What Is Earned Secure Attachment — And How Can You Cultivate It?

What is Earned Secure Attachment?

Earned secure attachment is when someone develops secure, healthy relationship patterns in adulthood despite having experienced insecure attachments in their early years.

How Do You Know If You Have Earned Secure Attachment?

When you have earned secure attachment you can reflect on your challenging early attachment experiences in a balanced and coherent manner, having worked through these difficulties. This balanced perspective is achieved through therapy, reflective work, and forming subsequent secure relationships that can serve as new models of attachment.

How Can You Cultivate Earned Secure Attachment?

It happens through your relationship with yourself and with others. Therapy can play a pivotal role in this transformation, providing a safe space and a supportive relationship that facilitates healing and the development of secure attachment behaviours and beliefs.

The Future

Those with earned secure attachment are more likely to engage in healthy parenting practices and form fulfilling romantic relationships, similar to individuals with continuous secure attachment.

Having insecure attachment is not a life sentence — there is another way to be with yourself and in your intimate relationships.

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Heal Your Anxious Attachment

Jenny’s book Heal Your Anxious Attachment is a compassionate, practical guide to understanding your attachment style and transforming anxious patterns into secure, loving connections. Available now wherever books are sold.