Amir Levine, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It 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.”

• “Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs.”

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

• “They calm themselves quickly and effectively, reconnect easily with their mothers on their return, and rapidly resume playing while checking to make sure that their moms are still around. They seem confident that their mothers will be there if needed. Less resilient youngsters, however, are anxious and aggressive or detached and distant on their mothers’ return. The kids who can calm themselves usually have warmer, more responsive mothers, while the moms of the angry kids are unpredictable in their behavior and the moms of detached kids are colder and dismissive. In these simple studies of disconnection and reconnection, Bowlby saw love in action and began to code its patterns.”

• “The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be. Although this flies in the face of our culture’s creed of self-sufficiency, psychologist Brooke Feeney of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found exactly that in observations of 280 couples. Those who felt that their needs were accepted by their partners were more confident about solving problems on their own and were more likely to successfully achieve their own goals.”

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

• “When we love our partner well, we offer a blueprint for a loving relationship to our children and their partners. Better relationships between love partners are not just a personal preference, they are a social good. Better love relationships mean better families. And better, more loving families mean better, more responsive communities.”

• “If you know your loved one is there and will come when you call, you are more confident of your worth, your value. And the world is less intimidating when you have another to count on and know that you are not alone.”

• “If you have a responsive love partner, you have a secure base in the chaos. If you are emotionally alone, you are in free fall. Having someone you can rely on for connection and support makes healing from trauma easier.”

• “The quality of our love relationships is also a big factor in how mentally and emotionally healthy we are. We have an epidemic of anxiety and depression in our most affluent societies. Conflict with and hostile criticism from loved ones increase our self-doubts and create a sense of helplessness, classic triggers for depression. We need validation from our loved ones. Researchers say that marital distress raises the risk for depression tenfold!”

• “When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the hurts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them.”

• “The message of EFT is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same. EFT focuses on creating and strengthening this emotional bond between partners by identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving relationship: being open, attuned, and responsive to each other.”

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.”

• “... 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.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “If you're with someone secure, they nurture you into a more secure stance.”

• “People with a secure attachment style are more likely than others to forgive their partner for wrongdoing. ...secure people just naturally dwell less on the negative and can turn off upsetting emotions without becoming defensively distant.”

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

• “Maybe there is something deeply wrong with me,” Carol tells me. “It’s just like my mom used to say, I am too difficult to love.” 

• “How did this way of dealing with emotion work to keep the most important relationships in your life intact?”

• “When that person is emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, we face being out in the cold, alone and helpless. We are assailed by emotions — anger, sadness, hurt, and above all, fear. This is not so surprising when we remember that fear is our built-in alarm system; it turns on when our survival is threatened. Losing connection with our loved one jeopardizes our sense of security. The alarm goes off in the brain’s amygdala, or Fear Central,”

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

• “If you have an anxious attachment style, you tend to get attached very quickly, even just on the basis of physical attraction. One night of sex or even just a passionate kiss and, boom, you already can't get that person out of your mind. As you know, once your attachment system is activated, you begin to crave the other person's closeness and will do anything in your power to make it work even before you really get to know him/her and decide whether you like that person or not!” 

• “If you're anxious, when you start to feel something is bothering you in a relationship, you tend to quickly get flooded with negative emotions and think in extremes. Unlike your secure counterpart, you don't expect your partner to respond positively but anticipate the opposite. You perceive the relationship as something fragile and unstable that can collapse at any moment. These thoughts and assumptions make it hard for you to express your needs effectively.”

• “Our culture encourages you [with an anxious attachment style] to believe that many of your needs are illegitimate. But whether they are legitimate or not for someone else is beside the point. They are essential for your happiness, and that is what's important.”

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

• “Maybe there is something deeply wrong with me,” Carol tells me. “It’s just like my mom used to say, I am too difficult to love.” 

• “How did this way of dealing with emotion work to keep the most important relationships in your life intact?”

• “When that person is emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, we face being out in the cold, alone and helpless. We are assailed by emotions — anger, sadness, hurt, and above all, fear. This is not so surprising when we remember that fear is our built-in alarm system; it turns on when our survival is threatened. Losing connection with our loved one jeopardizes our sense of security. The alarm goes off in the brain’s amygdala, or Fear Central,”

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.”

• “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.”

• “If you're avoidant, you connect with romantic partners but always maintain some mental distance and an escape route.”

• “Susan, who has an avoidant attachment style, ... sees need as a weakness and looks down on people who become dependent on their partner,”

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

• “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

• “The more I _________, the more you _________ and then the more I _________, and round and round we go.”

• “The longer partners feel disconnected, the more negative their interactions become.”

• “What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.”

• “When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant.”

• “When love doesn’t work, we hurt. Indeed, “hurt feelings” is a precisely accurate phrase, according to psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California. Her brain imaging studies show that rejection and exclusion trigger the same circuits in the same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate, as physical pain.”

• “Curiosity comes out of a sense of safety; rigidity out of being vigilant to threats.”

• “In insecure relationships, we disguise our vulnerabilities so our partner never really sees us.”

• “If I appeal to you for emotional connection and you respond intellectually to a problem, rather than directly to me, on an attachment level I will experience that as “no response.” This is one of the reasons that the research on social support uniformly states that people want “indirect” support, that is, emotional confirmation and caring from their partners, rather than advice.”

• “When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness...”

• “We have to dive below to discover the basic problem: these couples have disconnected emotionally; they don’t feel emotionally safe with each other. What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.”

• “Sociologist James House of the University of Michigan declares that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two!”

Heidi Priebe

If you do not learn to meet your needs directly, you will learn to meet them neurotically.

You will develop routines and relationships and rituals that are designed to help you get just enough of what you want without having to ask for it directly.

But never enough to feel fulfilled. To be fulfilled, we must go straight to the source. We must extract whatever it is that is fuelling our anxieties and ego trips and neurotic compulsions and fears and we must face that.

Otherwise, we can waste a whole lifetime trying to understand what the soul – at its core – already knows.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

• “To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”

• “But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

• “One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, to this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

• “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”

• “Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.”

Daniel J. Siegel, Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive

• “We are not meant to live in isolation, but are dependent on one another for emotional well-being.”

• “Children are particularly vulnerable to becoming the targets of the projection of our nonconscious emotions and unresolved issues.”

• “Awareness creates the possibility of choice.”

• “Taking time to reflect opens the door to conscious awareness, which brings with it the possibility of change.”

• “When we become parents we are given an incredible opportunity to grow as individuals because we ourselves are put back into an intimate parent-child relationship, this time in a different role.”

• “All of this research have further demonstrated this crucial parenting from the inside out principle: making sense of your life is the best gift you can give your child, or yourself.”

Diane Poole Heller, The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships

• “Our attachment style isn’t something that we can talk or wish our way out of; it’s deep inside of us, and it is always active automatically. For this reason, it is crucial to have compassion for yourself. We need to have compassion for others too, of course, but it’s critical that compassion begins at home.”

• “Self-regulation and co-regulation are both needed and beneficial throughout our lifetime. Many of us have established techniques to regulate our own nervous system—yoga, breathing practices, physical exercise, and meditation—and I don’t want to diminish the importance of how helpful those can be. Being comfortable in your own skin and having tools that help you relax is a really big deal, but learning how to feel safe with others is revolutionary.”

• “When your nervous system can co-regulate with other people, and you feel safe and playful and relaxed, you can develop a stronger sense of secure attachment and enjoy its profound rewards, no matter what environment you grew up in.”

• “—a definition of trauma should include “broken connection.” Accordingly, our healing comes in the form of reconnection—to our own body, mind, and spirit, but also to other people (especially”

• “Couples therapist and author Marion Solomon writes about “positive dependency.”3 Dependency gets a bad rap, like it’s a derogatory word, but dependency can be generative, connective, and healthy. It’s important that we learn to meet our own needs, of course, but we also need to receive support from others and offer to meet their needs, as well. Doing so makes relationships valuable and rewarding.”

• “our brain is designed with neuroplasticity. In other words, it is constructed to allow for growth and adaptation. As adults, this means that we can affect our neural pathways and steer them in the direction of secure attachment. We are fundamentally designed to heal. Even if our childhood was less than ideal, our secure attachment system is biologically programmed in us, and our job is to find out more about what’s interfering with it and learn what we can do to make those secure tendencies more dominant. Our goal is to excavate our secure attachment so that it will eventually prevail over any relational trauma or attachment disruption that comes up—or at least that we might become more resilient and recover more quickly from distress.”

• “We can never be completely safe, but we can move toward relative safety. We will never have our needs met perfectly, and we will never be (nor have) the perfect parent. Thankfully, that’s not required for deep and lasting healing. As we grow out of our wounded self and become a more securely attached, resilient being, we can foster the same process in others, becoming intimacy initiators and connection coaches for our families, friends, and the larger world.”

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

• “It is very important that you be compassionate with yourself. The worse you feel about yourself, the more you'll want to go back to the false safety of the bad relationship you were in. Your attachment system gets activated more when you feel bad about yourself”

• “...being happy and fulfilled is probably one of the most attractive traits you can offer a partner.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

• “Until we address the fundamental need for connection and the fear of losing it, the standard techniques, such as learning problem-solving or communication skills, examining childhood hurts, or taking time-outs, are misguided and ineffectual.”

• “Emotional connection is crucial to healing. In fact, trauma experts overwhelmingly agree that the best predictor of the impact of any trauma is not the severity of the event, but whether we can seek and take comfort from others.”

• “Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me?”

• “We need validation from our loved ones. Researchers say that marital distress raises the risk for depression tenfold!”

• “Injuries may be forgiven, but they never disappear. Instead, in the best outcome, they become integrated into couples’ attachment stories as demonstrations of renewal and connection.”

• “Love has an immense ability to help heal the devastating wounds that life sometimes deals us. Love also enhances our sense of connection to the larger world. Loving responsiveness is the foundation of a truly compassionate, civilized society.”

• “We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence. This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive.”

Daniel J Siegel, Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive

• Research in the field of child development has demonstrated that a child’s security of attachment to parents is very strongly connected to the parents’ understanding of their own early-life experiences...If you had a difficult childhood but have come to make sense of those experiences, you are not bound to re-create the same negative interactions with your own children. Without such self-understanding, however, science has shown that history will likely repeat itself, as negative patterns of family interactions are passed down through the generations.”

• “When parents don’t take responsibility for their own unfinished business, they miss an opportunity not only to become better parents but also to continue their own development. People who remain in the dark about the origins of their behaviors and intense emotional responses are unaware of their unresolved issues and the parental ambivalence they create.”

• “How we treat our children changes who they are and how they will develop. Their brains need our parental involvement. Nature needs nurture.”

• “When we are preoccupied with the past or worried about the future, we are physically present with our children but are mentally absent.”

• “It is confusing to children if their reality of an experience is denied or misunderstood by their parent or another significant adult, because those are the very people with whom they most need to connect.”

• “Making sense of life can free parents from patterns of the past that have imprisoned them in the present.”

• “History often repeats itself, and parents are vulnerable to passing on to their children unhealthy patters from the past. Understanding our lives can free us from the otherwise almost predictable situation in which we recreate the damage to our children that was done to us in our own childhoods.”

The Mindful Parent by Shirley Pastiroff

• “So much has been taught and written from the starting point of changing our children, but in my experience – both personally and professionally – it doesn’t work so well. If you have ever tried to change anyone else, be they a partner or a friend, you’ll know how hard it is. Our main responsibility, even as a parent, is our own responses. And it’s our own response that are the key to gently shifting anything we’d like to change in our relationship with our children.”