Secure
Grief that moves
You feel it, and it goes somewhere. Comfort can be taken in. The waves are real and they are not organized around a fear of needing people.
A reflection, not a diagnosis
What is your attachment style?
Most attachment quizzes ask how you behave in relationships. This one asks something narrower and, if you are here, probably more useful. How does your attachment history shape the way you grieve?
John Bowlby, who built attachment theory, spent the third volume of his life's work on exactly this question. He found that people do not all mourn the same way, and that the differences were not random. They tracked back to what happened when they were small and needed someone.
Twelve questions. Your result appears here on the page. The fuller version, the part with what actually helps, comes by email.
Start the reflectionThe four patterns.
Mary Ainsworth identified the first three in the 1970s by watching what babies did when their mothers left the room and came back. Mary Main and Judith Solomon named the fourth in 1986. The names are clinical and a little cold. What they describe is not.
Anxious or preoccupied
Grief that stays close
It stays near the surface and does not quiet down. Bowlby called this chronic mourning and traced it to a childhood where comfort came sometimes and not other times.
Avoidant or dismissing
Grief that waits
You handled it. Everyone said you were strong. Bowlby called this the prolonged absence of conscious grieving, and he was clear that it is not the absence of grief.
Disorganized or fearful-avoidant
Grief that pulls both ways
You want closeness and you get away from it, sometimes within the same hour. This pattern forms when the person who was meant to be the comfort was also the one you had to watch.
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Where this comes from.
I want to be straight about what this is and is not, because attachment language gets used loosely online and it deserves better.
What it is. A psychoeducational reflection built on the research literature. The four patterns and the grief descriptions come from:
- John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volumes 1 to 3 (1969, 1973, 1980). Volume 3, Loss: Sadness and Depression, is where he describes chronic mourning and the prolonged absence of conscious grieving.
- Mary Ainsworth and colleagues, Patterns of Attachment (1978), the study that identified secure, anxious, and avoidant patterns.
- Mary Main and Judith Solomon (1986), who described the disorganized pattern.
- Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987), who first carried attachment into adult relationships.
What it is not. It is not an assessment, and it is not a diagnosis. Real attachment measurement takes a structured interview or a validated inventory administered by someone trained to score it. Twelve questions on a website cannot do that, and any quiz that claims otherwise is overselling.
Attachment patterns are also not fixed. They are adaptations that made sense in the conditions where they formed, and they shift with consistent relational experience. They can also shift temporarily under load. A sudden loss, or a loss stacked on older losses, can reorganize a previously steady pattern for a while. That is the system working, not failing.
If anything here lands hard, that is worth taking seriously rather than pushing past. You can reach me directly, and if you are in crisis, please call or text 988 in the US.
If this gave you language.
Here is where people usually go next.
Why grief keeps coming back
The free guide on why new loss wakes up older loss, and why that is not you going backward.
Read it →The grief library
The books I actually recommend, including where to start with Bowlby if you want the source material.
Browse →Work with me
1:1 sessions, EMDR intensives, and equine work at Shakti Ranch in Malibu. It starts with a free conversation.
See how →