Now let's turn our attention more specifically to attachment and attachment styles. Our caregiving environments once again set the tone but are not set in stone, but they do set us up to behave in ways that are prototypical and especially during times of need and threat. And that has led researchers and clinicians to categorize attachment in four ways. We can talk about secure attachment characterized by the capacity to love and be loved, to be able to move with and through emotion, and to use it as a compass for life.
What we would describe as effective affect regulation. In the adult world, we talk about anxious preoccupied attachment, a second category which is characterized by reactive intensification of emotion, a tendency to cling and to demand and to behave in ways that in the therapy space sound exasperated. There's a sense of desperation and you can hear it in people's voices and you can observe it in the way that they interact relationally. A third category is dismissive avoidant attachment characterized by a capacity to shut down, to numb out, and to withdraw or retreat in relationship. A fourth category that is consistent with the disorganized attachment style that we see in childhood, in adulthood is called fearful avoidant attachment and it's characterized by a propensity to reactively intensify emotion, shut it down, a combination of both that can often feel quite disorganized and chaotic for therapist and client alike. From an eFit perspective, we don't concern ourselves specifically with what category our clients fit in, but instead what we pay close attention to is how they regulate emotion.
Do they turn emotion up, turn it down, some combination of both and how does that impact their most important relationships? Secondly, we view attachment on a continuum, low anxiety to high anxiety, low avoidance to high avoidance and we recognize that some of our clients are going to flip between the two And we can think about symptoms as representations of effective strategies. So for example, when you think about dissociation over here, you can think about that as an automatic reflexive strategy for coping, for shutting down, for managing intolerable stress or trauma. Similarly, you can think about low anxiety or high anxiety, and you can think about symptoms as being manifestations of where people are on this continuum.
For example, panic attacks, chronic anxiety, chronic worry might be further along on the continuum. This helps us clinically both structure the therapy process and pace the therapy process. And what we want to do is move people out of rigid, reflexive, limiting strategies and we want to move people toward flexibility in terms of attachment strategy. So when we think about working with emotion, we're specifically focused on helping people to tune into their internal worlds.
In either case, reactive intensification of emotion or numbing out takes people away from their experience. And our goal is to help people slow down and get closer to their experience so that they can begin to feel more in control. We can begin to help them to achieve some kind of flexibility with these strategies that have become automatic and we can begin to help them to have more flexibility in the ways that they respond and relate to others. So when we tune in with our clients and join with them and get to know them, it's not for the purposes of categorizing their attachment style, but more specifically and more relevant to us in an emotion focused attachment based therapy is how do they move in the world emotionally and how does that play out relationally.