Our well-being depends on our ability to have and experience a secure base. It’s the place we come back to when distressed and in need of support.

Babies may find it in their relationship with their parents. However, the way they experienced this relationship transformed their attachment to their parents. With his research, John Bowlby laid the foundations for his theory on attachment styles.

Whatever attachment style they developed, it influenced how and how easily the baby seeks proximity with others. Seeking such proximity is done in the hope of developing a secure base from which they can explore the world.

As children mature, they can learn to develop a secure base within themselves. One they won’t use exclusively, but one their confidence in themselves can be based on. A confidence and autonomy they developed while exploring the world and moving back and forth between their secure base and the world they explored.

Coming back to their secure base, they learned to regulate their emotions through receiving support when they experienced discomfort or felt upset. Moving away from their secure base, they learned to step into discomfort, unpredictability, and chaos. But also to only go as far as is manageable.

It meant learning how to separate and how to connect.

The separation leads to opening the door to discomfort and the unknown. Connecting is finding one’s way back into a feeling of comfort and predictability. It’s a deep-seated learning of letting go.

However, our attachment experience and the attachment style we developed can make it difficult to accept to separate or to connect. As a consequence, letting go may not be feasible as long as a secure base to reconnect with remains missing. Or, in other words, as long as there is not enough confidence in one’s own sense of worth.

It impacts our ability to change.