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 Does Emotional Safety in a Relationship Really Mean?
Emotional safety is the foundation of secure love. When you feel safe in a relationship, your body can relax, you can be yourself, and conflict becomes something you work through together instead of something that threatens the bond.
What Is Your Sense of Self?
A strong sense of self allows you to move through life with confidence, authenticity, and emotional resilience. Learn how to develop a deeper connection to yourself, accept your flaws, and build more fulfilling relationships.
Splitting vs. Integrating: How to Shift from Extreme Thinking to Balanced Perspectives
Understanding the difference between splitting and integrating can help you develop a healthier, more balanced perspective in relationships. Learn how to move from extreme thinking to a more integrated way of seeing yourself and your partner.
3 Tips to Help Your Anxious Partner Feel More Secure
Anxious partners feel more secure when their relationship needs are met. Learn three practical ways to support your partner in feeling safe, valued, and emotionally connected.
Validation: The Key to Emotional Connection
Validation is the foundation of emotional safety in relationships. Learn how to practice validation to strengthen connection, improve communication, and create a deeper bond with your partner.
Navigating Relationship Challenges: Answers to Common Questions
Understand how attachment styles, boundaries, and emotional security shape your relationships. Learn how to distinguish between anxious fears and intuition, repair negative cycles, and move forward with clarity.
Resolve Conflict Using the D.E.A.R M.A.N. Method
Learn how the D.E.A.R M.A.N. method can help you express yourself clearly, set boundaries, and resolve conflict while maintaining emotional connection in your relationship.
How Do Secure Partners Do That?
Securely attached partners communicate effectively, regulate emotions, and maintain strong boundaries while fostering connection. Learn how these behaviors create thriving relationships.
Why Do Disorganized Partners Do That?
Disorganized attachment can make relationships feel unpredictable and overwhelming. Learn how survival strategies formed in childhood impact adult relationships and discover steps for healing.
Why Do Avoidant Attached Partners Do That?
Understanding why avoidant partners engage in behaviors like appeasing, shutting down, or defending themselves is key to breaking negative cycles. Learn how to transform these behaviors and build a more secure relationship.
Why Do Those with Anxious Attachment Do That?
Anxious attachment behaviors often stem from deep fears of abandonment. Learn why these behaviors feel safe and how to shift toward healthier relationship patterns.
Common Experience of Avoidant Partners: Fear of Conflict
Avoidant partners often struggle with emotions, both within themselves and in relationships. Learn how to reconnect with your emotions and build deeper connections.
Things to Know About Your Relationship And Sex
Sexual intimacy offers numerous physical and psychological benefits, but a healthy emotional connection is the foundation of a fulfilling sex life. Learn how to nurture intimacy and address challenges in your relationship.
How Does Attachment Play a Part in Long Distance Relationships?
Long-distance relationships bring attachment needs into sharp focus. Learn how to strengthen security in your relationship before focusing on the logistics of managing distance.
When I'm Sorry Isn't Enough: Repairing Trust Beyond Apology
Saying 'I’m sorry' isn’t always enough. Learn how to truly repair trust by understanding, validating, and committing to change in your relationship.
Insecure Attachment Styles and How They Keep You Stuck
Anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles often keep partners stuck in negative cycles. Learn how to break free by improving communication, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.
Common Experience of Anxious Partners: The Sense of Over Responsibility
Many anxious partners struggle with over responsibility, feeling the need to control everything to feel safe. Learn how to balance expectations, release control, and build a healthier relationship dynamic.
Being Emotionally Supportive is NOT the Same as Being Your Partner’s Therapist
Many people want to support their partner emotionally, but worry they’ll say the wrong thing, make it worse, or become responsible for their partner’s feelings. Emotional support is a learnable relationship skill, not a therapist role, and it works best when it’s reciprocal.
Relationship Trigger Toolbox: Handle Emotional Reactions
Learn how to handle relationship triggers with self-reflection, regulation, empathy, and effective communication. Use the Relationship Trigger Tool-Box to break negative cycles and foster emotional safety in your relationship.
Emotional Intimacy: What It Looks Like (for Men) and How Avoidant and Anxious Partners Block It
Both avoidant and anxious partners block emotional intimacy in unique but equally intense ways. By understanding these dynamics, couples can begin to break the negative cycle and build a more secure, emotionally connected relationship.

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