changed her behavior until she appeared to have completely
destabilized. We used to run together around the reservoir in Central
Park, and she would bring both her work 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