What Her Mother Left Behind
My phone lights up. Again.
It’s the third time in an hour, and I already know who it is before I even look. A voice message, maybe two minutes long, about nothing in particular: a show she’s watching, something her sister said, a question about what I’m doing later. I listen, I reply, I put my phone down. It lights up again.
I care about this friend deeply. But there were stretches of time where spending time with her felt, somehow, exhausting in a way I couldn’t name. She’d notice if I posted an Instagram story without her. She’d ask, in that careful half-joking way that wasn’t really joking, why I hadn’t called. If I spent a weekend with other friends, there would be a shift: something quiet and wounded underneath the normal conversation that followed. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know what it meant.
It wasn’t until I started learning about attachment theory that something clicked.
In the 1950s and 60s, a British psychologist named John Bowlby proposed something that seems obvious now but was, at the time, quietly revolutionary: that the bond between a child and their caregiver wasn’t just a nice thing to have. It was a biological necessity. Bowlby argued that infants are born pre-programmed to form attachments: to seek closeness, to use a caregiver as a safe base from which to explore the world, and to protest loudly when that closeness is threatened. This wasn’t sentiment. This was survival.
But Bowlby went further than that. He suggested that the quality of those early attachments doesn’t stay in childhood. It gets internalised, absorbed into what he called an internal working model: a set of unconscious beliefs about whether other people can be trusted, whether we are worthy of love, and how relationships tend to go. A child who learns that reaching out brings comfort begins to expect comfort. A child who learns that reaching out brings nothing, or brings something unpredictable, learns something else entirely. And here’s the part that matters: those expectations travel. They come with us into friendships, into romantic relationships, into every new connection we try to make.
We draw a map early. And then we use it for a very long time.
In 1970, psychologist Mary Ainsworth designed a study that would become one of the most replicated in developmental psychology. The Strange Situation procedure was elegantly simple: a mother and her infant were brought into an unfamiliar room. A stranger entered. The mother left. The mother returned. The whole thing lasted around twenty minutes, but what it revealed was remarkable.
Ainsworth identified three main patterns of attachment, later extended to four, and they were strikingly consistent. Around 60–65% of infants showed what she called secure attachment. When their mother left, they were distressed; when she returned, they sought comfort and were soothed. They used her as a base. They trusted that she would come back, and she did.
But then there were the others.
Insecure avoidant infants, around 20–25%, appeared almost indifferent. They didn’t cry much when their mother left. They didn’t rush to her when she returned. On the surface, they seemed fine. But physiological measures told a different story: their stress responses were just as elevated as the other infants. They had simply learned not to show it. Reaching out hadn’t reliably brought comfort, so they’d stopped reaching.
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Insecure resistant infants made up around 10–15%. They were distressed when their mother left, intensely so. But when she returned, they couldn’t settle. They’d seek closeness and then resist it, push away and then reach back, caught in a loop of need and anger that wouldn’t resolve. They wanted comfort. They just couldn’t let themselves receive it.
And then there were the insecure disorganised infants, identified later by Main and Solomon, who showed no consistent strategy at all. They’d approach and freeze. They’d seem confused, dazed, frightened. For these children, the caregiver had often been simultaneously a source of fear and a source of comfort, and the nervous system simply didn’t know what to do with that contradiction.
When I learned about insecure resistant attachment, I thought about my friend almost immediately.
Her mum had been distant. Not cruel, just not quite there. My friend had grown up never quite knowing what version of her mum she’d get: present some days, withdrawn on others, emotionally difficult to read. And so she’d done what insecure resistant infants do, she’d learned to turn up the volume. To protest louder. To stay close, stay watchful, never fully relax into a relationship in case it shifts. The constant contact, the anxiety when I was with other people, the way a small distance could feel to her like abandonment, none of it was manipulation. It was a strategy. An old one, formed long before she was old enough to choose it.
Her internal working model had been written in uncertainty. And she was still reading from it.
One of the most interesting things about Ainsworth’s work is what happened when other researchers tried to replicate it across different cultures. Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg conducted a meta-analysis in 1988, examining Strange Situation studies across eight countries, including Japan, Germany, the United States, Israel, and the Netherlands. The results were striking in two directions at once.
On the one hand, secure attachment was the most common type across every culture studied. That suggested something real and universal in Bowlby’s original claim: that humans are built to attach, and that sensitive, responsive caregiving tends to produce secure attachment regardless of where in the world you are.
On the other hand, the rates of insecure attachment varied considerably. German infants showed higher rates of avoidant attachment; Japanese infants showed higher rates of resistant attachment. Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg noted that the Strange Situation itself might not translate perfectly across cultures: in Japan, infants are rarely separated from their mothers, so the procedure may have felt more extreme than it would in Western contexts. Culture shapes what caregiving looks like, and it shapes what separation means.
What this tells us is something nuanced: attachment is universal, but the form it takes is not. The map we draw is influenced not just by the specific people who raised us, but by the world those people were living in.
Bowlby always believed that the internal working model was not fixed forever, that new relationships could revise it, slowly, over time. A securely attached partner, a consistent friendship, a therapist who shows up reliably, these things can shift the model. Quietly. Gradually. The research broadly supports this, though the process is rarely fast or simple.
I think about that when I think about my friend.
Because understanding where her anxiety comes from didn’t make it easier to be on the receiving end of it, not always. But it did change something in the quality of my patience. It moved me from frustrated to something more like sad: for the little girl who’d learned that love was unreliable, and who was still, all these years later, holding on just a little too tight because she didn’t quite trust that you’d stay.
She didn’t choose her map. None of us do. We’re handed it before we have the language to describe it, before we even know we’re being shaped. What we do with it later, how we learn to read it critically, how we let new experiences redraw it, that’s a different question. A longer one.
But I think it starts with understanding why the map looks the way it does in the first place.
