels like you cannot find secure people around you, it may simply be that secure people make less noise in relationships and come up less often at friends’ dinners.

“Secure personality” is not a personality type: four common mix-ups

“Secure personality” is a search-box phrase. Psychology has no such personality type. Attachment describes your expectations and habits in relationships, and it shifts with the partner, your age and your experiences.

Two studies argue against treating attachment as a personality. Fraley and colleagues (2011) used a questionnaire that can assess different relationships separately and collected online data from more than 21,000 people. People develop different attachment representations for different partners: you might be avoidant with your mother, at ease with a college roommate and a little anxious with your current partner. Attachment measured for a specific relationship also usually predicted personal and interpersonal outcomes better than global attachment, while global attachment was better at predicting personality traits. A second study tested whether adult attachment is categories or a continuum and favored the continuum (Fraley et al., 2015). So instead of “I am secure,” it is more accurate to say “with this person, I don’t panic much and I don’t feel much like hiding.”

The blind spot in the last row also appears on this site’s quiz result page: secure people so often play the steady one that they do not speak up when they hurt, and with a partner high in anxiety or avoidance, that steadiness can be read as “you clearly don’t care.”

Secure attachment traits: what they actually do when stress arrives

Secure people in research do not face less stress. The difference is that they tend to ask for help directly, respond to a partner’s request for support, and return to normal sooner after a fight.

Each of these has laboratory observations behind it:

• Asking for help directly. Collins and Feeney (2000) recorded 93 dating couples in which one person told the partner about something bothering them. The more stressful the problem, the more directly the speaker asked for help, and the more helpful the partner’s response. Being answered well left the person feeling cared for and in a better mood. People higher in avoidance asked in ways that worked less well, and people higher in anxiety did worse when it was their turn to be the caregiver.
• More stress, more closeness. Simpson and Rholes (2017) summarized years of their research: when tension was induced in a lab, people higher in avoidance sought their partner less as they got more anxious. People lower in avoidance, more secure ones, did the opposite. The tenser they were, the more they moved toward a partner, and the more anxious the partner was, the more comfort they gave.
• Comfort lands. When couples tried to solve a relationship problem, people with more secure representations of their parents grew calmer the more emotional care (empathy, reassurance) their partner gave, especially when they were tense. More dismissing people responded better to practical help (Simpson et al., 2007).
• Recovering after a fight. Salvatore and colleagues (2011) followed 73 young adults who had been in a study since birth. After a 10-minute argument with a partner came a 4-minute “cool-down” period to see who could step away from the conflict. The more often someone had been rated securely attached as an infant, the better they cooled down, and so did their partner.

In daily life, that might look like this: at 10 p.m. a partner has not replied, and the secure person thinks “probably working late,” sends “finish up and get some sleep,” and goes to shower. After a whole day of being chewed out by a boss, they say straight out, “rough day, I could use a hug.” Halfway through an argument, when they notice they are about to say something ugly, they say “I’m going to grab a drink, back in fifteen minutes,” and come back with two drinks. None of it is a superpower. It is small stuff: say what you need, and do what you said.

Secure attachment in everyday relationships: what they say about read receipts, silent treatment, meeting the parents and long distance

Secure people’s lines share a structure: say your own state first, make one specific request, and leave the other person a little room. Here it is applied to the scenes where couples most often get stuck.

The lines are written this way because of the research in the previous section: when a request is direct, a partner’s response tends to be more helpful (Collins & Feeney, 2000). “Do you even care about me?” and “can we video chat for half an hour Sunday night?” may come from the same longing, but only the second gives the other person something they can do.

Of course, lines are not spells. If you say it clearly and the other person still doesn’t respond, doesn’t show up, or won’t agree to any time to come back, that is important information too. At that point it matters more to see clearly what they actually do than to come up with one more excuse for them.

Can a secure partner “bring up” an anxious or avoidant partner?

Research supports that partner buffering exists: when one person responds in a way that fits, the other’s insecure reactions in the moment shrink. But it is an interaction between two people, not a rescue mission for the secure one.

Simpson and Overall (2014) call this partner buffering: a partner regulates the insecure person’s emotions and behavior so they feel better, respond more constructively, and the relationship improves. The key is fit, because anxious and avoidant people need different things.

For people high in avoidance, Overall and colleagues (2013) observed 180 heterosexual couples. When one partner wanted the other to change something, the avoidant partner who was asked was usually angrier and more withdrawn, and the discussion went worse. But in the stretches where the partner communicated in a “softened” way, respecting the person’s autonomy and making them feel valued, the avoidant partner’s anger and withdrawal dropped and the discussion went better. For people high in anxiety, the research summarized by Simpson and Rholes (2017) finds they become more distressed and behave less evenly in major conflicts, but the more committed the partner is and the more seriously they take the relationship, the weaker those reactions become.

Over the long run, Arriaga and colleagues (2014) followed 134 partners in committed relationships and found something a bit unexpected. At a single point in time, trusting the partner went with lower anxiety and having goals supported went with lower avoidance. Looking forward in time, the direction flipped: feeling that the partner is dependable predicted lower avoidance later, and feeling that the partner supports your personal goals predicted lower anxiety later. So to help an anxious partner, beyond saying “I’m here,” you can back their goals outside the relationship so they slowly come to believe in their own ability. The capybara waiting at the pottery studio in the picture is doing exactly that. Salvatore and colleagues (2011) also found that a partner who recovers well from conflict can buffer the insecurely attached side from infancy: two years later, their relationships were more stable.

It also helps to be clear about what this research does not answer. Most of it looks at whether the buffered person improves. Whether the person doing the buffering gets worn out over time, or gets pulled into anxiety or silent treatment, has received little attention. A secure person can offer more patience but does not have to carry it alone. If the partner refuses to adjust at all, or the relationship involves control, humiliation or violence, that is beyond what attachment style can explain. In the US, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or call 911 if you are in immediate danger.

For more on what a partner may be thinking, there are guides on anxious attachment: why a read receipt sets off panic and avoidant attachment: the urge to pull away as closeness grows. If a partner swings between clingy and cold, showing both reactions, they may be closer to fearful-avoidant attachment, and the way you buffer needs to adjust as well.

Earned secure attachment: does “earned security” really exist?

Earned security does exist, but in the research it is more complicated than the inspirational version: some people really do move from insecure to secure, others simply recall a hard childhood, and becoming secure does not mean the past stops hurting.

“Earned security” first came from Adult Attachment Interview research: someone who describes a difficult childhood and difficult relationships with their parents, yet can now talk about it clearly and coherently, is classed as earned-secure, with people who were secure in both childhood and adulthood (“continuous security”) as the comparison group. Note that this is an interview classification, and it does not measure the same thing as this site’s quiz or self-report questionnaires online.

Pearson and colleagues (1994) compared parents of 40 preschoolers. Earned-secure parents parented about as well as continuously secure ones, but their depressive symptoms resembled those of insecure parents. The share above the clinical cutoff was 40% for earned-secure, 30% for insecure and only 10% for continuously secure parents. The authors read this as suggesting that past difficulties can remain an emotional burden even after they have been worked through.

Roisman and colleagues (2002) then tested this with data following people for 23 years from infancy, and it overturned an assumption. People classed as earned-secure by how they recalled things now were no more likely than continuously secure people to have been insecurely attached as infants. The mothering researchers had observed in their childhood and adolescence was, in this high-risk sample, among the most supportive and coherent. The study did not settle why. One possible explanation, an inference and not something the study tested directly, is that recalling childhood is colored by present mood, and feeling now that things were hard does not always mean they were harder than for others. People defined using infancy data, who really did move from insecure to secure, went on to do well in adult intimate relationships, and many of them did not report elevated depression or anxiety.

How did those people get there? Saunders and colleagues (2011) interviewed 121 low-risk women expecting their first child. Sixteen were earned-secure, which is 13% of the whole group and a quarter of the secure ones. Compared with others, they had received more emotional support from people other than their parents (practical help did not differ) and had spent longer in psychotherapy. Their babies were also more likely to develop secure attachment than babies of insecure mothers.

The diagram shows the same idea: early experience forms expectations, and later relationship experiences keep circling back to revise them. The samples in these studies are small and mostly American parents or mothers, so apply them cautiously. Still, a stable enough relationship (not necessarily romantic) and professional help are both real paths toward security.

How to become securely attached: five practices for today

To become more secure, research points toward accumulating experiences of “I asked for help and someone responded” and “I was myself and was supported.” Those experiences can come from a partner, friends or therapy.

1. Turn complaints into specific requests. Swap “you never care about me” for “I’m wiped today, can we eat dinner together?” The more specific you are, the easier it is for the other person to respond (Collins & Feeney, 2000).
2. Practice a pause with an end time. When a fight is about to run away, say “I need twenty minutes, then I’ll be back,” and come back when time is up. Recovering well can itself protect a relationship (Salvatore et al., 2011).
3. If you lean anxious, grow a goal outside the relationship. Sign up for a class or exercise regularly, and let your partner know what you are doing. Being supported in your own goals is linked to lower anxiety later (Arriaga et al., 2014).
4. If you lean avoidant, lean on someone over something small. Ask a partner to grab you lunch or go to the dentist with you, and note afterward “I leaned a little and nothing happened.” Trusting that a partner is dependable is linked to lower avoidance later (Arriaga et al., 2014).
5. If you are already secure, let someone look after you. Even oaks need water. Say so when it is your turn to feel low, so your partner gets a chance to respond and the relationship does not rest on one person.

After a while, you can retake the Attachment Style Quiz every few weeks to see whether your two axis scores have moved. Scores naturally rise and fall with your recent life, so the overall direction is what counts, and a few points either way are no cause for worry.