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Amir Levine is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, an associate professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, and the coauthor of the mega-bestseller Attached.
I just read and loved his new book, which is called, Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life.
Today, we review the four attachment styles and the myths surrounding them. Amir explains how each of us—regardless of our starting point—can flex and become more secure in our relationships. He takes us through his tools for those of us who tend to be more anxious, and his strategies for those of us who tend to be more avoidant. He explains why certain seemingly insignificant minor interactions—which he calls SIMIs—have an outsize effect on our brains and our intimate relationships.
We talk about a lot of psychological phenomena that I think will resonate with many of you—from attachment gaslighting to something called “the protest-regret cycle.” Amir offers some advice for turning down the volume on the insecure attachments in your life, and for finding what he calls the hidden sparks of talent in our partners and in our ourselves.
This conversation was such a delightful one!
MORE FROM AMIR LEVINE, M.D.
Amir Levine’s Website
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ELISE:
I love the premise of this book and the spirit in which it’s offered, which is once we have an understanding of attachment, how do we become more secure? And as a testament to this book, I workout with a handful of friends a few times a week and I wasn’t diagnosing them, but we were talking about one is avoidant and one is anxious. And I was like, “For you two, you really need some ... “ I was explaining essentially the book and I think that’s a sign that this book also will have legs as it goes out into the world. So it did Attach. It didn’t launch as a bestseller. It just ... How many copies have you sold? Millions?
AMIR:
Oh yeah. It’s like more than three million copies.
ELISE:
Isn’t that crazy? That is so- That’s insane, right? Edge case and books. And it’s just done it slowly over time.
AMIR:
Yeah. And I think this whole idea of attachment styles is just such a powerful, something that comes from research. And before these attachment style, before we translated it into something that people can use in everyday life, it was just buried in all these lingo, scientific lingo. And it was a challenge to take it and create it into something that people can use. And I think in this book, I go a step further because I don’t even ... I have to tell you, now I think about attachment styles as a starting point, not really a diagnosis. And also in this book, I talk about how it can change from relationship to relationship and how it’s not set in stone and how it doesn’t necessarily come from childhood. All these different myths that people have about it, I really try to append that in this book and really give a much more up-to-date information.
Attachment styles are really your starting point and you can get so much further. If you learn the brain logic of attachment, you can really open it up and change a lot. So it was important for me to get this message out. Here’s
ELISE:
What you
AMIR:
Can do to change.
ELISE:
Yeah. I want to go into all of that, including this idea of it being a starting block or a way that maybe you are designed or patterned rather than a foregone conclusion that’s your parents’ fault, because I found that particularly relieving. I am secure, anxious, and I’m married to someone who is secure, avoidant. And so even- It sounds
AMIR:
Similar.
ELISE:
Yeah, you’re probably the same. And it’s funny, we saw very occasionally, we haven’t been in years, and I’ve talked about this on the podcast, but many years ago we went to see this marriage therapist here, Stan Tatkin, who uses a version of attachment theory. Yeah. And he has his own, he trains therapist. He’s amazing, is sort of a legend, and you go in and you bootcamp with him, and he puts you on tape, and he puts you into conflict. And the whole thing is the content is boring. I do not care what you ... We’re not here to litigate rights and wrongs. If you want to have a successful partnership, you need to know the animal that you’re with. And it was so helpful and revelatory that we don’t need a recurrent therapist to process what’s happening between us because I know his patterns and he understands mine.
And that’s why I think your book is such a gift because even reading it, I was like, I need to remind Rob as an avoidant how to manage me when I go into anxiety so that I don’t make his avoidance worse and he doesn’t make my anxiety worse. So let’s start at the beginning.
AMIR:
Okay.
ELISE:
Let’s start with, I guess there are four. And your point is the more secure we can all be, the more we can help modulate each other and there are ways within that our world too. Yeah, because
AMIR:
Secures are so good at it.
ELISE:
Yes. Yes, exactly. So let’s start with the four types.
AMIR:
Attachment
ELISE:
Styles. Yeah. Yeah.
AMIR:
So there are four attachment styles and it’s called the anxious, avoidant, secure, and fearful avoidant. So there are three insecure, ones anxious, avoidant, and fearful avoidant, and one secure one. So you can even divide it into insecure and secure. And sometimes it’s helpful to do that because a lot of the tools in the book that I bring to help people with insecure attachment styles, they’re good for everyone. But it all has to do with how comfortable we feel with intimacy and closeness, but also how sensitive of a radar do we have to potential danger in a relationship. And danger in a relationship from an attachment perspective, something very, very specific. We constantly monitor, we do it without even knowing it. We constantly monitor for the availability of our loved ones or the people that we’re close with. And if we feel that there’s some sort of disruption in that availability, it will set up the alarm.
So for example, even as we’re sitting now, you kind of have an idea where your loved ones are. You mentioned Rob, you probably have an idea where he is, and that is pretty much okay. But if I told you, God forbid, and I even hate doing it, that there was a terrible earthquake or something bad happened, you wouldn’t be able to continue this conversation. You’d have to stop and you’d have to reach out and make sure that he’s okay. And then you can come back, we can continue, albeit a little bit on edge and we can continue it. So it shows you we have this radar they’re constantly surveilling for that our loved ones and feels them out, knows that they’re out there because fundamentally that’s how we feel safe in the world. So to make a long story short, people who have an anxious attachment style love to be close, but they also have this very, very sensitive radar for potential threat in their relationship.
People with avoidant attachment style, they also want to be in a relationship because we’re a social species. We all need relationships. No one can do without it. But once they get into a relationship, something funny happened. They don’t feel too comfortable with too much closeness. It’s like, “Oh, okay, I want you, but I want you there, not here.”
ELISE:
And
AMIR:
Then people who are fearful, avoid and have a mixture of both. It’s almost like one hand they say, “Come forward.” And then the other hand they say, “Stay back, stay back.” And it introduces a lot of conflict, inner conflict also, and outer conflict. And the secures of this world are people who love closeness and intimacy, just like the anxious, but they don’t have a very sensitive radar. So everything goes over their head. They’re easy to get along with. They don’t really get upset very easily. And because they have this calm demeanor, they can really help people in relationships calm down very quickly. They’re usually the first ones to apologize. It’s just like they’re just very, very, very good in relationships. I’ve really come to fall in love with the secures of this world and the process of this whole journey of me becoming this attachment expert.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, we all want secures in our life to modulate our nervous systems and keep us calm, right? Exactly.
AMIR:
I’m glad you mentioned that because if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective and from a psychological perspective, this is the true function of a relationship and secure relationships excel in it really because we’re social species. The main way for us to regulate our affect, which is going to calm ourselves down is through other people. And you can think if something really bad happens to you, we have an attachment hierarchy in our head. I know exactly who’s number one that I’m going to go to, who’s number two, is number three, and I’m sure you do too. And when we’re securely attached to them, sometimes it’s just a hug or a single word that will make us feel better immediately. There’s no Xanax or clonopine in the world that gets even close to that effect because we’re a social species.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I feel like right now, I don’t want to drag us into culture, but there’s so much happening too that if you’re wired for anxiety, being in the presence of other people who are also sort of hyperventilating about what’s happening can be not always productive. Similarly, you don’t want to feel abandoned by avoidant people and you don’t want to feel gaslit. We’ll go into all of that. But first, I thought just to go into sort of the biology that you pull into it, but that these are gifts. It feels like the fearful avoidant one, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s where often familial trauma patterns and disordered relating shows up. Whereas for the other two, it’s not necessarily poor parenting or a misalignment. It’s actually maybe a superpower in the same way that being secure sounds really nice, sounds delicious.
AMIR:
It’s true, but this is one of the most important things that I wanted to convey in this book is to really dispel this myth that’s so common now. You can hear it so much on social media that it’s something that you need to heal where in fact it really is, again, from an evolutionary perspective, it is very, very valuable that we’ll have different segments of the population respond differently to different scenarios. So what really happens is that people with an anxious attachment style, when you review the literature, and even the research literature itself is a little bit biased, but when you actually look at it from my perspective, which is like a therapist’s perspective, a secure therapist perspective, I really discovered that they had this amazing ability, not just to identify danger, but also to just really read social cues better than anyone else and faster than anyone else.
And I even gave that example in the book about this woman who had an adopted child and actually gives me goosebumps whenever I talk about it.
That she goes, she’s there with her daughter in the first day of school and all of a sudden her daughter meets a new girl and they start playing together. And then she stops and she’s like, “Oh my God, this girl, this other girl, she’s my daughter’s sister. I’m convinced of it. I see they don’t look exactly the same, but the way they act, their facial expressions, they were sisters and she turns to others and like, what are you talking about? “ No one believes her, but she doesn’t really give up. And eventually, lo and behold, they are sister and they’re still in touch till this day. She found her daughter’s sister. So you see, it’s not only danger that people can identify if you have those amazing superpowers and it really plays out in so many things in our world, like in negotiations, at work, how we parent, how we befriend, it’s that extra sensitivity, but that sensitivity comes with a price.
ELISE:
Yeah. Yeah. I love the study that you cite where there’s a smoking computer and those who are anxious are the first ones to notice that it’s smoking and the avoidant ones are the first to leave the room, which is perfect, right? It’s like in that moment- Perfect. In an emergency, my husband is spectacular.
AMIR:
They’re just like, “Okay, what do we need to do? “ They’re like, “Oh, here, honey, I have to ask you, what should we do? Should we do this? Do we do this? “ It’s like, “No, I’m going to do this. You follow.”
ELISE:
Yeah. He’s like, “You get in the car, you take the boys, da, da, da, da. I’m going to do this. I’m going to get this neighbor go. “ He’s monitoring everything. It’s amazing. It’s very ... He doesn’t leave us behind, but he is the first to leave when he sees you.
AMIR:
Right, exactly. And you follow, and he doesn’t need a lot of reassurance or, “Oh, what are we going to do? “ It’s just no action mode. I think that study is brilliant just because it really shows that superpower thing and the person who is such a brilliant study and it really drives such an important message home. I think definitely you can see the advantage from an evolutionary perspective to have these canaries in the coal mine that can
ELISE:
Identify,
AMIR:
Oh, a little bit of smoke and then let everybody else know that the people sort of rush out first and then the rest follows. But evolution doesn’t really care about our personal wellbeing. So evolution really cares about the progression, the continuation of the species. It sees us as a vehicle of genetic transfer, but I care about our wellbeing. So I think the research overwhelmingly shows that people who are secure, the benefits are really far and wide, not just in relationships, also for us ourselves, for how we see ourself, how we experience ourself. And so I really thought really along and hard, how can I help people live with that biology that they’ve brought with them, but still become more secure? And the science really shows that you can become more secure.
ELISE:
Yeah. And that this idea of sort of the orchid dandelion, if the anxious attached has this superpower but is an orchid, how do you create an environment in which you feel safe and secure enough to be your glorious orchid self and be ... When I worked in a more corporate culture, I was known as the secret shaman because I just knew what was going to happen. It was like my own psychic intuitive power, particularly in how dynamics would play out between people or when something was wrong. You see?
AMIR:
Yeah.
ELISE:
Yeah.
AMIR:
Incredible.
ELISE:
Yeah. And it’s not always great because sometimes you get blamed for what happens just for anticipating that it’s going to happen. And I’m like, I’m not that powerful. I’m pretty powerful, but I’m not that powerful. But yeah, I mean, it’s this ability to discern, intuit, read people, manage energy is one of my sort of bread and butter traits. It’s gotten me very far. So let’s talk a bit about- Sure. Yeah. Because the two things that you outline, I want to talk to you about this whole idea of semis and harp, but the gaslighting and then that dynamic of the backlash.
AMIR:
The
ELISE:
Project regret
AMIR:
Cycle. Oh
ELISE:
My God. Yes. Oh my God. I was like, you are screaming at me on the page. So can we talk about that? Or maybe before we get into that, should we talk about how the ultimate goal is if you’re an anxious person to create more security in your relationships and if you’re an avoidant person to understand that other people need more security and to sort of do the bare minimum to create that standard, even if you’re like, “I don’t need this and I don’t understand why you need this. “ Yeah, exactly. Basic relationship hygiene that I think goes over that. It just goes over there and the avoidance. They don’t realize anything. My husband is like up in the carport all the time. I get it. I love it. He knows he has to come and see me occasionally, but he would rather live in a different house.
AMIR:
I love that. That’s so funny. But you see, the thing is once you know that,
ELISE:
He told
AMIR:
You, you have to understand the animal that he is. And I love
ELISE:
That. It’s not personal.
AMIR:
No.
ELISE:
No.
AMIR:
And in a way, it gives you also space. So the thing is, the whole idea is to understand that once our attachment system is not activated, so that good relationships are not really about constantly talking or being attached at the hip. That’s not the attachment logic. The attachment logic is that, again, it’s just a way for us to feel safe. So what it wants is for the relationship. We know where you are and now we can forget about you. I mean, we still kind of, like I told you, the surveillance, but forget about you and we can engage in the world. And you can see it so clearly with kids, you bring them into a room full of toys and it’s like, “Oh, start pointing and wanting to play with the toys.” And every once in a while they’ll look to see if the mom is there or their caregiver is there, but they’re not constantly where she is or where they are.
But if they leave the room and they leave them, they drop the toys. They don’t want to play with anything. You’ll try to give them a throw in your face or crying. It’s like you’re owing it for them. So as an adults, we don’t really play with toys like that anymore, but we have the same neurosecretary, we have the same biology. So really secure attachment, secure relationships. And that’s what a lot of people don’t really understand. They’re there to, they need to be in the background. They need to be boring, so boring from the sense that they don’t activate us. So we can engage in our work, in our career, in parenting, and having friends, and having hobbies, all of these different things. It’s sort of similar to playing as kids. So the idea is to keep that for anxious and for avoidance. For all of us, the secure secret that I really try to untangle in the book and show you how to get to that secret is to find a way to make those relationships in the background and not to blare, get the alarm going off constantly.
Who can work like that? Imagine if you were in a home where whenever every move you’ll make, the alarm will go off. You can live like it’s not. And not only you can live like that, now we have the science to also show how bad it is for your health and longevity, not just psychologically.
ELISE:
Yeah, 100%. So to that end, sort of using my own marriage as an example, I’m not worried. I don’t have any anxiety that my husband is sort of plotting leaving our partnership and he gives me a ton of space, which I appreciate to go and do my work. And he knows that he needs to send a text every five hours, just a bat signal like, “Hi, that’s it. We don’t have to ... “ It’s enough. I know whenever I call him, he’s like, “What? Why are you calling me? “ That’s enough for me to not feel freaked out or at risk and it works really well.
AMIR:
Right. So what you’re describing, but I love the excitement because clearly the book spoke to you and I’m so
ELISE:
Happy because- Yes. It’s so helpful. Yeah.
AMIR:
But what you’re describing basically is are those semis, the seemingly insignificant minor interactions because oftentimes when people think of changing and how do they change, how do they become more secure? They think about the big things. I need to go and talk about my childhood. I need to unpack really difficult things that have happened to me. And rarely people think about what I’ve come to call the seemingly insignificant minor interactions or in short semis as a vehicle for change. But when you understand the brain from a neuroscience perspective, you understand that each and every one of those semis are a vehicle for change to help people become more secure, to actually change your brain. Your brain’s wiring towards becoming more secure because each and every interaction like that is very meaningful for the brain because our brain constantly scans for connectedness and it’s very aversive to it when we get that disconnect.
Even if we say hello to someone and they kind of don’t respond to us,
ELISE:
It
AMIR:
Actually injures our brain. But when we get that connectedness, the way that you described it is amazing. It’s because you can do your own thing, but everybody has their different set point of when they need that check-in, which is just the way that the kid looks to see if the mom is there. We are doing the same thing with those simis. And if you get those secure simis, you’re set, your husband gets his freedom and you get your freedom. That’s what we want really for be able to have the peace of mind to explore.
ELISE:
Yes. And this is great for giving language of, “Oh, we had a wonderful weekend with you. I need six hours to just go be by myself without needing to explain it or for me to take it personally.” No, it’s so helpful. And then I think your point too, and in the book, the way that it’s let you go and you plot your different relationships and you can have a different dynamic amongst different primary characters in your life and then start to recognize I can only manage as an anxious person however many anxious attachments and I need to turn the volume down on those. So let’s talk about the Simis I think is such a good example of just, it’s not that deep, it’s not that much work to do this baseline hygiene when you’re dealing with someone who’s maybe your significant other, your primary coworker.
AMIR:
Yeah.
ELISE:
Yeah. It’s easy to sort of- It’s
AMIR:
Not just our ... The whole thing about this new book is that the new research really shows that attachment comes into play everywhere with our friends, with our coworkers, with our kids. It’s really everywhere. And those see me, by the way, that really invite you for a moment. So part of the research really shows that hyper-connected state, which is kind of what I came to understand is so beneficial to the brain. I came to understand it from, first of all, from the negative, there’s something that’s called the cyberball effect
ELISE:
That I
AMIR:
Call it in the book. And I start, I think the first chapter is about that because I really want to tell people. You have to understand, our brain loads exclusion. And in the cyberball experiment, you play catch, it’s a little video game, really like a two-dimensional video game, and you play catch with two other participants, imaginary participants, and all of a sudden they stop throwing the ball in your directions. And lo and behold, areas of stress and self-scrutiny and horrible distress and painful distress sort of come online in the brain and nothing mitigates it. If you give money to people to say, “Okay, whenever the ball is not throwing you in your direction, we’re going to give you a little bit of money.” No, it didn’t help. Even when they told people that the other two players are despicable people, they told minority students that the other two players were members of the KKK, still they had this really adversive reaction also psychologically, it makes people have low self-esteem, feel that life is less meaningful and have a less sense of control over their lives.
Things that you would think have no connection to these little moments of exclusion with other people. I mean, my self-esteem, why should I care if someone didn’t throw the ball in my direction or didn’t say hello to me or how much control I have over my life or how much meaning I sent to life. All these deep psychological things that we assigned to the self is actually related to how connected we feel to the world.
So if we understand that, and then you understand that the opposite, what I’ve come to call hyperconnectedness, which is the reverse cyberball, you’re now standing in the middle and you’re throwing the ball to one person, they throw it at you, you turn to the one next there, you throw the ball to them, they throw it to you, and the opposite happens. All the benefits, exactly the opposite. You feel more self-esteem, you feel more that you’re control of your life, that life is more meaningful. So in this book, I really try to create, how do I create a hyper-connected state where we can engulf our brain and our lives in this very, very nourishing environment that can help us change?
ELISE:
Yeah. So let’s talk about the cycling that happens with the anxious because- That’s very important. This is so important, sort of this gaslighting and the other backlash cycle, I think.
AMIR:
Yeah. The protest regret side
ELISE:
Of yes. Oh my God. Okay. Take us through them because I think there are going to be people nodding along and feeling very seen.
AMIR:
So I think what happens when you’re anxious, again, you have that very sensitive radar with all the benefits, it’s sometimes really hard to be anxious because you see things that other people don’t see. And I like that you know those movies of people with superpowers, how initially many things go wrong and don’t go wrong because they don’t know how to control their
ELISE:
Powers. Their power.
AMIR:
So that’s how I think about people with anxious attachment style. If you don’t know how to control your power, it can really, many things can go wrong in your life. And one of the things that go wrong is that you see threat and you respond to it and you don’t know how to sort of channel. You create an environment that’s unsafe for you, that’s not suitable for your, like you said, your orchid brain to that particular ability and you suffer in it. And so the attachment gaslighting, it’s basically what allows you to create that environment. Let’s say you’re in a work situation where you constantly are not invited or where people, there’s a lot of insecure interactions going on and you notice everything. You just see everything and you suffer. So maybe that’s not the ideal workplace for you, but our culture doesn’t recognize that so much.
So instead, people find themselves either externally or internally gas lining. Internally will be like, “I’m too sensitive. I shouldn’t let it get to me. “ Well, I mean, guess what? How can you ... I can’t shut my ears. I can’t stop hearing. It’s hard to ... How do you turn off your senses, your ability to sense the world? We can’t. So by engaging in this self-attachment gaslighting, you’re missing an opportunity to try to create the environment that’s right for you and you’re really cutting at your powers by saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t respond to it. I shouldn’t respond to it. “ Instead of saying, “Well, I like the way that you mentioned it when you were working in a corporate environment.” It was challenging because you had all these powers and sometimes it hit a wall. Whereas I think where now when it’s more about connecting with people in a way that’s different, you can use it to the full.
So that’s a good example, I think, of how changing your setup can really change and let your powers shine.
ELISE:
Yeah. I think too, I think for someone who’s wired like me or maybe like you, I find working on my own to feel more secure because I have fewer people to emotionally manage and modulate and I’m not having to read as many interactions to understand what’s happening and who is safe and who is not.
AMIR:
Although
ELISE:
You
AMIR:
Clearly can do it and you’ve done it very well.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, 100%. And I recognize that about myself. I would not have assigned it to being an anxious attachment person. I would’ve been like, “Oh, I just am highly intuitive.” But I think that the two obviously are correlated. And I have enough experience now in my 46th or 47th year, whatever age I am now where people don’t gaslight me as much, right? They’re more inclined to be like, “Oh, if you’re feeling that, it’s likely real.” So my husband, I manage my own catastrophizing, but my husband doesn’t gaslight me, but he doesn’t catastrophize with me either.
AMIR:
Right.
ELISE:
But that helps.
AMIR:
That helps a lot. Part of what I try to do is to teach people how to create their secure village. And it sounds like you’re Your husband, to a very big degree, is your secure village, and you don’t want them to catastrophize with you. If anything, you want them to do this kind of secure priming that will actually give you a secure viewpoint of things. But that’s very, very different from gas lighting. So the gas lighting would be like, oh, you’re too sensitive, you’re reading too much into it. But the secure priming would be, they did this to you this time, but they really love you. And I’m sure they didn’t even think about it at the time that they did it. So they help you give you a secure perspective on things. And that’s very, very different from gas lighting.
ELISE:
Yes. Or why don’t you sleep on it? Oh,
AMIR:
That’s
ELISE:
A great one too. Which is for me- You know that you’re
AMIR:
Going to feel
ELISE:
Better later. Yes. Don’t react in the moment. Why don’t you sleep, go for a walk, which is very helpful because let’s talk about the next cycle. It’s so fun.
AMIR:
During great cycle, what happens when you don’t sleep on it?
ELISE:
When you decide. Yes. When you take action because you have such a strong, intuitive or set- And you feel like you have to react
AMIR:
Immediately. No, I have to say this. It’s almost once it just comes flying out. And I talked to someone about this as a psychologist and she said, yes, this protest regret cycle happens to me all the time with my ... She has adult kids. She gets upset that they don’t call her enough, that they don’t listen to her. When she calls them, they get off the phone quickly. And then she lashes out at them. And then she really says really mean things. You don’t care about me, you don’t love me. You only come here when you do laundry. Take your own laundry and take it home, which is called protest behavior. And that’s very important attachment lingo. Protest behavior is any behavior that you engage in to try to increase the availability of the other person. Because remember I told you, we scan for the availability.
And when we feel that they’re not available, if there’s kind of danger that happens, then it gets activated. But even if they’re not available because they disappear on us or don’t text us, that can trigger protest. And protest, it triggers an activating thing that you start thinking about and then protest behavior. Protest behavior is any behavior to try to get the other person to engage with you. And it can be very bad behavior. The marriage doesn’t care.
ELISE:
Yeah.
AMIR:
It can be really mean and horrible, but it doesn’t care because it’s about safety. And it’s more about ... The feeling is if you’re not available to me, life is dangerous and we can talk where that comes from. But then you protest, which can be really ugly. So she yells at them, “Yo, don’t bring your laundry here. Don’t come here.” And then hangs up the phone. And then for a while you can stow on it even more, I don’t know, for an hour or two or day or two. But then eventually what happens, the regret sets in because especially people with anxious attachment, they have a very sticky attachment and it’s not that easy for them to let go of people, which can be both good and bad. But once they engage in that protest, then once it comes down, the attachment needs come rushing back in and, “Oh my God, what have I done?
I’ve really, really fought myself into a really bad place with this person.” And then you engage in that attachment guys lighting, “It’s all my fault. I was too sensitive. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not a good response.” All the while forgetting that it wasn’t out of nowhere that you lashed out. There was a reason they were not consistent, available, responsive, which is kind of like the hallmark of this of secure attachment. They weren’t. So there’s a reason why I did that, but that now goes away. You don’t even think about that anymore. So you have to apologize. And because you really upset them, now the whole conversation is about how bad your behavior was, but the original reason why you lashed out to begin with hardly ever killer comes up. And so then you go back to a relationship.
ELISE:
Yeah.
AMIR:
But then eventually again, it will come up because you haven’t resolved anything. So that’s why it’s a protest regret cycle. And it’s especially with people who are not secure, they instigate because they’re not being what I call CARP, they instigate that activating strategies and protest behavior, and then you go off to the races.
ELISE:
Yeah. I want to talk about CARP. Before we get to that, because it’s obviously massive, for people who are listening in this protest regret cycle, it can also be ... I mean, obviously you want to keep your children close. You want to manage through that interaction in a more skillful way. And so that in the process, you can be like, “I need a little bit more from you to not fly off the handle.”
AMIR:
I have an example for that. So the same situation, mother of school college kids. And also she noticed that when she calls them, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have time for you. “ And then so what they did was, because again, you remember how we said that attachment is simple. It’s in those simis. They set up all of their exercise apps to synchronize, so they all see what each other is doing. So whenever she sees that they go on a walk, she gives them a thumbs up. They give her a thumbs up after, I don’t know, Pilates class. So in a way, people always talk about how technology makes us disconnected, but technology is what we make of it. And she found a very shrewd way to make them feel more connected. And so there’s a little bit of a back and forth synchronicity that allows them to feel more secure.
And then she actually did say that she knows when they’re driving somewhere or when they have time, that’s usually when they call her. And she said, “Yeah, I know I’m a voice, but I love my children.” So she made sure that those times she’ll be available to answer their calls.
So you find ways.
ELISE:
You find ways. And it’s like a skillful management.
AMIR:
A way of
ELISE:
Managing
AMIR:
It.
ELISE:
And then for those who are listening, and we all have a lot of, we’ll call them relationships that are highly optional, right? Whether it’s a friendship or a romantic relationship where you’re not legally signing any documents where you get into the wrong dynamic with someone who leaves you feeling highly insecure. Your point is you want to minimize the amount of insecure attachments that you have so that you are maintaining good ground for your orchid nature, right? And that there are ways to not trigger the protest regret, which happens when you’re like, “I’ve had it, you’re dumped, go F yourself.” And then you’re like, “What have I done?” We’ve all been in those cycles. So can you talk about turning down the volume? That was so helpful.
AMIR:
Yeah, because I mean, so the stakes are so high. So when you have all these superpowers and the volume is up and you get triggered all the time, it not only is bad for your relationships, there’s really all these studies that shows that it’s bad for your health. It increases inflammation. There’s this one study now that shows that it actually decreases longevity. It makes you age faster. It’s kind of crazy. And then the way to change is to actually create this hyper-connected world around you. So you want to immerse yourself and enrich social, secure social environment. So how do you do that? So the way that you do it, you have to first learn about the five pillars of a secure life, which is you want yourself to be and other people to be consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. It sounds like really ... Yeah, that’s CARP.
I actually have on my website, you can go and you can download a little cheat sheet with CARP and SINIs on it because I really wanted it to be available to people so they can use it and they can sort of keep it as a reference card basically. So you want people to be consistent, available and responsive, and then you monitor for that. So you want to create this enriched social environment for yourself. And the way to do it is really to ... All really it asks for is to make a shift in your attention because usually what happens when we get triggered like that, we get consumed with those insecure relationships and yet at the same time, often most of us, the vast majority of us have these secure relationships in our lives, these secure people in our lives that we barely pay any attention to because they’re boring.
They always text when we text them. They’re always there for us. There’s just no drama. So our brain naturally gravitates towards that drama, trying to fix it. And part of the whole anxious thing is that we get preoccupied with it and it’s hard to let it go. So part of the idea in this therapy, and also what I talk about in these tools is you really have to make a list of the people who are secure in your life. And I call you, instead of like, “ Why haven’t you texted me? What’s going on? I’m engaging in protest behavior, shift and think about, okay, this person, let me text them instead. “And then over time to really deprioritize those insecure relationships and prioritize those secure relationships that we don’t really pay enough attention to, we have this amazing resource available to us and we don’t use it enough.
And the whole idea in this book is to teach you to shift and actually make use of that resource and create your secure
ELISE:
Village,
AMIR:
Basically.
ELISE:
When I was reading about the protest response over my life, there have been relationships that I’ve needed to let go of. And we don’t really talk culturally about things like friendship, divorce, or when you’re like, “ I can’t be at this work relationship or whatever it is But historically I’ve been triggered by that protest and I do it very gently, but I feel so bad. Oh, I shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t let this relationship go. “And so it consumes a lot of energy. And so just this idea too of, no, you can turn the volume down on these relationships by only responding when they reach out, not initiating, and so you’re not triggering your own anxious attachment style, but you’re minimizing them until you’re in the Christmas card territory.
AMIR:
Yeah, exactly. So the tool that you’re describing,
ELISE:
That I’m
AMIR:
Describing in the chapter for the anxious, I call it wall tennis with love.
ELISE:
Wall tennis with love. Yeah.
AMIR:
So the idea is, I don’t know if you’ve ever paid tennis against the wall, but it’s like- Yeah, of course. Whatever you dish the wall, it sort of gives back in just a little bit less, it can’t really start a serve or anything like that. It returns whatever you dish it. So the idea is that you are the wall and in this insecure relationship, once you’ve determined that you need to put the volume down, it’s basically how do you do it in a way that doesn’t trigger your attachment Because if you’ll try to cut just to completely cut down the ties, usually that actually then there’s an attachment backlash
ELISE:
And
AMIR:
You get into that protest regret again. So the world tennis with love allows you to take the volume down. So when they reach out to you, and it has to be with love because you don’t want to trigger the relationship. When they reach out to you, you respond very warmly, you inquire, but you don’t initiate too much. It’s kind of like an art to learn how to do that. And I actually discovered myself in my own life, I thought that it’s a way to make the relationships go away, but in some instances they did really recede into the background and became like the Christmas card territory. But in other instances, it actually created a new type of relationships that I have with people that we do communicate from time to time, but it’s on their dime and their terms, but I don’t have the expectation anymore.
So it doesn’t trigger me. I never really think about ... I will never initiate because I decided it’s wall tennis with love. And you can see, sometimes you’ll see the thanks. Sometimes this particular person think about sends me, he’s a friend of mine, he sends him and I immediately respond hi as soon as I can, then nothing for days. And then another hi, and then I say another hi. And then all of a sudden he calls and I answer and I talk to them very warmly and ask about their family and this and that and the other thing, but I will never call and if I’m in trouble, if I need help to deescalate an insecure relationship, I have my secure people to call. I will not call this person because they’re not going to help me. And if anything, sometimes they’ll either not listen or get tired of listening to me or abruptly get off the phone and then all of a sudden that what happens when we talk about the avoidance, I get even more upset because they’ve sort of cut me off abruptly.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, it’s so helpful. It’s just like, oh, now I understand that feeling of regret, remorse. Oh, I was too hard on them. Oh, I’m being mean or unfair when that gets triggered by me that it’s, “Oh, this is actually a dynamic of relationship attachment. I’m wired for this and I can actually manage it and sort of go through relationship withdrawal without experiencing intense cravings.”
AMIR:
That’s
ELISE:
Exactly
AMIR:
It. It’s kind of a way to
ELISE:
Bypass
AMIR:
That thing. Kind of like, okay, I’m
ELISE:
Like- Skip the drama. Yeah.
AMIR:
Completely.
ELISE:
Yeah. And then in the avoidance chapter, this section just made me delighted and laugh because it’s such a ... I mean, I experience it all the time and I have friends who are highly avoidant who I love and it’s that being a cat around these people a little bit while recognizing they just don’t ... My husband, not to pick on him, but he doesn’t really listen to the podcast. But if he listens to this, he’ll be like, “Oh, I need to just practice my carp and do my simis and we’re golden.” But he’s funny because he would never occur to him that he’s sort of doing this avoidance style, but when he wants something and someone doesn’t immediately respond to him, he gets very like, “What?” And I’m like, “That’s funny. I sent you something four days ago and I don’t think you’ve read it.
“ But that avoidant deep need for space, but then the way that they get triggered, right? So can you talk a little bit about their attachment
AMIR:
Wound or tendency? I have to say, I really try to make amends to the avoidance in this world, in this book, and not even just make amends, give them tools they can use rather than go and tell them, because a lot of the time you see a lot on social media and there’s also in general, I think I told you, I think there’s some bias even in the research questions about the origin of these attachment styles, which is really unproven territory in psychology. We’ve played the blame game so much and sort of attributed things to childhood in a way that’s not really supported by research completely.
ELISE:
So
AMIR:
The idea for avoidance is that you had a lack of closeness in upbringing, your needs weren’t met enough so you learned to fend for yourself and that’s why you are the way you are and that you need to heal somehow from it in order to be able to be more open and closer to others. But when you look at biology, you see, actually really you can just look. I see it everywhere now because once your eyes are open, you can’t not see it. There’s a preference from distance and closeness. Again, because we talk about there’s a need for variability within the population. Everywhere we look, some dogs, for example, my dog, he doesn’t like too much closeness. He’s over there, he’ll still be close, but not sitting in my lap, not sitting close to me from afar. He’ll sit there, but from afar. Other dogs like my nephew has a dog, she constantly, she’s on your neck the whole day.
She needs to be super close. And some cats actually also love closeness and some cats, if you’ll try to pet them, they’ll claw you. So that preference for distance and closeness is everywhere in nature. And why wouldn’t it be in humans too? And it’s all very biological, but at the end of the day, I really thought it would be important for people to understand. We have this preference from closeness and distance, and people just prefer more distance, but then they build a whole psychology around it. So that’s where the three pitfalls that avoidance often fall into because they don’t understand. Avoidance are about 20, 25% of the population. It’s not that they don’t understand. They never really to stop thinking about the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t process things the way that they process things. So the first pitfall, I think we said is heal thyself.
I call it heal thyself because usually avoidance when they’re having trouble, they take care of their own issues. They don’t come to you to talk to you about my partner who’s secure and avoidant, there’s avoidance. Things happen to him at work. He doesn’t come to talk to me about this trouble. Very rarely he would come. Most of the time, no, I need to solve it myself.
ELISE:
You’re like, “I’m a therapist. Bring it to me. “ Yeah.
AMIR:
Yeah. No, no. It’s like, I need to solve it myself. It’s like, no, I don’t need to talk about this. Well, I have this very over ... I think the vast majority of the population has that need to talk about things and regulate, co-regulate, but they don’t. They oftentimes, most of the time, regulate them on their own. So the idea that someone will come to them for help is just very foreign to them because, look, I don’t do that. Why are you coming to me now? And so what happens is, unbeknownst to them, think about what happens when we go and we’re in trouble, help us, help us. And the other person is blowing you off. That elicits the protest regret cycle.
So all of a sudden you forget about the bad things happen to you and you’re like, “Whoa, this person’s not available to me. “ Then it becomes all about that now and then you lash out and then you start to really argue with them and they’ve added insult to injury and they are clueless that they’ve done that. And so much of my therapy when I teach this to patient, it’s like a revelation for avoiding. It’s like maybe it is, you need to understand that yours is a minority response and the rest of the world doesn’t operate like you. So you need to find a way to extend of yourself a little bit in a moment like that because otherwise it’ll pay off for you.
ELISE:
Yes. If you
AMIR:
Want your distance and your quiet time, you need to act now before it gets much, much worse. And I like to give that analogy. You don’t wait for a child to be super hungry to feed them or you don’t wait until they’re super tired to put them to sleep. So same thing here. You need to take care of this need early on when it’s still small,
ELISE:
Before
AMIR:
It explodes into something huge that you become the center of it.
ELISE:
So
AMIR:
That’s the sort of heal,
ELISE:
I heal
AMIR:
Myself, why can’t you?
ELISE:
Preventative care and-
AMIR:
Entirely.
ELISE:
Yeah. No. And when we were seeing Tatkin, he was like, “You can stay up until whatever hour you want, but you’re going to go to bed with your wife and tickle her back or whatever until she falls asleep. And then you can get up and go do whatever you want, but you can’t just parallel play through life and expect not to have issues.” Yeah. It’s funny though, because there are times when we either have the best marriage or there’s something wrong, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong.
AMIR:
So no, no. So that’s the ... I always talk about the pitfalls that prevents us from getting into a secure mindset. And one of the pitfalls is telling people that life is always a mixed bag, especially relationships and having this idea and you can’t really throw the baby with a bathwater thinking about imagine an idealized life and then feeling really bad about the life that you have here, especially if there’s a lot of things like the way that I’m hearing from so many good things. So no, there’s always, when we meet another person, there’s always going to be they like things this way and I like things that way. But one of the things that I really teach, and I call it the hidden sparks of talent, it’s like to learn to identify both within yourself and in others, the hidden sparks of talent, because if you understand biology, we are so enormously diverse molecularly.
We are made of all the ... It’s like a kaleidoscope. Each and up is our own unique version. And what it does, it really translates to very unique talents that each and everyone have, that we all possess. Sometimes you know how people can turn their tongue in a certain way or they can ... But we all have these little things from starting as little as that to bigger things that we have. And what I find to be really helping people move towards security is to start looking at the hidden sparks of talents in their partners and also in themselves. And oftentimes when we come from a place of insecurity, the things that we think are the biggest impediments are actually hidden sparks of talent. And it’s such a helpful shift to think about it from that perspective.
ELISE:
Yeah. I love that. Well, I love this book. I’m so excited for it to be in the world and it’s very loving and not criticizing. There’s a lot of beauty in the way that each of us manages. So if we can understand that better, we can manage ourselves and each other better. Know the animals we’re with. It’s really what it comes down to. Yeah. And
AMIR:
Know the animal that you are.
ELISE:
What a delightful person. He is delicious. I don’t think he would mind me describing him in that way. I just wanted to double back on two of the big concepts in the book that I think are really important to understand whether you identify as an avoidant or an anxious or secure or a fearful avoidant, which I think is ... And he writes a bit about this in the book. We didn’t get to it really in the conversation. That’s the trickiest. That’s, I think, not to diagnose, but that’s where you might already have been tuned for anxiety. And then maybe you grew up as the child of alcoholic parents and you are really become sort of fearful and avoidant. So I think that’s where a lot of our childhood trauma or patterning shows up when it gets into that territory. But I am not a physician.
I don’t know if you guys know that. I wanted to just reiterate what the CARP is because this is what you want to sort of maintain as much as possible. And then also the semis. These are big themes in the book and really important and easy to understand and action. Okay. So the five pillars of security, this is CARP, which stands for consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. So consistent, you keep the same level of involvement over time without fluctuations and keep that at the level at which you are able to commit, right? Available. You are there for the other person when they need you. Responsive. When the other person contacts you, you respond. Reliable, the other person feels they can count on you to be consistent, available, and responsive. Predictable. They can anticipate your actions, no negative surprises like ghosting or other erratic or abrupt behavior, and no still facing or cyberballing.
Still facing is when you sort of evince no response to what someone’s saying to you. It’s the still face experiment that you probably heard about where the mom with the baby goes still face and stops responding and how scary that is and disorienting. And then simis, those are what he calls seemingly insignificant minor interactions of everyday life. And his point is like these are very small attenuated ways of showing up for people with huge upside. So for him as a therapist, it’s showing up for people on time. It’s just small indications that their time matters, that you’re paying attention, you’re acknowledging them, you’re not avoiding them, et cetera. These are not major things. This is sort of the small preventative hygiene that keeps relationships really functioning. It’s keeping your word, right? It’s like, “Oh, let me call you back.” It’s calling the person back or sending a text to say, “Hey, I got dragged into something.
I’m going to try you tomorrow.” Stuff like that. Those are simis, but they really create sort of that secure base for other people. All right, friends, this was a fun one. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.