A successful stock-market trader walked into therapy with a very specific request: fix his anxious attachment style so he could stop spiraling over a woman who wasn't texting him back. Dr. Amir Levine, psychiatrist and co-author of the 3-million-copy-selling book Attached, had a different idea - maybe the trader's hyperawareness of subtle indicators was exactly what made him good at his job. The trader wasn't buying it and got his money back.
Now Levine is back with Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life, hoping for a more receptive audience than that one guy. The book's radical premise: you don't have to become a perfectly "secure" person; you just need to take a red pen to your social environment and edit out the flaky, emotionally unavailable characters.
Attachment theory has long held that anxious and avoidant styles stem from childhood trauma - caregivers who taught you that love can't be relied upon. Levine argues they're just normal biodiversity, like being tall or having a good sense of smell. Anxious attachers are simply more attuned to environmental cues; one fMRI study found they detect facial expression shifts faster, and another showed they notice smoke rising from a computer before everyone else. Avoidant attachers, meanwhile, are free thinkers who in that same smoke study just got up and left - and then everyone else followed.
"A tribe needs some members who detect danger and some who stray from the pack," Levine notes, adding a cautionary tale about 323 reindeer found dead after huddling together during a lightning storm. "It turns out there are risks to being close to others."
For the anxious and avoidant among us, Levine recommends designing a "social habitat" rather than trying to will yourself into security. Avoidant attachers should find people who support their need for freedom. Anxious attachers should seek out people who are CARRP - consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable - and "downsize" bonds with those who take forever to text back. He calls this "wall tennis": matching the other person's level of effort. Levine himself stopped reaching out to a flaky, emotionally guarded friend; now when they do talk, it's actually a nice chat. "The relationship isn't abandoned," he says. "It's 'right-sized.'"
Levine is walking a fine line here. In an era of friend-firing, date-ghosting, familial estrangement, and AI companions, telling people to cut loose challenging relationships might seem tone-deaf. A 2019 Pew poll found nearly half of Americans agree "people are not as reliable as they used to be," and rates of secure attachment have been dropping since the 1980s. But Levine insists he's not giving anyone a pass for solipsism - just asking people to be conscious of their own strengths and weaknesses, and perceptive of others' too. Avoidant attachers are counseled to offer small tokens of presence; anxious attachers are reminded that wall tennis doesn't mean cutting people off entirely.
Of course, you could just ask yourself how a secure person would behave - and do that. To which Levine says: Good luck! "Outsize ambitions can backfire," he warns. Anxious attachers who belittle themselves for feeling hurt may grow more distressed; avoidants who go all-in on socializing can burn out and retreat even more dramatically. The book offers a philosophy of acceptance: of yourself, but also of others. People aren't who you want them to be. They're just who they are.