Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

by Amir Levine

connection between infant and caretaker was as essential for the child’s survival as food and water.

when two people form an intimate relationship, they regulate each other’s psychological and emotional well-being.

Once we choose a partner, there is no question about whether dependency exists or not. It always does.

If you want to take the road to independence and happiness, find the right person to depend on and travel down it with that person.

having an attachment figure in the room was enough to allow a child to go out into a previously unknown environment and explore with confidence. This presence is known as a secure base.

Your comfort with intimacy and closeness (or the degree to which you try to avoid intimacy). Your anxiety about your partner’s love and attentiveness and your preoccupation with the relationship.

The secure baby is visibly distressed when mommy leaves the room. When mother returns, he is very happy and eager to greet her. Once in the safety of her presence, he is quick to be reassured, calm down, and resume play activity.

What often happens when we’re dating is that we

censor ourselves for different reasons: We don’t want to sound too eager or needy or we believe it’s too soon to raise a certain topic. However, expressing your needs and true feelings can be a useful litmus test of the other person’s capacity to meet your needs.

If you have an anxious attachment style, you possess a unique ability to sense when your relationship is threatened. Even a slight hint that something may be wrong will activate your attachment system, and once it’s activated, you are unable to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that he or she is truly there for you and that the relationship is safe.

Activating strategies are any thoughts or feelings that compel you to get close, physically or emotionally, to your partner. Once he or she responds to you in a way that reestablishes security, you can revert back to your calm, normal self.

be it by spending many precious hours online at work pretending to be someone else or by constantly talking about him in analysis or to her friends. In this way, she kept him in her mind at all times. All these seemingly erratic thoughts and behaviors—activating strategies—had one goal: to establish closeness with David.

the brains of people with an anxious attachment style react more strongly to thoughts of loss and at the same time under-recruit regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. This means that once your attachment system is activated, you will find it much harder to “turn it off” if you have an anxious attachment style.

The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others. So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again.

WHy anxious people get attracted towards avoidant people?

Avoidants are in the dating pool more frequently and for longer periods of time.

the probability that they have an avoidant attachment style is high—much higher than their relative size in the population—25 percent.

You associate a calm attachment system with boredom and indifference.

Don’t let emotional unavailability turn you on.

By being someone you’re not, you’re allowing another to be with you on his or her own terms and come and go as s/he pleases.

The only way to make sure that you meet potential soul mates is to go out with a lot of people. It’s a simple law of probability—the more you meet, the greater the chances you’ll find the one who is a good match for you.

“Happiness only real when shared.”

A deactivating strategy is any behavior or thought that is used to squelch intimacy. These strategies suppress our attachment system, the biological mechanism in our brains responsible for our desire to seek closeness with a preferred partner.

Joe, 29: “When I was growing up, my father constantly told me not to rely on anyone. He said it so many times it became a mantra in my head: ‘You can only count on yourself!’ I never disputed its truth until I first went to therapy. ‘Relationships? Who needs them?’ I told my shrink. ‘Why would I waste my time being with someone when I can only count on myself.’ My therapist opened my eyes. ‘That’s nonsense!’ he said, ‘Of course you can—and should—count on other people, you do it all the time anyway. We all do.’

My conversation with Barb about not expecting my partner to stnd up for me!

When you find yourself idealizing that one special ex-partner, stop and acknowledge that he or she is not (and never was) a viable option.

even if there is a correlation between attachment style in childhood and in adulthood, it is weak at best.

Sometimes secure people, despite their innate talent for warding off potentially unsuitable matches and making their partners more secure, can find themselves in bad relationships. This can happen not only when they’re inexperienced but also when they respond to their long-term partner’s unacceptable behavior, by continuing to give them the benefit of the doubt and tolerate their actions.

Been there done that

For one, as we’ve seen, people with a secure attachment style view their partners’ well-being as their responsibility. As long as they have reason to believe their partner is in some sort of trouble, they’ll continue to back him or her.

people with a secure attachment style are more likely than others to forgive their partner for wrongdoing. They explain this as a complex combination of cognitive and emotional abilities: “Forgiveness requires difficult regulatory maneuvers . . . understanding a transgressor’s needs and motives, and making generous attributions and appraisals concerning the transgressor’s traits and hurtful actions.

It’s in your best interest to end a dysfunctional relationship rather than get stuck forever with the wrong person just because you’re secure.

need to be reassured a lot that your partner loves you and is attracted to you (at least in the initial phase of a relationship), instead of trying to conceal this wish because it is not socially acceptable to sound so needy, you state it as a given. When presented this way, you don’t come off as either weak or needy but as self-confident and assertive.