Summary: Why every ABD needs a village—and how to build yours.

​

Est. Reading Time: 5 minutes (that will save you endless rumination)

Feel More Secure on Your ABD Journey

Tips for Building the Support You Need to Finish

​

By Gayle Scroggs, PhD, PCC

​​​

Attachment theory has gone viral. What began as a specialized framework for observing infants and caregivers has diffused into our collective cultural vocabulary, reshaping how we view everything from adult romance to workplace dynamics.​

​

​Applying attachment theory to doctoral students’ relationships with advisors and faculty makes sense as these relationships also carry real emotional stakes.

​

While the new book Secure, by Amir Levine, MD, is aimed at a general audience, I discovered it illuminates the doctoral experience surprisingly well. His perspective, based on his clinical experience and research, also offers hope in the form of concrete strategies not found elsewhere.

You may already know the four attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful avoidant, and may have wondered which applies to you. And if you are like many people, you have probably heard the last three styles as problems to be fixed—but without any path for improvement.

 

Feeling secure matters deeply for doctoral students. The dissertation is not only an intellectual project. It is a long relational challenge, full of waiting, feedback, uncertainty, evaluation, hope, and dread. No wonder attachment patterns get activated.

 

Rather than ruminating over one’s defects, Levine encourages you to ask a more hopeful question: “What helps me become more secure?”  

 

The core idea, according to Levine, is “earned security.” As an adult, you can develop this capacity through repeated experiences of safety, responsiveness, and trust. You do not need to erase your history because your nervous system can learn.

 

For ABD students, that's a radically hopeful idea: your anxious sensitivity, avoidant independence, or fearful caution developed for good reasons, and under stress those patterns can make dissertation work harder—but in a more secure environment, the same capacities can become gifts rather than liabilities.

 

Security Unlocks the Gifts

 

Creating a more secure environment for yourself does not change who you are. Rather, as Levine explains, it helps you unleash your innate potential.

 

As a positive psychologist, I'm always drawn to what allows people to flourish—and attachment researchers ask a related question: what conditions let people feel safe enough to connect, learn, risk, recover, and grow? Attachment styles are simply patterns of protection, learned from how connection once felt: uncertain, overwhelming, unavailable, unsafe. The gifts inside each pattern get their own spotlight below.

 

To nurture earned security, surround yourself with people who show up with these five qualities—what Levine calls CARRP:

 

• Consistency: A steady, dependable rhythm.

• Availability: Present when you reach out.

• Responsiveness: Quick, sensitive reactions.

• Reliability: You trust they'll show up.

• Predictability: No hot-and-cold behavior.

 

​

When You Lean Anxious

 

If you lean anxious, one of your gifts is relational sensitivity—you notice shifts in tone, timing, warmth, and feedback that others miss.

 

On the plus side, that sensitivity can make you conscientious and responsive, but when you don’t feel safe, a delayed email may feel like rejection.

 

A brief comment may morph into a catastrophe. Silence can become a screen on which the mind projects every possible failure.

 

Under perceived threat, sensitivity becomes hypervigilance, but under security, it becomes discernment.  Here are some tips to help leverage your sensitivity in a healthy way:

 

• Before assuming the worst from a delayed email, write down the least dramatic possible explanation and check it against what you actually know—their work or travel schedule, their usual response time—before writing your own version of events.

• Ask your advisor directly, once, what response time to expect ("A week, or should I check in after two?"). A concrete norm leaves less room for imagination to fill the gap.

 

​

When You Lean Avoidant

 

If you lean avoidant, one of your gifts is independence—you can work alone, think for yourself, and tolerate long stretches of solitary effort.

 

Those strengths serve dissertation work beautifully—stamina, judgment, and the ability to keep going when no one is applauding. 

 

Yet, when under threat, that same independence can harden into dysfunctional isolation.

 

You may hold onto drafts too long, merely skim feedback, or tell yourself you will figure everything out alone. While such habits protect autonomy, they impede progress.

 

Of course, you should continue to do your own thinking first—but then invite feedback early enough for it to matter without expecting doom. To start shifting from hyper-independent to  confident autonomy, follow these tips inspired by Levine’s work:

 

• Set a hard polish threshold before submitting your work, and then stick to it, e.g., "two rounds of self-edit, then it goes out.”

• Schedule a check-in with your advisor or a peer even when you have nothing new to show, just to practice being seen mid-process.

 

​

When You Lean Fearful Avoidant

 

If you lean fearful avoidant, you may carry both longings at once: the wish to be helped and the wish to flee before help can hurt.

 

There's a gift here too: caution. You're perceptive about mixed messages and power dynamics—useful in doctoral work, where advisors do have power and committees do evaluate.

 

When you don’t feel safe, your advisor’s request for a meeting might be read as trouble brewing—triggering endless rumination and even paralysis.

 

Meanwhile, with earned security, caution becomes wise discernment. You select whom to trust and deepen it in small steps.

 

• Test trust in low-stakes ways first, e.g., by sharing a rough outline before a full draft.

• Keep a short log of CARRP moments, i.e., times others showed up reliably. Over time it gives you evidence to reach for when doubt spikes.

 

​

How to Build a Secure Village

 

Security shouldn't depend on one person.

 

No single person—not a significant other, not a doctoral advisor—can meet all of a doctoral student's emotional, intellectual, and practical needs. A whole village serves you better. 

 

This tracks with long-term research on doctoral attrition. In her classic study, Barbara Lovitts, Ph.D., traced much of it to the structure and culture of graduate programs themselves. Subsequent research showing the power of strong mentoring networks and psychosocial support confirms her analysis.

 

For a successful and healthy dissertation experience, who should you choose for your secure village?

 

Your village might include your advisor, a committee member, a writing partner, family, and that peer who knows exactly how absurd revising Chapter Two for the umpteenth time can feel at 11:37 p.m.

 

Your village provides perspective, encouragement, accountability, and belonging—so no single relationship has to carry the whole dissertation.

 

Notice the Small Interactions

 

Security won’t arrive overnight. It often grows and blooms through small, seemingly insignificant interactions.

 

An advisor takes time to clearly explain something. A classmate smiles and says, "See you next week." A committee member jots a comment on your manuscript: "This is promising."

 

Singly, these are "seemingly insignificant meaningful events," or SIMIs, to Levine. In concert, they teach the nervous system new expectations: I am not alone. Feedback does not always mean danger. 

 

For ABDs, these micro-moments matter because the dissertation is built from repetitions—you return to the chair, you revise, you try again.

 

Those moments become more frequent when you surround yourself with CARRP people. For doctoral students, those qualities aren't luxuries—they're the soil in which sustained intellectual risk becomes possible.

 

Building earned security means noticing how people treat you, and spending more time with those who are CARRP—and less with those who leave you chronically activated, ashamed, or frozen.

 

Your Journey Can Change More Than Your CV

 

Even as you cultivate earned security, you may still lean anxious, avoidant, or fearful at times. Accept these tendencies as part of the human material you bring to the work, Levine says—and notice the gifts inside your patterns too.

The dissertation changes your title. Earned security can change how you inhabit your work and your life.

Recommended Resources​

​​

• Amir Levine (2026). Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life. (Listen to a 38-minute interview with him here).

• Barbara E. Lovitts (2001). Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study

P.S. WANT TO BECOME THE KIND OF PERSON WHO HELPS OTHERS FEEL MORE SECURE? BECOME A COACH.​

​ 

The qualities that create secure relationships are also at the heart of excellent coaching: listening deeply, responding with empathy, asking thoughtful questions, recognizing strengths, and building trust.

 

MentorCoach offers two paths for developing those capacities while earning an ICF coaching credential: the ACC Track for those beginning their professional coach training, and the PCC Track for those ready for more extensive training and deeper mastery.

 

Learn more here.

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION
If you have received this copy from a friend or colleague, you can subscribe here. 

 

YOUR OWN COACH
If you are considering whether to get your own coach to help you reach your academic goals, fill out this brief application for a free consultation with a dissertation coach.

 

GAYLE SCROGGS, Ph.D., P.C.C., Editor, ABDSG
Get Coach Gayle's new free e-book, Nine Strategies That Get My Dissertation Clients Across the PhD Finish Line. An accomplished coach and former professor, Gayle earned her social psychology doctorate from the University of New Hampshire. Now she leverages her unique integration of positive psychology and coaching to partner with clients to cultivate strengths, habits, and confidence to overcome procrastination, impostor syndrome, self-doubts, and other blocks so they achieve their big goals. A popular coach trainer, she also contributed two chapters to Women's Paths to Happiness. For coaching and presentations on flourishing at work, school, or life, contact her at gayle@essencecoaching.com. Enjoy more free resources at essencecoaching.com.

​

BEN DEAN, Publisher, ABDSG
Ben holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He began writing the ABDSG in 1997. Over the years, the ABDSG has published hundreds of articles and provided thousands of hours of pro bono coaching and teleworkshops to ABDs all over the world. Ben is also the founder of MentorCoach (www.MentorCoach.com), a virtual university focused on training accomplished professionals to become part-time or full-time coaches. You may wish to subscribe to the Coaching Toward Happiness eNewsletter! It's on applying the science of Positive Psychology to your work and life (131,000 readers). Ben lives in suburban Maryland with his wife, Janice, their two children, and Dusty, their Norwegian dwarf bunny.

 

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER NEWSLETTER

Subscribe to our other free e-mail Newsletter: The Coaching Toward Happiness News.