Secure: A Guest Post by Amir Levine

Amir Levine has developed a new approach to cultivating security in your life so you can thrive and navigate even the hardest of life’s tests with ease and confidence. Read on for an exclusive essay from Dr. Amir Levine on writing Secure.

From Amir Levine, MD, coauthor of the multimillion-copy bestseller Attached: What’s the secret to finding success, happiness, and love? You need to feel SECURE.

I didn’t set out to write this book.

In the spring of 2021, after my father died of COVID, I found myself unable to continue working on the book I had been writing. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. What felt important shifted. I kept coming back to a different question: how do people actually become more secure? 

That question had been following me for years.

After Attached came out, I kept hearing the same thing, from patients, from readers, from interviewers: understanding attachment styles is helpful, but what do you do with that knowledge? How do you change? I didn’t feel I had a complete answer, and that stayed with me.

At the same time, my work in neuroscience and clinical practice was pointing in a new direction. We were learning how strongly the brain responds to connection, how even small interactions shape it over time, and how security isn’t fixed but something that can be built. 

This wasn’t the attachment theory most people were familiar with. It suggested something more practical. And no one had translated it into tools people could use in everyday life.

That’s where Secure came from.

The book introduces tools I’ve developed over years of clinical work and research. Things like CARRP, the five qualities that make a relationship feel safe, and SIMIs, the small, everyday interactions that shape our sense of security. These ideas grew out of a simple realization: change doesn’t come from insight alone. It comes from what we experience, again and again, in our daily lives.

What I hope readers take from Secure is this: becoming more secure isn’t about going back and excavating your childhood, and it’s not just about your romantic relationship. It’s about the full ecosystem of relationships around you, friends, family, colleagues, even brief interactions. Over time, those interactions shape how your brain works and how you move through the world.

When that environment becomes more secure, something shifts. People handle stress better, recover faster, and have more energy for the things that matter. Living in what I call “secure mode” frees you up to connect, create, and explore. 

Security isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you build.

If Attached gave people a way to understand themselves, I wanted Secure to give them a way to change. That’s what I set out to write. The tools in this book have certainly helped me through the trials of caring for my ailing father, the aftermath of his death, and beyond. I think you will find them just as useful.