Beyond Attachment Styles [Part 1]. Rethinking connection, authenticity, and relational safety in neurodivergent experience.
In my previous article, I explored how many neurodivergent individuals are described as having “insecure attachment,” often framed as avoidant, anxious, or disorganised. These formulations are widely used across clinical and therapeutic settings, and they can offer a useful starting point for thinking about relational patterns. However, in my clinical work, I have increasingly found that these categories do not always capture the complexity of neurodivergent relational experience.
What becomes apparent over time is not simply variation in attachment style, but variation in how connection is accessed, maintained, and disrupted. This distinction is subtle but clinically significant.
Attachment theory, as originally developed by John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, assumes that secure attachment is reflected in relatively stable patterns of proximity-seeking, emotional responsiveness, and relational consistency. These indicators are meaningful within the populations in which the theory was developed. However, when applied to neurodivergent individuals, particularly autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD adults, they can lead to interpretations that conflate difference with dysfunction.
For example, a client who requires space after social interaction may be described as avoidant. A client whose communication is inconsistent may be framed as anxious or disorganised. A client who becomes quiet or withdrawn under sensory or emotional overload may be understood as disengaged from the relationship. In each case, the observable behaviour is accurately described, but the underlying meaning is often assumed rather than examined.
From a neurodivergent-informed perspective, these behaviours can be more usefully understood in relation to sensory processing, attentional variability, and nervous system regulation. The issue is not necessarily an absence of attachment, but a shift in how connection is experienced under different conditions.
This is where I find it helpful to move away from the question of attachment style and instead focus on relational process. In clinical terms, the more relevant question becomes: under what conditions is connection accessible to this person, and under what conditions does it become more difficult to access?
In practice, many neurodivergent clients describe a consistent capacity for connection that becomes less available in the absence of certain cues. These cues may include physical presence, shared attention, predictable communication, or a regulated internal state. When these are in place, connection is experienced as clear and stable. When they are absent, the individual may still care deeply about the other person but find it more difficult to access that feeling in a way that is experientially immediate.
This distinction is often overlooked in traditional attachment frameworks, which tend to assume that a stable internal representation of the other is continuously available. In contrast, what I observe clinically is that for some neurodivergent individuals, connection is more context-dependent. It is not absent, but it is not always equally accessible.
To describe this, I have begun to use the term relational accessibility, the extent to which a person can access a felt sense of connection at a given moment. This allows for a more nuanced understanding than the binary distinction between secure and insecure attachment. It also aligns with emerging theoretical work, such as Neurodivergent Attachment Theory, which emphasises the role of sensory and cognitive factors in shaping attachment expression.
A related concept that has proved clinically useful is authentic security. In many neurodivergent clients, the experience of safety in relationships is closely linked to the ability to be present without sustained masking. When a person feels that they must continuously monitor, adjust, or perform in order to maintain connection, the relationship may be experienced as unstable, even if the other person is consistent and available. Conversely, when there is sufficient space for authenticity, connection tends to become more stable and less effortful.
This shifts the focus from proximity or responsiveness alone to the quality of the relational environment. Safety is not only a function of how available the other person is, but also of how much adaptation is required to remain in the relationship.
The Double Empathy Aspect provides an additional layer of understanding here. Rather than conceptualising relational difficulty as a deficit located within the neurodivergent individual, it suggests that misattunement arises from differences in how people perceive, interpret, and respond to one another. In this context, repeated experiences of being misunderstood or of having to translate oneself in order to be understood, can shape how safe it feels to remain open in a relationship.
Over time, this can lead to patterns that resemble insecure attachment, but which are better understood as adaptations to chronic misattunement. A client may withdraw, not because they do not seek connection, but because connection has repeatedly required effortful adjustment without reciprocal understanding.
In couples work, this dynamic is often particularly visible. One partner may interpret the other’s need for space as rejection, while the other experiences closeness as overwhelming or cognitively demanding. Without a shared framework, both partners can feel that the relationship is unstable, even when there is mutual care and commitment. In these cases, shifting the focus from “attachment style” to “conditions for connection” can be transformative. It allows both partners to understand how connection operates for the other, rather than assuming a shared baseline.
This also has implications for how we think about trust. In neurodivergent contexts, trust is often less about consistency of behaviour alone and more about predictability, clarity, and the reduction of ambiguity. Where masking is present, particularly partial masking, there can be a persistent uncertainty about how much of the self is visible in the relationship. This can make trust more difficult to establish, even in the absence of overt relational rupture.
For this reason, I find it helpful to think in terms of contextual attachment, the understanding that relational patterns are not fixed traits, but emerge in interaction with specific environments, partners, and demands. This perspective allows us to move beyond static categorisations and towards a more flexible, process-based understanding of connection.
From a clinical standpoint, this shift has practical consequences. It invites us to assess not only what a client does in relationships, but the context in which those behaviours occur. It encourages us to prioritise regulation before interpretation, to explore the impact of masking on relational safety, and to support explicit communication about how connection is experienced.
It also opens the possibility of developing new language that is more closely aligned with neurodivergent experience. Terms such as relational accessibility, authentic security, co-regulated connection, and masking-mediated distance are not intended as replacements for existing theory, but as additions that allow for greater precision in clinical work.
The aim is not to discard attachment theory, but to extend it. To recognise that the original framework captures certain aspects of human connection, while leaving others under-theorised, particularly those shaped by neurodivergent ways of sensing, processing, and relating.
In the next article Beyond Attachment Styles (Part II), I will explore more: What attachment questionnaires may be measuring in neurodivergent people.
For now, it may be sufficient to note that what is often described as insecure attachment may, in many cases, reflect a more complex interaction between neurobiology, environment, and relational context. When we begin to account for these factors, the clinical picture becomes both more nuanced and more accurate.
