Read an Excerpt
Before You Dig into This Attachment Journey
Welcome friends! I am aware of the courage it takes to do this work and am so glad you are here. The journey to finding and maintaining a deeply secure romantic relationship can feel extremely daunting, if not downright unattainable at times.
Why? Because within each of us lies an entire universe full of our childhoods and past relationship experiences and stories. When we become close to another person, our universes collide. Building intimacy is beautiful and exciting and expands our world, but it can also trigger past pain and knee jerk reactions that create distance and disconnection from our partners. This can lead to deeply unhappy relationships, or to painful and costly breakups and divorces.
Trying to sort out how to get close to someone and also stay close with someone can feel extremely challenging, especially if you are one of the 45% of people who grew up in a family who was unable to offer you a secure relationship experience.
This book is what I wish I could have read in my twenties when I was scrambling all around town trying to figure out how to create a secure partner relationship. Unfortunately for me, there was no such book at the time, so I kept falling into the same potholes with different people and ending up on the same dead end street. Instead of finding secure love, I found myself starting to worry that something was inherently flawed in me.
Eventually, I hired myself a shrink, or what my mom kindly refers to as a “rent-a-friend”. It was in this therapy process that I learned all about attachment theory and it turned on all the lights upstairs for me. Learning about myself through an attachment lens, I started to believe that I wasn’t unlovable. BUT that I did have some insecure patterns to work on. As I explored my attachment story, my emotional responses and behaviors in my romantic relationships made perfect sense.
I felt WAY less insecure and WAY more hopeful.
And guess what? It worked! I transformed an insecure pattern of relating into a secure pattern and I took those skills and used them to build a deep, solid, passionate relationship with the incredible human who is now my spouse.
I then went to graduate school in 2005 and after I completed my studies, I started a therapy practice where I have been nerding out on the magic of attachment research and its clinical applications with my incredible clients ever since.
And the biggest truth nugget I have found both in the science and in my clinic is this:
What happens in our lives as little people plays a big role in how we relate to our close friends and partners as adults.
When I share this message I am aware that you might immediately imagine me as some odd HBO therapist stereotype wearing a paisley scarf and staring into the camera saying something painfully weird like “your inner child is handing you a zucchini, what do you think that means?”. So let me just go ahead and reassure you that paisley is not my thing. Oh and also, changing your attachment strategy does not mean that you will be stuck in some creepy version of your past, in fact, it will help you do the opposite. By really doing the work to understand your attachment story, you will be able to shed some of the pain from it and move forward into the kind of connection you want now and in the future.
While all attachment strategies make sense in your childhood contexts, they don’t all work to your advantage in creating the love you want now. Many of you will discover through this book that you had an insecure attachment experience and developed some insecure strategies to cope with that. I want to be clear up front: these insecure patterns are not personal defects. They are survival tools you used in your past relationships and they need to be transformed because they don’t serve you in your quest to be securely attached.
If you find that you are one of the lucky half of people who has a secure strategy in attachment relationships, there is still lots of good reflection in here for you too. Some will be about your journey and some may be about people you care for who haven’t had the same secure experiences as you. This will still serve you as you continue to love people in an imperfect world!
How to Use This Book
I organized the book into three parts so you can get a sense of the three distinct tasks at hand in learning a secure attachment pattern.
Part I is about processing and grieving your childhood attachment experiences (yes you are going to feel some feels). This is important because it helps you understand WHY you relate the way you do and WHAT it was that happened in your early relationships, which will allow your nervous system to release the pain from those experiences.
Part II is about how PART I got translated into your grown-up experiences. It is also about how your grown-up experiences either reinforced your insecure strategies, made them even more pronounced, or for the lucky ones, helped you move toward healing. If you have never had a serious romantic relationship, use this section to reflect on the ways you have navigated your closest friendships. Friends can absolutely be attachment figures for us.
Part III is about the tactical things you will need to learn and adapt now that you have processed your pain and original attachment stories. This section will break it down to the nitty gritty so you have a solid idea of how to relate to others with a secure pattern.
The book is also color-coded throughout to show you the distinctions between the four attachment categories in the different topics. Here’s the key:
Green = Secure
Yellow = Ambivalent/Preoccupied
Blue = Avoidant/Dismissive
Red = Disorganized/Unresolved
Y’all, I am a total nerd when it comes to attachment. And in my nerdiness I am a research-loyal gal. I don’t feel good guiding people along a path if there isn’t solid, observable, peer-reviewed evidence to support the likely outcomes. Just in case you all are a little bit nerdy too, I have summarized some of my favorite research facts and sprinkled them throughout in sections called “Attachment Nerd Alert”.
In terms of how long doing this workbook should ideally take you, my invitation is to pace yourself. Healing is not a sprint. Give your mind and body time to catch up with the ideas you are learning and the work you are putting in to apply them to your life. 4 to 6 pages a week is a great steady pace. If you are an energizer bunny and must go faster, I get it; I have the same problem. But take breaks if you start to feel overwhelmed or checked out. Your body might just need a minute to process what you are feeling and reflecting on.
