pager and cell phone with her (and in those days cell phones were relatively
big and heavy!). She would alternate checking first the one and then the
other every few minutes just to see if he had called. At work she would
spend hours tracking David’s activities on the then-novel Internet, creating
a false Internet persona and chatting him up in the chat rooms he
frequented. In short, she became obsessed.
Her analyst could not make sense of this horrible transformation in his
most promising candidate. From a resilient, together person, Emily began to
change into someone with “masochistic borderline personality traits.” It
now seemed that analysis would take many years.
A SENSITIVE ATTACHMENT SYSTEM
But Emily’s was not a case of masochism or borderline personality disorder.
It was a simple case of an activated attachment system. People with an
anxious attachment style like Emily have a supersensitive attachment
system. As we mentioned in previous chapters, the attachment system is the
mechanism in our brain responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety
and availability of our attachment figures. If you have an anxious
attachment style, you possess a unique ability to sense when your
relationship is threatened. Even a slight hint that something may be wrong
will activate your attachment system, and once it’s activated, you are unable
to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that he or
she is truly there for you and that the relationship is safe. People with other
attachment styles also get activated, but they don’t pick up on subtle details
that people with an anxious attachment style do.
To demonstrate how sensitive the attachment system of people with an
anxious attachment style is, a study from Chris Fraley’s lab at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—he is the same researcher who
designed the ECR-R attachment styles inventory—in collaboration with
Paula Niedenthal from Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand,
France, found a unique way of measuring the vigilance to social cues of the
anxious attachment style. They used a “morph movie” technique—a
computerized movie in which a face initially displays a specific emotional