Customer Reviews

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YouFind?and Keep?Love

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an excellent book for those dating and looking for love and those already in a relationship that is not working and they wonder why not. The authors do a great job explaining attachment theory not only from a scientific perspective but also from a real world perspective with examples.

People basically have one of three attachment styles:

Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back.

Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving.

The book is about the frustration people feel in relationships when these types cross. The more an anxious person wants to be close to an avoidant person the more the avoidant withdraws fearful of losing their independence. Most anxious people function fine in all other areas of life then discover they are very anxious in relationships to their dismay. Anxious types many times confuse the feelings of being anxious with excitement toward a potential partner that is avoidant and miss out on secure people that they feel are boring. Secure people tend to soothe and help anxious types, while avoidants trigger anxious people and lead to hopeless pursuits and wasted time. Two avoidants can rarely be together in a relationship because no one holds it together they just drift apart.

Through open and honest communication in relationships you should be able to identify if a possible partner is some one who can meet your needs. The book teaches that you always benefit from honest communication because it moves you toward your goal of the right relationship regardless of the outcome. Do not get stuck in a dead end relationship, get out if your needs are not met. "It's a simple law of probability-the more you meet, the greater chances you'll find the one who is a good match for you.

"In a true partnership, both partners view it as their responsibility to ensure the other's emotional well-being." Never forget that.

This book is the result of two decades of research, the principles presented can help you to find happiness in your romantic connections and to soar in all aspects of your life.

Excellent book, I highly recommend for those who want happy relationships.

Wow. This book is such an eye-opener! I just bought it yesterday and have almost done reading it. I've read lots of relationship books and most of them are a combination of psycho-babble and personal opinion. This book is completely different. It's grounded on soundly-based scientific findings and the authors are constantly interlacing their conclusions and advice with experiments and research studies. They also bring a lot of real life examples that are very easy to relate to (a couple of examples are a bit repetitive, but they get the point across really well). The authors walk readers through understanding themselves and their "attachment style" and understanding their partner's "attachment style" -- which drives them, what their basic beliefs are and why they act like they do with you. This book has really shifted the way I think about my relationships and I'm going to use a lot of the tools here to make better decisions going forward. I also loved the part about how when your needs are met, you actually become less needy and more likely to excel in different areas of life. It's just when your needs aren't met that you act clingy. If you want to learn more about what is really going on in your relationship, this book is a must!

What an amazing book. For years I had been hearing friends and others identify their behaviors with such negative labels like "co-dependent" or "needy", etc. Now comes this easy-to-read, easy-to-understand book that sheds all new light on relationship patterns! I've learned that those former, negative labels like 'needy' are not really helpful - my relationship style has more to do with my attachment style.

I continually found this book enlightening -- i could even see some of my past relationships within the many examples provided in the book.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding some simple truths about having a successful relationship - it's a great book.

I found the book both interesting and informative. After reading it, I saw things in my relationship patterns that went back to high school and I was able to understand how my childhood may have affected my attachment style. I also thought the explanation of "protest behavior" was excellent.

That said, I feel the book takes a superficial look at what causes attachment styles and deals with how to manage a relationship with someone who has an insecure attachment style vice addressing its underlying causes. Much of the behavior described in the red flags table is blatantly abusive. The authors discuss the avoidant-anxious axes but apart from secure attachment styles, they bypass the quadrants these axes form. The authors scrupulously avoid bringing personality disorders into the mix. While not everyone with an insecure attachment has a personality disorder, the clinical literature indicates persons with personality disorders have insecure attachments. One study says, "For Dutton and colleagues,35 both fearful and preoccupied attachment, as assessed by the RQ and RSQ in abusive men, were predictive for borderline personality, but fearful attachment was so strong a predictor that the authors concluded that having borderline personality was the prototype for this particular attachment style." ([...]) You will not find any reference to fearful attachments in the book. Borderline personality disorder appears once in the text but not in the index. I was in a 5yr relationship with a woman with this attachment style and failing to address this in the book is a serious omission. At its worst, it could lead someone to stay in an abusive, even dangerous, relationship with someone in the false hope that if they did enough of the right things to calm the insecure attachment, good results might eventually materialize. If the cause of the insecure attachment is a personality disorder, that's unlikely to happen. There are enough high conflict divorces and real and false, accusations of domestic violence without a book that leads you to believe the problem isn't as serious as it may really be.

Again, I thought the book was very good. It was easy to read and has lots of good information. It just leaves a lot of important information out.

I felt like I was given the language via this book to pull together and understand what I have experienced my whole life and what perplexed me my whole life. It's like when you are struggling to understand the math equation and then the instant comes when you get it. That was this book, for me.

But I'm frustrated with something. "Attached" says that I, an anxious attachment style person, am more likely to choose a partner who is an avoidant style, that when I do my attachment needs will never be fully satisfied even if both partners are willing to change to some degree as recommended in the book. "Attached" recommends I choose a secure attachment style partner to be happy. It also says that my attachment system will be activated by an avoidant, say on a first date, causing me to be drawn to him, and not activated by a secure person, who will bore me. The recommendation is to not get turned on by the avoidant attachment style person. After all the outstanding explanations and recommendations in the book, I feel it really falls short with that pithy recommendation to just not get turned on by the avoidant! Any anxious person will tell you that's near impossible!

Where's the steps for the anxious person to bypass the immediate and biologically based attachment to the avoidant?! Secures probably have the ability to make a choice in their selection of a partner to a greater degree. If I do as recommended in accepting my attachement style, am I to accept that I'm doomed to be sucked in to a series if unsatisfying relationships with avoidant people? "Attached" does have a helpful section on evaluating anxious/avoidant relationships and improving them and even on getting out of them. The shortfall is in how to make a different choice at those critical moments before getting into the relationship. "Just say no" never really worked.

When the first revision comes out, I hope it includes another chapter.

This book is incredible. Hands down the best relationship book I've every read, and trust me, I've read a bunch. Approaching relationship dynamics from the perspective of attachment theory is genius and the model fits my personal experience 100%.

The clarity with which this book answers common questions such as "am I really compatible with my mate?", "does it make sense to start a relationship with this person?", "is this relationship worth staying in" with crystal clarity.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is in a relationship, looking for a relationship, or even avoiding a relationship

Fantastic book.....never read a book written in such simple language with such a practical application to my day-to-day quality of life. It completely changed my focus on what to look for in a realtionship and how to go about finding it. A must for anyone dealing with attachment issues and/or insearch of a relationship or wanting to solve problems in an existing relationship.

Finally!!! A book that explains the science behind attachment in a way that makes sense and is relatable & meaningful in "real life" (vs. just in a lab setting). And it doesn't stop there.

The authors outline actionable guidelines for:

* understanding our own attachment style
* recognizing the attachment styles of others
* responding to other attachments styles in ways that help obtain more desirable outcomes (without being manipulative)

One of the most helpful things about the book is the real-life examples the authors provide. While I can easily understand the definitions and explanations provided, the narratives about friends, colleagues and clients really help "drive things home".

Another great thing about the way the book is written is that it can help you no matter where you are in the relationship cycle: single & dating, early stages of a relationship, long-term relationship, married, newly-single, etc.. It's like having an owner's manual for your dating life.

I've already recommended this book to several friends, family members and clients. I predict that it will find a familiar, comfortable spot on my "You should read this." list for the foreseeable future.

I am a Clinical Social Worker and this is the most insightful, easy-to-read book on self-help in relationships that I've come across. It goes hand-in-hand with Myers Briggs and the Enneagram to help with self-understanding. Not only does it help you identify your relating style and that of your partner, it provides practical 'how-to' steps in becoming an effective communicator, no matter what your style. Insightful and compassionate; I highly recommend it. I only wish it had been written sooner!

In this book they try to extrapolate the highly validated attachment research on parent-child relationships to adult romantic relationships.

I think this works well for single people trying to make a good choice of partner but is reckless and irresponsible when applied to people who are already married. For single people, who ideally have not already fallen in love with someone, I would say this book is invaluable. When you are dating, it is so hard to discern, of all the foibles and flaws that your date has, which you'll be able to live with and which will be the eventual doom of your relationship. So their speculative endeavor is appropriate for decisions like, should you go on to the second date or not.

On the other hand, it is not well grounded enough to make life altering decisions like should you break up your family and get a divorce. The authors primarily base their ideas off of dating workshops they run. They divide all of humanity into 3 categories. Woe to you if you married someone in the avoidant category. They lump everyone with an avoidant attachment as uniformly hopeless. First off, is that true? Of course not every avoidant is equally avoidant and some situations may be more repairable than others. They fairly directly advise you that you should leave a relationship with an avoidant if you ever want to be happy. Never mind the fact that the authors are not seasoned couples therapists and don't have extensive experience trying to save marriages. Never mind that they have no research data to support their dire pronouncements. Never mind that actually truly effective evidenced based therapy does exist to heal the very relationships that they are advising you to give up on. Never mind the fact that they actually say in the book that they don't know much about avoidant attachment types (presumably because these types don't attend their dating workshops) and their description of this type is almost a caricature. They have the nerve to say that one of the signs that your partner is avoidant is if his behavior was more romantic during courtship and then the romance fades after marriage. Probably 75% of the US population would decide to send their spouses packing.

This is not a balanced presentation at all. People in the secure and anxious categories can be in relationship and people in the avoidant category ate misfits that you should just avoid. If your marriage is troubled this book allows you to feel smug and righteous. You can decide that your partner is avoidant and you now have "scientific" proof that your troubles are all your partner's fault, and you should just divorce them and make a more informed choice next time. Many people in troubled marriage already harbor these kinds of thoughts and to get "scientific" proof that it is all your partner's fault is insidious and destructive. I think it is horribly irresponsible for them to make these hopeless statements when, in fact, true help does exist.

This book is not the fruit of wise, seasoned professionals. Instead it is a fairly immature, simplistic almost gossipy presentation on love. If you are having trouble in your marriage please read "Hold Me Tight" and avoid this book. This book contains a lot of unfounded, ideas that will leave you hopeless when there may still be hope.