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!
How to Talk With Your Partner About Emotional Blocks (and Build a Secure Relationship)
Emotional blocks are not the problem in relationships. The problem is not knowing how to talk about them. Learn how couples can discuss their protective patterns with curiosity, vulnerability, and emotional safety to build a more secure relationship.
What’s Really Behind All That Anger in Your Relationship
If you feel stuck in anger or resentment and it’s affecting your ability to connect, this session will help you understand what that anger is really trying to tell you and what to do with it.
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.
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.
Attachment Needs & Fears
Every partner has attachment needs that support emotional safety. Learn how unmet needs and fears drive disconnection—and how to move back toward security.
4 Tips to Help Your Avoidant Partner Feel Safe
Avoidant attachment doesn’t mean your partner can’t connect. Learn four key ways to help them feel safe, successful, and emotionally understood.
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.
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.
How to Set Gentle Boundaries With Your Partner
Boundaries do not have to be harsh to be effective. Gentle boundaries help you protect emotional safety, interrupt negative cycles, and stay committed to connection while still honoring your limits.
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.
How Personal Anxiety Can Impact Your Relationship
Trying to control your environment—like keeping a spotless house—can sometimes be a way to manage inner anxiety caused by relationship disconnection. But when that strategy backfires, it can create more of the very disconnection you’re trying to avoid. This post explores how personal anxiety shows up in relationships, and how couples can break the cycle.
Attachment-Friendly Boundaries Sound Like This
Secure relationships are built on mutual respect and emotional safety. These examples of attachment-friendly boundaries show how to protect connection while still speaking your truth.
What Is Vulnerability—and Why Does It Matter?
Vulnerability is the foundation of connection—and without it, relationships stay surface-level. But when you've learned to hide, overshare, or shut down, it can feel impossible to get it right. Here’s how to begin.
What to Do Instead
When your partner shares a concern, like spending habits, it can be tempting to shut down, deflect, or fight back. But emotional safety comes from staying engaged, validating each other, and communicating with clarity.
Do You Really Want to Be Agreed With? Or Do You Just Want to Feel Valued and Understood?
Constantly arguing over facts in your relationship? You may not be seeking agreement—you may be seeking emotional validation. Here’s how to tell the difference and reconnect.
Your Attachment Style Has So Much to Say…
Each attachment style holds a story—about fear, need, and connection. When we give those stories words, we begin the process of healing, connection, and secure attachment.
Met Attachment Needs = Secure Attachment
Secure attachment is built on a foundation of consistent emotional attunement and met needs. When both partners feel seen, valued, and safe, the relationship thrives.
Your Partner Doesn’t Want Help With Their Feelings?
When your partner avoids emotional support, it can feel confusing and lonely. But it often stems from shame, fear, or past conditioning—not rejection. Learn five reasons this happens and how to respond with compassion.
Hope: 8 Ways to Grow Secure Attachment in Your Relationship
Secure attachment doesn’t just happen—it’s created moment by moment, through emotional safety, self-awareness, and commitment. Here are 8 hopeful and practical ways to build a stronger, more connected relationship.
Unmet Childhood Attachment Needs: How Early Experiences Shape Adult Relationships
Many struggles in adult relationships trace back to unmet attachment needs from childhood. Explore how early emotional experiences shape your reactions, defenses, and patterns—and what healing can look like.

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