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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!
Every partner has attachment needs that support emotional safety. Learn how unmet needs and fears drive disconnection—and how to move back toward security.
In Chapter 4 of the Secure Love Book Club, Julie Menanno explores how negative cycles—not your partner—keep you stuck. Learn how to map your cycle and begin the path to healing disconnection.
Avoidant attachment doesn’t mean your partner can’t connect. Learn four key ways to help them feel safe, successful, and emotionally understood.
The emotional patterns you repeat in your relationship often stem from your attachment style. This post outlines common signs of anxious or avoidant attachment.
Anger can divide or connect—depending on how it’s expressed. This post shows the difference between reactive and assertive anger and how to use it for deeper connection.
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 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 relationship doesn’t feel like constant bliss. It feels safe. Valued. Trusted. Seen. This post explains what secure attachment really looks and feels like.
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.
In Chapter 3 of Secure Love, we begin one of the most foundational steps in the healing process—identifying your attachment style. In this session, I guide readers through recognizing the patterns that shape how they relate, connect, and protect themselves in relationships.
Setting boundaries in a loving relationship doesn’t mean shutting your partner out. It means protecting emotional safety while staying committed to connection.
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.
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.
In this week’s Secure Love Book Club, I guide you through Chapter 2, where we unpack the fundamentals of attachment theory and how it affects your ability to feel safe, seen, and connected in romantic relationships.
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.
In emotionally stuck relationships, your partner isn’t the enemy. The negative cycle is. Learn how to identify the cycle, understand each other’s roles, and begin the process of healing.
In this first meeting of the Secure Love Book Club, Julie Menanno introduces the foundation of her book and dives into Chapter One, helping participants understand how negative cycles erode connection and how we can begin to heal by recognizing the deeper pain underneath conflict.
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.
Should you get back together with the person who ghosted you? How can you build a secure relationship after being ghosted?
Healing after a breakup isn’t easy—but it’s possible. Learn how to face the pain, let go with intention, and build emotional resilience as you move through the process.
In this session, Julie explores the often unspoken question: Am I carrying too much of the emotional weight in my relationship? She breaks down what emotional work really means—offering support, creating space for connection, showing vulnerability—and helps you identify when it starts to feel one-sided or unsustainable.
Julie guides you through why these patterns develop, what they might be protecting, and how to begin shifting out of them. Whether you tend to over-function or struggle to engage emotionally, this conversation offers a clear, grounded path toward more balance, clarity, and connection.
In this meeting, Julie dives into the crucial role of emotional safety and communication during disagreements. She highlights how it's not the disagreement itself, but how couples handle it that truly matters. Learn how being open, curious, and validating each other's emotions can help maintain a safe space for constructive conversations.
Julie also explores how small arguments often mask deeper emotional needs, like wanting to feel heard or valued. She addresses how different attachment styles (anxious versus avoidant) can influence communication and encourages couples to better understand each other’s emotional needs.
Julie walks through a framework she uses with couples, illustrating how unresolved emotions, personal wounds, and attachment insecurities impact communication and relationship dynamics. She emphasizes the necessity of emotional awareness, healthy assertion, and processing difficult feelings rather than avoiding or acting out on them.
For those interested in learning how to navigate emotional wounds, assert boundaries, and cultivate healthier relationship dynamics, this session provides valuable insights and practical tools.
In this session, we explore what it really means to “expect too much” in a relationship. Julie talks about how sometimes, without realizing it, we lean too heavily on our partner to manage emotions we haven’t yet learned to hold ourselves. This can show up as constant venting, needing endless reassurance, or expecting our partner to join us in unhealthy ways of coping.... like over controlling, avoiding, or shutting down.