Attachment Based Relationship Tips
Looking to strengthen your relationship? Our blog offers expert relationship tips rooted in attachment theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy. Learn how to identify your attachment style, communicate more effectively, and foster emotional safety with your partner. From overcoming conflict to building deeper trust, our practical advice and tools, created by couples therapist Julie Menanno, are designed to help you move toward a secure and fulfilling connection. Dive in and start transforming your relationships today!
What Makes a Relationship Thrive (and What Makes It Fail)
Most relationships don’t break because love disappears. They break because emotional safety disappears—usually through unmet attachment needs, unhealed wounds, and negative cycles that keep partners from finding each other again.
Introduction to Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) helps partners break negative cycles and build secure bonds using the science of attachment. Learn how EFT works and why it’s so effective.
Helping Your Partner Emotionally Engage
Emotional engagement is at the heart of connection, but many partners struggle to share their inner experience. This post offers gentle, practical tools to support your partner in opening up without pressure or intrusion.
Reaching and Responding: Chapter 7 of the Secure Love Book Club
Reaching and responding are the smallest, most powerful moves in a relationship—and the ones most likely to be misunderstood. Chapter 7 helps you spot the reach, respond with intention, and change the entire trajectory of a moment.
How Therapy Can Help With an Avoidant Attachment Style
Therapy can help people with avoidant attachment communicate more openly, connect more deeply, and become more emotionally available in relationships.
Preventing Your Negative Cycle: Chapter 6 of the Secure Love Book Club
Learn how to turn everyday interactions into an “attachment-friendly” environment, swap reflexive fight-or-flight reactions for healthy connection, and use Julie’s E-V-I-C-T framework to keep shame (and negative cycles) out of your relationship.
Interrupting Your Negative Cycle: Chapter 5 (Part 1) of the Secure Love Book Club
In Part 1 of Chapter 5, we explore what it takes to interrupt your negative cycle in the moment. Julie shares how to slow down, name the pattern, and choose connection over protection—even when it’s hard.
Mapping Your Negative Cycle: A Workshop to Transform Your Relationship Patterns
Get stuck in the same argument with your partner? The Mapping Your Negative Cycle workshop helps you uncover what’s really happening—and how to change it.
Understanding Shame: The Missing Link in Relationship Healing
Shame is often the hidden force behind emotional disconnection. This workshop helps you understand, name, and work with shame—so it no longer controls your relationships.
Attachment 101: The Course Every Relationship Needs
Your attachment style shapes how you love, fight, and connect. The Attachment 101 Course helps you understand your emotional patterns—and how to build secure bonds.
How Do Different Attachment Styles Approach Making Sacrifices for the Good of the Relationship?
Anxious partners over-sacrifice. Avoidant partners resist change. Secure partners give for the greater good. Learn how attachment shapes relationship sacrifices.
How to Recognize Your Attachment Style in Everyday Reactions
The emotional patterns you repeat in your relationship often stem from your attachment style. This post outlines common signs of anxious or avoidant attachment.
Before You Label Your Partner, Try This Perspective
It can feel easier to label your partner than to feel powerless. But what if the answer isn’t in blame, but in understanding the cycle? This post offers a new way forward.
After the Fight: 3 Options That Shape Your Relationship
After a fight, couples often choose between self-abandonment, protest, or repair. This post breaks down the three paths and helps you choose connection over disconnection.
A Secure Attachment Isn’t Bliss—It’s Safety
A secure relationship doesn’t feel like constant bliss. It feels safe. Valued. Trusted. Seen. This post explains what secure attachment really looks and feels like.
Julie’s Bi-Weekly Group: Grow in Real Time with Support That Sticks
Real relationship change takes repetition, reflection, and support. Julie’s Bi-Weekly Group gives you live guidance, a community of growth, and tools that last.
Why Your Partner’s Bad Mood Triggers You—and What to Do
Your partner’s bad mood doesn’t have to mean disconnection. Learn how to regulate your nervous system, reflect with empathy, and stay connected—even when it’s hard.
Can You Lean Into Your Partner’s Emotions?
Leaning in—offering empathy even when you don’t agree—isn’t the whole relationship, but it is the beginning. Here’s why it matters and how to do it well.
Testing Your Partner’s Love?
Do you find yourself constantly testing your partner’s love? This blog explores why reassurance never feels like enough and how you can begin to build real trust—from the inside out.
How to Be Emotionally Available – Part Four: Emotional Presence
Emotional presence is the ability to join someone in their feelings without losing yourself in the process. When practiced consistently, it deepens connection and builds trust.

In this week’s group, I dove into identity loss in relationships and how we can slowly disappear in the service of “keeping the connection safe.” If you have ever felt like you’ve become a quieter version of yourself, edited your needs, or organized your whole life around keeping the relationship stable, this session will land.
We talked about how shame and early attachment learning can wire the nervous system to prioritize safety over authenticity, and why that strategy can feel protective in the short term but quietly blocks the closeness you are actually longing for. You will also hear how identity loss fuels hypervigilance, anxiety, and negative cycles, even when your partner is not asking you to shrink.
A portion of the meeting focused on the difference between denying your needs to keep the peace versus owning your needs while recognizing a partner may not be able to meet them.
Individual Exercise
How To Rebuild Your Identity
Couple’s Exercise