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Once upon a time, Amir Levine was embarrassed by Attached, his 2010 book (co-written with Rachel S.F. Heller) that sold more than 2 million copies and brought the concept of attachment theory to the masses. The book was a side gig that he mostly worked on during his subway commutes and expected few people to read. “I’m a serious scientist,” Levine, a psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher, told me. “I’m not supposed to write a self-help book. I didn’t tell anyone at work for a long, long time that I wrote it … and then it kind of took on a life of its own.”
Attached explains the basics of adult attachment theory, the psychological principle that categorizes people into four categories based on the way they relate to others. There’s anxious (in Levine’s words, “craving closeness but fearing rejection”), avoidant (“preferring independence over closeness”), fearful-avoidant (“a mix of the two”), and secure (“comfortable with closeness and easygoing”). The framework—which Levine applied to love—offered such an alluring simplification of romantic relationships that it became an obsession for pop gurus and influencers alike: Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, and Jay Shetty have pontificated on it to their followings, while couples therapists like Julie Menanno have built entire careers around it (her Instagram, @thesecurerelationship, has 1.3 million followers). Elsewhere, attachment theory has been applied to the workplace, athletics, and shopping, and there are workbooks, online quizzes, and dedicated subreddits (r/AnxiousAttachment and r/AvoidantAttachment) where people go to discuss the myriad agonies of the way they bond.
Countless social media posts and videos are tagged #attachmentstyle, and seemingly every website has published an article or three about it.
The ubiquity didn’t really dawn on Levine until a 2021 New York Times piece on attachment theory, for which he was interviewed. Noting a surge of discourse around the time of the COVID pandemic, particularly on TikTok, the Times piece reported that over 100,000 copies had been sold in that year alone. Around the same time, Levine began to notice its impact in personal interactions. At a neuroscience conference where he was presenting, a woman approached him to voice surprise that he was there, as if his now-soaring author profile made his scientific work pale in comparison. He heard directly from readers, too. The most memorable letter he received was from a woman in Iran who told him that his book inspired her to leave her relationship and find one with a secure partner. “She said she experienced an orgasm for the first time because she could finally ask a partner for what she needed,” he recalled. Talk about a seismic impact.
Surprisingly, a lot of said impact went over Levine’s head. His work keeps him too busy to keep up with social media, and despite his expertise, he’s never taken the opportunity to fashion himself as an attachment influencer online. Plus, he’s been hard at work on a new book, Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life, out April 14. While it builds on the guidance in Attached for finding secure connection no matter a reader’s attachment style, Secure is at once broader in scope and more nuanced in its approach. With a focus on all relationships in a person’s life—not just romantic ones—the book weaves together new research on attachment science and basic neuroscience, and stresses the importance of building a “secure village” of trusted connections rather than relying on the few close relationships in a person’s life to do all the caretaking work for them.
“Our brain is wired to appreciate emotional continuity with the people around us, and when that gets disrupted or stops for whatever reason, it bothers us to no end,” writes Levine in Secure. To that end, the book stresses the importance of SIMIs—seemingly insignificant minor interactions, like pleasantries exchanged with strangers—and maintaining connections that adhere to a standard Levine calls CARRP (consistency, availability, responsiveness, reliability, and predictability). It also touches on a new modality he developed called Secure Priming Therapy, which “encourages the sharing of secure memories as we seek to unearth those kernels of security within us and then use these experiences as stepping stones to become more secure in our everyday lives.” Contrary to popular wisdom about how set in stone attachment styles are, Levine says anyone can become temporarily more secure when exposed to “short bursts” of secure cues (“for example, by telling them about secure relationships, having them watch movies that depict secure interpersonal interactions, or asking them to read words that convey safety in relationships”). These short-term secure insights can often lead to dramatic improvements in people’s lives.
But while Secure mostly lays out new research about attachment, it also serves to correct some of the misunderstandings people got from Attached. One of these is the idea that one’s attachment style as a child predicts their adult attachment style. This is actually a conflation of two different sciences—in its original incarnation, attachment theory was developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby in the 1950s as a way of illustrating the importance of caregiver bonding to the emotional well-being of a child. Later, an experiment by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, the Strange Situation Procedure, assigned said styles based on the observed reactions children had to the absence and reemergence of their caregivers. Work in the 1980s by Mary Main, Cindy Hazan, and Phillip Shaver cultivated an adult attachment theory that is distinct from but influenced by the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth. Attachment theory remains a staple of child psychology, but during a phone conversation, L. Alan Sroufe, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of developmental psychopathology, explained that childhood attachment is not as deterministic as social media makes it seem. “Clearly, early attachment experiences are important, and I would argue that there’s nothing more important,” he said. “But it’s best thought of as initiating a pathway.”
Attached is explicit about the weak correlation between child attachment and adult attachment. Secure further meditates on this in a full chapter. Despite the tenuous connection being baked into Levine’s initial work on the topic, which introduced attachment theory to millions of laypeople, discourse abounds linking the two. Shetty has claimed on his podcast that attachment style is made in the first three years of life and “continues for the rest of our lives.” TikTok’s TherapyJeff, who now has nearly 3 million followers, said in 2021, “Here’s a really easy way to understand why you have the attachment style you have. Yes, I’m going to blame your parents. I’m a therapist, that’s what we do.”
“For many psychologists or influencers, it’s almost like it explains everything, and that can’t be,” Manu Bazzano, an existential therapist and Zen teacher who wrote a 2023 essay lambasting the pitfalls of attachment theory, told me. “It’s only one of the many stories.
For me, if one story takes over, we have a problem.”
Levine agrees. “That whole blame game, I don’t like,” he said. “We’ve been there in psychology—that whole notion of, ‘Because this was done to you, you’re this way.’ ” To prove his point, he invoked the debunked notions that distant fathers create gay sons and “refrigerator mothers” raise autistic children. The reality is much less cut-and-dried—certain childhood experiences can impact adult intimacy, but the pitfalls of a person’s relationship style cannot be attributed exclusively to them.
Another major misconception is that attachment styles are fixed. (Online, people discuss them as if they were astrological signs, painting each with a broad brush.) Attachment theory has been used as a practically psychic predictor, with people claiming to know the “#1 way to tell the avoidant feels safe” or what different attachment styles are thinking or how avoidants will behave post-breakup. Yet as Levine laid out in Attached, attachment styles are less of a strict designation and more of a spectrum. “They’re malleable, he told me. “While we tend to have a general attachment style and fall more regularly under the same one, we can also have different attachment styles with different people.” To underscore this, Secure focuses less on diagnosing a person’s individual attachment style and more on what Levine calls their “attachment topography”—the plotting on a coordinate grid of one’s attachment style in their different important relationships (the X axis moves from secure to anxious and the Y goes from secure to avoidant).
The resulting attachment matrix is but one example of Secure taking a more careful and deliberate route than Attached. Whereas the first book provided a questionnaire to determine one’s partner’s attachment style, the latter warns that “it’s important not to jump to conclusions when considering attachment style.” If there are direct amends Levine is making in his new book for what was included in his old one, they’re most apparent in the commentary on avoidants, who Levine says “get kind of a bad rap,” adding, “the research is not fair to them.” Levine explained that there’s a widespread assumption that people become avoidants “because they had parents that didn’t give them what they needed, so they learned to fend for themselves.” It’s common to see and hear avoidants referred to as “just assholes,” or for people to claim that “the best thing you can do is break up with the avoidant before they can break up with you.” Secure’s more delicate treatment of avoidants includes examining them without judgment (“What if … you’re simply wired to like your distance, and no amount of ‘healing’ would change that?”) and highlighting their advantages (“Research has shown that avoidants often function well under pressure at work, and are capable of making tough decisions on their own and executing them with precision”).
Part of Levine’s Secure Priming Therapy involves unearthing the “hidden sparks of talent” related to each attachment style. “All attachment styles can be seen as talents bestowed on us by Mother Nature,” he writes. For example, an avoidant style can be beneficial when a solo project is on one’s docket, while an anxious attachment style can help one detect subtle signals in a social situation. Ultimately, the book advocates for more kindness—projecting it, finding it in seemingly insignificant moments, and cultivating it by prioritizing secure relationships.
With this, Levine has come to understand that his spark—something he was initially ashamed of but that it turns out is a strength—is popular science writing, after all. “It’s not less important than finding a new medication for depression or anxiety,” he told me. “This can also help a lot, potentially. It took me time to come around to that and understand the importance of it.”
It’s safe to say that Levine is no longer embarrassed by his books. He sounds, well, secure.
