Help-less
Arlie Arlizzi on Self-Help Literature
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller is, aesthetically, classic self-help. It is a simple and unassuming paperback that would not look out of place on the psychiatrist’s bookshelf while you’re in session. The cover, with the title in a serif font and an image of two magnets arranged in a love heart shape above it, is bright and fluorescent white, giving the air of a scientist’s lab coat.
When John Bowlby came up with attachment theory in the late 1960s, he wanted to examine how different parenting styles can produce, at least according to him, either ‘self-reliant, secure, adventurous and healthy’ children or deviant, angry, maladjusted ones. Attached relies on a loose reading of works by Bowlby and more contemporary academics working with Bowlby’s theories of attachment today. After Bowlby published a highly influential trilogy of books—Attachment (1973), Separation (1973) and Loss (1980)—exploring the relationship between parental attachment and childhood development, psychologist Mary Ainsworth was spurred to develop her own system of attachment types, using what she terms a ‘strange situation procedure’ to further sort young children into three groups. Ainsworth’s types consisted of: ‘A’ (Anxious-Avoidants), ‘B’ (securely attached), and ‘C’ (Anxious-Ambivalent/Resistant). Securely attached ‘B’ babies are, Ainsworth notes, characteristically ‘more cooperative and less angry’ than the other two groups, while those who fall under ‘A’ are the most prone to anger and outbursts.
Drawing loosely on Ainsworth’s system and some of its descendants, Attached adopts a simple matrix of categorisation with three main characters Levine and Heller consider noteworthy: the Avoidant, the Anxious, and the Secure, dedicating a chapter to each. Readers are first encouraged to self-assign through a personality questionnaire, following which they will learn to assign a label to their partners by completing a series of quizzes, that investigate the ways they seek intimacy and show affection. Questions such as whether the subject enjoys casual sex or feels able to remain friends with an ex help to form a diagnosis. The partner assessment is not done by interview, but by observing the partner as a developmental psychiatrist would an infant.
An upper middle class English academic, Bowlby was raised by a nanny and went to boarding school from a young age before qualifying as a psychoanalyst in the 1930s. He was deeply interested in how early separation from parent figures, particularly mothers, can produce what he calls ‘maladjustment’ in later life. In Attached, Levine and Heller—a psychiatrist and neuroscientist respectively—insist that Bowlby knew that attachment styles developed in early childhood can influence a person’s personality and behaviours their entire life, and thus set about using their own interpretation of attachment styles to assist the reader to find secure and happy ongoing love. To them, this becomes a way of further updating the literature around attachment theory to include sexual and romantic relationships.
In the introduction, Levine and Heller write that they wrote the book to help readers learn their personal attachment style in order to ‘find—and keep—love’ with the right person. From the get-go, the book sets itself up as a defense of specifically monogamous romantic dependency. According to Levine and Heller, coupledom is universally desired for a reason; it provides a ‘survival advantage’ and is socially necessary and evolutionarily justified.
Implicitly, Attached is also an attack on a maligned cultural figure: the needy, anxious woman. Featuring a revolving cast of tragic characters the authors describe as ‘activated’ (i.e. prone to attachment-related distress), these women mismanage their emotional grievances in a host of cringeworthy ways that are designed to be relatable. Their behaviours, Heller and Levine tell us, could be resolved by applying attachment science to the way they go about conducting their relationships. There’s Tamara, whose friends become alarmed and begin to doubt her resilience when she becomes preoccupied by a new, non-committal man in her life. He keeps her at a distance, always giving her just enough attention to keep her engaged and hopeful. There’s also poor Emily, who becomes so anxious over David, a porn-addicted new man in her life, that she can’t leave her phone alone. She begins to track David’s online activity using fake camgirl personas to talk to him on dating sites after he starts exhibiting ‘mixed signals’. Emily, the authors reassure us, doesn’t suffer from borderline personality disorder and isn’t a masochist; she just has never been made aware of attachment science.
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Since Attached’s publication in 2010, which has suggested to the mainstream that attachment theory can be put into practice outside of the relationship between parents and children, its application has continued to wander further away from traditional relationship structures. In the years following, there has been an uptick in interest as podcasts, wellness influencers and other self-help books begin to apply attachment theory to polyamorous unions. Notable titles since Attached include Polysecure (2020), The Attachment Theory Workbook (2019), The Power of Attachment (2019), Attachment Theory (2020), and Attachment Theory in Practice (2020). Each title either slightly modifies, admonishes, or simply plagiarises the wisdom of the others. Polysecure, for example, is written for those in non-monogamous relationships, citing multiple types of attachment that sit outside of the traditional model. According to the book, how one responds to their environment, as well as experiences of economic and social marginalisation are examples of factors which can produce attachment wounds. Its author Jessica Fern maintains a characteristic steady and normative faith in the capability of romantic and sexual partnership to resolve these issues. ‘I believe in love,’ she declares in the book’s opening lines.
Similarly, North American ‘love coach’ and author Katherine Woodward Thomas built a brand from her exclusive masterclasses and self-help book, both titled Calling in the One, which, as the name suggests, claims to help participants make space in their life for their soulmate. But it was Conscious Uncoupling (2015)—her follow-up work eleven years later and her bounce back from her own break-up with her One—that became a bestseller after it was mentioned by Gwyneth Paltrow when she split from Chris Martin. Paltrow continues to espouse this idea: in a blog post on the website of her equally famous skincare brand goop, it’s explained that the ultimate goal of conscious uncoupling is to eradicate breakups altogether:
The idea of conscious uncoupling is to gain enough self-awareness that we no longer have to do it anymore because we’ve now found ourselves in a fulfilling, sustainable, long-term relationship.
These claims to universalism—such as Thomas’ understanding that we can all find the One, or Levine and Heller’s foundational understanding that all our relationships are governed by our attachment styles—are part and parcel of the modern self-help genre’s formula. In these texts, race is never discussed, let alone colonisation or imperialism. Neither are there any cultural variations in parenting or relationships styles and structures. In the foreword of an updated edition (2021) of Attached, Levine and Heller respond to critique of this omission by asserting that their formula is actually universal—that is, as universal as the idea of the couple. According to them, the book’s contents ‘resonates with people from vastly different cultures across the globe … it seems the message and ideas of attachment hold true whether you live in a small village in Peru, in a high rise in Tokyo or Manchester—as well as across genders, sexual orientations and race.’
This oversimplified framing, along with the wielding of scientific authority, promises of life-changing revelation, and the provision of certainty (you will find your Secure partner if you follow our instructions!) is what makes modern self-help so compelling. Similarly, the taxonomy of ‘types’ is one of its selling points, acting as a guide for readers and consumers of attachment theory discourse towards understanding themselves and their partners, akin to how one would diagnose their own personality through Buzzfeed-esque quizzes. In more extreme examples, self-help taxonomies reproduce and encourage self/other dichotomies: according to this line of thinking, ‘avoidant’ and ‘anxious’ are presented as a neat binary whose tendencies activate and reinforce one another and thus deepens their dysfunction, as is the case with the empath/narcissist dynamic.
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I was first made aware of the narcissist/empath dichotomy in 2015. Sitting in a gutter in Footscray near a squatted community space where a noise gig was on, a good friend and I were chain-smoking and discussing our recent breakups. After hearing about how that relationship failed, my friend asked, ‘Have you ever heard of the empath and narcissist dynamic?’
When I said that I had not, my friend then spent the next half hour explaining that empaths—which she thought included herself, and now me—are intuitive, sensitive, overly generous and empathetic people. Empaths are people whom narcissists readily identify with, are drawn to, and take advantage of. Typically this pattern involves one of each type of person, resulting in exploitative and one-sided relationships where the empath is sucked dry and the narcissist’s ego is reaffirmed, ultimately destructive for both.
Since then, the burgeoning awareness surrounding the empath/narcissist dichotomy has seemingly led to terms such as love-bombing, ‘energy vampires’ and gaslighting, all of which are now commonly circulated in popular culture. Although the narcissist has been a compelling figure for decades, via the story of Narcissus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, popular analyses of ‘the narcissist’ in self-help literature don’t engage with narcissistic personality disorder as a psychiatric diagnosis per se. Instead, the lines between regarding it as a serious pathology and simply a type of personality are constantly blurred. Attached performs a similar maneuver, metabolising Bowlby and Ainsworth’s findings about avoidant qualities into a romantic personality ‘type’ they call the ‘Avoidant’. This type of person is a mashup of existing pathological descriptions from psychoanalysis over the decades, defined as someone who maintains an indifferent distance in order to exert power over their partner and the relationship.
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A chaotic referential style is typical of the self-help genre, which aggregates findings from obscure scientific papers and converts them into something that speaks more to a general reader. Part of the practice of writing self-help is assembling a new text of social norms and problem-solutions from a variety of other texts (philosophical, anecdotal, scientific, literary, and religious) and distilling them down to pearls of wisdom for everyday use, which, as Levine and Heller note, is a way of ‘creating everyday life solutions from a mountain of scattered pieces of data’. One benefit of this process—that is, of translating scientific findings into interpersonal toolkits via self-help—is that it enables readers to parse previously inaccessible psychiatric texts in order to apply their learnings in their day-to-day lives.
In The Self-Help Compulsion, literary studies academic Beth Blum explores the idea of self-help as a type of fantasy due to its tendency to imagine a fantasy life or fantasy self. It is a kind of aspiration. Blum writes:
[...] self-help has historically served another, curatorial function: to mine, collate, and reorganize the archive of textual counsel for the purposes of inspiring self-transformation. If the literary text is a ‘tissue of quotations,’ then the self-help book is even more so.
Attached is no exception, borrowing from scholars such as Spinoza, popular media like The Amazing Race, a host of contemporary psychological researchers and theorists, and a bricolage of semi-fictionalised and autobiographical anecdotes, often presented in the form of data.
This type of information collaging from various decontextualised sources has resulted in self-help being a genre that is typically not taken seriously and resented by literary critics. Academics tend to rail against its commercial success, its capacity to elevate certain works of fiction to mainstream attention while omitting others, and what is seen as minimal engagement with capitalism, globalisation, war, homophobia, compulsory heterosexuality and racism as systemic causes of the suffering it claims to cure. Self-help, as Blum writes, has maintained a powerful cultural authority since its very beginnings in 19th-century Europe. She traces this back to Samuel Smiles’ original work Self-Help (1859), a neoliberal text promoting the value of self-reliance, which played a major role in elevating the profile of the writers it did cite:
[...] countless readers in Britain and beyond first encountered the classic literature of the West through Smiles’s Victorian handbook. In late nineteenth-century Meiji Japan, for example, Self-Help was so influential that the authors it praised became instant sensations, whereas the authors it neglected to mention remained largely untranslated.
As for Bowlby, he published a selection of his own findings post bestselling trilogy into A Secure Base (1988), a volume of lectures. Here, he reflects on a broader concern with the social context and impact of parental failings, but seems hesitant to give advice that is not evidence-based. He also explicitly backs away from any direct historical or political analysis. Similarly tepid and depoliticised, Attached is unconcerned with power dynamics outside of the totalising anxious/avoidant framework. As per the self-help formula, Levine and Heller rely entirely on anecdotal evidence for their untested claims about relationship health, throwing a host of their tragic and romantically deranged friends and clients into the mix.
A few decades before his bestselling trilogy however, Bowlby published a thesis titled ‘Forty Four Juvenile Thieves’ (1946), which provides an explanation for youth delinquency (with a focus on theft). At the time still very much in the developmental phase, he applied his version of attachment theory onto how he thought neglectful parenting influences a young person’s actions and decisions, going on to change their life trajectory in irreversible ways. Revisiting the study in 2010, the same year that Attached was released, a paper produced at the University of Glasgow discusses how what Bowlby at the time labelled ‘affectionless psychopathy’ (surely a diagnosis which is a precursor to the Avoidant) can easily be reclassified into what the authors would call, at least in our modern context, reactive attachment disorder (RAD). The World Health Organisation defines RAD as one of the primary forms of recognised disorders of social functioning with onset in childhood or adolescence, starting:
[...] in the first five years of life and is characterized by persistent abnormalities in the child's pattern of social relationships that are associated with emotional disturbance and are reactive to changes in environmental circumstances (e.g. fearfulness and hypervigilance, poor social interaction with peers, aggression towards self and others, misery, and growth failure in some cases). The syndrome probably occurs as a direct result of severe parental neglect, abuse, or serious mishandling.
Bowlby’s scholarly attentiveness to the neglected child, which he hypothesised as something that happens either due to parental separation, war or other factors such as careless or inattentive mothering, gained attention quickly post-thesis. Childhood delinquency, truancy, and criminality has long been a subject of fascination for psychiatrists. What causes people to deviate from the accepted status quo? To that end, Bowlby’s research focusses on how emotionally deprived and unsettled children become ‘persistent thieves’, eventually failing to integrate well into social and family life.
If there is a persistent thief in Attached, it is surely the Avoidant. The Avoidant (usually a man in Levine’s and Heller’s telling) remains a constant preoccupation in the mind of the anxiously attached woman, making her forget her work, neglect herself, and lose the respect of her friends and family. The Avoidant’s withdrawals and non-committal behaviours lead his partner—invariably empathic, sensitive, highly attuned to her intuitions and usually accurate in her assumptions—to take such intimacy-seeking actions as surveilling him online. More drastic measures include protest behaviours like silent treatment or lashing out.
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In recent years, self-help discourse has taken root in the queer community, acting as a prominent framework that we use in the hopes to understand and regulate social and intimate conflicts in couples, groups, sharehouses, and occasionally even workplaces. Proliferated first through psychiatric research, then through popular nonfiction and finally, in decontextualised and unatrributed one-liners on social media, self-help rhetoric on attachment has incrementally come to govern many of the queer relationships around me. It structures the format of conflict resolution in a serious way, prescribing correct conflict resolution behaviours and appropriate conduct in intimacy.
I first noticed how Attached was integrating itself into my social and romantic circles about a decade ago, when a friend (an Avoidant, let’s call her Simone) explained to me that astrology and attachment theory were the ‘nature and nurture of the queer community’. We were both twenty-two years old at the time, cycling through a series of relationships that were playfully referred to by our friends and each other as ‘lesbian vortexes’. This was how our social circle half-jokingly referred to relationships that seemed frighteningly intense, compulsively sexual, and completely consumed by interpersonal drama.
The same summer that this took place, another friend, Jack, lent me their copy of Tristen Taormino’s Opening Up, before abruptly asking for it back in an ‘emergency’ later that evening. The emergency was that their partner Naomi had asked them over text that evening if it was okay that they go on a date with someone else. I never opened up Opening Up, and Jack and Naomi broke up two weeks later. Months later, another friend, Cara, after a particularly nasty conflict with her girlfriend Kat, demanded that Kat read Attached before they were permitted to be in contact again. Kat complied, and they got along much better. ‘She’s having a lot of realisations,’ Cara told me. A few months later, they, too, had broken up.
Fast forward to 2022. My friend Bill and I were at a friend’s birthday party minding our own business when we were confronted by our friend’s parent, who told us that she was trying to start her own self-help and meditation course. She explained how she wanted to ‘use’ us, both trans men in our early 30s, as part of her first ‘batch’ of sample clients to kickstart the business. Our friend apologised to us on her mother’s behalf later on, explaining that she had been on a ‘reinvention bender’ lately and had identified, through conversations with her friends, that trans people ‘belonged to an emerging market’ in need of self-care coaching.
When Heller and Levine wrote Attached, I doubt that they had queer and trans people in mind, let alone those in polyamorous and BDSM subcultures and communities. Yet we have somehow become one of its most fervent unwitting audiences. In modern psychological practices, establishing a secure attachment with a client (a form of turbocharged rapport building referred to as ‘limited reparenting’ in schema therapy) is an everyday therapeutic tool. In the DIY grassroots wilderness that encapsulates my social circles and other queer in-groups, though, this simulated and semi-therapeutic family attachment roleplay is happening all the time. Queer and trans people have always used the formula of parent/child and sibling relationships to heal and/or fuck (with) each other; practicing a type of backyard psychiatry on one another particularly in light of the disrupted or unhealthy blood family relationships we tend to experience. This, you can argue, is one of the ways that we are the perfect target market for accessible self-help. It might have made more sense, and been more socially useful, to direct the lens of attachment theory towards a wide variety of parenting scenarios, including our experiences of reparenting each other as adults.
What continues to unnerve me about Attached is its unrepentant attachment to the couple-bond, as if it should be the centre of its readers’ lives. The epilogue reinforces the author duo’s loyalty to romantic partnership, with the ‘most important take home message’ being that partnership is the thing most of us would ‘sacrifice the majority of their goals in life’ to secure. They continue by urging readers to systematise their approach to coupling; reminding them that love should never be ‘left to chance’. But the problems outlined by attachment theory require a broader approach, especially in terms of how its ideas pertain to relationality. What if we would like to abolish the idea of ‘the couple’ as a normalised cultural phenomenon? After all, Bowlby himself, in a 1980 lecture, described how the expectation that a small family unit could offer the best emotional support to a child so that they could grow up to be secure, self-reliant and stable was a hallmark of a ‘topsy-turvy world’. If attempting to ‘fix’ love remains a continual focus in seemingly radical communities, then it will only perpetuate the very forms of angst these self-help books describe, rather than offering help to hapless readers and their dates.
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Arlie Alizzi is a Yugambeh freelance writer and editor who has written for outlets like Overland, The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC. He was awarded a Long Lede Fellowship by the Judith Neilson Institute in 2022 to write about sport and fascism. This piece was written on Yawuru Country.