In your earliest days of existence, you were raised by someone whose job was to meet your every need, not the least of which was emotional nurturance. Usually, this is a parent, and most often, the mother, but this need not be the case. Ideally, this person fed you, kept you warm and clean, and did everything possible to ensure that you thrived in body and mind. In the ensuing years, for most people, even if these efforts produced less than ideal consequences (the occasional unchanged dirty diaper), the odds are that they emerged as adults in relatively good shape emotionally.

The feeling that others can be trusted stems from these very early childhood experiences and shapes future relationships, according to what is called attachment theory. In addition to trust, attachment theory proposes that caregiving in childhood shapes an individual’s sense of self. This foundation of your personality remains with you throughout life and influences how you relate to others as well as your own well-being.

How Stable Is Attachment Style?

You may also have heard it said that personality doesn’t change due to the existence of fixed traits. However, research on adult development challenges this view. When it comes to attachment style, there is less evidence about its evolution over life. In some ways, you might expect that with its basis in relationships, it could be more fluid than traits. On the other hand, if formed during the earliest of early interactions, it might sit there as an unchanging core within personality that is resistant to outside influences.

Taking the view that attachment style could in fact be moldable, Michigan State University’s William Chopik, along with University of Basel’s Rebekka Weidmann and Syracuse University’s Jeewon Oh (2024), took on the task of reviewing the available literature on adult attachment changes. They note that people can be insecurely attached in one of two ways—either by fearing abandonment (anxious attachment) or feeling uncomfortable when they are close to other people (avoidant attachment). Rather than use “style,” furthermore, Chopik et al. adopt the term “attachment orientations—people’s characteristic approaches to social relationships.”

As the authors note, there are many reasons that people wouldn’t change in their attachment orientation. There is something about your trust in other people (and yourself) that could bias development toward stability. If you’re securely attached, you’ll have the kind of positive interactions that reinforce your faith in people. If you’re avoidantly attached, you’ll stay away from the kind of relationships that could help whittle away at your reluctance to get close to others. If anxiously attached, you might distort what are good relationships into your belief that people don’t care about you. Even given all of this, Chopik et al. suggest that there is “plenty of evidence to suggest that attachment orientations are not set in stone from birth.”

Evidence for Change

In their review of the literature, the MSU-led research team considered evidence from both longitudinal (follow-up) and cross-sectional (one-time comparisons) studies across the adult years and concluded that, in fact, people do move, on average, toward greater attachment security. Whether any one individual will change can’t be predicted from these patterns of progression because the effects are not that large. It then becomes more interesting to examine why anyone changes at all. If the tendency to let your attachment style influence your relationships tends to “privilege stability,” people do mature over time (becoming more agreeable and emotionally stable) and do experience events that can help to shape them, even if only so gradually.

Think about the last time someone unexpectedly helped you feel better about yourself. Perhaps you were walking around town and encountered a former coworker you hadn’t seen in years. After they effusively greet you, they share with you a memory of a time that you helped them so much that it changed the course of their life. You helped them, but this sharing of the memory has certainly given you a well-being boost. Not only that, but you gain a tiny amount of confidence in your relationship strengths.

The possibility that positive experiences can reshape your attachment orientation is consistent with the Attachment Security Enhancement Model, which suggests that “attachment anxiety can be reduced through experiences that foster a secure model of the self (an intrapersonal process) in people’s daily lives.” Although you view relationships from the lens of your attachment orientation, which, in turn, affects the way you perceive events, a tiny bump from one of those events can reposition that lens.

People can also become more securely attached because they seek positive changes in their relationships. There are many ways this can happen, not the least of which is a desire for self-improvement. However, assuming an individual is in some type of relationship, the partner can move this process along through “buffering.” Following an upsetting event, the partner of an anxiously attached person can provide emotional reassurance, which can “enhance closeness and security.”

Some limitations in the literature remain, despite the logical and empirical support for the possibility of change. One is that many studies were conducted on young adults, or maybe older individuals, but rarely on the majority of people in the middle. Another is that relationships have rarely been studied outside the context of romantic partners. However, the upshot tends toward “good news” in the “lifespan shifts toward attachment security.”

Putting Attachment Orientation to Work for You

If you’re happy with your attachment orientation now, this paper suggests that it will only get better, barring unforeseen events that could potentially shift your trajectory. However, if you’re looking for that “buffering” effect, either from a partner or from someone you’ve yet to meet, the idea that you don’t have to be stuck in your current way of viewing relationships can be encouraging, indeed.

Perhaps the first step is to make an honest assessment of where you lie now on the dimensions of anxiety and avoidance. How much are you letting your fear of being let down keep you from exploring possibilities to do things and meet people who could tinker with your insecurities? Giving people a chance to make some inroads into your view of relationships and ultimately yourself could start a process that, little by little, helps you gain what you may have either lacked or not had enough of in terms of early life security.

It can also help to know that attachment insecurity can be traced to events that happened long ago, before you were aware of their impact on you. Although you may believe the way you are in relationships is a reflection of something about your own constitution, all of this happened when you were so tiny that you had no personal control over your destiny. You can change that now, as an adult.

To sum up, personality change is a process that continues throughout life, reflecting the features that helped shape who you are. Even more importantly, it is also a process that can shape you as you seek greater fulfillment in the future.