Attachment Disturbances in Adults, by Daniel Brown and David Elliott
A manual on anxious, avoidant, secure and disorganised attachment styles.
Unfortunately this book continued my trend of feeling like knowledge is impossible because people fit new information into their existing frameworks to such a degree that it's basically impossible to evaluate things fairly and reasonably. I actually do think the Attachment Styles paradigm is pointing at something real -- that is, the dynamic it describes seems to actually occur in actual relationships -- but that leaves open the question of whether their analysis of the causes & their proposed solutions are actually right.
And I feel like the evidence for that presented in this book has the common issue that it's mainly convincing if you're already convinced -- every study they cite, and every interpretation of every study, is filtered through the lens of the authors already believing the overall paradigm of modern clinical psychotherapy and psychiatry.
And obviously I, by contrast, come from a paradigm of overall being skeptical about modern clinical psychotherapy and psychiatry and social science studies and (etc etc etc), and therefore read their book entirely through that lens.
I don't know what to do about this? I was once asked to write a book about Fake News, back in the early days of Fake News being a thing people wanted to talk about. And I gave up on it because I honestly couldn't figure out what to say or how to say it -- I think that people evaluate new evidence in relation to the things that they already believe, and that convincing someone that X is true and Y is false requires convincing them away from the entire framework of knowledge they hold which supports Y and denies X, and all the while you have the funny/ironic background buzz that ALL THIS ALSO APPLIES TO YOU, YOU LIL' FREAK. I think that most of the people who agree with me about things believe the right things for the wrong reasons, and since I am a person who (occasionally) agrees with me about things.....
Anyway, attachment disturbances in adults! Probably an important topic, possibly a useful framework for it, but I find books like this increasingly frustrating -- I think we're adding bunting to our existing beliefs, rather than constructing good beliefs for good reasons. (But "it's really hard to know things" is one of my main schticks, so of course that would be my response to it....)
p.s. it's hard to articulate it exactly but here's my challenge to the attachment disturbance framework. Basically, different people get into relationships in different ways: some people ask people out, some people never ask anyone out, some people are good at seeming romantically available, some people can't tell when someone is interested in them, etc etc etc. As a result, the people we get into relationships with are very non-random -- e.g. if you're oblivious to people liking you, the only people you'll ever get into relationships with are people who proactively initiate with you despite your obliviousness.
It seems to me that the repeated attachment/avoidance/secure dynamics people fall into in their relationships could be explained by the processes which determine who they end up dating -- a kind of selection bias, basically. The same dynamics may be recurring in their relationships because the process through which they end up in relationships keeps throwing them together with people who they have that dynamic with.
Now, you could claim a couple of things:
1) your seeming-romantic-availability, ability to flirt, willingness to ask someone out etc are all a result of your attachment style. This could be true!, but I don't think it's obvious or necessary.
2) actually when people get certain interventions (a secure loving adult relationship, "effective psychotherapy") they then develop a secure-r attachment style.
idk, I'm not convinced by this? It seems to me like Omitted Variable Central -- why do some people get Effects from Psychotherapy but others don't? What if A Secure Loving Adult Relationship is either a result of being with the (a) right person (for you), or a result of you changing in other ways that make a good relationship possible for you when it wasn't before?
Again, I'm not opposed to the attachment framework on principle! I think it might be true! But I'm not sure how we figure out if it's true, and separate its specific explanations from the "mere" fact that many relationships feature dynamics where one person is avoiding and one person is anxious, which seems like a separate thing.