How to Get Secure Attachment

[in adult relationships]

The short answer: Do what the Secures do.

The long answer is about understanding the key differences between secure and insecure attachment, and how people with these attachment styles show up in the world.

If you want a loving, supportive long-term relationship, the research is clear: having secure attachment is the way to go. So let’s dive into how that happens.

What Is Attachment Style?

Your attachment style is like an internal operating system — a framework for how you relate to yourself, your emotions, and the people around you. It starts developing in childhood, based on how your caregivers responded to your emotional needs.

If you grew up with secure attachment, you likely learned early on that can trust your thoughts and feelings, and use these internal experiences to navigate your environment. This happens largely through our interactions with our caregivers when they mirror back our emotions. When something painful happened — like you fell and skinned your knee — a parent might empathetically respond with, “Oh no, that must have hurt!” That simple moment of mirroring tells a child: What you feel makes sense. You are safe and cared for.

Over time, these repeated emotional mirroring interactions and validations helped you build trust your own internal signals. This, in turn, gave you a reliable model for navigating life, leading to a confident sense of self, where you are worthy of love, value your well-being, trust your emotions, and avoid putting yourself in harm’s way.

If you grew up with insecure attachment, you likely had more than half of your interactions with your caregivers that didn’t mirror or validate your internal state. Let’s return to the same childhood example — skinning your knee — and consider some different caregiver responses:

The dismissive response: “Oh, you’re fine. Walk it off.”

The exaggerated response: “Oh my god, you’re bleeding! We need to bandage this immediately! How did this happen? I’m so upset, you need to be more careful!” 

The punitive response: “Stop crying and being a crybaby. I’m too busy for this right now!”

Or the neglectful response, in which the parent doesn’t respond at all.

Reflecting on these examples, it’s not difficult to understand how a child could learn that their feelings are untrustworthy, overwhelming, or not worth recognizing at all. 

When a child's internal experience doesn’t mirror the external environment, the child learns that their feelings are not reliable for predicting how to navigate the environment, inevitably leading to doubting or dismissing feelings, difficulty recognizing their self-worth, questioning whether they deserve love, and struggling to trust others.

If we learn that are emotions aren’t trustworthy, we can then go one of two ways: 

Succumbing to our emotions: The Anxious Response which manifests as seeking constant confirmation from the environment through acting out, overly seeking validation, or attempting to control others in order to get our needs met.

Repressing our emotions: The Avoidant Response which manifests as denying the existence or importance of our emotions, over-relying on logic or objectivity, and often gaslighting or diminishing the emotions of others to avoid having to feel our own.

Or sometimes, a combination of both: The Disorganized or Fearful Avoidant Response.

We never chose any of these responses consciously as children, rather they are predictable behavioral responses determined by environment and genetics. Remember, our traumas are not our fault, but they are our responsibility. 

The Real Tragedy: Why You’re Still Single or Why Your Relationship Sucks 

The hard truth is that our brain and nervous system crave what's familiar — not necessarily what's healthy. Most often, the natural course of development for most people is to maintain the same attachment style they developed as a child.

If you’re anxious and tend to doubt your emotions, being with someone avoidant—someone inconsistent in their behavior (as a way of controlling their own emotions)—will feel familiar. Just like the "hot and cold" parent you grew up with.

If you're avoidant, you may unconsciously seek out emotionally intense partners, or your own behavior might push a partner into being more clingy and emotional. This only reinforces your belief that emotions are dangerous, overwhelming, or untrustworthy.

Anxious and Avoidant individuals inadvertently miss out on secure partners—not because they’re not interested, but because secure people feel unfamiliar. They’re not chaotic enough to activate the nervous system into its familiar stress pattern. Or, Secures don't tolerate half-assed emotional engagement.

So then what happens? The Anxious and Avoidants remain unattached for years. The Secures find each other early on, and the dating pool remains largely filled with Avoidants, with a few anxious folk drifting from one mismatch to another, walking right past the rare unicorn of a Secure… or at least that’s how it feels. 

But here’s the good news: you don’t have to wait around for someone secure to show up…

You Can Become Secure

You can become a Secure yourself and then you will attract other secure partners, or at least those trying to be secure as well. 

To be secure means learning not only to recognize and feel your emotions, but also to trust those emotions to guide your actions. It means acknowledging what you feel—even when it's difficult or inconvenient—and being willing to act on or share those feelings, even if it leads to conflict, rejection, or being alone. It means taking responsibility for your own mental health and not placing all your needs on someone else, and it also means being dependable, consistent, and generous, within your capacity to do so. It means not taking things personally, and choosing to seek understanding rather than blaming your partner. Above all, it means being radically honest with yourself, living in alignment with your emotional truth, and refusing to settle for less.

If you identify as Anxious or Avoidant, or a little of both, and you’re on the fence about whether you should be with your partner, ask yourself the following questions:

1) Do their actions and words align? Do mine?

2) How do I feel when I’m around them? Anxious? Overwhelmed? Or safe and relaxed?

3) How do I feel about myself when I’m around them? Do I feel like I’m not good enough? Do I feel like the “bad guy”? 

4) Am I staying with them out of fear? Of being alone? Not finding love again? Starting over?

5) Do I believe healthy, secure love is actually possible for me?

Anything less than a positive, hopeful response to these questions means there’s more growth to be had. When you’re ready, I’m here.

A Cautionary Tale With Belief: The Narcissist.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post: belief creates reality. Our beliefs dictate how we see the world—and how we show up in it.

If I believe that I am good, righteous, and deserving of good things, then I interpret others’ actions as confirming this. I see myself as valuable and worthy.

Overall, this mindset is incredibly empowering, and I wholly encourage people to embrace it. But, like anything, it can become problematic when taken to an extreme. When self-belief becomes dogmatic and resistant to feedback, it starts to resemble something else: narcissism. It’s precisely because belief shapes our reality and the way we exist in the world that narcissists can be so incredibly dangerous and powerful.

Narcissists have no room for other people’s perspectives or realities. Their defense mechanisms are so deeply ingrained that they can manipulate almost any situation to cast themselves as either the hero or the victim—but never the abuser or the perpetrator of harm. Because of this delusionally strong self-belief, they can overpower and wear down anyone who disagrees with them—especially when the disagreement requires self-reflection.

Imagine someone saying an outrageous and deeply offensive claim, like: “Children deserve to be abused” or “Rape is sometimes excusable” or “The Nazis were right.” These statements are so shockingly incorrect and morally reprehensible that no argument could ever sway you. You would shut it down easily–with clarity, conviction, and self-righteous anger—because your belief is unshakeable. That is what narcissists do, but about themselves. They deny, dismiss, and defend against anything that challenges their sense of righteous supremacy. They hold such an unwavering belief in their own superiority, ‘benevolence,” or victimhood, that no opposing view can penetrate.

This blind fervor toward themselves is, paradoxically, both the source of their power and their eventual downfall.

Narcissists often succeed in the short term: their self-belief is so intense that they can impose their reality on others. They are highly persuasive. Their confidence is compelling. People may see them as bold, different, even as forces for change. They may appear to challenge broken systems or offer clarity in chaos. 

But over time, the gap between the narcissist’s version of reality and our individual realities becomes harder to ignore. Eventually, the disconnect becomes too big. People start waking up to the realization that they are eating sand, not caviar. What was once clarity, is actually control. 

Ultimately, the narcissist is destined to fail because their reality depends on minimizing or invalidating others. In an interconnected world—where our experiences and truths inevitably overlap—this approach is unsustainable. 

The narcissistic manifestation is then, by its very nature, limited and fleeting. It creates unwavering positivity for the self but offers little to no room for the well-being or perspectives of others. And because their success so often comes at the expense of those around them, it’s only a matter of time before the structure collapses. When enough people get cut down, that’s when the reckoning takes place. 

In the meantime, how can we arm ourselves against such a formidable threat? Be equally clear and grounded about who YOU are and what works for YOU. Trust your perspective and your feelings. Know your needs and values. By trusting in yourself, the narcissist loses their power over you. 

It is precisely because kind people give others the benefit of the doubt, own their own mistakes, and see the world in shades of grey, that they often fall prey to narcissists. These positive qualities are perfect tools for narcissistic exploitation:

• “The way I behave must just be a misunderstanding or due to ignorance—I’m not actually responsible for my actions.”

• “See, I’m not the problem – you’re the problem! You’ve hurt me too. So I don’t have to consider anything you're saying.”

• “Oh, it’s not black and white? You’re not 110% sure? Then you must have doubt—and if you have doubt, what you believe must not be true.”

  
  

These tactics exploit people’s inherent goodness and undermine their confidence.

This is why I believe the only true solution to dealing with a narcissist is to exit. There’s no room for flexibility or growth. Even when they’re eating sand, they’re exceptionally good at convincing themselves it’s caviar.

Only when their external reality profoundly contradicts their internal one is growth even possible—and even then, it’s painfully slow, rare, and unpredictable. Many narcissists never reach that point. They’re masters of blame-shifting, reinterpreting reality, or surrounding themselves with people who reinforce their perspective.

When you honor your own feelings, beliefs, and needs, you see clearly: there is no space for the narcissist’s version of reality to expand to fit yours.

So leave. Create distance. Set firm boundaries. Reclaim your own reality.

Back to self-belief – how can you then avoid becoming the narcissist yourself? Believe in yourself and believe in others. Accept feedback. Consider a reality where opposing viewpoints can both be correct. 

Choice is an illusion until we gain knowledge of our true selves.

Because our reality is constructed by our beliefs—the way we perceive, interpret, and make sense of the world—the idea of choice doesn’t fully exist... at least, not until certain conditions are met. Until then, we don’t truly choose anything. Who we are is dependent on things outside our control: our genetics, our family, and societal and cultural influences.

We learned to exist in the world as a function (or product) of the family we grew up in, along with various other influences: genetics, society, and culture. But let’s focus on the family part.

A common idea is that we have a tendency to “marry” one of our parents—that despite our best efforts, we often pick a partner who resembles one or both of them. There are many proposed reasons for this phenomenon: we marry what’s familiar; we have unresolved trauma subconsciously looking to get resolved, so we choose someone who triggers us in the same way; or we seek from our partners what we didn’t get from our parents. The ideas go on.

But I have a much simpler theory.

Let’s use the analogy of a puzzle. Each person in your family is a puzzle piece that makes up the whole. Each piece and each puzzle is unique—but what remains true across all puzzles is that, for the pieces to fit together, their shapes must fit into each other. As you grew up, you developed your unique shape in response to the family you were part of. You adapted to a way of existing that allowed you to “fit.” That shape—your particular way of being—is your personality, your beliefs, your worldview.

So the reason we “remarry” our parents is simply because the only other shape that fits our own, is one that resembles theirs. And so, we are doomed to repeat the same tragedies and re-live the same painful triggers from our family systems—now with our partners.

This is why choice does not exist, and why it was impossible for you to have made different choices in the past. You were always programmed to choose what you did, by factors beyond your control. The feeling of choice you had was an illusion. Those choices were predetermined by family, genetics, cultural and societal programming.

This raises questions about free will. Perhaps it doesn't truly doesn’t exist. But what does exist is the power to become aware of your particular shape and to live a life that aligns with who you are, not just who your family shaped you to be.

A consistent theme I see in my therapy is people feeling weighed down by ideas of failure, or experiencing pressure to be a certain way, achieve a particular goal, or live up to some predefined version of success. Often, there’s a deep sense of shame, disappointment, or grief tied to not meeting the expectations—whether internal or external—of who they believe they “should” be.

But that’s all baloney.

Nothing in life is fixed. Ideas like right and wrong, success and failure, worth and disgrace — they’re dependent on perspective. Life simply happens and then there are consequences — or rather, outcomes — to the choices we make. Those outcomes aren’t inherently good or bad; they simply are. Each one comes with trade-offs, and it’s up to each one of us to decide which compromises we're willing to live with, and what we can or cannot accept.

So until you have internalized this idea I’m proposing, your puzzle piece has already been shaped—and your future choices can be predicted by that preset algorithm.

The situations may change, but you’ll keep meeting the same types of people, having the same interactions, getting triggered in the same ways. The problem doesn’t lie with others—it lies with the shape you are. And inevitably, you will continue to find puzzle pieces that match that shape.

If you want different outcomes—different people, different relationships—you must change. This does not mean you are the problem… I hear this all the time in pop psychology, self-help, and spiritual communities, and I reject that narrative. It leads nowhere—just more shame and self-loathing. 

What I mean is: you need to change your shape. You need to examine the constructs that were handed to you and internalized, and figure out which ones fit you and which ones don’t. Then decide what feels true for you—regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Re-write those constructs: beliefs about yourself, others, the world, how things work, right and wrong, good and bad, etc. Figure out your values. Live from that place. Take actions based on your values. 

You are not broken—you are shaped. And the shape can be changed, but not until you see it clearly. Change your puzzle shape—and break the generational cycles that formed you.