50 pages • 1 hour read
Amir Levine, Rachel S.F. HellerAttached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “When Attachment Styles Clash”
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “The Anxious-Avoidant Trap”
Levine and Heller examine the relationship between anxious and avoidant partners. Through a series of examples, the authors ask the reader to assess a conflict within each relationship and to question the deeper issue. Each scenario demonstrates the effect of attachment styles on conflict. While the anxious partner craves intimacy, the avoidant partner attempts to maintain distance. This becomes an endless cycle for an anxious-avoidant pairing.
Levine and Heller illustrate this cycle in a diagram that displays the clashing reactions to conflict that characterize anxious-avoidant relationships. While avoidant partners seek to isolate and deactivate, anxious partners seek to engage and activate. To help readers identify the signs of an anxious-avoidant relationship cycle, Levine and Heller list the signs, which include a lack of stability and constant fights about minor issues. The authors warn that intimacy differences can divide partners over time, avoidance of conflict will continue, and the relationship will disintegrate.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Escaping the Anxious-Avoidant Trap: How the Anxious-Avoidant Couple Can Find Greater Security”
Chapter 9 opens with the question of whether there is any solution to the clashing intimacy needs within an avoidant and anxious pairing. To answer this question, Levine and Heller introduce the concept of “security priming,” which asks individuals to recall and draw inspiration from either past successful relationships with secure partners or other successful secure partnerships they have witnessed. Research shows that security priming proves successful in enacting change within avoidant and anxious relationships. Levine and Heller outline steps to aid avoidant and anxious partners in identifying positive secure role models in their lives, and insert information on the lessons avoidant and anxious partners can learn through relationships with their pets. The authors argue that the loving, nonjudgmental attitude owners maintain for their pets can inspire similar attitudes toward romantic partners.
The first step to implementing change is identifying one’s working model, which Levine and Heller define as one’s belief system about relationships. They suggest completing a relationship inventory, where individuals recall all past romantic relationships through the lens of attachment theory. According to Levine and Heller, viewing past experiences through a new lens will help reshape misguided beliefs into secure ones. As a resource for readers, Levine and Heller include a copy of the relationship inventory and an overview of common anxious and avoidant thoughts, emotions, and reactions with related attachment principles. Levine and Heller provide various relationship inventories as successful examples of how the process works. Using research, Levine and Heller emphasize the positive impact of building a secure relationship.
Levine and Heller end the chapter by addressing the question of what happens when change does not occur. One tactic they suggest is to accept that conflicts between attachment styles are inevitable and that no one partner is to blame. While some couples choose to separate, others learn to minimize conflict by lowering expectations for their partners.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “When Abnormal Becomes the Norm: An Attachment Guide to Breaking Up”
Chapter 10 explores anxious-avoidant relationships that cannot find resolution either through change or compromise. Levine and Heller confront two misconceptions about these turbulent relationships—that those in these relationships deserve mistreatment and are replicating childhood trauma. Through the story of Marsha, the authors counter misconceptions and offer hope to those in similar situations.
An intelligent college student, Marsha began a relationship with Craig, a dismissive and emotionally abusive partner who belittled Marsha’s appearance and demanded strict control over their relationship. After years of turmoil, Marsha finally left Craig and found a new, supportive partner. Using Craig’s withholding of sex as an example, Levine and Heller explain the ways avoidants “use sex to distance themselves from their partner” while anxious partners attempt to use sex “to achieve a sense of affirmation” (203-04). Despite Marsha’s best efforts to gain Craig’s approval, she became an enemy in his eyes. The authors posit this occurs frequently to anxious partners paired with avoidants.
Levine and Heller insert a list of signs that this enemy dynamic exists within a relationship. They warn anxious individuals to notice if they hide the mistreatment they receive, they react with surprise to positive comments about their partner, they rely on their partner’s conversations with others for information, they doubt their partner’s reliability during crises, they witness their partner prioritize kindness for strangers, and they suffer the brunt of their partner’s insults. Levine and Heller juxtapose and contrast these behaviors with treatment by a secure partner who regards their partners “like royalty” (207). They conclude this section with a list of warning signs seen in Craig and Marsha’s relationship.
Although Levine and Heller emphasize the positive impact of Marsha’s breakup with Craig on her general happiness, they note how difficult it is for an anxious partner to end their relationship. To successfully extricate herself from their toxic relationship, Marsha implemented the same deactivating strategies used by avoidant Craig. Levine and Heller highlight the need for anxious partners to deactivate from their attachment systems to set themselves free from incompatible partnerships. They recommend anxious partners surround themselves with a strong support system, meet attachment needs through new sources, maintain compassion for themselves, record the reasons for separating, and remind themselves that transitions are temporary.
Part 3, Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Part 3 addresses the unique attraction between anxious and avoidant partners. Levine and Heller aim to produce a realistic but hopeful account of how attachment theory can affect those without a secure attachment style. Chapter 8 defines the issue of the turbulent anxious-avoidant pairing, documenting the attraction between anxious and avoidant partners. The authors use a simile to compare this attraction to a trap—“you fall into it with no awareness, and like a trap, once you’re caught, it’s hard to break free” (157).
With the hopes of educating anxious and avoidant partners about the dangers of entering tumultuous relationships, Levine and Heller again draw on visuals to communicate their point, and represent the cycle of insecurity that anxious-avoidant relationships perpetuate. They label the upper half of a diagram the comfort zone and the lower half the danger zone. These labels communicate the complicated nature of anxious-avoidant relationships. Levine and Heller propose that anxious-avoidant relationships can minimize conflict in the comfort zone, if both anxious and avoidant partners can respectively maintain lowered activation and deactivation. If not, then they enter the danger zone and risk increased conflict.
In Chapter 9, Levine and Heller expand on their positive outlook. While Chapter 8 defines the issue of anxious-avoidant relationships, Chapter 9 discusses how to fix the issue. Rather than advising partners within an anxious-avoidant relationship to end their partnership immediately, Levine and Heller offer concrete steps to help anxious and avoidant partners escape from the trap of conflict. The relationship inventory outlined in Chapter 9 guides readers through the process of self-reflection. Levine and Heller pair the relationship inventory with a resource summarizing the common thoughts, emotions, and reactions of both anxious and avoidant partners to solidify readers’ understanding.
Levine and Heller include multiple examples of sample relationship inventories and record how to analyze these relationships through the lens of attachment theory. Their choices highlight the positive outlook on change that anchors Attached to its greater themes. Levine and Heller highlight the duality of attachment styles, imploring readers to “remember that attachment styles are stable and plastic” (188). They acknowledge the predictability of attachment styles when viewed through the lens of attachment theory, while also comparing these styles to malleable plastic capable of reshaping. This image of flexibility underscores their belief that one can change their attachment style.
Levine and Heller also portray the dark side of anxious-avoidant relationships. They acknowledge how anxious-avoidant relationships can end, and reveal specific steps anxious and avoidant partners can take when incompatibility between attachment styles cannot be resolved. By including Marsha’s story, Levine and Heller introduce the dangerous dynamic that can manifest between anxious and avoidant partners. Anxious Marsha suffers the emotional abuse hurled at her by her avoidant partner Craig and finds peace only when extricating herself from the relationship. Marsha’s story serves as a warning for anxious partners.
As Levine and Heller dissect the elements of Marsha’s story, they discuss signs that a relationship is unable to continue. When an avoidant partner becomes overwhelmed by growing intimacy in a relationship, they can label a partner as the enemy. Levine and Heller argue that this dynamic signals the potential need for separation. With the purpose of guiding readers through separation, Part 3 ends with a summary of nine strategies readers like Marsha can use to escape the potentially toxic cycle in anxious-avoidant relationships.
In this section and throughout the book, the authors blend a discussion of attachment theory with steps readers can take. By addressing various forms of anxious-avoidant relationships, Attached aims to navigate insecure attachments and help readers find freedom form the anxious-avoidant cycle.
