A successful stock-market trader once went to therapy with a very specific request. He had been dating a woman he was really excited about—but now she wasn’t responding to his texts, and he was despondent. He was frustrated with her, but also with himself: with his own sensitivity to rejection, with his sensitivity to everything, with the blaring siren in his brain activated by the tiniest hint of danger. He knew some people would call such delicacy an “anxious attachment style.” So now he was asking to be fixed.
The therapist was Amir Levine: a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and co-author of the 2010 book Attached, which has sold more than 3 million copies. If anyone could excise your anxious attachment and sew you back up, it might be him.
Levine had another idea, he told me on a recent call. He pointed out that the trader had made his fortune predicting trends in the market. His anxious style, Levine suggested, might be part of what gave him that edge: He was hyperaware of subtle indicators that other people hadn’t picked up on yet. Wouldn’t he rather learn to live with himself than become someone else? The client was unconvinced, and he ended up getting his money back. But now Levine has released his second book—Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life—hoping to find a more receptive audience than this man. The subtitle is telling: If you aren’t “secure” yourself, Levine believes, you can still build a secure life. It may just mean taking a red pen to your social environment—and changing some of the major characters in it.
In the popular understanding of attachment theory, there is only one good option. Everyone wants to be “secure”: easygoing, unflappable, comfy-cozy in the belief that others are well intentioned. No one wants to have an anxious style, meaning a hunger for reassurance and intimacy, or an avoidant one, implying distance and self-reliance. (The “fearful avoidant” category involves a combination of yearning for connection and an impulse to push it away—but less is known about that one.) Psychologists have tried to communicate nuance; these terms are only meant to express tendencies, which fall along a spectrum and can change over time, or between relationships. Yet the “insecure” varieties still tend to get pathologized. The common assumption—born in the 1950s, passed on for seven decades since, and sometimes distorted as in a game of telephone—is that anxious and avoidant qualities are reactions to childhood trauma: to caregivers who implicitly taught that love cannot be relied on.
In his new book, Levine argues that those styles can in fact emerge from normal biodiversity, just like many other traits. Some people—those we might call “anxiously attached”—are simply more attuned to environmental cues; that’s why they notice so many portents of rejection or abandonment. They were faster, in one fMRI study, at identifying when a face shifted from a neutral expression to a sad, angry, or happy one. They even pick up more quickly on signals that aren’t social at all. In one study, “anxious attachers,” as Levine calls them, detected and reported smoke rising from a computer before other participants did.
Avoidant attachers truly just need their space. They’re still interested in relationships, but they prefer ample independence. And they tend to be free thinkers, able to act without worrying what everyone else is doing. In the smoke study, while other participants were looking to one another to gauge how to react, the avoidant ones just up and left—and then the others followed.
Levine thinks this all makes sense, evolutionarily: A tribe of animals needs some members who are good at detecting danger and motivated to communicate it. But it also needs some who will stray from the pack—and survive if danger does occur. (In Secure, he relays an anecdote about a herd of 323 reindeer that were all found dead; they’d been huddled for warmth when they were struck by lightning. “It turns out there are risks to being close to others,” he writes.) Such evolutionary explanations are always speculative; you can’t prove or disprove them. But regardless, presenting anxious and avoidant attachers as anything but maladapted is a quietly radical reframing. He even takes the secure style off its pedestal. Although secure types can be wonderfully stabilizing presences, he doesn’t believe they’re always magnanimously rising above social injury; they may just not be very good at picking up on it. A secure person could have a partner with multiple secret families, he said with a laugh, and never suspect a thing.
Yet existence can be harder for the anxious and avoidant among us. The anxious tend to feel wounded when other people pull back. Avoidants tend to accidentally wound others when they themselves pull back. This is why he wanted to write a guide to designing a secure “social habitat,” as he put it to me—one that wouldn’t require people to somehow find a secret, hidden well of security within themselves.
To be clear, people can change. Levine knows this well. His research background is in molecular neuroscience, studying the brain’s plasticity. But that work taught him that what leads to transformation isn’t necessarily sheer willpower; it’s shifts in one’s surroundings. Though most people understand the need for sunscreen, many don’t realize that the brain, like the skin, is an organ with exquisite receptivity to the outside world. And certain people—whom scientists refer to as “orchids”—seem to be especially sensitive to their environments. Unlike “dandelions,” who can prosper just about anywhere, orchids are easily hobbled. But if you give them the right conditions, they can flourish brilliantly. “If I have an orchid,” Levine told me, “I’m not gonna put it out in the storm.”
Thus Secure presents the orchids of the world with a proposal: What if you stopped trying to brave the rain and found a nice, dry pocket of soil? Levine suggests that avoidant attachers find people who support their desire for freedom. Anxious attachers, meanwhile, can seek out people who are “CARRP”—consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable—and downsize bonds with the ones who take forever to text back or who cancel every other plan. He compares that process with a game of wall tennis: matching in intensity what the other person is contributing to the relationship. Levine told me about a time when he had to “become the wall” with his own friend, who for years had been both flaky and emotionally guarded. He stopped reaching out. Now when he has a problem, he calls other people instead.
The book is full of examples, taken from Levine’s pseudonymized clients, of people coming to terms with their own needs and adjusting their social lives accordingly. An anxiously attached man wants more time with his girlfriend than she feels like she can give—so he starts hanging out more with friends, new and old, to scratch his itch for companionship. A fearful-avoidant woman finds that she’s well suited to long-distance friendships, which require less of her finite social energy. When I spoke with Levine, he mentioned one client who’d tried going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings but found that when she arrived, she’d worry about the group dynamic: Did they save a seat for me? Who’s sitting next to whom? It was high school all over again. So she stopped going—but she kept up the one-on-one relationships with people she’d met there. Those bonds have helped her stay sober.
Levine is walking a fine line here. At some points in Secure, I wondered if his approach wasn’t implicitly giving readers permission to lean into their own ways—and to keep looking for people who rise to their standards, rather than working on the ties they already have. Some relationships are both highly difficult and deeply rewarding; some are rewarding because they’re difficult and require us to grow. Now might be an especially good time to remember that. Americans are in an era of friend firing and date ghosting and familial estrangement, of easy and individualized AI companionship, of low social trust, not only in faceless institutions but in other human beings. In a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, nearly half of respondents agreed that “people are not as reliable as they used to be.” Psychologists have found that rates of secure attachment have been dropping since the 1980s. Avoidant and fearful-avoidant styles have been on the rise.
But I don’t think Secure gives anyone a pass for solipsism; it just asks people to be conscious of their own strengths and weaknesses, and perceptive of other people’s as well. Avoidant attachers are counseled to try offering small tokens of presence to keep their loved ones reassured: by, say, briefly acknowledging texts and promising to respond later, or explaining that their own need for solitude is nothing personal. And anxious attachers are reminded that “wall tennis” does not mean cutting people off. When Levine stopped trying so hard to connect with his flaky friend, he told me, that actually strengthened their bond; now he isn’t constantly feeling aggrieved. Occasionally the friend calls, and they have a nice chat. The relationship isn’t abandoned, he said. It’s “right-sized.”
Of course, you could also just ask yourself how a secure person might behave—and do that. You could resolve not to take slights so personally, to stay in constant touch with all your loved ones, to live in the Goldilocks zone of connection, making everyone around you feel both loved and free. You could start today. And to that, Secure says: Good luck! This is a realist’s guide, and it warns that outsize ambitions can backfire: The anxious attachers who belittle themselves for feeling hurt may grow only more distressed. The avoidants who go all in on socializing to appease their loved ones can get so burned-out that they retreat even more dramatically.
Reading this book, what you get instead is a philosophy of acceptance: of yourself, but also of others. People aren’t who you want them to be, after all. They’re just who they are.
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