In any healthy disagreement, two people exchange their perspectives with each other. However, if the conflict is personal in nature, something else happens. The nervous system interprets criticism as danger, and your body reacts before your logic can catch up. Personal conflict can cause your heart rate to rise and your defenses to activate. You may feel shame or maybe even shut down completely.

When someone close criticizes us, our fight-or-flight circuitry scans for danger. And before you know it, a small complaint your partner raised isn’t a repair request anymore, it’s a verdict on who you are.

The single best explanation for that lightning-fast slide from “disagreement” to “I’m under attack” is attachment sensitivity. It influences how wired your brain is to treat close others as sources of safety and how prone you are to read criticism as a threat to belonging or identity.

Here’s why this happens and what to actually do when your chest tightens.

Long before interpersonal therapists called it “attachment,” neuroscientists showed that social rejection lights up the brain’s pain network. A renowned 2003 study published in Science illustrates this, in which researchers used an exclusion game while people lay in an fMRI scanner. The results showed that........

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