A successful stock-market trader once went to therapy with a very specific request. He had been dating a woman he was really excited about'but now she wasn't responding to his texts, and he was despondent. He was frustrated with her, but also with himself: with his own sensitivity to rejection, with his sensitivity to everything, with the blaring siren in his brain activated by the tiniest hint of danger. He knew some people would call such delicacy an 'anxious attachment style.' So now he was asking to be fixed. The therapist was Amir Levine: a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and co-author of the 2010 book Attached, which has sold more than 3 million copies. If anyone could excise your anxious attachment and sew you back up, it might be him. Levine had another idea, he told me on a recent call. He pointed out that the trader had made his fortune predicting trends in the market. His anxious style, Levine suggested, might be part of what gave him that edge: He was hyperaware of subtle...
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