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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!
In Chapter 9 of Secure Love, we explore attachment injuries—what they are, how they form, and what it takes to repair them. These moments of relational pain shape our protective strategies, but they also offer an opportunity for deeper connection if we’re willing to stay emotionally engaged.
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.
In The Secure Love Podcast, follow real-life couple Melissa and Drew through 20 unscripted coaching sessions. With expert commentary and free homework downloads, you’ll learn how attachment theory can help you transform conflict into connection.
Repairing after a negative cycle is one of the most powerful skills in a relationship. In Chapter Eight of the Secure Love Book Club, Julie Menanno guides readers through the process of emotional repair—what it looks like, why it’s hard, and how to make it meaningful.
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.
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.
In this session, Julie explores how emotional disgust, toward our own feelings or our partner’s, can silently block intimacy and emotional engagement. A powerful conversation with real-life examples and tools for healing.
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.
Therapy can help people with avoidant attachment communicate more openly, connect more deeply, and become more emotionally available in relationships.
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.
Old betrayals, lost dreams, and “wasted years” create hidden grief that silently powers the negative cycle. In this preview, Julie Menanno explains how to name and process relationship grief so couples can move out of stuckness and into secure connection—catch the full replay inside Julie’s Group.
In Part 2 of Chapter 5, Julie ditches the slide deck for a full hour of live Q & A—pressure-testing interruption tools on real couples, unpacking avoidant re-engagement, and prescribing homework that turns resentment into micro-repairs before Chapter 6.
When your partner triggers you, the L.O.V.E. tool helps you pause, regulate, and respond with clarity and care. Here's how to shift from reaction to connection.
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.
Julie Menanno pinpoints the hidden trio—unmet needs, fear, and negative cycles—that keep partners spinning in place, and shares the first tiny moves that push a relationship forward again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this session, Julie explores how anger and resentment can quietly block progress in relationships, even when both partners are doing their best to stay connected. She talks about how anger often goes unacknowledged, how it can become stuck in the body, and how it sometimes masks deeper emotions like grief, fear, or shame.
You’ll learn how to recognize the signs that unresolved anger is showing up in your relationship, what anger is actually trying to communicate, and how to work with it in a way that supports healing. Julie also talks about how different attachment styles tend to experience and express anger, and how couples can begin to hear and validate each other when anger comes up.
This conversation includes self-work, relationship work, and real-time questions from group members who are working through anger in their own relationships. Julie also shares more about her new self-paced course on experiential self-work.
In this session, Julie explored an emotional block - disgust. She unpacks how emotional disgust develops from early messages about which feelings are acceptable, and how it can silently undermine our ability to connect with ourselves and our partners. Whether it shows up as a shutdown response to a crying partner, a cringe at your own vulnerability, or a tendency to label certain feelings as “too much,” emotional disgust can disrupt communication, intimacy, and authenticity.
Julie shares tools for identifying this internal response, examining where it originated, and beginning the process of re-patterning. The session also includes two powerful live discussions—one on how disgust shows up in sexual intimacy after trauma, and another about supporting a partner who shuts down around emotions. If you’ve ever wondered why it’s hard to “sit with” emotions this conversation will help make sense of it.
In this session, Julie walks us straight into the heart of relationship grief—the unspoken losses that keep even the most motivated couples stuck in the same fight. She breaks down how broken trust, dashed hopes, and “lost years” silently fuel anger, anxiety, and shutdowns, then shows you how to name those hurts, feel them together, and finally lay them to rest. You’ll see live coaching moments where partners practice holding space for each other’s pain without slipping back into blame or self-defense, plus step-by-step prompts for talking through grief in real life. If you’ve ever wondered why your new skills still get hijacked by old wounds, this replay is your roadmap out of the fog and back into secure connection.
In this session, Julie dives into what it really means to create and maintain healthy boundaries in your relationship. She explains how boundaries are not about building walls, but about protecting your well-being while staying connected to your partner. You’ll hear practical examples of where couples often blur the line between closeness and overreach, and how to communicate limits in a way that strengthens, rather than weakens, the bond. Julie also answers member questions on how to set boundaries when your partner struggles with them, how to know when you’re overstepping theirs, and how boundaries connect to secure attachment.