Attachment Theory Glossary

1. The four styles and their aliases

Six names for four things, plus two that are not aliases.

Secure. Anxious, also written anxious-preoccupied or simply preoccupied. Avoidant, also dismissive-avoidant, dismissing-avoidant or dismissing; all one thing. Fearful-avoidant, also anxious-avoidant, and used in adult work as the counterpart of what the child research calls disorganised. What are not aliases: anxious-avoidant does not mean an anxious person paired with an avoidant one, which is the commonest mix-up online and is a description of a couple rather than a person. And disorganised is not a fifth style sitting beyond the other four.

2. What the theory says a relationship is for

Secure base, safe haven, internal working model.

A secure base is the function that lets you go out and do things, on the understanding that somebody is there. A safe haven is the other half: the place you come back to when something has gone wrong. One relationship is meant to provide both, and they fail separately, which is why a partner can be excellent in a crisis and no use at all for ordinary confidence. The internal working model is the set of expectations formed early about whether people come when called. Not a belief you hold. A default you act on before you have thought.

3. Activation and deactivation

The two directions the system moves, and their strategies.

Activation is the attachment system switching on: the pull towards contact when connection feels threatened. Deactivation is the opposite move, the system turning the need down until it stops registering. Hyperactivating strategies are the behaviours that go with the first, turning the volume up until a response arrives. Deactivating strategies turn it off: finding fault, remembering an ex more fondly, becoming suddenly busy. Neither set is chosen in the moment. And deactivation is not the same as not caring, which is the most expensive misreading in the whole vocabulary.

4. Protest behaviour, and what it is not

The behaviours that get named worst and understood least.

Protest behaviour is what the system does when contact is not forthcoming: repeated calling, keeping score, engineering a reason to be contacted, a withdrawal staged to be noticed. It was named in the childhood research, describing what a separated child does, and it looks much the same in adults. What it is not is manipulation, which is deliberate and has a plan. Protest is loud, unstrategic and usually costs the person doing it more than anyone else. Stonewalling belongs to a different vocabulary again, from conflict research, and describes a state during an argument rather than a style.

5. How it gets measured

Why two sources can give you two different answers.

Two traditions. The developmental one observes behaviour, originally through the Strange Situation, a laboratory procedure watching how a small child responds to a parent leaving and coming back; its adult version is a long interview, scored on how somebody talks about their childhood rather than on what they report about it. The other tradition is self-report: questionnaires, including the free quizzes online, which place you on two dimensions, anxiety and avoidance. A style name is a convenient summary of a position on those two. Interview and questionnaire measure related but different things, so they do not always agree.

6. The borrowed words

Clinical terms doing work they were never built for.

Attachment disorder is a childhood clinical diagnosis, made about severe early deprivation, and it is not a stronger version of an attachment style; nobody has one because they are anxious in relationships. Trauma bond describes an attachment formed under abuse and intermittent relief, not an intense relationship, and using it for the second has largely emptied it of meaning. Codependency comes from the addiction field rather than from attachment research and means something narrower than its usual internet sense. Attachment style itself is not a diagnosis and appears in neither DSM-5 nor ICD-11.

7. What you had wrong

Three lines, and the most useful part of the sheet.

The value of a glossary is not the definitions. It is finding the two terms you had swapped, because a swapped term quietly alters the conclusion you built on top of it. People commonly arrive believing that avoidant and dismissive are separate styles, that disorganised is a fifth category, or that deactivation is a decision somebody makes. Write down which one you had, then write the sentence you had built on it. That second line is the one worth keeping, since it is usually a sentence about a person rather than about a definition.

Where these words came from

Attachment theory began with John Bowlby, who was interested in what separation does to children, and Mary Ainsworth, whose Strange Situation gave the field a way of observing it. Most of the first four groups above descends from that work. The adult vocabulary arrived later and from a different direction, which is the honest explanation for the mess: nobody ever sat down and agreed the terms across the two traditions.

That history is also why one word can be technical in one place and loose in another. When a term appears to contradict itself between two articles, it is usually worth checking which tradition each is drawing on before concluding that one of them is simply wrong.