Secure Attachment
A description of secure attachment in daily life, including how it feels in relationships and in your relationship with yourself.
Secure attachment is sometimes imagined as a state with no worry or conflict at all, and that is not what research or clinical experience suggests. People with a secure way of relating still feel hurt, still disagree, and still have difficult days. What tends to differ is how they move through those experiences, because they have a more reliable sense that connection can survive them.
In Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT), attachment security applies to the relationship you have with yourself as well as the relationships you have with other people. A secure sense of self usually includes responding to your own distress with some understanding, trusting your own judgment, and having a quieter inner critic. These abilities are built through experience, which is part of why change tends to come from felt experience and not only from insight.
Many adults did not have consistent security growing up, and the research and clinical literature suggest that these experiences can be built later. Close relationships, good friendships, and therapy can all offer corrective emotional experiences, which are experiences that provide a new, more secure way of relating to and responding to vulnerable feelings. In therapy, those experiences happen repeatedly, in a relationship that is steady, attuned, and paced to what you can take in.
Security tends to arrive gradually. Clients often notice that a reaction passes more quickly than it used to, that they can ask for something with less dread, or that a conflict ends in repair and not in distance. These small shifts add up, and they are usually a better sign of change than a dramatic moment of insight.
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