15. Secure Attachment: ‘A Pot of Gold Within’ | Attachment Styles To Your Unique Self: 40 Lessons in Personality Psychology

To Your Unique Self: 40 Lessons in Personality Psychology

Wang Fang

Family Upbringing and the Formation of Personality

Hello, I’m Wang Fang. You have surely heard Tolstoy’s words: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.””（All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.Do you agree?

Before answering, hear another line, from literary master Vladimir Nabokov. It initially resembles Tolstoy but means the opposite: “Happy families are all more or less different; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.””（All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.）

Which do you favor? Family therapists would probably choose Nabokov, because they repeatedly find the same things causing trouble at home. They call thempatterns.Where do they cause trouble? Inrelationships.Relationships are the most important part of life, where we invest the most emotion and concern and find most joy and pain. Therefore,understanding a person’s nature requires understanding their relationships with others, especially significant others.

Here we turn to psychology’s remarkableattachment theory.（Bowlby, 1969），It explains the intimate emotional bonds people form with significant figures, usually parents and partners, and how those bonds shape the self and emotional experience throughout life.Its key assumption is that early in life humans must attach to a primary caregiver and instinctively approach a source of warmth and safety. Events in those early relationships influence later ones. Secure relationships support mental health; unstable or uncertain ones produce self-doubt and negative interpersonal outcomes, including difficulty becoming an effective parent or partner.