So, it turns out cats have attachment styles. Just like dogs. Just like babies. Just like you. Just like me.

This is unsettling news for a few reasons.

First, it suggests that your cat might actually care about you—or not. Second, it means science has taken another bold step in proving that nothing is special, not even our relationships with our pets.

And third, it means some poor researcher spent their days filming cats to confirm what any cat owner could have told them over a glass of wine: some cats like you, some cats tolerate you, and some cats would burn your house down if they had opposable thumbs.

A new study in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that staring at your phone while your partner is trying to connect with you—what many call "phubbing"—can lead to some nasty relationship behaviors.

In plain English, ignoring your partner in favor of doomscrolling might make them more likely to lash out.

The study found that people who feel snubbed by a screen get aggressive in ways that mess with emotional intimacy.

And for women, the gap between how much support they want from their partner and how much they get plays a big role in that aggression.

A recent study published in Psychopharmacology has found that some autistic adults report lasting improvements in mental health and social engagement following psychedelic experiences.

This research suggests that psychedelics, including LSD and psilocybin, may reduce distress and social anxiety while increasing social connectedness.

However, the study also underscores the need for caution, as a minority of participants reported negative experiences.

If love were a stock market, we’d all be terrible investors.

We dive in at an all-time high, convinced we’ve struck gold, only to watch the market crash into a series of disappointments, mismatched socks, and arguments about which direction the toilet paper edge dishwasher should face.

And yet, despite the inevitable declines, we keep reinvesting in love like a bunch of optimistic fools.

A new study published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology confirms what anyone who’s been in a relationship longer than a Netflix trial already suspects: relationship satisfaction starts strong but fades over time.

This downward spiral is even steeper in relationships that eventually go up in flames.

And if you think jumping into a new romance will solve the problem—well, buckle up, because you’re just strapping yourself into another ride on the same emotional rollercoaster.

Listen up, lovebirds and gentle readers: Science has spoken, and it turns out that being a little too invested in your partner’s daily miseries might actually help keep your fledgling romance afloat.

Yes, you heard that right. Your tendency to spiral into existential dread when your partner’s barista gets their latte order wrong? That could be the glue holding your love life together—at least for now.

This revelation comes from a research team led by Emre Selçuk, published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.

Their studies suggest that when people lose their emotional composure in response to their partner’s stress, it signals investment, care, and commitment.

In new relationships, this is like waving a giant flag that says, I really, really care about you—even your completely ridiculous micro-stresses! And weirdly enough, that seems to matter.

Dr. Emily Impallomeni, Dr. Jacob L. Stiegler, and Dr. Brittany McGill are the kind of people who look at the world and think, Maybe relationships don’t have to be so hard.

This makes them optimists, which is not always a safe thing to be when studying human relationships.

In 2020, while most of us were busy overcooking sourdough and side-eyeing our quarantine partners for breathing just a little too loudly, these three researchers had a question:

Can people argue less just by pretending to be someone else for a few minutes?

Once upon a time, in a world where people sincerely believed that love conquers all—and yet kept making dating apps with increasingly complex algorithms to help people avoid the wrong kind of love—some researchers decided to study romantic attraction through the lens of racial ideology.

Because, you see, humans are strange creatures.

They want to believe in free will but also prefer to be shackled to patterns they don’t even notice.

One such pattern, known to the social sciences as homogamy but to your Aunt Cheryl as “birds of a feather flock together,” is the tendency to be romantically drawn to people who resemble us in some fundamental way.

Same hobbies, same religious upbringing, same favorite childhood TV show. And yes, same race.

Love is a drug.

Not in the poetic, “You’re my addiction, baby” way.

In the literal, neurobiological sense.

Your brain, right now, is running on an attachment-based dopamine economy—one that was programmed by your earliest relationships.

• If love was inconsistent, your brain learned to crave the highs and lows.

• If love was unavailable, your brain learned that wanting is safer than having.

• If love was painful, your brain wired itself to expect suffering.

This is not a metaphor.

This is dopaminergic conditioning.

And if you don’t reprogram your brain’s reward system, you will keep chasing the same kind of relationships over and over—no matter how much therapy you do.

So let’s talk about it.

You did it.

You set the boundary. You said no. You left the toxic relationship. You stepped out of the family’s preordained emotional contract.

And now?

Now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your hands are sweating. Your heart is racing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted but wired. Every cell in your body is screaming:

• Go back.

• Fix it.

• Apologize.

• Do whatever it takes to restore balance.

This is not a sign you made the wrong decision.You set the boundary. You said no. You left the toxic relationship. You stepped out of the family’s preordained emotional contract.

And now?

Now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your hands are sweating. Your heart is racing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted but wired. Every cell in your body is screaming:

• Go back.

• Fix it.

• Apologize.

• Do whatever it takes to restore balance.

This is not a sign you made the wrong decision.

This is your nervous system recalibrating after a lifetime of being programmed for survival.

If you want to test your commitment to personal growth, tell your family you’re in therapy.

Watch their faces.

• Your mother may will get defensive, even though you never mentioned her.

• Your father may make a sarcastic joke about "overanalyzing everything."

• Your sibling might say, "But your childhood wasn’t that bad."

And you?

You might start doubting yourself.

• Am I making too big of a deal out of things?

• Maybe I should keep the peace instead of stirring things up.

• Am I the problem?

No, you are not.

But you have violated a sacred rule:

You have disrupted the family’s homeostasis—the invisible force that keeps everyone locked in their roles, no matter how much it hurts them.

And the system?

It will fight to restore order.

We like to believe that change is individual—that if we just work on ourselves, develop better habits, or go to therapy, we can break old patterns and rewrite the script of our lives.

But real change rarely happens in isolation

Families are not just a collection of individuals—they are an interconnected emotional organism.

This is one of the central ideas of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory, a perspective that has reshaped how we understand relationships, personal growth, and even mental health.

Bowen was one of the first to articulate that what happens to one member of the family impacts the whole system, sometimes in ways that are subtle, sometimes in ways that are seismic.

And if you try to change yourself without understanding the system you’re part of, you may find yourself being pulled back into old patterns—sometimes by forces you don’t even recognize.

The real question is: How do you create personal transformation without being undone by the emotional forces that hold the system in place?

Most theories in psychoanalysis focus on what we remember, what we repress, or what we try to forget. But Christopher Bollas took a different approach.

He asked:

• What about the things we know, but have never consciously thought about?

• What about the truths that shape our emotions and behaviors, even though they have never been fully articulated?

• What happens to knowledge that is never hidden—but is also never spoken?

This led him to one of the most influential yet under-discussed ideas in modern psychoanalysis: the unthought known—a concept that helps explain intergenerational trauma, family dynamics, and the silent forces that shape our lives.

To fully grasp the power of this idea, we need to go back through the history of psychoanalysis and understand how Bollas built on, challenged, and expanded the theories of his predecessors.