Attachment styles can change. That single idea, backed by Joanne Davila and her colleagues in their 1997 longitudinal research, quietly dismantled one of the most discouraging assumptions in relationship psychology: that how you bonded as a child is simply who you are forever. Their work showed that attachment patterns shift across time, that life experiences reshape them, and that the path toward more secure relating is genuinely available to adults who do the work.
As an introvert who spent decades misreading his own relationship patterns as personality flaws rather than attachment wounds, this finding hit differently. I didn’t just find it academically interesting. I found it personally clarifying.
Much of what I explore on this site connects to how introverts experience closeness, attraction, and love in ways that don’t always match the cultural script. Our Introvert Dating and Attraction hub brings together the full picture of how introverts form and sustain meaningful relationships, and attachment theory sits at the center of a lot of that conversation. Before we get into what Davila’s work actually found, it helps to understand why attachment matters so much to introverts in the first place.
Why Do Introverts Feel Attachment So Intensely?
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, describes the emotional bond system humans use to seek safety and closeness with others. It starts in infancy, shapes childhood, and carries forward into adult romantic relationships in recognizable patterns. Most adults fall somewhere across four orientations: secure (comfortable with both intimacy and independence), anxious-preoccupied (craving closeness but fearing it will be taken away), dismissive-avoidant (self-reliant to the point of emotional distancing), and fearful-avoidant (simultaneously wanting and dreading closeness).
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Introverts are not automatically any one of these. That’s worth saying clearly because the conflation of introversion with avoidant attachment is one of the most persistent myths in pop psychology. Introversion is about where you get your energy. Avoidant attachment is about emotional defense. An introvert can be deeply, securely attached and still need three hours alone after a dinner party to recharge. Those are different systems entirely.
That said, many introverts do find that their internal processing style amplifies attachment experiences. When I think about how I fell into relationships during my agency years, I can see now that my preference for depth over breadth, my tendency to observe before engaging, and my discomfort with emotional ambiguity all made attachment anxiety feel louder and more consuming than it might have for someone who processes externally. There was nowhere for the worry to go. It just circled inward.
Understanding how introverts fall in love and the patterns that emerge helps explain why attachment theory resonates so strongly with this community. The selectivity, the intensity, the tendency to invest fully once trust is established, all of these are shaped by attachment history as much as personality type.
What Did the Davila et al. 1997 Paper Actually Find?
The Davila, Burge, and Hammen study followed young women over time, measuring their attachment orientations at multiple points. What made this research significant wasn’t just that attachment styles changed (earlier theorists had suggested some stability), but that the change was meaningful, patterned, and connected to identifiable life experiences and psychological processes.
Several findings from this work deserve attention for anyone thinking about their own relationship patterns.
First, attachment instability itself emerged as a meaningful construct. Some individuals showed consistent patterns across time points, while others shifted considerably. The researchers found that those who changed frequently between attachment classifications, rather than moving steadily toward security, often showed more depressive symptoms and interpersonal difficulties. Instability wasn’t simply growth in disguise. It sometimes reflected an underlying struggle with self-concept and relationship schemas.
Second, movement toward security was associated with positive relationship experiences. This is the finding that carries the most hope. When people had corrective experiences in close relationships, their attachment orientations shifted in a more secure direction. The relationship itself became the mechanism of change.
Third, the study highlighted that attachment change isn’t random. It’s connected to how people process and make meaning of their experiences, not just what happens to them. Two people could have similar relationship histories and land in very different attachment places depending on how they internally represented and interpreted those experiences.
For introverts, that third point lands with particular weight. We are, by nature, meaning-makers. We process experiences deeply, return to them repeatedly, and construct elaborate internal narratives about what they mean. That capacity can work for us or against us in attachment terms. A dismissive-avoidant introvert who suppresses emotional information (and physiological arousal studies confirm the feelings are still happening internally, even when they appear calm externally) may have rich internal narratives that actually reinforce the avoidance rather than challenging it. An anxiously attached introvert may replay interactions looking for evidence of abandonment until the fear becomes self-fulfilling.
Davila’s work suggests that the narrative itself matters, and that changing the narrative, whether through therapy, conscious reflection, or new relationship experiences, is part of what drives attachment change.
What Does “Earned Secure” Attachment Actually Mean?
One of the most important concepts to emerge from longitudinal attachment research is what researchers call “earned secure” attachment. This describes adults who did not have secure early attachment experiences but who have, through some combination of meaningful relationships, self-reflection, and often therapeutic work, developed a secure attachment orientation as adults.
Earned security looks functionally similar to continuous security in many ways. People with earned secure attachment can reflect coherently on their childhood experiences, including difficult or painful ones, without becoming flooded or dismissive. They can hold complexity. They can say “my early experiences were hard, and they shaped me, and I’m not defined by them” without either minimizing the pain or drowning in it.
That coherence of narrative is something the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a formal clinical assessment tool, specifically measures. It’s worth noting that self-report quizzes and online assessments are rough indicators at best. The AAI evaluates how you talk about your experiences, not just what you report about them. Dismissively attached people, in particular, may genuinely not recognize their own avoidant patterns because the defense is largely unconscious.
I ran agencies for over two decades, and one of the things I observed in high-performing leadership teams was that the people who could reflect honestly on their own failures, without either catastrophizing or deflecting, were consistently better at building trust. I didn’t have the language for attachment theory then. But I was watching earned security in action. The leaders who’d done some version of inner work could stay present during conflict, could tolerate uncertainty, and could repair ruptures in working relationships. The ones who hadn’t done that work either exploded or disappeared.
Those same dynamics play out in intimate relationships, just with higher emotional stakes.
How Do Introverts Experience Anxious and Avoidant Patterns Differently?
Anxious-preoccupied attachment involves a hyperactivated attachment system. The nervous system is essentially on high alert for signs of abandonment or rejection. This isn’t a character flaw or neediness. It’s a learned response, often developed when early caregivers were inconsistently available. The anxiously attached person learned that connection required vigilance and effort to maintain.
For introverts with anxious attachment, the internal processing style can intensify this hyperactivation. Every silence gets analyzed. Every delayed text message becomes a data point in a growing case file. The introvert’s natural tendency to observe and reflect, usually a genuine strength, gets conscripted into the service of anxiety. I’ve had conversations with people who described spending hours after a good date replaying every exchange looking for the moment they said something wrong. That’s not overthinking. That’s an anxious attachment system running on introvert hardware.
Dismissive-avoidant attachment works in the opposite direction. The attachment system is deactivated as a defense. Closeness feels threatening, not because the person doesn’t want connection, but because their nervous system learned to associate vulnerability with pain or disappointment. The feelings are present physiologically. Avoidants react internally even when they appear calm. They’ve simply learned to suppress that signal.
Introverts who are dismissively attached may find that their need for solitude and their avoidant patterns become intertwined in ways that are hard to separate. Needing space after social interaction is healthy and normal. Using that same space as a permanent buffer against emotional intimacy is something different. Distinguishing between the two requires a kind of honest self-examination that doesn’t come easily, especially when the defense is unconscious.
Understanding how introverts experience and express love feelings becomes more nuanced when attachment patterns are factored in. A dismissive-avoidant introvert and a securely attached introvert may both appear reserved externally, but their internal experiences of closeness are entirely different.
Can Relationships Themselves Drive Attachment Change?
One of the most significant implications of Davila’s work is that relationships aren’t just where attachment patterns play out. They’re also where those patterns can change. A partner who is consistently available, who doesn’t punish vulnerability, who repairs conflict without withdrawing or escalating, can become a corrective experience that gradually shifts an insecure attachment orientation toward something more secure.
This is both encouraging and sobering. Encouraging because it means you don’t have to complete years of therapy before a healthy relationship is possible. Sobering because it places real demands on both partners. The securely attached partner in an anxious-avoidant pairing, for example, has to maintain their own groundedness while the other person’s nervous system slowly learns that safety is real. That’s not a small ask.
Anxious-avoidant pairings can and do work. Many couples with this dynamic develop more secure functioning over time, particularly with mutual awareness and a willingness to communicate about their patterns rather than simply enacting them. What doesn’t work is expecting the relationship to do all the work without any individual reflection or effort.
Highly sensitive introverts face an additional layer here. The complete guide to HSP relationships explores how high sensitivity interacts with attachment in ways that can amplify both the beauty and the difficulty of close relationships. HSPs process emotional information more deeply, which means both the corrective experiences and the painful ones land harder.
When conflict arises in these relationships, the stakes feel higher. Handling disagreements peacefully as an HSP requires strategies that account for this heightened sensitivity, particularly when attachment anxiety or avoidance is also in the mix.
What Role Does Therapy Play in Shifting Attachment Patterns?
Davila’s research pointed toward meaning-making as a central mechanism of attachment change. Therapy, particularly approaches like Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), schema therapy, and EMDR, works directly with those meaning-making processes. EFT in particular was developed specifically to address attachment dynamics in couples, helping partners recognize their cycles of pursuit and withdrawal as attachment bids and defenses rather than character attacks.
Schema therapy addresses the deeply held beliefs about self and others that underlie attachment patterns. For someone with anxious attachment, a core schema might be “I am fundamentally unlovable and will eventually be abandoned.” For someone with dismissive-avoidant attachment, it might be “Depending on others leads to disappointment and pain.” These schemas operate largely below conscious awareness, shaping behavior without announcing themselves.
EMDR has shown particular promise for attachment wounds that are connected to specific traumatic or overwhelming experiences. When a fearful-avoidant pattern (high anxiety, high avoidance) is rooted in early trauma or relational harm, addressing those experiences directly can reduce the intensity of the attachment fear.
I’m not a therapist and I’m not prescribing any of this. What I can say, from my own experience and from watching people I’ve cared about do this work, is that the combination of a good therapeutic relationship and genuine willingness to look honestly at your patterns is among the most powerful things an adult can do for their relational life. The agency I ran in my forties was full of talented people whose careers were being quietly derailed by attachment patterns they’d never examined. I saw it in how they handled feedback, how they managed conflict, how they responded to uncertainty. It wasn’t a therapy practice, obviously. But the patterns were there.
According to an overview of attachment research published on PubMed Central, the mechanisms through which adult attachment patterns shift are multiple and overlapping, involving both relationship experiences and internal cognitive and emotional processing. That aligns closely with what Davila and her colleagues found in 1997.
How Do Introverts Express Love Within Different Attachment Styles?
Attachment style shapes not just how much closeness someone wants, but how they express and receive affection. For introverts, this intersection becomes particularly visible in the quieter, more deliberate ways love tends to show up.
A securely attached introvert might express love through sustained presence, thoughtful acts, and deep conversation. They’re comfortable with both togetherness and solitude, and they don’t need constant reassurance to feel confident in the relationship. How introverts show affection through their love language often looks different from the more demonstrative expressions that cultural scripts tend to celebrate, but it runs deep.
An anxiously attached introvert may pour tremendous energy into the relationship, sometimes to the point of losing themselves in it. Their expressions of love can feel intense and all-consuming because the underlying fear of loss is always present. The love is real. The intensity is driven by the fear, not the love itself.
A dismissively avoidant introvert may genuinely love their partner while simultaneously struggling to express it in ways the partner can feel and receive. The emotional information is there internally. The defense system blocks its outward expression. Partners often experience this as coldness or indifference, which can trigger the anxious partner’s fears and set the classic anxious-avoidant cycle in motion.
When two introverts are in a relationship together, these dynamics take on their own particular texture. The patterns that emerge when two introverts fall in love include both genuine compatibility and specific challenges, particularly around emotional expression and the risk of two avoidant patterns reinforcing each other’s distance.
What Does Attachment Stability Actually Look Like in Practice?
One of the subtler insights from Davila’s research is the distinction between stability and security. A person can have a stable attachment style that is nonetheless insecure. Someone who has been consistently anxious-preoccupied across multiple relationships and many years has a stable pattern. That stability doesn’t mean they’re doing well relationally. It means they haven’t yet had the experiences or done the work that would shift them toward security.
Conversely, someone who shows some fluctuation in their attachment orientation across time isn’t necessarily in trouble. Movement can be evidence of growth, particularly if it’s directional movement toward security rather than chaotic oscillation between insecure styles.
The practical implication is that consistency in your relationship patterns isn’t the same as health. I spent years being consistently self-sufficient in relationships in ways I told myself were about introversion and independence. Some of it genuinely was. Some of it was avoidance I’d dressed up in more flattering language. The work was in learning to tell the difference.
A piece published via Psychology Today on dating introverts touches on how introvert independence can be misread by partners who don’t understand the distinction between healthy autonomy and emotional withdrawal. That misreading is where a lot of anxious-avoidant cycles get started.
Additional perspective on the emotional interior of introverts in romantic contexts appears in this Psychology Today piece on romantic introverts, which helps clarify why introvert love can look different from the outside than it feels from the inside.
How Can Introverts Use This Research to Build Better Relationships?
Knowing that attachment styles can change is the starting point, not the destination. The question is what to actually do with that knowledge.
Start with honest self-assessment, keeping in mind that formal tools like the Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) scale give more reliable data than a five-minute quiz. Notice your patterns in past relationships. Did you tend to pursue and fear abandonment? Did you tend to withdraw when things got emotionally intense? Did you oscillate between both? Those patterns are information.
From there, consider whether therapy makes sense. Not because something is wrong with you, but because the meaning-making work that Davila’s research identified as central to attachment change is genuinely hard to do alone. A skilled therapist can help you see the narratives you’re running without realizing it.
In relationships, look for partners who are capable of the consistency that corrective experiences require. A relationship with someone who is themselves highly insecurely attached and unwilling to examine that is unlikely to provide the conditions for your own growth. That’s not a judgment. It’s just a practical reality about what secure functioning requires from both people.
Communicate about attachment explicitly when the relationship is ready for that conversation. Explaining to a partner that you tend to withdraw when overwhelmed, and that it’s not about them, can prevent a lot of the misreading that triggers anxious-avoidant cycles. Naming the pattern gives both people something to work with instead of just experiencing it.
Additional research on personality and relationship dynamics is available through this PubMed Central publication, which examines how individual differences shape relational outcomes in ways that connect to both personality and attachment theory.
For introverts who are also highly sensitive, the Healthline overview of introvert and extrovert myths is worth reading to clear away some of the cultural noise that makes it harder to see your own patterns clearly. And the Truity piece on introverts and online dating addresses the specific context where many introverts first encounter the attachment dynamics discussed here.
What Davila and her colleagues gave us in 1997 wasn’t a simple reassurance that everything works out fine. It was something more precise and more useful: evidence that the story isn’t finished, that the patterns aren’t permanent, and that what happens next in your relational life depends meaningfully on what you choose to do with what you understand about yourself now.
For introverts who have spent years wondering why relationships felt harder than they should, or why closeness brought as much anxiety as it did comfort, that finding is worth sitting with. The capacity for change is real. The work is real too. Both things are true at the same time.
There’s much more to explore about how introverts form, sustain, and repair meaningful connections. Our complete Introvert Dating and Attraction hub covers the full range of these topics, from first attraction through long-term partnership dynamics.
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 did the Davila et al. 1997 study find about attachment style change?
The Davila, Burge, and Hammen 1997 longitudinal study found that adult attachment styles are not fixed. Participants showed meaningful change in their attachment orientations over time, with movement toward security associated with positive relationship experiences and coherent meaning-making. The research also found that frequent instability between attachment categories, rather than directional growth, was linked to greater psychological difficulty. The study established that attachment change is real, patterned, and connected to identifiable psychological and relational processes.
Are introverts more likely to have avoidant attachment?
No. Introversion and avoidant attachment are independent constructs. Introversion describes where a person gets their energy and how they process stimulation. Avoidant attachment describes an emotional defense strategy developed in response to early relational experiences. An introvert can be securely, anxiously, or avoidantly attached. The overlap people notice often comes from the fact that both introverts and dismissive-avoidants can appear reserved or self-contained, but the underlying mechanisms are entirely different.
Can an anxious-avoidant relationship become secure over time?
Yes, with mutual awareness, honest communication, and often professional support. Many couples with an anxious-avoidant dynamic develop more secure functioning over time. What’s required is that both partners understand their own patterns, can name them without blame, and are willing to do the individual and relational work needed to interrupt the pursuit-withdrawal cycle. The relationship itself can become a corrective experience that gradually shifts both partners toward more secure relating, provided the foundational commitment and willingness are present.
What is “earned secure” attachment and how does someone develop it?
Earned secure attachment describes adults who did not have secure early attachment experiences but have developed a secure orientation through meaningful relationships, self-reflection, and often therapeutic work. It is functionally similar to continuous security in many ways. People with earned security can reflect coherently on difficult early experiences without becoming overwhelmed or dismissive. Therapy approaches like Emotionally Focused Therapy, schema therapy, and EMDR are particularly effective at supporting this shift. Positive relationship experiences with consistently available, emotionally safe partners also contribute significantly.
How can introverts tell the difference between healthy independence and avoidant attachment?
Healthy independence allows for genuine closeness when it’s wanted. The introvert can be emotionally present with a partner, can tolerate vulnerability, and can engage with conflict without shutting down or disappearing. Avoidant attachment involves a defense against closeness that operates largely automatically. The avoidantly attached person may feel genuine discomfort when a partner moves toward emotional intimacy, may find reasons to create distance when the relationship deepens, and may not recognize these patterns as defensive because the suppression is largely unconscious. Honest reflection, ideally with therapeutic support, is the most reliable way to distinguish between the two.
