book review: attached - Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller

Whew. While I highly recommend this book to everyone, it comes with words of caution: you WILL be called out by it if you have an avoidant or anxious attachment style. If you have the capability to sit in discomfort and to be honest with yourself about your tendencies, you will find it to be an incredibly rewarding read.

Attached does a great job of breaking down attachment theory, highlighting common behaviors of each attachment style - anxious, secure, avoidant - and providing real insight behind the cause of unhealthy attachment and how to become more secure in your relationships. No matter what your current relationship status is - seeking love, in a committed relationship, or recently broken up, there are nuggets of wisdom that will improve current and future relationships. The information isn't specific to romantic relationships, either; the majority of it also applies to platonic friendships as well. I came away from the book with a greater appreciation of how much my attachment style impacted the relationships in my life and with a game plan for achieving more security.

As an anxiously attached person-in-healing, one thing I really appreciated about Attached was its approach to dependency and codependency. Attached highlights how society has stigmatized relying on someone else, and states unequivocally that there is nothing wrong with depending on someone in a relationship. Furthermore, it reiterates that dependency is the bedrock of a strong relationship and helps forge deeper bonds between people. Codependency can be harmful depending on the circumstances, but that doesn't mean that we all need to go it alone as we face the challenges of life. Becoming secure does necessitate being able to sit with my emotions and become better at self-soothing, but it was refreshing to hear an approach that embraced dependency as a positive in a relationship.

Whether you are anxious, avoidant, or secure, you will be shocked at how deadly accurate Attached is at describing the behaviors associated with your attachment style. The hardest part of the read for me was facing the harmful behaviors associated with anxious attachment and recognizing them in how I have showed up in relationships. Rumination is closely associated with an anxious attachment style, and when I was forced to face how my past behaviors had been self-sabotaging it initially caused a lot of guilt and regret. The further I got in the book, the more comfortable I became with the idea of forgiving myself for not having the tools to navigate those past situations better. If the book has an unstated overaraching theory, it is to reframe your negative thought patterns - which are often based on valid emotions, needs, or concerns - into more constructive frameworks. Punishing myself for things that I can't change further prevents myself from becoming more secure. When I learned to view past interactions that I feel badly about as opportunities to grow and change, I was finally able to grasp the control that I would constantly seek but never achieve through rumination.

Another difficult aspect of the book is how simple most of it seems. Being straighforward about how you feel isn't exactly groundbreaking advice, but it's something that so often eludes us in relationships. Attached does a great job highlighting that when our attachment wounds are activated, it is almost as if our logical thinking goes right out the window and some sort of unhealthy autopilot (the emotional equivalent of a Tesla in self-driving mode, my words not the authors') takes over. It's easy to identify healthy thought processes when you're reading from the comfort of your bed, but it's another challenge entirely to put them into practice when your attachment system is activated. The journey to security involves not only healing our attachment wounds, but communicating our needs and emotions clearly and kindly. It also requires recognizing when relationships are not serving us or are making us more prone to an activated attachment system .

Attached helped me realize that my emotions and needs are valid, aren't too much, and aren't unreasonable. What needed adjustment was how I communicated my needs and how I reacted when I feared that they would go unmet. Again, this sounds so simple, and for securely attached individuals it usually is. Anxious and avoidant individuals are fighting against their neurological and biological impulses to protect themselves in the way that they learned worked for them. Their inner child is seizing control of their nervous system and pushing them towards the only behavior that they have ever known. A thought exercise that has helped me soothe and redirect this inner child is by imagining adult-me comforting the youger version of myself. It has helped me realize that like that child, I am deserving of love and an environment that cultivates safety and understanding for my vulnerability.