Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the science of adult attachment can help you find – and keep – love

Expressing your needs and expectations to your partner in a direct, nonaccusatory manner is an incredibly powerful tool. Though it’s used naturally by people with a secure attachment style, it is often counterintuitive for people whose attachment style is anxious or avoidant.

If you’re secure, you’re very reliable, consistent, and trustworthy. You don’t try to dodge intimacy or go nuts over your relationships.

You too can provide a secure base by adopting the following secure behaviors: Be available: Respond sensitively to their distress, allow them to be dependent on you when they feel the need, check in with them from time to time, and provide comfort when things go wrong. Don’t interfere: Provide behind-the-scenes support for their endeavors. Help in

If you’re avoidant, you connect with romantic partners but always maintain some mental distance and an escape route. Feeling close and complete with someone else—the emotional equivalent of finding a home—is a condition that you find difficult to accept.

Numerous studies show that once we become attached to someone, the two of us form one physiological unit. Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the levels of hormones in our blood. We are no longer separate entities. The emphasis on differentiation that is held by most of today’s popular psychology approaches

Oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide that has gotten a lot of press coverage in recent years, plays a major role in attachment processes and serves several purposes: It causes women to go into labor, strengthens attachment, and serves as a social cohesion hormone by increasing trust and cooperation. We get a boost of oxytocin in our brain during or

Once your attachment system becomes activated, another interesting phenomenon is triggered: You will get overwhelmed by positive memories of the few good times you had together and forget the multitude of bad experiences.

Adult attachment designates three main “attachment styles,” or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children:

was more interesting was that there was no observed difference between secure couples and “mixed” couples—those with only one secure partner. They both showed less conflict and were rated as better functioning than were the “insecure” dyads. So not only do people with a secure attachment style fare better in relationships, they also create a buffer