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!
Identifying Your Attachment Style: Chapter 3 of the Secure Love Book Club
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.
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.
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.
Chapter 2 of Secure Love: Understanding Attachment Theory in Relationships
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.
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.
Your Partner Isn’t the Enemy—Your Negative Cycle Is
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.
Secure Love Book Club – Chapter One: The Problem Beneath the Problem
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.
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.
Coping With Ghosting
Should you get back together with the person who ghosted you? How can you build a secure relationship after being ghosted?
How to Get Through a Breakup
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.
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.
Emotional Attunement: Meaning, Examples, and How to Be Emotionally Attuned to Your Partner
Emotional attunement is the skill of staying present with your partner’s feelings without trying to fix, correct, or rush them. When you learn how to be emotionally attuned, conflict de-escalates faster, emotional safety grows, and problem-solving finally becomes possible.
How to Be Emotionally Available – Part Two: Authenticity
If you’re not showing up, there’s none of you to connect with. Authenticity is the foundation of emotional availability—and it's something you can learn.
How to Be Emotionally Available – Part One: Emotional Validation
Emotional validation isn’t about agreeing with your partner—it’s about showing them that their feelings matter. And when it comes to emotional availability, few things are more powerful.
Tips for Preventing the Negative Cycle When Discussing a Difficult Topic
Tough conversations can easily spiral into disconnection when couples fall into the negative cycle. But it doesn’t have to go that way. These tips can help you communicate better, create emotional safety, and stay connected even when things get hard.
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.
The Negative Cycle: Part Six – Putting It All Together
The real enemy in your relationship isn’t your partner—it’s the negative cycle you both get caught in. When you understand how it works, you can work together to step out of it and reconnect.
The Negative Cycle: Part Five – Examining the Next Trigger of the Avoidant Partner
It may look like the avoidant partner doesn’t care, but in reality, they’re overwhelmed. When conflict escalates, their instinct is to shut down—not to hurt their partner, but to protect themselves.
The Negative Cycle: Part Four – Examining the Next Trigger of the Anxious Partner
When anxious partners feel dismissed, they often double down in protest. It’s not about control—it’s about emotional survival and the fear of being too much to love.

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