 | Mikulincer and Shaver map adult attachment as measurable strategies — not childhood labels frozen in time. Hyperactivation chases closeness; deactivation mutes need; caregiving and felt security show bonds can update when responsiveness is practiced, not only wished for. Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. First published 2007 - Updated (2017) · Guilford Press · ISBN 9781462533817 |
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Key principles
- Hyperactivation strategies — Under threat, anxious patterns amplify monitoring, protest, and closeness-seeking — the system treats distance as catastrophe until regulation returns.
- Deactivation strategies — Avoidant patterns suppress need, dependency language, and intimacy cues — pseudo-independence trades felt safety for chronic self-reliance theatre.
- Caregiving behavioral system — Providing responsive support is its own innate system — giving care well is learnable, not the opposite of receiving it.
- Working model coherence — Expectancies about self-worth and others’ availability steer perception and memory — models update through repeated earned-security experiences, not one insight.
- Felt security priming — Brief secure-base cues (warmth, accessibility, non-judgment) can soften defensive strategies in the moment — context gates which strategy runs.
- Attachment-system coupling — Exploration, caregiving, and sexuality interlock with attachment — bond repair may require more than communication skills on the surface topic alone.
Core science
The handbook integrates Bowlby–Ainsworth ethology with adult social-cognition research, self-report and interview measures, neurobiological correlates, couple and caregiving studies, and intervention evidence — central volume on Attachment and bonding lineage. Mikulincer and Shaver treat attachment as behavioral strategies organized around felt security — not a fixed trait certificate — with hyperactivation and deactivation as complementary defensive architectures. Change literature (therapy, security priming, reflective functioning) supports plasticity within bounds: strategies shift when responsiveness is reliably experienced, not when insight alone is performed.
Application
Reach for this volume when you confuse orchestrating external soothing with genuine bond repair — or when shutdown and cling both look like character instead of strategy. Use when you need the adult vocabulary for patterns Bowlby named in development: which system is running, and what would increase felt security before negotiating content. Open Self-support on the Atlas shelf for the mechanism map.