Jim Coan

So after therapy, when the person was holding their partner's hand, who they now feel close and connected with, who's a safe haven for them, the threat comes, and their brain stays calm.

Um, I did ask my colleague who did this with me, a scientist called Jim Coan from the University of Virginia, what the blue pieces meant, and he said to me, "It means they're not dead, Sue."

[laughs]

So basically, you don't have a relationship unless you have some form of dependency.

So then the sense of self is created within the human mind, and the sense of self starts with your body, so that's why you duck out of the way of a baseball flying at your head involuntarily so that it doesn't hit you and kill you.

But then ideas of identity also seep into that sense of self, and this was proven by Jim Coan at UVA, who then identified that our people around us become portions of our sense of self.

And so then our threat analysis can identify, oh, if grandma gets sick, then we have an emotion about grandma getting sick.

That's how this simple logic system of our brain calculates these threats.

What is secure partner buffering? Now that we understand where these protective survival templates come from, how is the biology of buffering actually discovered? For decades, we knew attachment styles existed, but it wasn't until the mid two thousands that neuroscientist Dr.

James Coan and his team at the University of Virginia mapped the exact neurobiological mechanics of it.

Dr. Coan placed married women into fMRI brain scanners and subjected them to the threat of a mild electric shock.

The results were groundbreaking.

When the women held a stranger's hand, their threat detection networks calmed slightly.

But when they held their husband's hand, the brain's alarm centers, specifically the amygdala, anterior insula, and hypothalamus, instantly shut down or dramatically reduced activation.

Crucially, when Coan looked closer, this buffering effect depended entirely on the quality of the relationship.

Women in deeply secure, supportive marriages experienced a massive neural calming effect, while those in distressed relationships showed little to no buffering effect at all.