Most people I work with can explain their attachment pattern *beautifully*.
They’ve done the therapy. They’ve watched the videos, listened to the podcasts, learned the communication techniques, maybe even studied NVC.
And they STILL walk right back into the same pattern in their next relationship.
After more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve watched that theory fail in real time, over and over again. And I learned it myself (after almost three decades of studying psychology, doing therapy and getting a master’s in psychology). Knowledge was never the missing piece.
So in this post I want to talk about the piece that changes things: the state of secure attachment, what it feels like in your body, and how you can start practicing it.
What secure attachment looks like in a relationship:
If you’re secure, you know what it’s like to be a good team player. You come towards your partner instead of away from them.
You stay grounded through conflict and you talk things through. You get upset sometimes, but you recover pretty fast. Nobody’s perfect, and everyone is generally taking responsibility for their own experience.
Underneath that is a template. A child who had secure relationships got an ongoing experience, repeated over and over again, that support is available.
If you’re stressed or upset, all you have to do is ASK, and the support is attuned, easy to receive, and helps you recover. Then you go back to playing, exploring, learning and growing.
That repetition creates beliefs about love: that relationship is reliable, that it’s natural to receive, and that it’s easy to be in a relationship where your needs get met.
Secure people STILL have stress. They still have conflict, which is a natural part of life. Their general experience is that conflict is manageable and that they can come back to connection easily.
Secure attachment has nothing to do with how attractive, easygoing, smart or wealthy you are. It comes down to whether you had an experience where it was easy to get support and easy for someone to show up for you.
What insecure attachment feels like instead:
When support was only available some of the time, or it was there but wasn’t really what you needed, your nervous system got used to *not* being regulated.
The beliefs that form are things like:
- I’m alone in the world and I have to do it myself.
- I’m the competent one and other people are a mess.
- Love is scarce, and it’s hard for me to get the amount I want.
And your nervous system gets more used to being in a stress response. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn become more of your day to day experience, especially in relationships.
If you lean anxious, you know the hyper attunement. You’re reading someone’s mood, their tone, their facial expressions, scanning for whether support is there before they’ve said a word.
You over function, accommodate, reach past your own boundaries… and then get angry that no one is meeting you the way you want to be met.
Folks with anxious attachment are usually good at asking for support. The feeling, though, is that you’re pulling for it more often than you feel like you’re getting it. You may lean on people for reassurance, but you’re not letting in the experience of being cared about.
If you’re not sure whether you lean anxious or avoidant, I walk through the difference in anxious vs avoidant attachment.
Primal state or powerful state
So here’s the KEY. You can’t create security while your nervous system is operating from threat.
At any given moment in a relationship, you’re either in a secure state or an insecure, primal state.
This state isn’t something you just decided. It’s something that got *practiced* into you, very early. We have a saying in psychology… whatever fires together, wires together.
In nervous system terms, that’s your sympathetic nervous system running protection and threat, or your parasympathetic nervous system, where safety and connection become possible. My teacher David Bayer calls these a primal state and a powerful state, and I love that distinction.
In a primal state, NO amount of insight changes what happens next, because the state is what’s driving you.
I saw this in hundreds of hours of couples work. People knew the communication technique they wanted to use with their partner, and they couldn’t access it. Everything they knew intellectually just left their brain.
In my own life, I could see this happening too. I started studying psychology when I was 18. I took counseling workshops, coaching workshops, spiritual retreats, the Landmark Forum… I got a master’s in psychology and started my own practice. By the time I was 35, I’d been studying personal growth for 17 years. And I was STILL playing out a stress state in my relationships, even though I couldn’t see it.
You can’t create security while your nervous system is operating from threat.
And the research shows that people with insecure attachment have a harder time metabolizing stress. They take longer to recover. Their sympathetic nervous system is online more of the time.
Try this: how many hours are you in a primal state?
Think about your whole day. (Maybe it’s 13, 15 or 16 hours.)
How many of those hours are you in a stress state, and how many are you in a secure, powerful state? Give yourself an actual number and write it down.
Now think specifically about your romantic or primary relationships, whether you’re single or partnered. What percentage of that time are you reacting from threat or fear, and what percentage are you able to think clearly, respond calmly, and not be worried?
Could be 10% of the time. Could be 50%. Could be 85%. Just give yourself a percentage.
Most people I ask land somewhere between a third and almost all of their relational time in a primal state. Now, this isn’t a flaw. It’s just how much room there is to actually work on this.
Secure attachment is a state you can practice
And my friend, this is such good news. Attachment styles are NOT set in stone. They’re not a personality.
In some ways your attachment style is a state of being, like being stressed. It’s more complex than that because it includes feelings, memories and beliefs you carry forward, but the state of being secure is available to you at any time.
This is what psychologists sometimes call earned secure attachment. You don’t have to have had it in childhood. If you’ve ever had a secure relationship at any point in your life, you can cultivate that state inside yourself and start to recognize it outside of yourself.
The way to create it is to practice it. To resource yourself. To keep doing the things securely attached people do to regulate their emotions and be in relationship. I share more of the steps in how to shift from anxious to secure attachment.
Why receiving is the whole thing
When you’re in an insecure pattern, there’s often a block to receiving. You stay in the stress response, like you’re trying to fix something, and you skip the step where you take in the help.
This happens with my toddler multiple times a day. “Mommy, I scraped my knee.” Then there’s a period of being held and cared for, taking in the support, and then going back to play.
As adults, we skip that step. Someone gives you an apology and you can’t let it in. You ask for love, someone says “I love you,” and it doesn’t *land*.
Learning to receive is the reprogramming of the attachment style.
A short practice for shifting into a secure state:
- Bring a relationship to mind, either getting into one or the one you’re in.
- Notice how it feels in your body, what you feel emotionally, and what beliefs are there about you and the other person.
- Ask yourself: is this a primal state or a powerful state?
- If it’s primal, imagine a supportive figure standing with you. Golden light, a wise figure, an ancestor, whatever feels right. Tell them what feels hard, and let them take your hand.
- Quiet your mind enough to receive one next step. Then imagine taking it, and notice what that state feels like.
When the old thought comes back (“I’ll never find anyone”), just notice it. Oh, I just went into a primal state again. Then ask: what if this isn’t true? What would I do if it were easy?
This takes repetition… and it takes a LOT of compassion for yourself. As a kid you had the same experience thousands of times, so it’s really in your nervous system.
As an adult it goes faster, and it still asks you to catch it, interrupt it, and choose a different state again and again.
Not sure what your attachment style is?
Join the 22,000+ people who have already taken it.
And if you want to go deeper into the primal and powerful states, I teach this fully in Part 1 of my free video training, Attachment Essentials. It walks through your state of being, your filter and your strategy, and it comes with access to my free community.
With love,
Sefora
