Colin Murray Parkes spent decades studying what happens to people when the bonds they depend on are threatened or broken. His work on attachment, grief, and the psychology of loss gave us a framework for understanding not just how we mourn, but how we connect in the first place. At the core of his thinking is a simple but profound idea: the people we love become part of how we understand the world, and when that bond is disrupted, our entire sense of reality can feel unstable.
Parkes built on the foundational attachment theory of John Bowlby, extending it into adult relationships and the experience of loss. His contribution helps explain why some people cling, some withdraw, some feel perpetually on edge in relationships, and some manage to stay grounded even when things get hard. Understanding Colin Murray Parkes attachment styles means understanding the emotional architecture beneath how we love.
As someone who spent years inside the pressure cooker of advertising agency life, I watched these patterns play out constantly, in client relationships, in creative partnerships, in the way my own team either leaned into conflict or disappeared from it. Attachment theory wasn’t something I studied in school. It was something I observed in boardrooms and eventually recognized in myself.
If you’re exploring how attachment shapes your romantic life, our Introvert Dating and Attraction hub covers the full landscape of how introverts connect, from first impressions to long-term partnership dynamics. Attachment theory sits at the center of much of that work.
Who Was Colin Murray Parkes and Why Does His Work Matter?
Colin Murray Parkes is a British psychiatrist whose career became inseparable from the study of bereavement and attachment. Working closely with John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London, Parkes helped translate attachment theory from its origins in infant development into something that could explain adult emotional life. His landmark book, “Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life,” remains one of the most cited works in the psychology of loss.
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What made Parkes distinctive was his insistence that grief and love are two sides of the same coin. You cannot lose deeply what you did not attach to deeply. And the way you grieve, whether you collapse, shut down, rage, or process steadily, reflects the same patterns that shaped how you loved in the first place.
His framework builds on Bowlby’s original four attachment styles, which were later refined by researchers Mary Ainsworth and Phillip Shaver into the model most commonly used today: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. Parkes contributed the emotional and relational texture to this framework, helping us understand what these styles actually feel like from the inside, and what they look like when relationships are tested by distance, conflict, or loss.
For introverts especially, his work resonates. Many of us have spent years trying to decode why we respond to closeness the way we do. Why intimacy can feel both deeply desired and quietly threatening. Why we sometimes retreat when we most want to connect.
What Are the Four Attachment Styles and How Did Parkes Frame Them?
Attachment styles are typically mapped along two dimensions: anxiety (how much you fear abandonment or rejection) and avoidance (how much you pull back from closeness to protect yourself). Parkes, drawing on Bowlby’s work, helped illuminate how these dimensions show up not just in childhood, but in the adult experience of love, loss, and connection.
Secure Attachment: Low Anxiety, Low Avoidance
Securely attached people carry a fundamental belief that they are worthy of love and that others can be trusted to provide it. They’re comfortable with closeness without losing themselves in it, and they can tolerate distance without interpreting it as rejection. Parkes emphasized that this security doesn’t mean immunity from relationship difficulty. Securely attached people still experience conflict, grief, and doubt. What they have is a more reliable internal foundation for working through those experiences.
In my agency years, I had a creative director who exemplified this. She could take brutal client feedback without either collapsing or going cold. She’d sit with it, process it quietly, and come back with something better. At the time I just thought she was unusually resilient. Looking back, I recognize what I was seeing was secure attachment expressed in a professional context: the ability to stay open under pressure without either clinging or shutting down.
Anxious-Preoccupied: High Anxiety, Low Avoidance
People with an anxious-preoccupied style desperately want closeness but carry a persistent fear that it won’t last. Their attachment system is hyperactivated, meaning they’re highly sensitive to signals of disconnection and often amplify those signals internally. This isn’t a character flaw or a choice. It’s a nervous system response shaped by early experiences where love felt conditional or unpredictable.
Parkes’s contribution here was in showing how this style shapes the experience of loss. Anxiously attached people often struggle intensely with grief because the loss confirms their deepest fear: that connection is fragile and temporary. They may oscillate between intense longing and desperate attempts to restore the bond, even when restoration isn’t possible.
In relationships, this pattern can look like what people dismissively call “clingy,” but that framing misses the point entirely. The behavior is driven by genuine fear, not neediness as a personality trait. Understanding this distinction matters enormously for how we approach introvert love feelings and the complexity of emotional experience in romantic relationships.
Dismissive-Avoidant: Low Anxiety, High Avoidance
Dismissive-avoidant individuals have learned to suppress their attachment needs as a way of protecting themselves. On the surface, they appear self-sufficient, even emotionally flat. They often genuinely believe they don’t need closeness the way others do. But this is a defense strategy, not an absence of feeling.
Physiological research has shown that dismissive-avoidants show internal arousal in response to attachment-related stress, even when their outward behavior appears calm and detached. The feelings exist. They’ve simply been routed underground through years of conditioning that said emotional needs were unwelcome or unsafe.
Parkes observed this pattern in how dismissive-avoidants experience grief. They often appear to cope well, returning to normal functioning quickly after a loss. But this apparent resilience can mask delayed grief responses that surface later, sometimes in unexpected ways.
I’ve seen this pattern in myself, honestly. As an INTJ who spent two decades in high-stakes agency environments, I got very good at compartmentalizing. A major client loss, a team departure, a failed pitch that I’d invested months in, I learned to process these things quickly and move on. That efficiency served me professionally. In personal relationships, it sometimes looked like I didn’t care. I did. I just hadn’t yet learned to make that visible.
Fearful-Avoidant: High Anxiety, High Avoidance
The fearful-avoidant style, sometimes called disorganized attachment, sits at the most complex intersection. People with this pattern both desperately want connection and feel deeply threatened by it. They may pursue intimacy intensely, then pull back when it gets close. They’re caught between the need for love and the belief that love is dangerous.
Parkes’s framework helps explain why this style is so difficult to sustain in relationships. The internal conflict is exhausting for the person experiencing it, and confusing for their partners. It’s worth noting that fearful-avoidant attachment and borderline personality disorder are distinct constructs, even though they share some surface features. Not everyone with this attachment pattern has BPD, and not everyone with BPD is fearfully avoidant.
For introverts who also identify as highly sensitive people, this intersection can be particularly complex. Our complete guide to HSP relationships explores how high sensitivity interacts with attachment patterns in ways that deserve their own careful attention.
How Does Introversion Interact With Attachment Style?
One of the most common misunderstandings I encounter is the assumption that introverts are naturally avoidantly attached. The logic seems intuitive: introverts need alone time, avoidants pull away from closeness, therefore introverts must be avoidant. This is simply not accurate.
Introversion is about energy. It describes where we draw our fuel from, internal reflection rather than external stimulation. Avoidant attachment is about emotional defense. It describes a strategy for protecting oneself from the perceived danger of closeness. These are independent dimensions. An introvert can be securely attached, fully comfortable with both intimacy and solitude, without any contradiction.
What introversion does affect is how attachment patterns express themselves. An anxiously attached introvert may not pursue their partner with phone calls and constant texts. They might instead ruminate intensely in private, replaying conversations, analyzing tone of voice, constructing elaborate narratives about what a partner’s silence means. The hyperactivation is internal rather than externalized.
A dismissive-avoidant introvert, on the other hand, may find their need for solitude becomes a convenient cover for emotional withdrawal. It’s genuinely difficult, even for the person themselves, to distinguish between “I need quiet time to recharge” and “I’m retreating because intimacy feels threatening.” That ambiguity is worth sitting with honestly.
Understanding how introverts fall in love and the relationship patterns that emerge requires holding both of these dimensions at once: the introvert’s genuine need for internal space, and whatever attachment style shapes how they experience closeness and distance in romantic bonds.
What Does Parkes’s Work Tell Us About Grief and Relationship Loss?
Parkes’s most enduring contribution may be his insight that grief is not a disorder but a natural response to the severing of an attachment bond. He described what he called “assumptive world” theory: the idea that we build our sense of reality around the people we’re attached to. When we lose them, whether through death, breakup, or estrangement, we lose not just the person but the world as we understood it.
This framework has profound implications for how we understand relationship endings. A breakup isn’t just the loss of a person. It’s the collapse of a shared future, a set of daily rituals, a version of yourself that only existed in relation to that person. For people with anxious attachment, this can feel genuinely catastrophic. For dismissive-avoidants, the assumptive world disruption may not surface immediately, but it surfaces eventually.
Parkes also identified what he called “chronic grief,” a pattern where loss is never fully processed and the person remains suspended in a state of longing. This is most common in anxiously attached individuals, and it connects directly to how highly sensitive people handle conflict and disagreement in relationships, often absorbing emotional residue long after the moment has passed.
One of the more counterintuitive aspects of his work is the observation that people who appear to grieve least may be struggling most. The dismissive-avoidant who “bounces back” quickly from a relationship ending isn’t necessarily healthier. They may simply have more efficient suppression mechanisms. The work of healing still needs to happen, just on a different timeline and often through less visible channels.
A piece published on PubMed Central examining attachment and bereavement outcomes supports this observation, noting that attachment orientation significantly shapes not just how people experience loss but how and whether they seek support during it.
Can Attachment Styles Actually Change?
One of the most important things to understand about attachment theory, and one of the most commonly misrepresented, is that attachment styles are not fixed life sentences. They can shift. They do shift. The concept of “earned secure” attachment is well-documented in the psychological literature: people who began with insecure attachment patterns can develop genuinely secure functioning through therapy, through corrective relationship experiences, and through sustained self-awareness.
Approaches like Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), schema therapy, and EMDR have all shown meaningful results in helping people reshape their attachment patterns. This isn’t about becoming a different person. It’s about developing more flexibility in how you respond to closeness, distance, and the inevitable uncertainties of love.
That said, change is rarely linear. I’ve watched people in my own life, and experienced this myself, where growth looks more like a slow recalibration than a sudden shift. There are periods where old patterns resurface under stress. A relationship that triggers deep attachment fears can temporarily pull someone back toward earlier defensive strategies, even after years of genuine growth.
The research on attachment continuity across the lifespan confirms that while there is meaningful consistency in attachment orientation over time, significant life events and relationships can shift attachment patterns in either direction, toward greater security or, under adverse conditions, toward greater insecurity. Context matters enormously.
For introverts in particular, the path toward earned security often runs through a specific kind of relationship: one where the other person is patient with the need for processing time, doesn’t interpret silence as rejection, and creates enough safety that the introvert can actually show their attachment needs rather than routing them underground. Those relationships are not always easy to find, but they’re worth recognizing when you do.
How Do Attachment Styles Show Up in Introvert Relationships?
Attachment patterns don’t announce themselves clearly. They show up in the texture of daily interactions, in how someone responds to a partner’s bad mood, in what they do when they feel disconnected, in how they handle conflict and repair.
For introverts, some of these patterns have distinctive flavors. The anxiously attached introvert may not demand constant contact, but they’ll notice every shift in their partner’s energy with almost painful precision. They’ll interpret a shorter text message as evidence of cooling interest. They’ll replay a conversation from three days ago looking for the moment things changed. The hyperactivation is internal, but it’s no less consuming for being quiet.
The dismissive-avoidant introvert may genuinely struggle to distinguish between healthy solitude and emotional shutdown. After a difficult conversation with a partner, retreating to their study to decompress might be exactly what they need. Or it might be a way of avoiding the vulnerability that repair requires. Honest self-examination is the only way to tell the difference.
When two introverts are in a relationship together, these dynamics can become especially layered. Both partners may have strong needs for independent space, and both may default to internal processing rather than verbal expression. Understanding the relationship patterns that emerge when two introverts fall in love requires paying attention to whether the space between them is nourishing or avoidant, whether the quiet is shared comfort or mutual withdrawal.
Attachment also shapes how introverts express affection. Securely attached introverts tend to show love through consistent presence, thoughtful gestures, and deep listening. Anxiously attached introverts may cycle between intense closeness and fearful withdrawal. Avoidantly attached introverts may express care through acts of service or intellectual engagement rather than physical or emotional vulnerability. Exploring how introverts show affection through their love language reveals how much attachment style shapes the form that love takes.
What Parkes Understood About the Introvert Experience of Love
Parkes never wrote specifically about introverts. But his work contains insights that resonate deeply with how many of us experience love and loss. His attention to the internal world of the grieving person, to the private landscape of longing and meaning-making, maps naturally onto how introverts process emotional experience.
He observed that people don’t just grieve the person they lost. They grieve the conversations they’ll never have, the version of themselves that existed in that relationship, the future they had imagined. This kind of layered, meaning-saturated experience of loss is something many introverts recognize immediately. We tend to invest deeply in our relationships precisely because we’re selective about them. When those relationships end, the loss is proportionally significant.
Parkes also wrote about what he called “the pining” that follows loss, a state of restless longing that drives the bereaved person to seek the lost figure even when they know it’s impossible. For anxiously attached introverts, this pining can be particularly consuming. The internal processing that normally serves us well can become a loop, replaying memories, constructing imagined conversations, searching for meaning in what happened.
What his work in the end points toward is the importance of having a secure base, someone whose consistent presence allows you to explore the world, including the world of your own emotions, without constant fear of abandonment. For introverts, that secure base doesn’t need to be available every hour of every day. But it needs to be reliably there. That reliability is what makes intimacy feel safe rather than threatening.
A piece from Psychology Today on the signs of a romantic introvert touches on this theme, noting that introverts in love tend to invest in depth and consistency rather than breadth and novelty. That preference for depth is both a strength and a vulnerability, because it means the stakes of connection feel very high.
Practical Ways to Work With Your Attachment Style
Understanding your attachment style is genuinely useful, but only if it moves beyond self-categorization into actual behavior change. consider this that can look like in practice.
Name the Pattern Without Becoming the Pattern
Knowing you tend toward anxious attachment doesn’t mean every anxious thought you have is valid information about your relationship. It means you have a pattern that generates anxious thoughts, and those thoughts deserve examination rather than automatic belief. Creating a small pause between the feeling and the response is where most of the real work happens.
I spent years in agency environments where I had to make fast decisions with incomplete information. One thing that experience taught me: the story I told myself in the first thirty seconds was rarely the complete picture. The same is true in relationships. The initial interpretation of a partner’s behavior, especially when attachment fears are activated, is usually worth questioning.
Communicate Attachment Needs Directly
One of the consistent findings in relationship research is that people with insecure attachment styles are often poor at directly communicating what they actually need. Anxiously attached people may hint, escalate, or withdraw, hoping their partner will intuit what’s wrong. Avoidantly attached people may insist they need nothing, then feel resentful when nothing is offered.
Direct communication about attachment needs feels vulnerable precisely because it exposes the need. But it’s also the most efficient path to getting those needs met. “I’m feeling disconnected and I need some reassurance” is more useful than three days of cold distance followed by an argument about something unrelated.
Seek Corrective Experiences
Parkes’s framework, and attachment theory more broadly, suggests that the most powerful vehicle for attachment change is a relationship that consistently disconfirms your worst fears. For an anxiously attached person, a partner who stays calm during conflict and returns reliably after distance provides a corrective experience. For an avoidantly attached person, a partner who respects their need for space without interpreting it as rejection can gradually make closeness feel less dangerous.
These corrective experiences accumulate slowly. They don’t erase old patterns overnight. But they do, over time, create new neural pathways for how love feels. The common myths about introverts and extroverts often obscure this kind of nuance, reducing complex emotional patterns to simple personality categories.
Consider Professional Support
Online quizzes can give you a rough sense of your attachment orientation, but they have real limitations. Avoidantly attached people in particular often don’t recognize their own patterns in self-report measures because the defense strategy involves not fully acknowledging the attachment need. Formal assessment through something like the Experiences in Close Relationships scale, or work with a therapist trained in attachment-based approaches, offers more reliable insight.
EFT in particular has a strong track record with couples where attachment insecurity is driving disconnection. It’s not a quick fix, but for people who are genuinely motivated to shift their patterns, it can be meaningfully effective. The academic literature on attachment-based interventions supports this, showing that therapeutic work can produce lasting shifts in attachment orientation when the approach is well-matched to the presenting pattern.
The Anxious-Avoidant Dance: Does It Have to Be a Dead End?
Perhaps the most common attachment pairing in romantic relationships is the anxious-avoidant dynamic, where one partner’s fear of abandonment and pursuit behavior triggers the other’s fear of engulfment and withdrawal, which in turn amplifies the first partner’s anxiety. It can feel like an inescapable loop.
Parkes’s work suggests this dynamic isn’t inherently doomed. What makes it destructive is when neither partner understands the underlying mechanics. When the avoidant partner genuinely believes they don’t need closeness, and the anxious partner genuinely believes their fear is evidence of the relationship’s fragility, the loop has no exit.
Awareness changes the equation. When both partners can recognize “you’re pulling away because closeness feels threatening, and I’m pursuing because distance feels like abandonment,” the behavior becomes something to work with rather than something to react to. Many couples with this dynamic develop secure functioning over time, particularly with professional support and genuine mutual commitment to understanding each other’s patterns.
This connects directly to the relationship patterns that emerge when introverts fall in love, where the intersection of personality type and attachment style creates dynamics that deserve careful, compassionate attention rather than quick categorization.
I’ve seen this play out in professional contexts too. At my agency, I had a client relationship manager who pursued clients with almost anxious intensity, and a creative lead who withdrew the moment a client relationship got complicated. They drove each other crazy. When I finally sat them down and named the dynamic explicitly, something shifted. They started working with each other’s patterns instead of against them. The parallel to romantic relationships isn’t perfect, but the underlying mechanics of attachment activation and response are surprisingly consistent across contexts.
If you want to explore more about how introverts approach dating, attraction, and connection, the full range of our work on this subject lives in our Introvert Dating and Attraction hub, where attachment theory is just one thread in a much larger conversation about how we love.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is an introvert who’s learned to embrace his true self later in life. After 20 years in advertising and marketing leadership, including running agencies and managing Fortune 500 accounts, Keith now channels his experience into helping fellow introverts understand their strengths and build fulfilling careers. As an INTJ, he brings analytical depth and authentic perspective to every article, drawing from both professional expertise and personal growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Colin Murray Parkes’s contribution to attachment theory?
Colin Murray Parkes extended John Bowlby’s foundational attachment theory into adult life, particularly through his research on grief and bereavement. His key insight was that the way people experience loss reflects the same attachment patterns that shape how they love. He developed the concept of the “assumptive world” to explain why losing a significant attachment figure disrupts not just the relationship but a person’s entire sense of reality and meaning.
Are introverts more likely to be avoidantly attached?
No. Introversion and avoidant attachment are independent dimensions. Introversion describes an energy preference for internal processing and solitude. Avoidant attachment is an emotional defense strategy developed in response to early experiences where attachment needs were not reliably met. An introvert can be securely attached, fully comfortable with both closeness and alone time. Assuming introverts are avoidant conflates personality type with attachment pattern, which are distinct constructs.
Can attachment styles change over time?
Yes. Attachment styles are not fixed. The concept of “earned secure” attachment is well-established in psychological research, describing people who began with insecure attachment patterns and developed genuinely secure functioning through therapy, self-awareness, and corrective relationship experiences. Approaches like Emotionally Focused Therapy, schema therapy, and EMDR have shown meaningful results in shifting attachment patterns. Significant life events and relationships can also move attachment orientation in either direction across the lifespan.
What does Parkes’s work say about how people grieve relationship endings?
Parkes argued that grief after any significant loss, including relationship endings, is shaped by the attachment style of the person grieving. Anxiously attached people often experience intense, prolonged grief because the loss confirms their fear that love is fragile. Dismissive-avoidant people may appear to recover quickly but often experience delayed grief responses. Parkes also noted that people grieve not just the person but the shared future, the daily rituals, and the version of themselves that existed within that relationship.
Can anxious-avoidant couples build a healthy relationship?
Yes, with awareness, communication, and often professional support. The anxious-avoidant dynamic becomes destructive when neither partner understands the underlying mechanics driving their behavior. When both partners can recognize their patterns and work with rather than against each other’s attachment responses, the dynamic can shift toward secure functioning over time. Many couples with this pairing develop genuinely healthy relationships. The presence of this dynamic is not a prediction of failure, but it does require conscious attention from both people.
