How to Become More Securely Attached

If you want to practice a steadier response to the person you love, Figlet, the AI relationship coach built on my work, is there at 2 in the morning, or right now: start building a more secure way to love.

You are lying next to someone who loves you, and you cannot feel it land. Or you are the one who reached again tonight and got a flat answer, a phone screen, a body in the bed with the lights out behind the eyes. Either way, there is a low hum in your chest that will not quiet. You have read the quiz results. You know the four words. Anxious. Avoidant. Disorganized. Secure. You have probably decided you are one of the first three, and you have come here because you want to know how to become the fourth.

I want to slow you down before you scroll another list of tips.

I have been a couples therapist for over seventeen years. In that time I have watched thousands of people try to think their way to secure attachment. They journal. They affirm. They read every book. They come in and tell me their type like a diagnosis, and then they wait for me to hand them the protocol that will convert them. It does not work that way. Secure attachment is not a personality upgrade you install alone in your bedroom. It is not the reward for enough self-work. It is a nervous system state that emerges inside a bond, and it changes shape as the bond changes shape.

That is not bad news. It is the door.

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Yes. I want to say that plainly, because so many people come into my office quietly convinced they are broken. They did not grow up in a secure household. Their parents were emotionally unavailable, or volatile, or both. They assume that means they are destined to repeat it.

You are not destined to repeat anything. John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who gave us attachment theory, described what he called internal working models: the deep, mostly unconscious answers your body formed in childhood to two questions. Am I worthy of love and care? Can I count on others to be there for me? For a long time those models were thought to be fixed. Then the developmental psychologist Mary Main and her colleagues found adults who had clearly difficult childhoods and still showed up as secure. They could tell their story with clarity and perspective. They did not minimize what happened to them, and they did not drown in it. That is where the idea of earned security comes from.

So your style is not a life sentence. It is a strategy. If you grew up anxious, your system learned that a caregiver who was sometimes there and sometimes not required you to turn the volume up. If you grew up avoidant, your system learned that expressing needs drove people away, so you stopped expressing them. Neither of those is a character flaw. Each was a brilliant adaptation to the environment you were given. The work now is not to shame the strategy. It is to give your body new evidence, again and again, until a different strategy becomes possible.

One thing I want you to hear before we go further: the goal is not to never feel insecure. The goal is to change what happens next. Instead of asking, how do I stop getting triggered, start asking, when I get triggered, how quickly can I come home to myself? That shift, from prevention to recovery, is the beginning of everything.

The Two Questions Your Body Is Actually Asking

Every couple I have ever sat with, no matter what they thought they were fighting about, was really fighting about one of two ancient questions. Not consciously. Underneath.

Are you there for me? Am I enough for you?

Every argument about the dishwasher, the tone, the money, the sigh at the door, is a proxy for one of those two. When your partner does not text back, your body is not concerned about the phone. It is asking, am I a priority. When your partner sighs as you walk in, your body is not parsing the sigh. It is asking, am I a disappointment again.

This is attachment theory at its most useful. Not as a label. As a description of what the bonded nervous system is doing every hour of every day.

Here is the piece almost nobody online will tell you. You were built this way on purpose. If you were born a hundred thousand years ago on the African savanna and your caregiver was not there for you, a dingo came and ate you. Your physiology today is exactly the same. When your partner looks away, goes quiet, or raises their voice, your limbic system responds with biological panic before your thinking brain has a chance to vote. You are not needy. You are human. We are an interdependent species from the cradle to the grave.

Secure attachment does not mean you stop needing your partner. Secure attachment means you can need them without losing yourself, and you can be needed without collapsing.

The good news is that this state can be learned at any age, which is what I mean by earned secure attachment.

Sovereignty Emerges From Safety, Not Before It

There is a lie in the culture that gets in the way of every person trying to become more securely attached, and I need to name it directly.

The lie is that you have to heal yourself first, alone, and then bring your finished individual sovereignty into a relationship. Do the shadow work. Fix your wiring. Then, and only then, are you ready for love.

This gets it exactly backward.

Individual sovereignty does not precede safety. It emerges from it. You do not become a sovereign self and then find a secure bond. You rest inside a secure bond, and out of that ground, a sovereign self becomes possible. We are not orphan sovereign nodes floating through space. Human beings settle in the context of another regulated human being. That is the machinery. Fighting the machinery is what makes people miserable.

This is where the confusion between codependency and interdependence has done real damage. People say they want sovereignty and what they actually mean is they do not want to need anyone. So when the natural pull of attachment arrives, the longing to be held and seen and chosen, they call it weakness. They call it codependency. They shame it.

Codependency is what happens when two people cling because the ground underneath them is unstable. Interdependence is the adult capacity to say I can stand on my own, and I choose to stand with you. Secure attachment is the second thing. It is not distance. It is not fusion. It is two nervous systems that have learned to find each other reliably.

The System Is the Problem, Not the Person

Couples arrive in my office in what I call I-consciousness. It is always my pain versus your bad behavior. He never listens. She is too critical. He is emotionally unavailable. She is anxious and controlling. Each partner has built a case, and each case is airtight, and neither case is going to help them.

The Empathi method rests on one principle. The problem is the system between you, not the person in front of you. When the bond gets shaky, both nervous systems fall into one of two positions.

The Relentless Lover reaches, pushes, protests, sometimes criticizes, because the body is saying please do not leave me, please let me matter. The Reluctant Lover retreats, shuts down, goes quiet, because the body is saying please do not expose my not-enoughness, please do not confirm what I already secretly believe about myself. One partner is answering the question am I there for you with a desperate yes I am here look at me. The other is answering the question am I enough for you with a shame-flooded no so I will disappear before you can confirm it.

Your protector meets your partner’s protector, and the relationship becomes a reenactment of wounds neither of you caused. The more one reaches, the more the other retreats, which makes the reach more urgent, which makes the retreat more absolute. This is the Waltz of Pain, and if you are in it, no amount of individual self-work will get you out of it, because you did not build it alone.

To become more securely attached, you have to stop fighting each other and start fighting the pattern together. The cycle is the enemy. Not your partner. If you want to go deeper on the withdrawing side of this dance, I have written more on what your avoidant partner is actually doing, because the cultural story about avoidance is almost entirely wrong.

The Representative and the Real Person

Something else gets in the way of secure attachment, and it usually starts before the relationship even begins.

When you first fall for someone, you are not meeting them. You are meeting their Representative. The polished version that shows up for the job interview. Attentive. Charming. Responsive. The Representative is not fake. Your partner genuinely possesses those qualities. But the Representative is also strategically omitting the anxiety, the withdrawal patterns, the shame, the relationship with the mother that will one day bleed into every conflict you have.

The real person only shows up when the stakes are high enough to trigger the deeper wiring. In calm weather, everyone looks securely attached. Storms tell the truth. So the first honest thing about becoming more securely attached is this: you cannot do it in calm weather. You do it in the storm. The storm is not the problem. The storm is the classroom.

If an old hurt keeps hijacking those storms, I lay out how attachment wounds actually heal, one repair at a time.

The C-Curve: What Secure Attachment Actually Feels Like In Motion

Here is a specific piece of choreography I teach couples. I call it the C-Curve. It is the emotional motion that turns a rupture into repair, and it is the closest thing I have to a technology of secure attachment.

At the top of the C, you are in reactivity. You are living inside what I call the Story of Other. Your partner is the problem. Their tone. Their face. Their behavior. Your protector part is fully deployed, and the whole system is oriented outward. This is where most fights live and die.

The descent is what I call reflexive participation. You pause. You notice you are affected. You notice what your body is doing. You notice which protector has taken the wheel. You are no longer fused with the reaction. You are a step behind it, watching.

At the bottom of the C, you touch the primary emotion. The vulnerable feeling under the anger. The shame under the criticism. The fear of abandonment under the protest. The terror of being not enough under the retreat. This is what I sometimes call the mush. It is not comfortable. It is the truth.

Then comes the final curve. You speak the vulnerable truth directly to your partner, not from the protector but from underneath it. You stop demanding. You start revealing. You ask for what you actually need, from the soft place. When both partners can do this, one C meets another C, and the shape they make together is an O. A closed loop. Secure attachment in motion.

Secure attachment is not the absence of the top of the C. Secure people get triggered. Secure people go into reactivity. What makes them secure is that they know how to travel the curve. They know how to come back.

The Missing Experience

Understanding your attachment style will not heal it. Empathy alone is morally neutral. Knowing why you fight is not enough to stop fighting. What actually rewires the nervous system is what I call the Missing Experience.

The Missing Experience is the moment in a relationship, or in a therapy room, when the younger part of you finally receives, from a partner who is fully present, the exact thing it never got from the original people who were supposed to give it. A moment of being held when you were used to being left. A moment of being witnessed when you were used to disappearing. A moment of your partner not turning away when your ugliest feelings showed up.

This is what changes attachment. Not insight. Not affirmations. Not a better vocabulary. A repeated, embodied experience of someone staying when your body expected them to leave, or someone accepting you when your body expected to be rejected.

Every time you and your partner move through a rupture and come back to each other, you add a block to a chain of trust that lives underneath the language brain. The body starts to update. Slowly. Not because you decided it should. Because the evidence has finally arrived. If you want to sit with the version of this wound that lives in the second question, I have written specifically about the ache of feeling unworthy of love, which is where the not-enough story runs deepest.

The Repair Is The Practice

Modern culture has sold people a Proof of Stake version of love. You deserve love because you are enough, because you did the work, because you read the book. Just show up as you are. This is Fiat Love. Decree without backing.

Sound love requires Proof of Work. And in relationships, the work is not performance. The work is repair.

You will disconnect. Regularly. If you love someone, you are going to scare the living daylights out of each other for the rest of your lives, because your survival is biologically braided together. Disconnection is not a bug of intimacy. It is a feature. Fights are not proof your bond is failing. Fights are proof it matters.

What separates secure couples from stuck couples is not the absence of rupture. It is the presence of repair. Secure couples cross the bridge. They own their part. They come back. They soften. They ask what happened for you back there. They mean it. Every time you complete that circuit, the nervous system files another piece of evidence that this bond will hold.

How to Become More Securely Attached: 8 Practices That Rewire the Body

People always ask me, okay, but what do I actually do? These are the practices I have seen move people from insecurity toward earned security, in my office and in my own marriage. None of them is a quick fix. All of them work through the body, not around it.

1. Name the alarm, not just the behavior

Most insecure behavior has a chain: something happens, your nervous system sounds an alarm, you do something to make the alarm stop, and the behavior creates consequences. Almost everyone focuses on the last link. I need to stop checking their phone. I need to stop shutting down. But the behavior is the last domino. Start noticing the alarm itself. A tightness in the chest. Heat in the face. A hollow drop in the stomach. The moment you can say to yourself, my nervous system just fired, I am in threat mode, you have created a tiny gap between the activation and the behavior. That gap is where all the growth happens.

2. Keep 75 percent of your awareness in your own body

When you feel insecure, you put nearly all of your attention on your partner. You scan their face, parse their tone, monitor their body for any sign of withdrawal. You have left your own experience to chase theirs. I teach what I call the 75/25 Somatic Boundary: keep 75 percent of your awareness on your own body, even mid conversation, and let only 25 percent go outward. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice your jaw, your shoulders, your breath. From that ground you can still listen. You are just no longer abandoning yourself to do it.

3. Take the five second pause

When your chest goes tight and your thoughts start racing, take five seconds before you respond. Not five minutes. Five seconds. That tiny gap is where your thinking brain has a chance to come back online. It is the difference between a reaction and a response.

4. Seat your protectors at the table, but take them off the throne

The pursuing part of you and the withdrawing part of you are protectors. They learned, probably very early, that this was the safest way to survive. Do not kill them. Do not shame them. Seat them at the table. Thank them. Listen to them. But do not let them rule. Something like: I hear you, you are trying to protect me from feeling abandoned, or from feeling like a failure. Thank you. And I am choosing to stay in this conversation anyway. The protector still gets a voice. It just does not get a veto.

5. Say the need directly, from the soft place

Secure people can say, I need reassurance right now, or, I need some space to process, and I am coming back. That sounds simple. It is incredibly hard for insecurely attached people, because direct expression of need was either punished or ignored early on. So practice it in small, low stakes moments. Name one feeling and one need. Then let your partner respond without grading the answer.

6. Make repair bids early, and remember that repair is retroactive

Do not wait until the fight has turned into scorched earth. The moment you notice disconnection, say something. I think I just hurt you. I can see you are pulling away. Can we try that again? Early repair bids are cheaper than late ones. And you are going to mess this up. You will spiral. You will go dark. That is okay, because recognizing it after the fact still counts. First you see the pattern the next morning. Then an hour after it happens. Then ten minutes after. Then, eventually, in real time.

7. Tell your story until it makes sense

What distinguished the earned secure adults in Mary Main’s research was not what happened to them. It was how they could talk about what happened to them. You can build that capacity through therapy, journaling or any honest reflection on your attachment history. But be careful. I have seen many people use self reflection as a way to stay in their heads and avoid the relational work. This is not an intellectual exercise. It is an emotional one. It requires actually feeling the feelings, not analyzing them from a safe distance.

8. Put yourself in relationships that can correct the old story

You earn security through what clinicians call corrective emotional experiences: moments where your nervous system expects danger and receives safety instead. A partner who shows up when you reach. A friend who does not punish you for having a need. A therapist who stays steady when your ugliest feelings arrive. Most people who earn security use some combination of a corrective relationship, attachment based therapy, and reflective practice. And I will be honest: for many people, especially those with a frightening childhood, skilled help makes an enormous difference. The nervous system learns through relationship, and a good therapeutic relationship is built to provide exactly those conditions.

The Path Looks Different If You Are Anxious or Avoidant

Everyone is moving toward the same destination. But the Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover start on opposite sides of the river, so the first steps look different.

If you lean anxious (the Relentless Lover)

Your core fear is abandonment, usually the slow, invisible kind, where your partner is in the room but not really with you. To manage that fear, your nervous system builds what I call a murder board, like the detective walls in crime shows. They took 45 minutes to text back. Red string. They rolled over in bed without reaching for you. Red string. None of it means anything alone, but your body connects it into a story: they are pulling away, do something, now. Your path to security runs through coming home to your own body before you reach for reassurance. Reassurance from your partner is a normal human need. Use it as a bridge while you build your own stability, not as a crutch you cannot function without. I go deeper on this in my step by step guide on how to stop being insecure in a relationship.

If you lean avoidant (the Reluctant Lover)

Your core fear is not abandonment. It is shame: being found inadequate, not enough. When your partner raises an issue and you go blank, that is not indifference. Your body has dropped below its window of tolerance and the part of your brain that handles language and empathy has gone offline. You cannot apply a cognitive solution to a biological problem, so the first step is to turn the flashlight inward and ask, where do I feel that in my body? Then name it, out loud if you can: I am noticing my body is shutting down. I want to stay in this conversation, but I need a second. If you need a break, make it time limited and promise to return: I need 20 minutes, I am not leaving, I will come back and we will finish this. Without the commitment to return, a pause is just another disappearance. I lay out the full path in how to stop being avoidant.

Notice what both paths share. Neither of you is being asked to stop needing. The anxious partner learns to need without losing themselves. The avoidant partner learns to be needed without collapsing. That is secure attachment.

The Sovereign Us

Most couples think a relationship contains two people. This is a subtle but expensive misunderstanding. In real love, there are three sovereign entities. Me. You. And Us.

The Us is a living organism. It has its own nervous system, its own needs, its own health, its own woundedness. It is not the sum of two individuals. It is a third thing you both belong to and both have to tend. When you fight for your position and forget the Us, you win the battle and lose the ground. When you collapse into the Us and lose yourself, you keep the peace and lose the person.

Secure attachment lives in the capacity to hold all three at once. Compassion for me. Compassion for you. Compassion for the Us, and for the heartbreaking reality that we are both in pain precisely because we love each other so much. This is what I mean by Empathy Cubed. Three truths held in the same body at the same time.

If you can only hold your own truth, you get self-righteousness. If you can only hold your partner’s truth, you get self-abandonment. If you can hold both, plus the truth of what the two of you are creating together, you get something new. Ground.

Building Secure Attachment Together: Co-Regulation

Our culture is obsessed with self regulation. Meditate. Journal. Take space. Calm yourself down before you engage. Those things help, and I am not against them. But they are neurobiologically incomplete. Humans are not designed to regulate alone. We are designed to co-regulate, to find safety in the presence of another regulated person.

Self regulation says, I can handle this on my own. Co-regulation says, I can handle this, and I am choosing to let you help me hold it. The first is independence. The second is interdependence, and interdependence is the actual goal. If you want to understand the biology underneath this, I explain what co-regulation is and how couples do it.

In a relationship, building security together looks like this:

• Name the pattern, not the person. Stop saying, you always shut down. Start saying, I notice we are in the pattern where I chase and you withdraw. I think we are both scared right now.
• Answer the bid. Your partner says, come look at this sunset. You put down your phone and go look at the sunset. It sounds trivial. It is not trivial. Every answered bid is a small deposit of trust.
• Treat vulnerability as sacred. When your partner tells you they are scared or ashamed, you never use it against them in the next fight.
• Ask, how old do you feel right now? When your partner is activated, the answer is often six, or eight, or twelve. Instead of arguing with the adult, offer comfort to the child: that little kid makes sense to me, I am not going anywhere.
• Build a drawbridge, not a wall. A wall says, I do not need you. A drawbridge can go up when you need protection, but it is built to come back down. Secure attachment is boundaries with connection. Autonomy without exile.

The measure of a secure couple is not that they never lose each other. It is a shorter lag time between rupture and repair. Can you get from disconnection back to connection in minutes instead of days? That is the real test.

Can You Become Securely Attached While Single?

You can make real progress. You do not need a romantic partner to earn security, but you do need relationships. The corrective experiences that update your body can come from a close friend, a mentor, a sibling who is steadier than your parents were, a therapist, a coach. What matters is that someone reliable stays present when your old wiring expects them to leave.

Being single is also a good time to do the body work: noticing your alarm, practicing the 75/25 boundary with friends and family, telling your story until it holds together. Then, when you date, watch for a trap I see constantly. Limerence, that intoxicating early chemistry, feels like certainty. Secure attachment feels like choice. If you keep chasing the person who sets your whole system on fire, you may be chasing the old wound, not a secure bond. And remember that in calm weather everyone looks securely attached. Pay attention to how a new person behaves in the first small storm. Do they come back? Do they repair? That tells you more than any chemistry ever will.

Why Progress Can Vanish in One Second: The Parking Ticket

I want to tell you about a moment I think about often, because it shows what becoming more securely attached actually looks like, setbacks included.

A couple leaves my office after the best session we have had in months. Both of them are soft. Both of them are present. They hold hands in the parking lot for the first time in a year. Real progress.

They get to the car. There is a parking ticket on the windshield. Within one second, one literal second, they are back in it. If you really loved me, you would have remembered to feed the meter. The softness is gone. The walls are back up. It looks like all the progress has vanished.

The parking ticket was never the problem. The loop was. A negative perception (you do not care), a reactive emotion (fear, shame, the old ache), and a protective action (the sharp line, the cold silence) fired faster than either of them could think. Their alarm systems deployed before their thinking brains even knew what had happened.

Here is what I want you to take from that parking lot. The progress had not vanished. The old wiring simply fired first, the way it always will for a while. Becoming more securely attached does not mean the loop never grabs you again. It means you start to recognize it, name it as the loop instead of the person, and come back to each other sooner. The couples who earn security are not the ones who never end up in that parking lot. They are the ones who learn to say, there it is again, that is our dance, and reach back across the car.

Signs You Are Becoming More Securely Attached

Progress is not linear. There will be stretches of growth followed by stretches where the old pattern comes back at full force. That is not failure. It is the nervous system testing whether the new pattern is real. Here is what I watch for as people move toward security:

• You catch the pattern sooner. What you used to see the next morning, you now notice in the middle of the fight.
• You can tolerate distress without catastrophizing. A short text stings, but you do not immediately decide the relationship is over.
• You can say the need directly. Instead of protesting or disappearing, you say, I need reassurance, or, I need a few minutes and I am coming back.
• Repairs get faster and cleaner. No three day silent treatment. No bringing up something from years ago. The apology is allowed to land.
• You can hold two truths at once. I love you, and I am furious with you. I need space, and I am not leaving.
• You think in terms of us versus the problem. The cycle becomes the enemy, not the person in front of you.
• Your partner’s independence stops feeling like rejection, and their closeness stops feeling like a trap.

What to Do Tonight

You do not have to do all of this at once. Here are a few small steps you can take tonight.

1. Catch one alarm. The next time your chest tightens or you feel yourself go blank, say silently, my nervous system just fired. That is the whole step.
2. Feel your feet before you send the text. Shift to 75/25. Wait five seconds, then decide whether you still want to send it.
3. Answer one bid. When your partner, a friend or a family member reaches for you tonight, put the phone down and turn toward them.
4. Name the pattern, not the person. If tension shows up, try: I think we are in our pattern. I chase, you pull back. I think we are both scared.
5. Make one small repair. If something went sideways today, go back and say, I think I hurt you earlier. Can we try that again?

Bringing It Home

Becoming more securely attached is not about becoming a different person. It is about learning to stay long enough with the person you already are, in the presence of someone who matters, that the old survival strategies stop being the only options available.

It looks like noticing you have gone up to the top of the C, and choosing to travel down. It looks like naming your protector out loud instead of letting it run the fight. It looks like reaching from softness instead of protest, and receiving from openness instead of suspicion. It looks like repairing faster and better than you rupture. It looks like tending the Us the way you would tend a third child, one whose nervous system depends on both of you showing up.

If you are the reacher, your work is to slow down enough to touch the fear underneath the protest, and speak from there. If you are the retreater, your work is to stay in the room, keep your body present, and let your partner see the shame you are certain will disqualify you. Nobody is fixing anybody. You are both learning to travel a curve together. The curve is the practice. There is no arrival. Only the practice.

Common Questions

Can you become securely attached on your own, without a partner?

Partly. You can do a lot of preparatory work alone. You can learn to notice your protector parts, track your nervous system, and grieve what you did not receive as a child. But secure attachment is a relational nervous system state. It reorganizes inside a bond. You do not need a romantic partner specifically, but you do need a reliable other person, a therapist, a close friend, a coach, whose consistent presence lets your body update its old expectations.

How long does it take to become more securely attached?

Longer than a weekend workshop and shorter than a lifetime. In my clinical experience, couples who commit to the work, meaning they stop debating who is the problem and start tracking the pattern together, feel meaningful shifts in three to six months. Deeper rewiring keeps happening for years. Secure attachment is a practice, not a diagnosis you graduate into.

Does having an anxious or avoidant style mean I picked the wrong partner?

Almost never. It usually means you picked a partner whose survival strategy is the mirror opposite of yours, which is the most common pairing there is. Reachers find retreaters. Retreaters find reachers. The pattern feels like proof of incompatibility. It is actually proof that you are both trying to solve the same threat with opposite moves.

What if my partner refuses to do any of this work?

Then you have real information, and it is worth being honest about it. Start with your own side of the pattern. Sometimes when one partner genuinely changes their steps, the choreography shifts and the other partner begins to engage. Sometimes not. If you are trying to tell a real dealbreaker from an old wound talking, this piece on relationship red flags versus anxious alarm bells may help you see more clearly.

Is secure attachment the same as never fighting?

No, and please burn that idea. Secure couples fight. What they do differently is repair. They do not let the disconnection sit and calcify. They do not build cases against each other in private. They come back. If you and your partner still find your way back to each other, even messily, you are closer to secure than you think.

Can you really change your attachment style as an adult?

Yes. Attachment research has found adults with genuinely difficult childhoods who show up as securely attached, which is what earned security means. The change does not come from understanding your style. It comes from repeated corrective experiences in relationship, where your body expects danger and receives safety instead, until the old internal working model updates.

Can an avoidant person become securely attached?

Yes. Avoidance is a nervous system strategy driven by shame and survival, not a fixed personality. The path runs through noticing the shutdown in your body, naming it, taking time limited breaks with a promise to return, and then doing the hard part: staying when every instinct says leave. Each time you stay and the bond holds, your body learns that closeness is survivable.

How do I stop being anxiously attached?

You do not stop the feeling. You change what happens after it. Learn to recognize the alarm in your body, keep most of your attention on your own ground instead of scanning your partner, and come home to yourself before you reach for reassurance. Then ask for what you need from the soft place, not from protest.

What does a securely attached person do differently?

They still get triggered. What they do differently is recover. They can feel the hurt and say, that landed hard, can we talk about it, instead of attacking or leaving. They express needs directly, repair quickly without scorekeeping, and treat the relationship as something both partners protect together.

Can I avoid passing my attachment wounds to my children?

Yes, and this is one of the most hopeful parts of the research. Adults who earn their security parent with the same attunement as adults who always had it. Children do not need parents who never fight. They need parents who can repair, and who let their children see them get hurt and find their way back to each other.

What to Do Next

You did not become insecurely attached alone. You will not become securely attached alone either. Find the person, or the practice, that can hold you long enough for your body to believe it. Then get to work.

The Empathi Quiz

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