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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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02 Jul 2024
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The loneliness trap: it is said to be as bad as smoking. So will it shorten my lifespan?

I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about a lonely old age. Closing in on my 61st birthday, eight years into a very happy marriage, I’ve got a wife, two teenage stepkids, an older daughter by an ex, a grandson and four siblings. Most of them at least tolerate me; a few even tell me that they love me. But maybe I’m taking too much for granted. People die, drift apart, fall out – and anyone who knows me will tell you that I can be very irritating.

Fifteen or 20 years from now it’s not inconceivable that none of my family will want to have much to do with me.

As for my close friends, some of whom I have known for more than 40 years, well, a) they’re obviously getting on a bit, and b) I’ve done a terrible job of keeping in touch with them. What with the lockdowns, and giving up booze, I have almost forgotten how to socialise. Almost four years after I stopped drinking, I’m not afraid of relapsing, but the sober me finds it just a little harder to enjoy pubs or wine bars, and has just a little less to say for himself. When I’m feeling charitable, I remind myself he’s also less likely to end the evening spouting bollocks.

 

What with the lockdowns and giving up booze, I have almost forgotten how to socialize

 

Maybe I’ll just be left with a dog or two. That might not be so bad. I’m a late convert to the waggy-and-licky cause, but for the past six years I’ve been lucky enough to look after two Romanian rescues. Sienna, a fatheaded staffie-dalmatian, and Stevie, a bogbrush-tailed quarter-alsatian, are always glad to see me, always good company. I talk to them more than you might think healthy. Is it wrong to call a dog darling?

Just out of curiosity (I talk to dogs!), I decided to see how I rank right now on the UCLA loneliness scale, introduced in 1978 and, after several revisions, still one of the most popular measures. How often do I feel alone, asks the online test. Never, rarely, sometimes, often? How often do I feel my interests and ideas are not shared by those around me? Never, rarely, sometimes, often? Twenty questions like this and I score 37 out of a possible 80. This represents a “moderate” degree of loneliness, as opposed to “low”, “moderately high” or “high”. That’s a little worse than I expected. Stevie, Sienna, you’re not pulling your weight.

We should probably pin down what we mean by loneliness, as opposed to solitude, aloneness, social isolation, disconnectedness etc. For Henry Rollins, the former Black Flag frontman turned writer, it’s something that “adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” I’m going to file that under Poetic Nonsense. The Campaign to End Loneliness (CEL), more usefully, defines it as “a subjective, unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. It happens when there is a mismatch between the quantity and quality of the social relationships that we have, and those that we want.”

This mismatch can ruin lives, especially as we get older, the grim reaper scythes his way through our loved ones, and retirement or infirmity undoes all the weak ties that come with the daily commute or weekly shop. Almost 4 million Britons are chronically lonely, according to the CEL, meaning they feel that way “often or always”. In 2022 Michael, a 58-year-old who had lost his mother a couple of years before, told the Mental Health Foundation his life was “like being on a desert island”. “When you have someone who really understands you,” he said, “who really gets you in a deeper way than other people, when you lose that person it’s quite a hole.”

“People who are often or always lonely,” the foundation noted, “have a higher risk of developing certain mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. This kind of loneliness is also associated with increased thoughts of suicide.”

 

Loneliness follows a U-shaped curve, with a peak in young adulthood, a trough in midlife, then another rise after 60

 

It’s hardly surprising that one manifestation of misery encourages another. But loneliness is as bad for our bodies as it is for our minds. The US’s top doctor, surgeon general Vivek Murthy, is so worried that last year he issued an urgent warning about the “epidemic” of loneliness and social isolation. (These are not quite the same thing, though there’s a big overlap. Social isolation describes an objective lack of social connections, while loneliness is all about perception. You can be lonely without being socially isolated – and, if you’re lucky, vice versa.)

Murthy didn’t mince his words. “Loneliness and social isolation increase the risk for premature death by 26% and 29% respectively,” he wrote. “More broadly, lacking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. In addition, poor or insufficient social connection is associated with increased risk of disease, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke. Furthermore” – you’re spoiling us, Dr Murthy – “it is associated with increased risk for anxiety, depression and dementia. Additionally, the lack of social connection may increase susceptibility to viruses and respiratory illness.”

Loneliness can hit at any age: Joe Harrison, a campaign manager for the Marmalade Trust, the charity that hosts the current Loneliness Awareness Week, describes it as “a natural feeling that kind of ebbs and flows across our lifetime”. According to researchers from the US’s Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, it follows a sort of U-shaped curve, with a peak in young adulthood, a trough in midlife, then another rise after 60, becoming particularly steep around 80.

Looking back, my own loneliest moments were in my teens and 20s – at school, in my first year away from home at university, as an English assistant in France, during a couple of unhappy relationships. I felt much more connected to the world in my 40s, even though I was mostly living on my own, in a mountaintop shack where I could go for days without seeing another human.

There’s something particularly brutal about loneliness striking in your 70s, 80s or 90s, when there’s so little time to grow through it. It seems so final. How do you get your head round Ruth Lowe’s observation that “3 million older people say that TV or the radio is their main source of company”? Lowe is the head of loneliness services for Age UK, and many of the risk factors that she cites seem more intractable than, say, settling into a new school or a different job.

“Things like bereavement, having physical and mental health conditions or needing to care for a loved one mean that older people are very much at risk of loneliness,” Lowe says. “And other life changes, such as losing the things many of us take for granted – like having good eyesight and hearing, or having the ability to walk to the shops – can lead to people spending countless hours alone with no one to talk to and ending up feeling isolated and invisible.” That’s why Age UK has an actual head of loneliness services, as well as a 24-hour Silver Line helpline for the over-55s, a telephone friendship service and face-to-face befriending.

 

Many of us struggle to admit we are lonely. ‘There’s a tremendous stigma,’ says Mark Rowland of the Mental Health Foundation

 

I do wonder how bad things would have to get before I accepted I needed help. Mark Rowland, the chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, says many of us struggle to admit that we are lonely, even to ourselves. “There’s still a tremendous stigma,” he says. “As a society we’re more fragmented, there are factors that individually we can’t control, but we internalise the cause of loneliness as being a defect of our personality – we’re not interesting enough, we’re not valuable enough. That can develop into a spiral of lack of confidence and withdrawal.” In other words, you feel lonely, you avoid other people, you feel more lonely …

 

 

To quote Michael again, loneliness is “corrosive”, “eats away at your self-image”, “makes you question the value of your life”.

As I learned from my long-ago experience of depression, when I spent months thinking it was everything around me that was falling to pieces, rather than my mind, naming what you are feeling can be the first step in doing something about it. “One of the messages we want to get across,” Rowland says, “is that loneliness is not insurmountable at any stage of life. But it’s very difficult when it’s, let’s say, rusting away at your mental and emotional life without you even naming it. Bringing it into the light and sharing that with yourself and then with others is really the first step to breaking that cycle.”

A plan for loneliness

Eight suggestions from the Mental Health Foundation:

Try to keep busy

This might involve a hobby such as gardening, going to the gym or even sorting out your kitchen cupboards, jigsaws, puzzles or knitting. Small activities can give you energy and positive feelings. It’s important these things are fun or fulfilling – be careful about working too hard or watching TV shows simply as a distraction. This will only delay or suppress your feelings and could actually make your mental health worse.

Stimulate your mind

This could include taking courses or listening to podcasts about anything from comedy to fitness. Just listening to the voice of someone you like can help you feel less lonely.

Get moving

Physical exercise can help with loneliness. It can be as simple as having a walk in the park when you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed. Alternatively, you could listen to music and dance around your living room. (Be aware of your neighbours, though.)

Try to engage with the people you meet

It can be hard to talk to others when you’re feeling lonely. However, trying to connect with the people you meet as you go about your day can be helpful. Even catching someone’s eye and saying “Hi” as you walk along can make you feel better. By sharing a polite greeting, you might find you give someone else a lift, too.

Find people who ‘get’ you

There are great benefits in finding people who have been through similar experiences to you. Look for connections in local groups or on social media.

Spend time with pets

Not only do animals provide us with unconditional love and support; they also help to give structure to our days and even encourage us to get out and connect with others. Interaction with pets is also shown to help reduce stress levels.

Try to use social media in a positive way

Social media can help your mental health – or harm it. Try to find digital communities that share your interests and passions. Most importantly, be aware of how you feel when you use social media and focus on topics and activities that work best for you.

Talking therapies can help

Talking therapy can be hard to get – but if you can find a counsellor or therapist, this will provide you with a safe space to work through your feelings and thoughts without judgment.

 

 

 

Original article here

29 Jun 2024
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Access The Body’s Secret To Repair Mode And Longevity Through Intermittent Fasting

It was about three years ago, as I recall, that a fellow called into my radio/TV program to suggest that a great way to slow aging and normalize weight was an intermittent fasting program called the 5:2 diet.

It involved eating normally five days a week and then eating no more than 500 calories for two days in a row, then back to normal eating for the next five days and so on. Several books have been written about it, as the subject of quite a bit of good science, the most recent reported last week in The Washington Post.

Fasting, it turns out, triggers a series of metabolic changes in the body that extend life and reduce the risks of everything from cancer and diabetes to vulnerability to infection. It does so, in part, by causing the body to inhibit a naturally-occurring enzyme in the human body known as mTOR, or the “mechanistic Target Of Rapamycin.”

This enzyme, mTOR, is, as the authors of a 2013 Nature article noted in the title of their piece, “A Key Modulator of Ageing and Age-Related Disease.”  The authors noted in their abstract that finding drugs to “slow ageing” was inevitable, and:

 

A leading target for such interventions is the nutrient response pathway defined by the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR).”

 

They noted that when the mTOR enzyme was blocked in various animals, including primates like us, it both “extends lifespan” and “confers protection against a growing list of age-related pathologies.”

A new study just published in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network Open found that 16 weeks of rigorously following the 5:2 diet produced a better result for Type 2 diabetics than even taking the widely-prescribed anti-diabetes drug Metformin.

Our bodies are generally running in one of two modes — build or repair. In build mode, the mTOR pathway (and others) direct us to manufacture fat from extra calories and use nutrients and calories to sustain our normal metabolism.

In the repair mode, which we enter when we fast for more than a day, our body begins to burn that fat to drive metabolism, while also scavenging the body for old cells that are still alive but have ceased, because of age, to do their jobs. They’re essentially zombie cells, using up energy and space but doing nothing more than draining resources from the body.

Through a process called autophagy, such zombie (senescent) cells are broken down, and their raw materials recycled for use by new and functional cells. It’s like a major housecleaning of the body, resulting in greater metabolic efficiency and less of a burden on the body’s systems.

Apparently eating more than 500 calories a day is the threshold that tips the body out of autophagy/repair and into the normal build metabolic mode. In all probability this reflects an evolutionary process with deep roots in the early human experience, when periods of feast and famine were common.

It also probably explains why people who survived the Nazi death camps — and had experienced prolonged starvation during that experience — tend to live around 7.1 years longer than people who never underwent that horrible experience.

Takarudana Mapendembe wrote about this at greater length in his Healthy Body Is Yours Substack newsletter last week, noting extensive scientific reports detailing how it helps with insulin sensitivity, weight loss, greater mental clarity and function, reductions in inflammation, improved immune system function, hormone regulation, better digestion, and reduced heart disease.

When Louise and I were first married, we read Arnold Ehret’s 1910 masterpiece Rational Fasting. We’d already become vegetarians because of both our spiritual practice and our opposition to the Vietnam War, but this added a whole new dimension to our eating lives; we regularly did 2- and 3-day water and juice fasts, and continued the practice well into the years when we were raising our three kids (who all grew up vegetarian).

After that caller told me about the 5:2 diet and how it had transformed his life (and body), we started doing that as well, and have noticed some real benefits.

One of my favorite things about it is that after two days of only 500 calorie meals I’m really hungry, something that most Americans literally never experience. I can’t describe what an utter pleasure it is to dig into a good meal when in a true state of hunger, as opposed to the appetite we normally experience.

I also find that after two days of fasting on less than 500 calories, my mind seems much clearer and sharper. Instead of being tired, as most people I’ve shared this with expected, I feel energized.

Check out the book The Fast Diet by the British scientist who figured out that 500-calorie threshold and how it could be used to produce the same or nearly the same effect on the body and mind as a couple of days of water fasting. It’s brilliant, and even if you don’t struggle with weight or diabetes, this is an important addition to the literature on health.

 

 

Original article here

27 Jun 2024
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Do you find the 21st century overstimulating? Try ‘longstorming’

 

Our experience of time is changing. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the early 21st century has left us ‘whizzing without a direction’. Our world is shaped by the restless, disorienting rhythms of near-term deliverables, social media impression counts, technological obsolescence, shallow electoral cycles, rapid news cycles, frenzied culture wars, sudden stock market shifts, gig economy hustles, and occupational burnout. Though it all seems exhausting and unmanageable, the whizzing isn’t slowing: digital platforms now bombard us, minute by minute, with fragments of information that fail to cohere into meaningful narratives, and algorithms that hijack our neurochemical reward systems.

As the treadmill of post-industrial society speeds up, some of us have become so addicted to the stimulation that we struggle to imagine another way to live: psychological research shows that most people would rather receive electric shocks than sit quietly alone with their own thoughts. In his book The Scent of Time (2017), Han borrows a concept from Marcel Proust – une époche de hâte – to describe our overstimulated moment. The ‘age of haste’ has arrived. And its problems are pervasive.

When time whizzes by, individual moments blur together and we stop contemplating how each fits into broader arcs of history. We forget, Han laments, to engage in slower-moving forms of cognition such as wonder, curiosity and introspection. We forget how to reflect and be still. But what can we really do about the age of haste? For many of us, a slower, more contemplative life often feels unattainable. You may feel trapped by the directionless whizzing of the 21st century – trapped on an accelerating treadmill. Can you forge a new relationship with time?

Perhaps your first impulse is to find ways of escaping the age of haste. This is a mistake. We cannot simply break free by ‘exiting’ the world we inhabit. Confronting time requires moreengagement with the wider world. This world, however, is not the one defined by near-term deliverables and neurochemically disrupting algorithms. It is the one that reveals itself when you glimpse the Milky Way on a cloudless night. It is the world that becomes clear when you gaze upon a mountain.

 

Venturing into breathtaking outdoor spaces helps us step back, slow down and think in the long term

 

Encountering spectacular natural environments can cause a radical shift in how we think about ourselves and the world. According to the psychologist Dacher Keltner, feelings of awe, especially those inspired by natural scenery, can make us feel more collaborative, less egoistic, more altruistic, and more open to social connection. Over the past two decades, Keltner tested this idea through a series of experiments that examined how a person’s attitudes and behaviours change after experiencing awe-inspiring places or things. He found that natural splendour seems to put us in a headspace that lets us reflect on our short lives as ephemeral organisms dwelling on a fragile planet floating in a vast cosmos. This way of thinking can be transformative, but its power is not a recent discovery. Greco-Roman Stoic philosophers, for instance, encouraged retreats into the countryside to proactively ponder life. Venturing into breathtaking outdoor spaces seems to help us step back, slow down and, most importantly, think in the long term. I call this style of thinking ‘longstorming’ because encounters with sublime geophysical and ecological environments can invite the mind to brainstorm about our long-term futures and pasts.

Brainstorming is a technique that was developed by the advertising executive Alex F Osborne in the 1950s. This technique, as Osborne explains in his book Applied Imagination (1953), involves generating a stream of new ideas by riffing about bold plans or even proposing outlandish hypotheticals. Osbourne’s goal was to help employees come up with creative proposals for advertising campaigns, but brainstorming has since become a widely used tool for generating new ideas in all types of contexts. Brainstorming also works well – perhaps even better – out in the wilderness, under vast constellations of stars, where the mind is calibrated to contemplate the deeper timescales of our planet and universe.

I believe that purposefully longstorming can help us retool how we relate to time itself. Outdoors, in a headspace better suited to imagining possible scenarios in hypothetical past and future worlds, we can find a way beyond the immediacy of the age of haste.

In this case, a ‘scenario’ is created by weaving together ideas about trends (social, ecological, economic), possible events (the creation of new species, the movement of tectonic plates), and potential detours (such as the unexpected asteroid that collided with Earth 66 million years ago). The scenarios we imagine need not even be scientifically accurate. The simple act of temporally extending the intellect across time is enough to change how we experience the here and now.

 

Towering above the canyon like silent guardians, I saw the tallest living things on Earth: coast redwoods

 

I recently tried longstorming while hiking through Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California. Standing inside the canyon itself, which a tiny stream had carved out over aeons, I thought about the fern species covering the 15-metre-high stone walls beside me. The ancestors of these leafy plants dated back 325 million years. Climbing over the tangled roots of a downed redwood tree, itself several hundred years old, I watched the rays from our 4.6 billion-year-old sun filter through the foliage, casting a soft dappled light. As I walked, I saw a tiny waterfall sprinkling over pads of moss as it fell from the high canyon walls. Towering above the canyon like silent guardians, I saw the tallest living things on Earth: coast redwoods. The ancestors of these trees have been growing in the region for about 20 million years, and their relatives thrived in the Jurassic period, roughly 160 million years ago. The scene felt like a portal to an earlier world – a reminder of the vast chain of life, and of my fleeting moment within it.

As I longstormed, I envisioned other moments from the past. Imagining how the nearby waterway would have looked hundreds of years ago, I pictured the redwood-plank homes built on its banks by the Indigenous Yurok peoples, who were some of the earliest inhabitants in the region. My mind drifted even further back. Tens of millions of years ago, redwood forests grew from Greenland to Alaska, France to the Czech Republic, England to Svalbard. The redwoods bear witness to the depths of time.

As I wandered, the canyon’s sprouting ferns and trickling water proceeded at a slow, deliberate pace. This invited me to ponder Earth’s ongoing dance of creation and erosion, growth and decay. Boundaries between the natural landscapes of the national park and the inner landscapes of my thoughts blurred. I thought about the impermanence of human endeavours, and how soon the digital equipment I had with me – phones, cameras – would become obsolete. I thought about the redwoods absorbing our emissions from the atmosphere, taking in carbon dioxide as they continued to grow. I pondered how climate change could reduce the coastal fog upon which the trees depend, or how reduced snowmelt could someday hinder the redwoods’ access to water. And I thought about my own life, my ancestors, and the intergenerational chains of connection that bind us to Earth and each other.

When I left the redwoods, and stopped longstorming, I found myself in a different frame of mind than when I arrived. I felt more tranquil and open to time. And I’m not the only one. In 1969, Claudia Alta ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson, then the First Lady of the United States, noted a similar experience in a Californian redwood forest. What she describes is a simple form of longstorming:

 

One of my most unforgettable memories of the past years is walking through the redwoods last November – seeing the lovely shafts of light filtering through the trees so far above, feeling the majesty and silence of that forest, and watching a salmon rise in one of those swift streams – all our problems seemed to fall into perspective and I think every one of us walked out more serene and happier.

 

Sublime outdoor spaces, such as a redwood forest, can offer a temporal perspective that is rare in contemporary consumer societies. Longstorming acts on this by creating a contemplative headspace in which the fleetingness of the present and the vastness of deep time mingle in harmony. This underscores the importance of conserving outdoor spaces not just as charismatic ecosystems or natural resources, but also as ideational resources for connecting our minds with the deeper timescales of our planet. For some, contemplating these settings may evoke a sense of planetary connection that makes the restless whizzing of our daily lives less oppressive, less urgent. For some, this may also be confronting, as we realise how insignificant our daily concerns are in the grand timelines of the universe. For others, it may shed light on hopes, fears, dreams, anxieties and desires.

By longstorming, your mind becomes a theatre for viewing possible planetary events across time. This is similar to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s concept of ‘timefulness’. Thinking about geological events on Earth, she writes in her 2018 book, can help us become more ‘mindful that this world contains so many earlier ones, all still with us in some way – in the rocks beneath our feet, in the air we breathe, in every cell of our body.’ Longstorming is also related to the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s concept of Robinsonner, in reference to Robinson Crusoe, from his poem ‘Romance’ (c1869-71). This invented French verb denotes the act of daydreaming by wandering mentally to distant places and times. Such plays of temporal imagination are essential to resisting the pressures of our age of haste.

 

Metals found in smartphones, such as gold and copper, were formed billions of years ago among distant stars

 

Anthropologists and geologists have long advocated that we focus on long-term horizons. In the 1970s, Margaret Mead warned against the modern, Western, hyper-individualistic pathology of being too rigidly rooted in one’s own cultural concept of time – a phenomenon that the anthropologist Robert Textor later termed ‘tempocentrism’. Bjornerud has diagnosed consumer society with ‘chronophobia’: the time denial associated with lives of instant gratification. In my book Deep Time Reckoning (2020), I caution against ‘shallow time discipline’: the way that socioeconomic pressures for short-term gains have created incredibly short-term rhythms in our lives. Tempocentrism, chronophobia and shallow time discipline are all ways of diagnosing our ever-accelerating relationship with the world, which we experience as a hyperactive whizzing that spins us, faster and faster, toward death.

Fortunately, you do not need to visit charismatic ecosystems, like redwood forests, to begin longstorming. Walking down any city street or a country road, you can attune to how the rocks beneath your feet have multimillion- or multibillion-year geological histories. You can attune to how the air you breathe is altered by decades of carbon emissions. You can attune to the evolutionary histories of the chirping birds or even the cells in your body. Contemplating the passage of time is, at some level, available to anyone willing and able to longstorm – to begin wondering about the longer timelines of the universe. When you return to your smartphone afterwards, you might even look differently at the device itself: less attuned to the newsfeeds and pings, and more attuned to the ancient geological histories of the elements and minerals that make it up. After all, many of the metals found in smartphones, such as gold and copper, were formed billions of years ago among distant stars.

That said, certain geophysical features (like mountain vistas or idyllic countryside), certain activities (like hiking or backpacking), and certain mental states (like awe or calm) tend to draw out more enriching temporal experiences than others. This has an unfortunate implication: opportunities to have life-transforming brushes with the deep time of our planet and cosmos are not evenly distributed across society. Not everyone is capable of leisurely neighbourhood walks, let alone treks up to mountaintop vistas. Not everyone has the resources to make such a trip, let alone the time. If we want all of society to resist the age of haste, we first need to reform its entrenched structures of poverty – temporal or otherwise.

In the age of haste, longstorming should be a necessity, not a luxury. Without a deeper attunement to planetary time, the therapies of the 21st century will deliver healing that soothes us only in the moment. The age of haste requires healing of a different kind: longer, slower, planetary.

 

 

 

Original article here

23 Jun 2024
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How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Relationships

 

While navigating the treacherous world of dating, the concept of “attachment theory” often crops up. You can identify your own attachment style by taking online quizzes like those used to identify the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs personality types. Unlike those quizzes, however, the theory of attachment styles is widely accepted in the academic psychology community.

When I first heard of the theory, after my divorce at age 24, it made sense to me that early childhood bonding patterns and trauma would drive how we seek intimacy and solve conflict as adults. I recognized that my own attachment style had evolved significantly over time and wanted to understand why that was, and learn how to intentionally develop a more secure attachment style.

Here, five experts in the mental health and social services fields help unpack the theory to help explain each attachment style, why people of certain styles tend to be drawn to each other, and how to become more secure in your relationships.

What is attachment theory?

Attachment theory comes from the work psychoanalyst John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth (whom Bowlby mentored) did together in the ‘60s and ’70s. As part of their larger focus on the effects of family bonds on the emotional development of children, they researched the behavior of infants who were separated from their mothers and how they behaved once reunited.

Based on their observations, they surmised that during the first year of a child’s life, children learn how to connect with others and express their needs. Those whose caregivers are consistently responsive, mirror emotions back to them, meet their needs and provide comfort help them form a “secure” attachment style. According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, this means that they’re more easily able to form connections later in life, express what they need, and ask for help without fear of abandonment or criticism.

But if this key period of childhood development is consistently disrupted, it may tamper with the development of secure attachment. This gives rise to the other attachment styles: anxious and avoidant, sometimes referred to as maladaptive attachment styles. Laura Young, a social worker in Charlottesville, VA, points out that minor fluctuations during the first year of a child’s life won’t doom them to a non-secure attachment style. “The research varies some, but ‘good enough’ parenting is typically classified as being tuned in to your child — if it’s an infant, soothing them to full calm — 50 to 70 percent of the time,” she says. (This statistic comes from a study that came out in Child Development in 2020.)

As psychology as a field has shifted from Freudian methods and theories, attachment theory has become a foundational theory for much of contemporary psychology, taught almost universally in Psych 101 courses (the experts interviewed for this piece all reported first encountering attachment theory in undergrad classes). It has become a useful system for thinking about myriad relationship dynamics, for reexamining early childhood traumas, for improving communication between family members and couples, and for helping individuals choose the right romantic partners.

So, what exactly is secure attachment?

Ainsworth posited that 70 percent of people have secure attachment styles, and 15 percent of people have each anxious and avoidant styles. A study by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver at the University of Denver found that just over half (56 percent) of participants had a secure attachment style, while the other two attachment styles were split fairly evenly (25 percent avoidant and 19 percent anxious/ambivalent). The book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love by Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller simplifies things a bit, and states that roughly 50 percent of people are secure, and the rest of the population is split evenly between avoidant and anxious styles. Regardless of which statistic is most accurate, the point is, it’s likely that the majority of the population is able to securely attach to others. Furthermore, those with secure attachments may positively influence those with whom they’re in relationships.

Young explains that “while primary attachment styles are formed in the first 12 months of a child’s life, childhood is full of literally millions of cycles of rupture/distress and repair/soothing between parents and children. Attachment is formed in the repair, too.” (She attributes this idea to Edward Tronick, who writes about the rupture/repair dynamic in his book The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children, and an experiment he did called “the Still Face.”) A secure attachment style, therefore, isn’t so much about absence of trauma, but about having needs met and emotions validated by the child’s primary caregiver. In adulthood, a secure attachment style in a partner relationship means someone is “attuned to their partner’s emotional and physical cues and know[s] how to respond to them,” as Levine and Heller write in Attached. Noncrisis levels of tension in a relationship don’t make the securely attached person totally shut down or react with an activated or outsized fight or flight response.

Christina Tesoro, a therapist in Brooklyn who specializes in sex education and works with primarily LGBTQIA+ clients, affirms that secure attachment is more about self-regulation and being unafraid of open communication than about a childhood free of trauma. “[Secure attachment is] not so much about not experiencing ‘negative’ emotions in the relationship, but it’s about… being able to communicate [negative] feelings to their partner or partners from a grounded place with self-awareness, especially around things like projection,” she says.

If you can see yourself clearly and are able to stay grounded and talk through difficult things in an open manner without getting emotionally flooded or shut down, you probably have a secure attachment style. Baltimore-based therapist Mary Rimi says, “Someone with secure attachment is more likely to look at situations more objectively, without overindulging in self-blame, while still being able to take ownership of mistakes.”

For me, feeling the sense of a secure attachment is usually about knowing that things that make me anxious are safe to bring up in a relationship without the fear of negative reactions to my vulnerability. It doesn’t mean that there’s no conflict or difficulty working through things, but it means that conflict produces greater intimacy, security, and growth, rather than a contact high of codependent enmeshment or a total shutdown of intimacy.

What are the anxious and avoidant attachment styles?

Then, we have the other attachment styles: avoidant and anxious. These two variant attachment styles exist on more of a spectrum rather than as black and white opposites, explains Esther Ehrensaft, a practicing psychologist in San Francisco. As attachment theory grew in popularity, practitioners found the assumption of someone being only secure, avoidant, or anxious to be less than accurate. The current understanding of attachment styles is more nuanced and includes mixed, or hybrid, attachment styles.

Avoidant attachment results when a child gives up on reassurance and assumes that their primary attachment object is not reliable, so they learn to fend for themselves, avoiding both connection and vulnerability. Tesoro notes that there are two variations of the avoidant attachment style: fearful and dismissive. Of the former, she says, “Fearful avoidant shows up in adulthood in individuals who feel driven to abandon their partners or pull away before their partners can pull away or reject them. They can respond to intimacy by feeling helpless or anxious and feel distrustful of others. You see this with folks who possibly grew up with abusive caregivers or, sadly, caregivers who were struggling with unprocessed trauma of their own.”

A dismissive avoidant attachment style may manifest as people who “have a really hard time being vulnerable with others,” Tesoro explains. “They’re used to doing things on their own, may rely too much on themselves for self-soothing, have difficulty interrelating, need a lot of space, and give a lot of space to others rather than turning toward and seeking intimacy.” According to her, this may be a result of neglect from early caregivers.

On the other hand, anxious attachment shows itself when the child is constantly monitoring their caregiver to reassure themselves that their primary attachment object is not going to abandon them. This can display in adulthood, for example, as the adult who texts their friends “Are you mad at me?” after a period of prolonged silence. Rimi explains, “Adults with anxious attachment are often seeking to please others, while constantly feeling like they fall short. There is often a preoccupation with how they are relating to others, and constant fear of being left, rejected, or abandoned.”

While sometimes these fears are unnecessary, when a relationship does happen to end, those with an anxious attachment style often see it as evidence that they were right to believe they were going to be left all along, according to Rimi. This may trigger a cycle of ongoing preoccupation and self-blame. “Someone who is anxious in attachment will often overpersonalize conflict,” she says, “particularly in close relationships.”

Ehrensaft tells Allure that understanding how someone was raised is important for knowing what their responses might be to intimacy and insecurity. From this contextual knowledge, we can learn what works for others: Do they like to have long conversations to process emotions, or are they more pragmatic and direct? Do they get emotionally overwhelmed easily? Asking these kinds of questions about someone you’re getting to know romantically is vital — it takes time and intimacy to accurately evaluate where a person’s attachment style falls along this spectrum.

Changing your attachment style is possible

Young always makes it clear to her clients that these attachment styles are not fixed forever, despite their deep roots in the early formation of the psyche. “They can be shifted,” she says. “If you have attachment wounds, they do not have to determine the course of your life or sentence you to miserable relationships. The brain is incredibly flexible; it can adapt to new information with repeated, gentle exposure to new ways of being grounded in a relationship with self and others.”

Compassion is crucial when dealing with maladaptive attachment styles. The solution to moving yourself or someone else toward a more secure way of relating is often about learning to ask the right questions and having some empathetic imagination: What might be causing these specific behaviors, and what might you or this person actually need? Ehrensaft says that with her clients, often adoptive parents and their adopted children who are struggling to forge a bond, she coaches the parent to imagine what the child may have experienced prior to adoption that’s prompting their anxious or avoidant reaction.

Before my divorce, I would have nightmares about my husband happily being in relationships with other women. Although he wasn’t actually cheating on me, these dreams caused me to experience frequent anxiety and panic attacks. I knew the end of our marriage was inevitable. When I started dating again, after my divorce, I didn’t want to repeat my earlier mistakes. Learning how to maintain that balance between asking for reassurance and self-soothing was the first step in applying attachment theory to my day-to-day relationships. I had to start small, practicing this with my close friends, siblings, and coworkers until I felt confident enough to really start dating again over a year later.

Tesoro affirms this experience, saying, “Thinking about what your needs are, how they’re being met, and how you feel if they’re not being met or unable to be met in these relationships…is a useful framing to understand the history of our attachment. Also, asking yourself how you might remain ‘over your own center of gravity,’ or rely on yourself when necessary, to act from a place of groundedness, is helpful.”

Whether it’s a therapist, a friend, or a partner, having secure figures in your life can change everything. Jessee Lovegood, an MFT candidate in the East Bay area in California, does a lot of reparative work with clients who have attachment trauma, and often serves as such a person. “[When] I work with my clients who have so much attachment trauma, the most important thing to me is to show up consistently for them,” Lovegood says. “Be there when I say I will, apologize when I’m not, continue to be a warm and calm presence in their lives. The most important thing is to show up for them.”

Finding the right partner for you

Not only is it tempting to go with what’s familiar, it can sometimes feel unavoidable, and relationships between anxious and avoidant people are extremely common. After all, this pairing replicates a lot of the patterns created in childhood. But once you’re aware of your patterns and behaviors, it becomes possible to change them. And while finding a partner who makes you feel safe will go a long way to help, it can only supplement the work you’re able to do on your own.

Pairings where two people are avoidant may feel safe, because there’s often less vulnerability involved — insecurities are rarely discussed or examined — but these couplings are typically unsatisfying to both parties, because there’s not much space for building intimacy and trust. But Rimi points out that it isn’t impossible: “I would encourage each partner to talk to the other about what sort of affirmations they need, as well as what they can offer. This is a particular dynamic [with] space for understanding, but the reverse response of that could be to trigger further anxiety. Partners can learn each other’s needs and signals to help them feel more comfortable and safe in the relationship.”

While the idea of maladaptive attachment styles might suggest that these are less than desirable traits in a partner, Rimi asserts that this is not the case. There may be some challenges, but these can be worked through if both parties are self-aware and invested in effective communication and growth. Finding secure friends who have been consistently invested in my well-being over the years has helped me learn to communicate in ways that don’t make independence feel like abandonment. And those with avoidant attachment may find that someone who is present and calm — who listens with openness and patience — can allow them to be vulnerable without feeling the need to run away and hide afterwards.

Of course, this is a long, slow process. Unlearning maladaptive attachment styles has to start with compassion for yourself, as these habits were formed to protect yourself as a child. They likely kept you safe, alert to untrustworthy bonds, and served you well. But in adulthood, you don’t need to use these behaviors any longer; it’s time to thank them for looking out for your emotional safety and ask them to take a rest.

 

 

Original article here

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