Levine and Heller examine the relationship between anxious and avoidant partners. Through a series of examples, the authors ask the reader to assess a conflict within each relationship and to question the deeper issue. Each scenario demonstrates the effect of attachment styles on conflict. While the anxious partner craves intimacy, the avoidant partner attempts to maintain distance. This becomes an endless cycle for an anxious-avoidant pairing.

Levine and Heller illustrate this cycle in a diagram that displays the clashing reactions to conflict that characterize anxious-avoidant relationships. While avoidant partners seek to isolate and deactivate, anxious partners seek to engage and activate. To help readers identify the signs of an anxious-avoidant relationship cycle, Levine and Heller list the signs, which include a lack of stability and constant fights about minor issues. The authors warn that intimacy differences can divide partners over time, avoidance of conflict will continue, and the relationship will disintegrate.

Chapter 9 opens with the question of whether there is any solution to the clashing intimacy needs within an avoidant and anxious pairing. To answer this question, Levine and Heller introduce the concept of “security priming,” which asks individuals to recall and draw inspiration from either past successful relationships with secure partners or other successful secure partnerships they have witnessed.