Dr. Alok Kanuja (Dr. K)

So people with an anxious attachment style will utilize sexual activity as a form, as a way to create intimacy.

So they'll do things that sort of, I'm afraid that you're not going to notice me or that you'll replace me with someone else or that I'm not worthy of your love.

So I'll do everything from cry to be passive aggressive to seduce you just so I know that you're not going to leave.

Like, please don't leave.

So people with an anxious attachment style oftentimes did not have attentive enough caregivers or their caregiving was highly intermittent.

So I can't count on you to always be there.

But if I express myself in the right way, if I start to cry a lot, then I can evoke caregiving.

caring behavior from you.

So this is a child who can't feel confident that their parents will notice them, love them, unless the child does a lot of stuff to sort of get their attention.

And that's how I sort of feel secure.

I have to do something to feel loved.

That's sort of the key feature of an anxious attachment.

Now, 25% of people on the planet are anxiously attached, but 25% of people are not limerent, right?

So even though anxious attachment is a component of it, it is not sufficient to explain out of the one out of every four people that are anxiously attached, this one to 5% of people who are very, very unlucky to experience limerence, there's a big gap between those two things.

20% of people have an avoidant attachment style that may have some relation to limerence, but probably not, right?

So attachment theory and the way that you were raised is certainly a part of it.

This is where I sort of put on my like, you know, this is just the way that I was trained.

So, you know, at Harvard, I was part of the people that I gravitated towards were what I would call the neuroscience philosophers.

So they're really, really philosophical.

A couple of generations before my time, the chief of psychiatry at Mass General was a Catholic priest.