Earned Secure Attachment: Can Attachment Styles Change?

Many people read about attachment styles and then ask the same question: is this who I am for good? The short answer from research is no. Attachment tendencies are fairly stable, but they are not fixed, and the concept of earned security was built around exactly that possibility.

Where earned secure attachment comes from

The idea grew out of the Adult Attachment Interview developed by Mary Main and her colleagues. Instead of asking adults to rate themselves, the interview asks them to describe their childhood relationships and support their descriptions with memories.^[1] What counts for security is not how happy the childhood was, but how coherently a person can talk about it: whether the account is consistent, balanced and open to reflection, including about painful parts.

This design made a surprising group visible. Some adults described clearly difficult early relationships, such as a rejecting or unavailable parent, yet told that story in the coherent, reflective way typical of secure speakers. Researchers began calling them earned secure, in contrast to continuous secure adults whose early care had been supportive.^[2]

How is earned security measured?

In the classic studies, earned security is not a questionnaire score. It is a classification from the Adult Attachment Interview, which is recorded, transcribed and coded by trained raters.^[1] The raters pay less attention to what happened than to how it is told. Imagine two adults with a similar story of a distant father. One says that he was rarely around, gives a few concrete memories, admits it still stings and adds that she now understands some of the pressure he was under. The other calls her childhood “fine” but cannot recall a single example, or gets pulled back into old anger halfway through a sentence. The first account is the kind of coherent, reflective telling that marks a secure state of mind.

Retrospective vs prospective earned security

This raises a question of definition. A retrospective definition classifies someone as earned secure because they coherently describe a difficult childhood today. A prospective definition needs evidence gathered at the time: a person observed as insecure early in life who is secure as an adult.

Glenn Roisman and colleagues could compare both, using a study that had followed participants for 23 years from infancy in a sample of families facing many risks.^[3] The retrospective earned-secure adults were no more likely than continuous-secure adults to have been insecurely attached as infants, and observers in childhood and adolescence had recorded some of the most supportive and structured mothering in the sample for them. The prospective group looked different: people who had been insecure as infants and secure as adults went on to do well in their close relationships, many without reporting high levels of distress.^[3]

What research found about earned security

Joan Pearson and colleagues compared parents classified as earned secure with continuously secure and insecure parents. The earned-secure parents reported more depressive symptoms than the continuously secure group, yet in observed interactions they parented with similar warmth and structure.^[2] The past had left marks, but it did not decide how they cared for their own children.

Roisman’s findings add a caution to this picture. Current low mood may color how people remember their past, so a painful story told today is not proof of how things were.^[3] The lesson is not that earned security is an illusion; it is that memory is not a record, and change should be studied over time rather than inferred from memories alone.

A study of 121 women expecting their first child then asked what goes along with earned security, using a strict retrospective definition. The earned-secure mothers reported more emotional support, though not more practical help, from people other than their parents who had been there for them. They had also spent more time in therapy than both the insecure and the continuous-secure mothers, and their babies were more likely to be securely attached to them than the babies of insecure mothers.^[8]

Can attachment styles change? What stability studies show

Two kinds of research address whether attachment styles can change.

From childhood to adulthood. Everett Waters and colleagues followed a group from infancy to early adulthood. Many participants kept the same classification over twenty years, and those who changed were more likely to have experienced major negative life events, such as the loss of a parent, parental divorce or serious illness in the family.^[4] R. Chris Fraley’s meta-analysis of stability studies found moderate stability from infancy onward, consistent with the idea that early experience leaves a lasting imprint that later experiences continue to modify.^[5]

Within adulthood. A later study by Fraley and colleagues tracked adults’ self-reported attachment repeatedly. It found a stable core alongside real fluctuation, and changes that tracked what was happening in people’s relationships.^[6] The picture is neither “set in childhood” nor “freely chosen”: a tendency with momentum that keeps responding to experience.^[7]

These results fit the two-dimension view of attachment described in two dimensions of attachment. Moving toward security usually means moving gradually lower on anxiety, avoidance or both, not jumping from one box to another.

What helps: everyday routes toward earned secure attachment

Research does not offer a formula, but it points to a few ordinary routes that repeatedly appear in the literature.^[7]

• Relationships that prove reliable. A partner, friend, mentor or relative who stays responsive over time can slowly update expectations. For anxious tendencies this may mean learning that reassurance does not run out; for avoidant tendencies, that depending on someone does not cost independence. The link between emotional support from people other than parents and earned security fits this route.^[8]
• Making sense of your story. The Adult Attachment Interview suggests that coherence matters more than a perfect past. Writing, talking with trusted people or reading about attachment can help you reflect on what happened and how it shaped you, without either excusing or dramatizing it.^[1]
• Noticing your strategy in the moment. Recognizing a familiar move, such as sending a third message or going silent, gives you a small choice about what to do next. Small repeated choices are how tendencies shift.
• Therapy. Many forms of therapy work with relationship patterns, and a therapist offers a steady relationship in which new expectations can form.^[7] In one randomized trial of three year-long treatments for adults diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, the number classified secure on the Adult Attachment Interview rose in one treatment, transference-focused psychotherapy, together with more coherent narratives, but not in the other two.^[9] Therapy is especially worth considering if your early experiences were painful, if patterns keep hurting you or others, or if anxiety or low mood are part of the picture. Our getting support page describes where to start.

For the specific styles, the anxious attachment, avoidant attachment and fearful-avoidant attachment pages each include a section on change. The secure attachment page describes what security looks like in daily life, which helps to know where you are heading. If you are unsure about the two avoidant patterns, dismissive vs fearful avoidant compares them.

What research does not show

The evidence on earned security is encouraging, but it has limits worth knowing.

• No timeline. None of these studies tells you how long change takes or how many sessions or years it needs.
• Links, not proof of cause. Earned-secure mothers reported more support and more time in therapy, but a study that measures both at one point cannot show that the support or the therapy produced the security.^[8]
• One trial is not every therapy. The therapy trial studied one clinical group and found a shift in one of three treatments.^[9] It does not show that any therapy, in any dose, makes a person secure.
• Interviews and quizzes are different tools. The earned-security findings rest mainly on the Adult Attachment Interview. A result on a self-report questionnaire, including ours, is not an interview classification.

A realistic view of change

Earned security is not a finish line. People described as secure still feel anxious or want distance at times; what differs is how quickly they recover and how openly they can talk about it. Setbacks during stressful periods are expected and do not erase progress. The popular idea that your style is fixed from childhood is one of the claims examined in attachment myths.

If you want a starting point, our attachment style quiz shows where you currently sit on the two dimensions. Taking it again months later can show movement, with the caveat that mood and current circumstances affect answers, as explained on how the quiz works. It is a reflection tool, not a diagnosis.