Attached Quotes

“When our partner is unable to meet our basic attachment needs, we experience a chronic sense of disquiet and tension that leaves us more exposed to various ailments. Not only is our emotional well-being sacrificed when we are in a romantic partnership with someone who doesn’t provide a secure base, but so is our physical health.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“As adults we don’t play with toys anymore, but we do have to go out into the world and deal with novel situations and difficult challenges. We want to be highly functional at work, at ease and inspired in our hobbies, and compassionate enough to care for our children and partners. If we feel secure, like the infant in the strange situation test when her mother is present, the world is at our feet. We can take risks, be creative, and pursue our dreams. And if we lack that sense of security? If we are unsure whether the person closest to us, our romantic partner, truly believes in us and supports us and will be there for us in times of need, we’ll find it much harder to maintain focus and engage in life. As in the strange situation test, when our partners are thoroughly dependable and make us feel safe, and especially if they know how to reassure us during the hard times, we can turn our attention to all the other aspects of life that make our existence meaningful.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“1. Show basic concern for the other person’s well-being. 2. Maintain focus on the problem at hand. 3. Refrain from generalizing the conflict. 4. Be willing to engage. 5. Effectively communicate feelings and needs.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“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.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Having a partner who is inconsistently available or supportive can be a truly demoralizing and debilitating experience that can literally stunt our growth and stymie our health.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“In a true partnership, both partners view it as their responsibility to ensure the other’s emotional well-being.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“When our partner acts as our secure base and emotional anchor, we derive strength and encouragement to go out into the world and make the most of ourselves. He or she is there to help us become the best person we can be, as we are for them.   Don’t Lose Sight of These Facts: • Your attachment needs are legitimate. • You shouldn’t feel bad for depending on the person you”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“experiences are only meaningful when shared with others”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“People with a secure attachment style know how to communicate their own expectations and respond to their partner’s needs effectively without having to resort to protest behavior.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“[Avoidants] might have sex only rarely -- or never -- with their partner, or fantasize about others while doing so. ... With avoidants, fantasy is not part of a mutual adventure but rather a deactivating strategy to keep them isolated.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Avoidants are not exactly open books and tend to repress rather than express their emotions.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“participants. This is an important lesson for someone with an anxious attachment style: If you just wait a little longer before reacting and jumping to conclusions, you will have an uncanny ability to decipher the world around you and use it to your advantage. But shoot from the hip, and you’re all over the place making misjudgments and hurting yourself. Once activated, they are often consumed”
― Amir Levine, Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the science of adult attachment can help you find – and keep – love

“Attachment theory designates three main “attachment styles,” or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant. Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“The emotions, thought patterns, and behaviors automatically triggered in children in attachment situations appear similarly in adults. The difference is that adults are capable of a higher level of abstraction, so our need for the other person’s continuous physical presence can at times be temporarily replaced by the knowledge that they are available to us psychologically”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Having a partner who fulfills our intrinsic attachment needs and feels comfortable acting as a secure base and safe haven can help us remain emotionally and physically healthier and live longer.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“... 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. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver, in their book Attachment in Adulthood, show that 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 . . . Secure people are likely to offer relatively benign explanations of their partners' hurtful actions and be inclined to forgive the partner." Also, as we've seen previously in this chapter, secure people just naturally dwell less on the negative and can turn off upsetting emotions without becoming defensively distant.
The good news is that people with a secure attachment style have healthy instincts and usually catch on very early that someone is not cut out to be their partner. The bad news is that when secure people do, on occasion, enter into a negative relationship, they might not know when to call it quits--especially if it's a long-term, committed relationship in which they feel responsible for their partner's happiness.”
― Amir Levine & Rachel S.F. Heller, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Effectively expressing your emotional needs is even better than the other person magically reading your mind. It means that you’re an active agent who can be heard, and it opens the door for a much richer emotional dialogue.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Avoidants often use sex to distance themselves from their partner. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will cheat on their partner, although studies have shown that they are more likely to do so than other attachment types. Phillip Shaver, in a study with then University of California-Davis graduate student Dory Schachner, found that of the three styles, avoidants would more readily make a pass at someone else’s partner or respond to such a proposition.

Intriguingly, they also found that avoidant men and women were more likely to engage in less sex if their partner had an anxious attachment style! Researchers believe that in relationships like Marsha and Craig’s, there is less lovemaking because the anxious partner wants a great deal of physical closeness and this in turn causes the avoidant partner to withdraw further. What better way to avoid intimacy than by reducing sex to a bare minimum.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Susan, who has an avoidant attachment style, ... sees need as a weakness and looks down on people who become dependent on their partner,”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Numerous studies show that once we become attached to someone, the two of us form one physiological unit. Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the levels of hormones in our blood. We are no longer separate entities. The emphasis on differentiation that is held by most of today’s popular psychology approaches to adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective. Dependency is a fact; it is not a choice or a preference.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Five Secure Principles for Resolving Conflict 1. Show basic concern for the other person’s well-being. 2. Maintain focus on the problem at hand. 3. Refrain from generalizing the conflict. 4. Be willing to engage. 5. Effectively communicate feelings and needs.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“There is a major difference between couples who are dealing with non-attachment-related issues and those who are engaged in intimacy struggles. While the first couples want to find a common ground and reach a resolution that will bring them closer together, the latter either engage in ongoing, irreconcilable fights or one of the two is forced to compromise unilaterally in areas that are near and dear to him or her.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“You might be too enmeshed with the other person, or “codependent,” and you must learn to set better “boundaries.”

The basic premise underlying this point of view is that the ideal relationship is one between two self-sufficient people who unite in a mature, respectful way while maintaining clear boundaries. If you develop a strong dependency on your partner, you are deficient in some way and are advised to work on yourself to become more “differentiated” and develop a “greater sense of self.” The worst possible scenario is that you will end up needing your partner, which is equated with “addiction” to him or her, and addiction, we all know, is a dangerous prospect.

While the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse (as was the initial intention), they can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“In prehistoric times, people who relied only on themselves and had no one to protect them were more likely to end up as prey.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Other studies have found that faced with a stressful life event ... avoidants' defenses are quick to break down and they then appear and behave just like people with an anxious attachment style.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Whether plain or gorgeous, we've learned to appreciate [secure-type people] for what they really are -- the "supermates" of evolution -- and we hope that you will too.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“The more attuned you are to your partner's needs at the early stages -- and he or she to yours -- the less energy you will need to expend attending to him or her later.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“They rarely search inside themselves for the reason for their dissatisfaction, and even more rarely seek help or even agree to get help when their partner suggests they do so. Unfortunately, until they look inward or seek counseling, change is not likely to occur.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“By using the abundance philosophy, you maintain your ability to evaluate potential partners more objectively. What you are actually doing is desensitizing your attachment system and tricking it into being easier on you.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

“Paradoxically, the opposite is true! It turns out that the ability to step into the world on our own often stems from the knowledge that there is someone beside us whom we can count on—and this is the “dependency paradox.”
― Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love