Attachment Theory Explains Marital Disconnect / Milan & Kay Yerkovich Offer Path for Growth

Your first fight started long before you ever met your spouse. That’s because coping skills formed in childhood play a much larger role in later relationships than most people realize. Counselors and authors Milan and Kay Yerkovich realized when studying attachment research that the ways young children bond (or don’t) with their parents during their early years deeply affect their ability to connect with their spouse later in life. Their How We Love resources help people discover their unhealthy behavior patterns and overcome the deficits that plague their marriages.

Milan and Kay have worked with couples and families for the past 30 years. Milan’s an ordained minister and pastoral counselor; Kay obtained her master’s degree in marriage and family therapy in 1993 after raising their four children. Like so many whose personal pain inspired their work, the Yerkovichs struggled to emotionally connect in their early years of marriage.

It wasn’t until Kay began her counseling studies that they were introduced to the concept of attachment theory, which usually refers to children and their ability to bond with their parents. The couple noticed a commonality between their own childhood experiences and the way their attachment experience disconnects caused invisible roadblocks to their marriage success.

This revelation prompted them to develop ways to apply attachment theory to the marital relationship, which was groundbreaking in the 1990s. Eye-opening results in their own lives spilled into their counseling practice.

As they write in their book, How We Love, “When we each backed up and looked at our first lessons in love from our families of origin, we immediately recognized the unseen forces governing how we loved. For the first time, we understood the source of our frustrations and why we were stuck. Deep change was possible at last.”

They refined their practice and began training others as they developed Relationship180, a non-profit organization devoted to counseling individuals and families toward healthy relationships that Milan directed from 2003 to 2020. Milan began co-hosting a nationwide counseling talk show at New Life Ministries with Steven Arterburn. Steve wrote the Foreword to How We Love, which was released originally in 2006 and was updated in 2017. He considers the Yerkovichs’ concepts life changing.

“Rarely is there a book everybody ought to stop and read for their own sake as well as for the sake of everybody around them. How We Love also falls into that category,” he wrote.

The Yerkovichs share their concepts through webinars, conferences and events and continue to counsel couples individually. They’ve also developed a course, Attachment Core Pattern Therapy, originally designed to train therapists how to use How We Love as a therapy model. It has also been used by and is helpful to coaches and mentors. The reasonably priced course is designed for those interested in mentoring or leading groups – no official licensing or credentials are required — and will provide “a couple or therapist clear guidelines to supply effective therapeutic interventions,” as described at howwelove.com.

How We Love 

Milan and Kay use an analogy of a couple dancing to describe the How We Love concept.  The dancers find themselves stumbling and running into each other because their families taught them different steps to different music. Their subsequent interaction is like trying to mix the Tango and Polka together at the same time!

“For years, Milan and I danced through marriage, each with two left feet, tripping each other and stepping on each other’s toes. Little did we know we were each moving to songs we knew by heart – and the melodies didn’t match,” Kay wrote.

“Our experiences growing up, good and bad, left a lasting imprint in our souls that determined our beliefs and expectations about how to give love and receive love. Milan and I had different lessons about love, which resulted in different imprints, and without realizing it, we were dancing to different tunes. No wonder we were stepping on each other’s toes! Lasting change became possible when we made that revolutionary discovery.”

The Comfort Question

Much can be discovered by the answer to the first question the Yerchovichs ask: Do you have a memory of comfort from your childhood? A time when a parent who was a safe person saw your distress and comforted you through touch, listening or relief of your concern.

They’ve found many people do not have childhood memories of comfort – and in fact – the attempt to remember an instance brings up painful memories of times when their parents were unwilling or unable to give them the comfort they needed. The hurt child learned not to seek comfort in relationships.

“Stress, trauma, and inadequate parenting cause children to feel anxious about how to get what they need, so an anxious core forms instead of a core of trust,” they write.

The early years form an attachment experience that remains with people even though they chronologically age, Milan said. “It’s very powerful in animating them.”

Wounded people learn to cope in ways that form predictable patterns – what the Yerkovichs have named Love Styles. The five unhealthy love styles are the Avoider, Pleaser, Vacillator, Controller, and Victim. “All of the styles are reactive,” Milan said. “Fleeing is reactive. Anger is reactive. Freezing is reactive. It is reactivity that makes it hard to get through a conversation. Instead of fleeing and detaching, we give people new tools so they can grow toward engaging their emotions.”

After decades of working with couples, Milan and Kay can identify a person’s pattern just by talking with them for a few minutes, but the How We Love website, www.howelove.com, includes a short quiz that will help anyone self-identify. That information also can be found in more detail in the book and workbook.

Core Pattern

It’s important to know your unhealthy love style and that of your spouse, because the two together form the key to a couple’s struggle. The juxtaposition of unhealthy love styles causes couples to continually repeat the same arguments over and over, what the Yerkovichs call their core pattern.

“Most couples don’t look back. They don’t even think about how their histories are playing out,” Kay said. “When the two histories collide, you get a predictable pattern that explains the root of the dynamic.”

The Yerkovichs’ process helps couples look at their histories, see how they connect to a love style and notice how a core pattern develops as attachment histories collide. The information will explain how a person’s behavior can trigger the other.

“The physical nearness of your mate triggers old feelings as you look to him or her to meet many of the needs your parents were originally supposed to meet,” they write.

Once a couple identifies a starting spot, they can move forward more productively. The process provides growth goals for the individual styles and helps couples move out of their core pattern. As each become more emotionally healthy, they’ll find they slip into the core pattern less frequently.

Milan noted no matter what problem may have initially prompted a couple to seek his and Kay’s counseling help, they have discovered when they focus on deepening a couples’ bond and connection by addressing each person’s love style, the initial symptoms often lessen as the couple practices new, healthy skills.

Another benefit – compassion between spouses grows as they realize and empathize with their partner’s childhood hurts.

“The ability to console and bring relief to your spouse when he or she is upset and agitated is foundational to a close emotional bond,” they write. “Our marriage relationships will shine the spotlight on our old attachment injuries. The good news is marriage offers an opportunity for you and your mate to be each other’s healer as you face these wounds together.”

How We Love has sold more than 270,000 copies and is now available in German, Romanian, Mandarin, and audio translations. It explains each of the attachment love styles, common complaints, and the nine core patterns that depict the bad dance couples unconsciously follow. Each person will find growth steps to improve, along with new information on the origins of reactivity, called “triggers,” as well as charts, tools and discussion guides that will help any couple begin taking control of their painful dance.

“You only have two choices: take control and change your pattern or let your pattern continue to master you,” they write. The accompanying workbook provides greater depth and growth exercises, and a corresponding six-hour workshop can be taken online or broken into a nine-week study for small groups.

Parents themselves, How We Love has application in parenting, which they’ve expanded in the book, How We Love Our Kids. The Yerkovichs are quick to point out that learning from the past does not mean blaming families of origin.

“There is no perfect parent because we live in a broken world,” Kay said. People cannot give what they don’t have. Most parents were well intentioned and did the best they could with the emotional cards they had been dealt.

However, patterns can be altered. The more a person grows toward the ideal love style of secure connector, the more they can be mindful to parent from a place of emotional stability and pass on a better legacy to their children.

As Milan and Kay explain in How We Love, “Adults who have a secure foundation enter marriage with skills and experiences to draw from when they face relational challenges. Of course, these individuals aren’t perfect; they’re just prepared. Early and ongoing dance lessons like the ones they received make it worlds easier for them to move in unison with their mates.”

“Marriage is as hard or easy as your childhood,” Kay said.

Often Christians don’t want to look back. “We need to learn how our experience can become more sanctified,” Milan said. “God doesn’t erase our C drive. He doesn’t do a disk scan and clear our brain (of bad memories or history). We need to ask, ‘What do we need to do to bring ourselves to look more like Christ?’”

“God peeled back our layers,” Kay said. “We knew we were broken, and we committed to the process of growth as a step of obedience to God. I had to break the unspoken childhood rules to grow.”

“Overall, the church has been deficient in the overall subject of emotional intelligence,” Milan added. “How can we do all the ‘one-another’s’ of scripture, how can we bear each other’s burdens or comfort each other if we don’t share our problems?”

“We are champions for each of these attachment styles becoming more secure and then productive and fruitful,” Milan said. “The core pattern is miserable…. The same old fight, the same old dance. Pain is the ultimate motivator.”

Curious to know your and your spouse’s Love Style and Core Pattern? (or that of the couple you are coaching). Ready to stop going around in circles? Start your growth journey at howwelove.com.