Paul Rand: When people hear the word attachment, they usually think about their deep bonds to their partner, their kids, their dog, or even material things.

Amir Levine: But that’s not really what attachment is about. It really is a safety mechanism. That’s how we feel safe in the world through other people.

Paul Rand: That’s Amir Levine, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. You may have heard of his bestselling book, Attached, which helped bring attachment theory into the mainstream. Now he’s written a new book called Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life.

Amir Levine: So after I wrote Attached, many patients and people came to me for therapy. I’m a psychotherapist and a neuroscientist and they wanted me to help them become more secure. So I didn’t have an immediate answer to how you can become more secure. And then I spent really over a decade in coming up with tools and ideas and really a whole new type of therapy and coaching. I call it secure priming therapy and coaching to help people become more secure.

Paul Rand: For decades, we’ve been told that our behaviors are shaped in childhood, hardwired early and difficult to change. But what if the way we connect, love, and even experience the world is far more flexible?

Amir Levine: In fact, we can and do change our attachment styles and we can change it all the time. And I find that to be very, very, very promising. And that’s one of the reasons why I wrote this book because I really thought it hard about how I can help people in a very orchestrated way, what tools can they use to change their attachment style to become more secure. So our childhood relationships are not destiny.

Paul Rand: And it turns out that being secure not only shapes how safe we feel in the world, but it can also impact how we respond to stress and even our own longevity.

Amir Levine: The latest research shows that when people are secure, it also affects our health. We’re healthier. It affects longevity. We live longer, we have better immune system. So the benefits of being secure goes way beyond our romantic relationships or even just our relationships in general.

Paul Rand: Levine says that even if you aren’t a secure person today, you could be one day. He argues that security is contagious and encourages you to find and lean on the secure people in your life.

Amir Levine: So over time, you create in neuroscience, there’s something that’s called an enriched environment and how it has an amazing healing power for the brain. The beginning of the book teaches you how to create an enriched social environment for your brain and for yourself so your brain can change.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains where we explore the groundbreaking ideas and the discoveries that are changing our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. Today on Big Brains, the science of attachment and how we can become more secure in our own lives. 

Paul Rand: For listeners that have not read the book, can you just maybe give us a bit of a look back and talk about what are the attachment styles that you focused in on and how do they show up in everyday life?

Amir Levine: Yes. So basically they’re four attachment styles, anxious, avoidant, fearful, avoidant, and secure. And it all has to do with how comfortable you feel with closest and intimacy, but also how sensitive of a radar for potential relationship disruption you have. So if you love intimacy and closeness, but you’re very sensitive for potential problems in the relationship, you have an anxious attachment style. And then what that would mean is you always are afraid that relationships are very fragile, then things may go wrong, that you’re going to be potentially left, people will abandon you. You worry a lot about relationship and you notice things much more than other people. If you’re avoidant, you also want to be in a relationship. We also want to be in a relationship, but something strange happens. When you get into one, you don’t feel that comfortable with too much closeness. So you start putting roadblocks to closeness.

It’s called the activating strategies, little ways and sometimes big ways to keep a measure of distance. Fearful avoidance are people who are both anxious and avoidance. So on one hand, they say come close, but on the other hand it’s like, stay away, stay away. They don’t know how to situate themselves on either of these dimension. And the secures of this world, which also led me why I sort of wrote the book, now I wrote a whole book about them, are just wonderful in relationships. It’s almost like they have this innate gift to know how to be in a relationship or skills, a whole set of skills that I describe in this new book that make them so great. They love closeness, but they don’t have a very sensitive radar for danger. So they come down very quickly. They’ll be the first ones to apologize. If you need the distance, they’ll give you your distance.

They’re not going to take it personally. If you need closeness, come by all means, come and be close. So they really know have a way of creating safe spaces for people.

Paul Rand: You mentioned that you wrote this because you felt something was missing. What was missing and what void did you hope to fill by addressing it in this new book?

Amir Levine: So after I wrote Attached, many patient and people came to me for therapy, I’m a psychotherapist and a neuroscientist, and they wanted me to help them become more secure. But this whole secure, all these attachment styles, they don’t come from a medical model. A lot of this research was done in social psychology and developmental psychology, and it’s never been trans before attached. It was never translated into the clinical realm. So I didn’t have an immediate answer to how you can become more secure. And then I spent really over a decade in sort of coming up with tools and ideas and really a whole new type of therapy and coaching. I called it secure priming therapy and coaching to help people become more secure. So in this book, all the tools that I give my patients in helping them become more secure, I laid it all out in the book to help people so people can use it in their life.

These are very simple things you can start doing right now to become more secure.

Paul Rand: In the book you talked about something is about a radar of availability, which I thought was a really interesting thing to think about it. We’re constantly scanning people to see if we’re safe and present in what we’re doing. Talk to me a little bit about this idea of what’s going on with this radar of availability.

Amir Levine: Right. So I think people think about attachment. It’s just like, oh, these really deep bonds and we have to really spend hours with other people. But that’s not really what attachment is about. It really is a safety mechanism. That’s how we feel safe in the world through other people. So as a safety mechanism, it scans for the availability of the people around us. And if we kind of have an idea, right now we have an idea where your loved ones are and they’re pretty much okay. And so when this whole thing about security, people who are secure, it’s instinctively always make them, you always feel that they’re available to you. They hardly ever fail you. And if they do, you know that it’s because they couldn’t help it.

Paul Rand: Okay. Tell me about Ruth.

Amir Levine: I get moved every time I think about it and I thought it was such a good ... I really wanted to explain. It’s basically when I was a teenager, I went on a week long summer holiday with my sister, a friend, and my sister’s friend’s mother. Her name is Ruth. And if you think about it, she didn’t know me and she agreed to include my sister and me in that week-long vacation. And it was one of the most memorable times of my life because she was such a gentle soul.

And there’s something about her that always ... We’re kids and kids are kids, but we never got into trouble there. We always wanted to do the right thing by her. There’s this whole demeanor of calmness and tranquility that really exuded to all of us and affected all of us. And now after all these research and understanding that Ruth was secure and the power of the people’s secure presence and also the research goes even further, it shows that those experiences leave a secure kernel within us that we can tap into to develop and become more secure ourselves. It’s actually recalling some of these experiences that we’ve had both past and present…

Paul Rand: Okay

Amir Levine: That can help us become more secure.

Paul Rand: Wonderful. You mentioned a little bit ago about your work in early childhood work. And I wonder if you can talk about what the science tells us about these early relationships and the way that they set the foundation of how we are as adults.

Amir Levine: So I’m glad that you said that because the research actually shows something very, very surprising and it really, I think in a way, dismantles some of the biggest myth in psychotherapy and in popular psychology today.

There’s this idea that our attachment styles as adult are basically something that developed in early childhood. But when you look actually at the research and you look at the attachment styles that kids have and then their attachment style in adulthood, you see that there’s a very modest correlation. Less than 10% of the adult attachment style can be explained by childhood attachment style. And actually 90% is not explained by that, but by other factors that happen later in life. And in fact, we can and do change our attachment styles and we can change it all the time. And I find that to be very, very, very promising. And that’s one of the reasons why I wrote this book, because I really thought hard about how I can help people in a very orchestrated way, what tools can they use to change their attachment style to become more secure.

So our childhood relationships are not destiny. And not only that, like I told you about Ruth, we have different relationships with different people in our childhood, and we’re a very sophisticated social animal. Our brains are extremely sophisticated social machine, so we can actually tap into different experiences that we’ve had, bring them to the fore, and use them to become more secure.

Paul Rand: One of the things that you did talk about is that security isn’t just about comfort. And I think what you said is the safer you feel, the more willing you’re going to be to take risks.

Amir Levine: Yeah. So imagine this scenario where you take a toddler into a room full of toys with his mom, his caregiver, his dad, and then immediately they’re going, oh, they start pointing at the toys. They want to play with them. They start playing with the toys. They’re completely invested in this new environment. 

Paul Rand: Of course.

Amir Levine: Of course, it’s just such a thing. So they see all these new toys, but every once in a while they look back to see if the parent is there and if they’re there, they just continue playing with toys

Paul Rand: That’s a great story. Yep.

Amir Levine: But then when you ask the parent to leave their room for a moment, everything changes. They drop everything, they rush to the door, they bang on, they start crying. All of a sudden, the whole interest in the toys just goes away. You try to give them a toy, they’ll throw it in your face, they couldn’t care about it. So it just shows you the very strong connection between our attachment, how we feel safe, and our exploratory drive. And so we explore in different ways, but the exploratory drive is still tied very closely to our attachment and we have a secure attachment to people around us. They fade into the background. We don’t think about them much, just like the parent when they’re back and then we check on them every once in a while. And then if they’re there, we can explore the world and engage in our work.

But if the relationship is insecure, we lose that ability to explore the world. We can’t. We are like, “ Where’s the person? Why are they not texting me? Is everything going to be okay? “It demands a huge energetic load from our brain, and we can’t engage in the world the way that we can when we’re securely attached.

Paul Rand: That’s a really good way of explaining it. Along that same realm, there’s not a person listening that has not felt the sting of social exclusion, whether that’s being picked last for a team, not coming to a party, being left out of a conversation. And what I remember you talking about is that that triggers the same sort of impact as even physical pain. Tell me why that exclusion hits us as human beings so hard.

Amir Levine: So in the book Insecure, I dedicate the first chapter to what I call the cyberball effect. It’s such an important thing to understand about our brain. Our brain loads exclusion and it loads it so much that they created this game where you play catch in a very rudimentary video game and all of a sudden they stop throwing the ball in your direction and then areas of painful distress and self-scrutiny come online. And then psychologically you feel that they found that people feel less self-esteem, they feel that life is less meaningful, they feel less in control over their lives. I was surprised by these findings because these are things that I thought these are psychological domains. I didn’t think that if I’m included or excluded, I will feel that life is less meaningful or that I’m not in control, that it would affect my self-worth. These are things that I thought were self-love, but apparently even our deepest, most things that we think about ourselves are affected by our connections to others.

So that’s what I call the cyberball effect. And I only understood why that, and it’s such a strong effect because even when you are giving money, let’s say, okay, the ball is not running interruption. We’ll give you money for it. You think, okay, what do I care? I’ll get some prize. No, it doesn’t mitigate the effect. Or even when you think that the other two people are despicable people, they told minority students that the other two people that are playing the video game are members of the KKK. They still, the same effect happen with the psychological effect of the brain.

Paul Rand: Interesting.

Amir Levine: So it’s almost like a knee-jerk reaction. It’s like an automatic reflex that our brain just hates exclusion. And I have my own ideas why that is.

Paul Rand: And what are your ideas on that?

Amir Levine: So our social brain knows that. It knows to find safety in numbers, but the human brain has something even better than that. It can assess the quality of the relationship and the better the quality, the more secure quality, the safer we feel. So it’s not just about the presence, but it’s also the quality.

Paul Rand: One of the themes of the book that came out that I really struck me was this idea that security is contagious and that it’s almost, I think you called it a social superpower, which I really love that. And even your story of Ruth kind of brings that up a little bit. Tell me what you mean by being contagious and why it’s so important. And I’m assuming in some ways, if you’re a parent and you’re listening to this, or you think about it for yourself or somebody else in your life, giving the gift of security is an extraordinary gift.

Amir Levine: Yes. I’m glad that you said that. And I think it really translates far beyond how well we do in relationships because the latest research shows that when people are secure, it also affects our health. We’re healthier. It affects longevity. We live longer, we have better immune system. So the benefits of being secure goes way beyond our romantic relationships or even just our relationships in general. It also affects our self-esteem and sort of like deep psychological feelings about who we are and how we are in the world. And one of the most important tools that I teach is to develop an awareness to the, what I’ve come to call the seemingly insignificant minor interactions of everyday life or in short “semis”

Amir Levine: Because when people want to change, want to become more secure, they think I need to go and talk about my childhood or really open up difficult things that have happened to me, talk about big events. They don’t really think about those small micro interactions that we have in our everyday life. But if you understand the brain from a neuroscience perspective, you really know our brain constantly surveys the environment, it sends out like these tendrils or our senses, and it’s one of the most sensitive organ to the environment. It constantly changes. Even if you’ll remember anything from this conversation tomorrow, that means that some structural changes have happened to your chromatin, to sort of the DNA in your brain, because it constantly changes. So every small interaction like that is an opportunity for change to rewrite an old idea, an old perspective.

Paul Rand: The other thing that I know you talked about with security, and it’s worth digging on for a second, is there are benefits to physical health on it. It’s not just mental benefits, but it affects your physical being.

Amir Levine: Yeah. Oh, yeah. In a huge way, they found that people who are more secure have ... Even if they have a difficult illness, let’s say one study was looked at fibromyalgia, they have better relationships with their care providers. They actually have less symptoms and the outcome is better. And then there’s also these studies that shows that we can, when we develop these feeling of connectedness to others, and we have a more secure environment, it really also affects longevity and multiple comorbidities. I think just one recent study showed the negative effect of, they called it hasslers, but really that’s like these are insecure interactions, has on our longevity. It’s really quite profound. And I think they can equate it even that whole secure social connectedness, not just any social connectedness. That’s very important to stress because the negative ones have a bad effect on your health to just on par as our diet and exercise.

So I always like to say, I mean, if you’re going to go to McDonald’s, at least take someone that you’re securely attached to with you so you can counter the effect of all the junk food that you’re eating.

Paul Rand: One of the concepts that you also talked about was something that you called the dependency paradox. Can you dig into that a little bit? I think folks will find that pretty interesting.

Amir Levine: Oh, I’m so glad you asked about that because especially in our society, we put such a huge emphasis on self-sufficiency, self being self-driven, like self-motivated, self, self, self, self. It’s like self everywhere. But if we look at our brain, our brain, we’re social. So the whole self-driven thing is really missing something really big that really in order to be able to achieve things and to feel, to have that secure base to explore,

We need to find the secure people to depend on our ability to collaborate. There’s even a questionnaire that you need to take a questionnaire to assess how well you collaborate with others because the whole idea is to choose and prioritize the people that are more secure because they will help you achieve more. They will help you become more independent. In order to become independent, choose the right person to depend on. And then like in that story with the child and the toys, you don’t really think about that much. You explore and you become independent while you can have that person in the background.

Paul Rand: At this stage, I think folks are probably getting a good sense of not only attachment styles, but the base ideas behind security. And then the question, of course, that you’re beginning to get into is that people may assume that their relationship patterns or their attachment are set in stone. And I think what you’re making very clear is that they’re not. And that if you have a desire to get to a different state, that’s within your means.

Amir Levine: I’m so glad you brought that up because that’s such an important thing for people to understand. And a lot of the time on social media, it says, “Oh, I’m avoidant. I’m anxious.” Well, it’s much more nuanced than that and much more complex than that because we can actually have more than one ... We can have different attachment styles with different people. And in fact, on my website, there’s a questionnaire where you can, I call it map your attachment topography. You can go on there and you can put a whole list of different people and figure out your specific attachment styles with them. You can also figure out your general attachment style. And you see a whole map of your relationships and how it really comes into action in real time. Even I have a thing that you can assess your attachment style with your pet and you get your attention topography and you see how it can vary.

And also the other thing is that it can change. And actually, I use the fact that our attachment style can be different with different people as a powerful vehicle for change because I teach people to give priority to the people, to the secure people in their lives. The problem is that oftentimes we ignore the security in our lives because they’re always there for us. They show up for us. They always text us when we text them. They’re just there. They’re boring. Our mind naturally gravitates, especially people who have insecure attachment style towards where there’s problem that I need to fix this. I need to ... No, he hurt me, he upset me. Let me try to fix it, fix it, or I need to run away, or whatever. One of the basic tenets in the book is to teach you to hear, does this secure person shift your attention instead of texting this person and fighting with them, text the secure person and give them our priority.

So over time, you create in neuroscience, there’s something that’s called an enriched environment and how it has an amazing healing power for the brain. The idea in the book is to teach you how to create an enriched social environment for your brain and for yourself so your brain can change.

Paul Rand: Okay. You also spent some time talking about what you called a secure states and this idea of getting into a mindset, but this with practice can become your default. And tell me what you mean by a secure state. And is it, do you think about yourself and say, how do I want to feel or act or behave in this type of situation? And that’s what I should be leaning into? 

Amir Levine: So I think the whole idea is that when you have an insecure attachment style, again, that’s kind of like a default system, but you can teach the ... And that’s kind of like the second part of the book is more concentrates on how to teach people with insecure attachment style. And there’s a chapter that’s devoted to each one, the anxious, avoidant, the fearful avoidance, how to become more secure or like enter a secure mode or secure state that will help you, that you can live more comfortably with all the benefits that we talked about, the health benefits and all that. So, and different attachment styles have different sets of tools that they need to apply. So sometimes it’s the same tool, but you need to apply them differently because you have different challenges and different things that you need to do differently in the world. So if you have anxious and or avoidant, you need to really go about it a little bit differently to get to that place.

Paul Rand: You talked about a program, I’m not sure if you use this word CARRP, C-A-R-R-P. And tell me what that is. It’s always nice to have an acronym to help think through a way of remembering things.

Amir Levine: It stands for consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. And I call these the five pillars of a secure life because again, the attachments-

Paul Rand: That’s pretty profound, isn’t it?

Amir Levine: I know. Yeah. I mean, I thought long and hard about it. And some of it came from ... Remember we talked about the cyberball experiment?

Paul Rand: Yep.

Amir Levine: And so there’s also an experiment called the reverse cyberball, where you’re standing in the middle and then you throw it all to one person, they throw it back at you, and then you turn around, you throw it to the person on the other side, they throw it to you. So you’re now hyper included. No one is excluded because you’re right, but you’re hyper included and they showed immense benefits for that hyperinclusivity or feeling hyper included, the same kind of things that you feel more self-esteem, you feel more in control of your life, you feel that life is more meaningful, all these really amazing psychological benefits. So I thought, how do I create that environment in real life? And from understanding the attachment neurocircuitry and how simple it is, I thought that really the way that to feel hyperincluded is when people are consistent, available and responsive to you…

Paul Rand: Yes

Amir Levine: …And you experience them as reliable and predictable because that means that when you text them, they text you back, they always include you in things, they include you in their life and you feel always kind of like the back and forth, like throwing a ball, constantly throwing and receiving. So that was my thinking around this whole carp thing and people that have been secure attachment style, people who are secure do it organically and people that have insecure attachment styles struggle with it. And I go into very, very specific details in each chapter for each attachment style, teaching them how to be carp and also how to create a carp environment for themselves.

Paul Rand: What are the things that you think are the most consistent and the most powerful if you said, “Listen, you got a lot of things in here, but let me give you two or three things that really kind of get to the heart of it.

Amir Levine: So I would definitely say, first of all, our attachment styles are not fixed, they can be changed and that we have a different attachment style with different people. And if we learn to be consistent, available, and responsive, and then reliable and predictable, CARRP, and you remember we talked about our “semis”. It’s not in the big gestures in those micro moments in our lives. Like when we go to the coffee shop, in restaurants, on the phone with people, at work, with everyone, we learn to be CARRP. And then also we can teach others to be CARRP with us, then we can enter that secure mode. And that secure mode is going to give us all of those amazing benefits, both psychological and physiological. So this is all of the whole sort of a synopsis of how to become more secure.

Paul Rand: Every one of us every day comes across people that you may say to yourself, “God, they’re insecure.” This interaction is coming from a place of insecurity. How do you find the best way of engaging with or neutralizing the downsides of dealing with somebody that’s having some of these insecure attachments?

Amir Levine: So I’m glad you asked me about that because the book actually, there’s a tool that I called a CARRP Intervention, which is again, the CARRP is consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. And so the CARP Intervention is that when you come across, it really teaches you how to create your secure village. It gives them, the honors is on them to maybe rise up and live to their secure potential because remember I told you, we all have these secure kernels in us. So you can summon it out of them. Or if they can’t live up to that expectation, it doesn’t mean that you have to completely cut them out of your life, you just give them less of a priority in your life and you give people with greater security, more priority. So this is very important for people in trying to create their secure village to help them become more secure.

Paul Rand: I think that it’s- If I can, let me push on this just a little bit more. Yes. We all have interactions with different people every day. And if you’re trying to have an interaction with somebody, but you recognize some of these less than secure tendencies, are there things that you can do to strengthen that interaction by understanding what’s really going on and then you can help address it and put it into a positive context?

Amir Levine: Oh, definitely. So for example, so I have two answers for this.

Paul Rand: Please. 

Amir Levine: Then you can either use both of them or just one which you like better. First of all, there’s something that I called the rules of secure engagement.

Paul Rand: Okay.

Amir Levine: And in that you really have to understand the logic. Attachment has a very different logic, which most of us don’t understand and which I really try to explain in the book. And it’s ... So when we get into an argument or fight, the attachment logic is relationships, secure relationships are there for one main purpose to keep people emotionally calm. So it’s in the background and you can explore. So basically the way if you ... So I have this rule that only one person is allowed to be upset at a time because if you understand that the attachment role is that if I’m in a relationship with someone, if they’re upset, my role is to regulate their emotions and have them calm down. So oftentimes the way that it translates when I give this rule to a couple, they go home and let’s say they get into a fight and then one say, wait, wait, wait a second.

We said only one person is allowed to be upset at a time and I was the first, so you have to help me. And oftentimes the effect is just what happened with you. It’s like they start laughing. It dissipates a lot of the tension.

And it also reminds them of what is the function of a good relationship is to really help reach that emotional calmness. But let’s say they fail it, and it’s not hard to fail that because when we get attached to someone, we become like one physiological unit and we reverberate. The emotions reverberate. So even if we have no reason to be upset, if someone who’s very close to you is upset, you’ll start to get upset. So now they’re both upset and they can’t follow the first rule. There’s a second rule that I called the Mea Culpa rule, which is kind of like it’s my fault. And so really, and that’s what people have sometimes a hard time with. At this point, you both failed the relationship because now you’re both upset. So you both have to apologize to each other for not being able to fulfill the role.

And so you both have to say, I’m sorry. I saw that you got upset and then I got even upset and I couldn’t be there for you to calm you down. And is there a way that I can help you? I really don’t want to do that. So you just say that. And people have a hard time with that because it’s like, No, but they’re right and I was wrong. But attachment doesn’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. It’s a different logic. It’s about, I need to feel safe. I don’t want to be right or wrong. I want to be safe. And you feel safe when there’s emotional calmness.

Paul Rand: Okay. We have covered all kinds of ground and you do a beautiful job explaining this. Are there any things that I didn’t ask you or things that you think we need to make sure we put into this interview to help people understand what your work is?

Amir Levine: I think I spent so many years doing this and I think it’s hard to put into words the advantages of living life in a more secure mode. And I myself, and I think I try to give some examples, even the small ones, of how much of the ... What a difference it makes in your day-to-day life, and then potentially also further down the road that I guess it’s hard to really explain to people who haven’t experienced secure attachment because I have patients like that and then they come and they learn and it’s such a different life. It’s really worth giving it a shot and it’s worth the work because it does take practice and it does take work, but it’s worth it.