Leverage Your Attachment Style to Overcome Oppression

When societies fracture, violence escalates, and public discourse collapses into blame, hate and fear, the instinct for most of us is to look outward for solutions. New leaders. Better policies. Stronger protest.

But oppression does not survive on, nor is it solved by force. Imagine if Trump, Putin and other dictators had only saints and sages surrounding them when growing up, they would have been stopped long before getting access to any form of power — and they would have been given adequate support to become better humans long before starting to seriously harm others. Violence and suffering would have been prevented for real.

What useful and actionable conclusion then can we draw from what the world currently mirrors us in the daily news?

As psychologist Sean Ruth argued in his seminal work on oppression and liberation, what ultimately keeps oppressive systems in place is internalised oppression: the moment when we unconsicously absorb powerlessness (“learned helplessness”), when we police and censure ourselves, and reproduce the very dynamics that harm us — in our families and workplaces and, ultimately, societies.

This is where attachment theory quietly enters the room.

Attachment styles are not just about romantic relationships or parenting. They are relational survival strategies formed in infancy (in a prelinguistic stage we have no conscious memory of) and carried into adulthood — including into our politics, activism, workplaces, and social movements. You bet they are powerful, with Brainstem (“Reptilian brain”) and Limbic System being in charge, yet in our blindspot until an inner excavation work is done do uncover them! When oppression meets attachment, liberation becomes not just a social struggle, but an compassionate individual aspiration contributing to a common goal of world peace and prosperity (👋, Bodhicitta).

Oppression Doesn’t Just Happen To Us — It Gets Inside Us

Ruth describes oppression as a multi-layered system: physical, economic, psychological — but most critically, internalized. People come to doubt their worth (👋, inferiority complex!), mistrust one another, attack their own leaders, narrow their culture, suppress their anger (turning it into illnesses), or displace it onto other groups (tyrants understood this all too well by diverting anger on an external, vilified enemy).

Sound familiar?

These patterns are not random. They map uncannily well onto the four primary attachment styles. Each style responds to oppression differently — and each requires a different path toward liberation. Let’s review them and see where each of us fit — and more importantly, what is the way out.

Secure Attachment: Resistance Without Losing Yourself

How oppression shows up:
Adults with predominantly secure attachment (rare as they are!) can recognise injustice without collapsing into shame or rage. They can name harm, tolerate complexity, and stay connected to others while resisting domination (those are servant leaders). Remember that colleague who de-escalated the conflict the other day while maintaining the rapport with both sides? This was a tiny bit of role modelling we can keep as part of our definition of “What good looks like”.

Risk under oppression:
Even secure individuals can become fatigued or isolated if they try to “hold it all together” alone.

What liberation requires:
Liberation here is collective. Securely attached adults thrive when they build alliances, sustain humble pride without comparison, and resist the temptation to dominate in return. This is the psychological foundation of Ruth’s Independent stage — self-respect without hatred, resistance without dehumanisation, with the understanding all of us are evolving beings, and evolution takes time.

Anxious Attachment: When Anger Becomes the Only Voice

How oppression shows up:
Anxiously attached adults often feel oppression viscerally. They are alert, angry, mobilised — and exhausted. (Complex PTSD theorists call it hypervigilant). Those individuals may idealise leaders, then tear them down... in their kitchen conversations. They swing between hope and despair. Protest becomes reactive rather than strategic, and falls short of achieving its goal.

This maps directly onto Ruth’s early liberation stage: rebellion driven by pain that has not yet been metabolised.

Risk under oppression:
Getting stuck in victim consciousness. Burning out. Turning understandable anger into cycles of infighting.

What liberation requires:
Not less anger — but contained and transformed anger. Liberation comes through validating grief, developing trust in our higher Self and Life itself supporting us every yoctosecond, and shifting from external rescue to internal equanimity. When anxious attachment learns to self-regulate, its passion becomes sustainable power that can be used in the service of good. As the humble Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us in Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, anger is an energy that can be recruited for the change we want to see in the world but must enact in ourselves instead.

Avoidant Attachment: Survival Through Silence

How oppression shows up:
Avoidantly attached adults often minimise oppression. They emphasise independence, respectability, rationality, or “being reasonable” or even “professional”. They may unconsciously side with dominant narratives to avoid vulnerability.

Ruth describes this as one of the most insidious effects of internalized oppression: appearing functional while quietly accommodating injustice. How many Germans were avoidant under the Nazi regime, “just doing their job”?

Risk under oppression:
Disconnection. Complicity. Emotional numbing mistaken for strength.

What liberation requires:
Reconnection — with feeling, with history, with others, before discovering their true nature above and beyond circumstances. Avoidant attachment must learn that asking for help is not weakness and that interdependence, chosen consciously, is a source of power rather than shame.

Disorganised Attachment: When Survival Takes Over

How oppression shows up:
Disorganised attachment emerged where care and fear were intertwined. (👋, fear, the most common emotion on this planet!) Under oppression, this can manifest as sudden submission followed by explosive aggression, or paralysis followed by chaos. Violence, collapse, or self-sabotage are not moral failures here: they are trauma responses.

Ruth is clear: violence is the language of powerlessness.

Risk under oppression:
Reenacting the very systems one seeks to destroy. Turning pain outward or inward with devastating consequences.

What liberation requires:
Safety first. Trauma integration. Get help. Non-violent, contained avenues for power. Liberation cannot be rushed here: it must be stabilised before it can be mobilised. Techniques proven by millennia (like meditation or breathing exercices) are available for you, if you recognise yourself in this type, and they can be practiced anywhere anytime. They stabilise and progressively heal the nervous system, unblocking access to neocortex with its resources of rationality and compassion. Take heart: it takes time.

Liberation Starts Where You Have Agency

Ruth’s most radical insight is this: attacking oppressors is not the same as dismantling oppression. Systems persist because people are trained — psychologically — to play their assigned roles. We see this repeating in the history over and over again: Al-Queda after Osama bin Laden’s death in 2011 didn’t disappear, it just transitioned to a new leadership. Dictators are symptoms of oppression, not cause.

Attachment styles reveal how those roles are internalised.

Liberation, then, is not just about changing laws or leaders. It is about interrupting internalized oppression where it lives: in our nervous systems, our relationships, our movements, and our sense of self.

You may not control the world.
But you do control how oppression lives — or dies — inside you.

And that is where real change begins.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash