Stan was. If he had attacked her out of the blue, she’d have struck
back and World War III would have broken out. She wouldn’t have
stayed collected enough to see what was really going on, to
understand that it wasn’t about her but about him. Stan’s ability to
handle the situation in the way he did required a real emotional gift. “I
have to remember how good it feels to be on the receiving end of that
and offer some in return someday,” she thought to herself.

WHEN THREAT GOES UNDETECTED

People with a secure attachment style, like Stan, are characterized by
something very real but not outwardly visible—they are programmed to
expect their partners to be loving and responsive and don’t worry much
about losing their partners’ love. They feel extremely comfortable with
intimacy and closeness and have an uncanny ability to communicate
their needs and respond to their partners’ needs.
In fact, a series of studies aimed at accessing subjects’
unconscious minds (by measuring how long it takes them to report
words that flash quickly on a monitor, as described in chapter 6)
compared the reactions of people with anxious, avoidant, and secure
attachment styles. The studies found that secures have more
unconscious access to themes such as love, hugs, and closeness and
less access to danger, loss, and separation. The negative threatening
themes didn’t get through to them as easily. However, unlike
avoidants, who didn’t react to these words initially but did react to them
when they were distracted by another task, secures continued to
overlook them even in the distraction condition. Unlike people with an
avoidant attachment style, secures aren’t concerned with threatening
relationship thoughts even when they are caught off guard. In other
words, they don’t have to make an effort to repress these ideas; they
simply aren’t worried about these issues—either consciously or
subconsciously! What’s more, when secures were specifically—and in
this experiment, consciously—asked to think about separation,
abandonment, and loss, they succeeded in doing so and did become