Attached The New Science Quotes

Most people are only as needy as their unmet needs.

Instead of thinking how you can change yourself in order to please your partner, as so many relationship books advise, think: Can this person provide what I need in order to be happy?

The trick is not to get hooked on the highs and lows and mistake an activated attachment system for passion or love. Don't let emotional unavailability turn you on.

Feeling close and complete with someone else -- the emotional equivalent of finding a home

True love, in the evolutionary sense, means peace of mind. “Still waters run deep” is a good way of characterizing it.

If you're still in a relationship, remember that just because you can get along with anyone doesn't mean you have to. If you're unhappy after having tried every way to make things work, chances are that you should move on. 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.

Anxious people may take a very long time to get over a bad attachment, and they don't get to decide how long it will take. Only when every single cell in their body is completely convinced that there is no chance that their partner will change or that they will ever reunite will they be able to deactivate and let go.

It's important to remember that even with effective communication, some problems won't be solved immediately. What's vital is your partner's response--whether he or she is concerned about your well-being, has your best interests in mind, and is willing to work on things.

Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs. When their emotional needs are met, and the earlier the better, they usually turn their attention outward. This is sometimes referred to in attachment literature as the “dependency paradox”: The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

if you're with someone secure, they nurture you into a more secure stance.

When your partner feels s/he has a secure base to fall back on (and doesn't feel the need to work hard to get close), and when you don't feel the need to distance yourself, you'll both be better able to look outward and do your own thing.

Usually, if you address things that are bothering you from the get-go and receive a positive response, our whole demeaner will change. Worries and fears surface more when you are not communicating your concerns and are letting things build up.

Hot sex doesn’t lead to secure love; rather, secure attachment leads to hot sex—and also to love that lasts. Monogamy is not a myth.

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

The best predictor of a child's security of attachment is not what happened to his parents as children, but rather how his parents made sense of those childhood experiences.

Getting attached means that our brain becomes wired to seek the support of our partner by ensuring their psychological and physical proximity. If our partner fails to reassure us, we are programmed to continue our attempts

Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened.

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.

Oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide ... plays a major role in attachment processes and serves several purposes: It causes women to go into labor, strengthens attachment, and ... [increases] trust and cooperation. We get a boost of oxytocin in our brain during orgasm and even when we cuddle -- which is why it's been tagged the "cuddle hormone." How is oxytocin related to conflict reduction? Sometimes we spend less quality time with our partner -- especially when other demands on us are pressing. However, neuroscience findings suggest that we should change our priorities. By forgoing closeness with our partners, we are also missing our oxytocin boost -- making us less agreeable to the world around us and more vulnerable to conflict.

Studies have found that the same areas in the brain that light up in imaging scans when we break a leg are activated when we split up with our mate. As part of a reaction to a breakup, our brain experiences the departure of an attachment figure in a similar way to that in which it registers physical pain.

There are many charming, intelligent people out there who can make you happy, but there are also many who are not right for you. 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.

experiences are only meaningful when shared with others

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.

In a true partnership, both partners view it as their responsibility to ensure the other’s emotional well-being.

After all, our brain assigns our partner the task of being our secure base, the person we use as an emotional anchor and a safe haven, the one we turn to in time of need. We are programmed to seek their emotional availability.

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.

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!

All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure(s).

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.

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.

...mismatched attachment styles can lead to a great deal of unhappiness in marriage, even for people who love each other greatly. If you are in such a relationship, don't feel guilty for feeling incomplete or unsatisfied. After all, your most basic needs often go unmet, and love alone isn't enough to make the relationship work.

Remember, an activated attachment system is not passionate love. Next time you date someone and find yourself feeling anxious, insecure, and obsessive—only to feel elated every once in a while—tell yourself this is most likely an activated attachment system and not love! True love, in the evolutionary sense, means peace of mind.

Avoidants are not exactly open books and tend to repress rather than express their emotions.

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.

You now live in suspense, anticipating that next small remark or gesture that will reassure you. After living like this for a while, you start to do something interesting. You start to equate the anxiety, the preoccupation, the obsession, and those ever-so-short bursts of joy with love. What you’re really doing is equating an activated attachment system with passion.

Our friends advertise the kaleidoscope of ways we can live. They expose us to new ways of being in the world, showing us another life is possible.

Love-that which biologists, nervous about being misunderstood call "attachment"-fuels the bond between dog and master or mistress.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A general word of advice: It’s always more effective to assume the best in conflict situations. In fact, expecting the worst—which is typical of people with insecure attachment styles—often acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume your partner will act hurtfully or reject you, you automatically respond defensively—thus starting a vicious cycle of negativity.

Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,” and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.” This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the stoned ape: by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate ancestors into Homo sapiens.

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

It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? — … There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. [Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787]

With every clash, the anxious person loses more ground: During bitter fights between anxious and avoidant partners, when there are no secure checks and balances in place, people with anxious attachment style tend to get overwhelmed by negative emotions. When they feel hurt, they talk, think, and act in an extreme manner, even to the point of threatening to leave (protest behavior). However, once they calm down, they become flooded with positive memories and are then overcome with regret. They reach out to their partner in an attempt to reconcile. But they are often met with a hostile response, because avoidants react differently to a fight. They

In prehistoric times, people who relied only on themselves and had no one to protect them were more likely to end up as prey.

A secure base is a prerequisite for a child’s ability to explore, develop, and learn.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain. As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen. The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work. Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed. Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally. Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence. So why does Daniel feel like something more?

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.

Unfortunately, just as the importance of the parent-child bond was disregarded in the past, today the significance of adult attachment goes unappreciated. Among adults, the prevailing notion is still that too much dependence in a relationship is a bad thing.

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.

Attachment patterns are one of the few dimensions of human life that appear to be largely independent of genetic influence. We can see this quite directly

Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.

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

All knowledge is conjectural and ... science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes. Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him? (Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A 1934 Symposium published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941; from Einstein's Out of My Later Years, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970, pp. 26-27.)

Attachment is about survival; relationships are about survival. When they are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects.

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.

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.

Despite rejection by the establishment, Bowlby pioneered on, giving form to a theory of what he called attachment. (The story goes that when asked by his wife why he didn’t give it its rightful name, a theory of love, he replied, “What? I’d be laughed out of science.”)

reexamine your recollections of past relationship experiences from a fresh new perspective. Viewing them through an attachment lens will allow you to change some unhelpful beliefs that rely on those particular memories, and by so doing reshape your working model into a more secure one.

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.

True love, in the evolutionary sense, means peace of mind.

Not only do they influence how we feel about ourselves but also the degree to which we believe in ourselves and whether we will attempt to achieve our hopes and dreams.

In the right context, sex can attach us emotionally to new partners or reinforce emotional bonds in unstable relationships.

Attachment is love.

When we feel distressed, our attachment object is our safe haven. Even—or perhaps especially—if our attachment object is the source of our distress.

We can think of insecure attachment as fitting into two different strategies: anxious and avoidant.

we live in a culture that seems to scorn basic needs for intimacy, closeness, and especially dependency, while exalting independence. We tend to accept this attitude as truth—to our detriment.

being your authentic self, which has been found to contribute to our general feelings of happiness and fulfillment, and being happy and fulfilled is probably one of the most attractive traits you can offer a partner.

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.

If, for example, your parent had a rough childhood and was unable to make sense of what happened, he or she would be likely to pass on that harshness to you—and you, in turn, would be at risk for passing it along to your children. Yet parents who had a tough time in childhood but did make sense of those experiences were found to have children who were securely attached to them. They had stopped handing down the family legacy of nonsecure attachment.

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.

We can honestly say that everyone we've known who has used effective communication has been grateful for it in the long run. Often, effective communication brings about huge relief by showing you just how strongly your partner feels about you -- and by strengthening the bond between you two. And even though in some instances the response may not be what you hoped for and you'll be convinced that you've ruined everything -- if only you had said or done something else, he would surely have come around -- we've never heard anyone say in retrospect that they regretted raising an important issue in a dating or relationship setting. In fact, they overwhelmingly express gratitude that effective communication got them that one step closer to their long-term goal of either finding the right person or strengthening their existing bond.

significantly in his work by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian researcher who helped give shape to his ideas and test them. Together, they identified four elements of attachment: •We seek out, monitor, and try to maintain emotional and physical connection with our loved ones. Throughout life, we rely on them to be emotionally accessible, responsive, and engaged with us. •We reach out for our loved ones particularly when we are uncertain, threatened, anxious, or upset. Contact with them gives us a sense of having a safe haven, where we will find comfort and emotional support; this sense of safety teaches us how to regulate our own emotions and how to connect with and trust others. •We miss our loved ones and become extremely upset when they are physically or emotionally remote; this separation anxiety can become intense and incapacitating. Isolation is inherently traumatizing for human beings. •We depend on our loved ones to support us emotionally and be a secure base as we venture into the world and learn and explore. The more we sense that we are effectively connected, the more autonomous and separate we can be.

... 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.

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.

True, in modern society, we are not hunted by predators as our ancestors were, but in evolutionary terms we’re only a fraction of a second away from the old scheme of things. Our emotional brain was handed down to us by Homo sapiens who lived in a completely different era, and it is their lifestyle and the dangers they encountered that our emotions were designed to address. Our feelings and behaviors in relationships today are not very different from those of our early ancestors.

Men become attached to certain particular sciences and speculations, either because they fancy themselves the authors and inventors thereof, or because they have bestowed the greatest pains upon them and become most habituated to them. But men of this kind, if they betake themselves to philosophy and contemplation of a general character, distort and color them in obedience to their former fancies; a thing especially to be noticed in Aristotle, who made his natural philosophy a mere bond servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well-nigh useless.

Psychologists Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper (1991) propose that a father’s presence or absence early in a child’s life can calibrate the kind of sexual strategy he or she adopts later in life. Individuals growing up in fatherless homes during the first 5 to 7 years of life, according to this theory, develop the expectations that parental resources will not be reliably or predictably provided and that adult pair bonds will not be enduring. These individuals adopt a sexual strategy marked by early sexual maturation, early sexual initiation, and frequent partner switching—a strategy designed to produce a large number of offspring, with little investment in each. Extraverted and impulsive personality traits might accompany this strategy. Other individuals are perceived as untrustworthy, relationships as transitory. Resources sought from brief sexual liaisons are opportunistically attained. Individuals who have a reliably investing father during their first 5 to 7 years of life, according to this theory, develop a different set of expectations about the nature and trustworthiness of others. People are seen as reliable and trustworthy, and relationships are expected to be enduring. These early environmental experiences channel individuals toward a long-term mating strategy—delayed sexual maturation, later onset of sexual activity, a search for securely attached long-term adult relationships, and heavy investment in children.

A final word for you—the anxious reader. There is no one for whom attachment theory has more to offer than men and women with an anxious attachment style. Although you suffer the consequences of a bad match and an activated attachment system more intensely, you also stand to gain the most from understanding how the attachment system works, which relationships have the capacity to make you happy, and which situations can make you a nervous wreck. We have witnessed people who have managed to walk away from loneliness to find the companionship they longed for, using the principles outlined in this chapter. We’ve also witnessed people who have been in long-term relationships that brought out the worst in them, but understanding and utilizing attachment principles marked the beginning of a new phase of their relationship—a more secure phase.

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround. Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed me out.) However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die! McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge. The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.

Your partner/date has an anxious attachment style. Someone with an anxious attachment style craves intimacy but is also very sensitive to even the smallest of perceived threats to this closeness. Sometimes they’ll interpret your unconscious actions as a threat to the relationship. When this happens, they become flooded with apprehension, but they lack the skills to communicate their distress to you effectively. Instead, they resort to a lot of acting out and drama. This can create a vicious cycle as they become even more sensitive to slights and their distress is compounded. This does sound daunting, but before you call it quits, it is important to know that if you’re sensitive and nurturing enough to calm their fears—which is very doable—you will win a greatly loving and devoted partner. Once you are receptive to their basic needs for warmth and security, their sensitivity can become an asset; they’ll be very much in tune with your wants and will be helpful and dedicated. What’s more, they will also gradually learn how to communicate their fears and emotions better and you will need to second-guess them less and less.

We remark, first, that in all ages, and especially in primitive philosophy, words such as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted an extraordinary influence over the minds of men. The meagreness or negativeness of their content has been in an inverse ratio to their power. They have become the forms under which all things were comprehended. There was a need or instinct in the human soul which they satisfied; they were not ideas, but gods, and to this new mythology the men of a later generation began to attach the powers and associations of the elder deities. The idea of good is one of those sacred words or forms of thought, which were beginning to take the place of the old mythology. It meant unity, in which all time and all existence were gathered up. It was the truth of all things, and also the light in which they shone forth, and became evident to intelligences human and divine. It was the cause of all things, the power by which they were brought into being. It was the universal reason divested of a human personality. It was the life as well as the light of the world, all knowledge and all power were comprehended in it. The way to it was through the mathematical sciences, and these too were dependent on it. To ask whether God was the maker of it, or made by it, would be like asking whether God could be conceived apart from goodness, or goodness apart from God.

Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.

The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.