You’ve taken the quiz and you’ve read the books, so you know your attachment style. But last night your partner said, “We need to talk,” and your whole body went off like a car alarm. That anxiety or panic is an insecure attachment style doing its thing. So, the real question is: can you actually change it? And the real answer is yes, you can. It’s called earned secure attachment; it’s real, and researchers have been studying it for decades.
Today you’ll learn what earned secure attachment really is, the three things earned secure attachment is not, and the five tools to start building it this week.
14-minute read
What Is Earned Secure Attachment?
Earned secure attachment means you didn’t have secure attachment growing up and you built it in adulthood anyway. The term comes from Judith Pearson and her colleagues back in 1994, and researchers have been studying it ever since, including a big review published in 2024 that gathered up thirty years of studies. So, we’ve got a lot of great information about this topic (which, of course, I’m going to use as the starting point for today’s teach).
I want to give you a quick definition first, so we’re using the same words. Your attachment style is the relational template your nervous system built in your earliest relationships, back before you had language or memory for it, and it answers three questions on your behalf constantly:
- Is it safe to need someone?
- Will they stay when things get hard?
- Am I too much?
Secure means closeness mostly feels safe to you, and insecure means it mostly doesn’t. If it doesn’t, if it’s insecure, you have some form of an anxious attachment style or an avoidant attachment style. For now, I’m going to assume you know the basics of attachment so we can get to today’s specific topic.
Earned security (aka: earned secure attachment) gets measured clinically with something called the Adult Attachment Interview, which was developed back in the 1980s by Mary Main and her colleagues right here at UC Berkeley in California. It’s a long interview about your childhood that gets scored by trained coders. But those coders aren’t scoring what happened to you; they’re scoring how you tell it. In other words, the instrument doesn’t care about the specific experiences of your childhood; it cares about the words you use to describe what happened to you.
Dr. Dan Siegel, whose work on how minds developed has shaped most of what we understand about attachment and the brain, said it best: how you make sense of your life is more important than what happened to you! Researchers call that quality coherence, and it doesn’t mean having a pretty story. It’s not “everything happens for a reason” needlepointed onto a throw pillow. It means you can say something like, “That was real, and it mattered, and here’s how it shaped me, and here’s where I get to write something different.” You can hold the painful parts without drowning in them and the good parts without pretending the painful ones weren’t there. A coherent story isn’t a healed one, it’s a held one.
Three Things Earned Secure Attachment Is Not
I want to clear these out of the way first, because every single one of these might make you quit after you’ve been doing this work for a few weeks, which would be sad because it’s right around the time your efforts usually start paying off.
1. It’s not a personality transplant.
You’re not going to be a whole different person when you do this work. You’re going to be you, just with a different way you perceive and tell your backstory. There are a few great studies that point to this. In one study, a team of researchers looked at parents who had earned their security and compared them to parents who’d had it since childhood. The earned group reported more depressive symptoms and more distress inside, but their parenting looked just as warm and just as steady on the outside as the group who had the good childhood!
In another study, researchers looked at moms experiencing high-stress days. On the hard days, the earned-secure mothers parented just as well as the continuously secure ones and noticeably better than the insecure ones. On the easy days, there was no difference between any of the moms (which tells you how much stress is at the center of acting out in unhealthy ways).
So, the earned-secure person is usually the one carrying more “stuff” on the inside and still showing up in healthy ways on the outside, and not because they’re faking it, but because that’s what earned actually means. You don’t get handed a whole new personality; you get a new way of looking at the world, so a different approach to life.
2. It’s not a calm nervous system.
I know you’re thinking that you’ll know you’ve made it when your partner sighs in the kitchen and you feel absolutely nothing about it. Stop it (I say with love). If the bar for secure attachment were never getting activated in the first place, then the only securely attached people on this whole planet would be corpses. (And even then, I’d want to see the data.)
Your threat detection system is doing exactly what it evolved to do, and the goal was never to shut it off. Securely attached people get triggered, they get flooded, and they snap at the person they love most over whose turn it is to put away the dishes.
3. It’s not something a therapist hands you.
Therapy helps enormously, and I’d be a real hypocrite to say otherwise given how I’ve spent the last forty years. But nobody has ever gotten earned security delivered to them the way you’d get a diagnosis or a prescription, because everything the research points to about how people actually get there comes down to reflection, relationship, and repetition. Which means you have to participate! You don’t get there by understanding it really, really well. (I see this all the time with my clients. The most insightful person is sometimes changing the slowest, because insight feels so much like progress that it’s easy to mistake one for the other.)
How Do You Know It’s Working? Check Your Repair Speed
All of that raises an obvious problem, which is that if security isn’t a feeling and it isn’t calm and it isn’t a personality, then how on earth do you know whether you’re getting anywhere?
Here’s the deal. Earned security isn’t measured by whether you go off, it’s measured by how fast you come back. It’s all about your speed of return.
This comes straight out of Ed Tronick’s research on mothers and their babies, and I personally find it to be one of the most reassuring findings in all of developmental psychology. Tronick and his colleagues filmed mothers with their babies, and what they found is that these pairs were out of sync with each other most of the time, something like two-thirds of the interaction! What does that mean? What does it look like? It’s when the baby looks up wanting to play, and the mother is looking at something across the room. It’s when the baby coos and the mother doesn’t look or answer right away. Or when the mother leans in for a big smile, and the baby turns away because it’s too much right now. Miss, miss, miss, all day long, in the pairs we’d consider the healthiest ones.
What made those pairs secure wasn’t that they were in sync. It was that they kept coming back. Miss, notice, come back. Miss, notice, come back. Hundreds of times a day.
The security got built in the coming back, not in the getting it right.
Which means the scorecard you’ve been using this whole time is the wrong one. You’ve been keeping score on your ruptures, counting up how many times you snapped, spiraled, went cold or sent the text. That’s the wrong column. Start keeping score on the return column.
I had a client I worked with last year who came in, after years of couples and individual therapy, convinced she was hopeless because she and her husband still fought. I asked her how long the fights lasted now, and she said, “maybe an hour, and then one of us comes and finds the other one.” I asked her what it used to be, and she thought about it for a minute and then admitted it used to be at least three days of silence, and then they’d both just pretend the whole thing never happened. She thought she was failing because the fights hadn’t stopped. She’d gone from seventy-two hours down to sixty minutes and she hadn’t even noticed, because she was watching the wrong number the entire time!
So, go find your number. How long does it take you right now, from the breach to a real return? And I don’t mean the fake return where the two of you are technically speaking but it’s still frosty over breakfast. I mean the real one. Whatever that number is, that’s your baseline, and that’s the number that’s going to move.
And because I’m not going to tell you to track something and then leave you to figure out how, I made you a free download for this one called Your Repair Speed Baseline. It’s a single page where you log where you’re starting from and watch that number come down over the next month, and it walks you through what actually counts as a real return so you’re not fooling yourself.
Now let’s talk about how to get there.
The Three Routes That Actually Build Earned Security
The research keeps landing on the same three roads to build earned security, and most people who get there are using some combination of all three. You can start any one of them today.
Route 1: You make sense of the story
This is the coherence piece, and it’s what that interview I talked about earlier is really measuring. It means being able to tell your own history in a way that holds together, ugly parts included, without either minimizing the whole thing (“it was fine, everybody’s parents were like that back then”) or getting completely swallowed by it. Both of those are incoherence. One of them is a story with the feeling cut out of it, and the other one is a feeling with no story around it, and what you’re after is the version where the events and the emotions are finally in the same room together. (If this is a big issue for you, I have worksheets to do this exact work in this week’s Therapy-to-Go Bundle, which I’ll talk about at the end).
Route 2: You get into a corrective relationship
Your template didn’t get built by insight; it got built by experience. So, corrective experience is another route to healing. When researchers went looking for what actually separated the earned-secure adults from everybody else, one of the biggest things they found was whether that person had an alternative support figure somewhere along the line, a grandmother, teacher, coach, clergy person, therapist, or a best friend, somebody whose steadiness gave their nervous system some contradictory evidence.
Polyvagal theory (which I know I mention often) explains the mechanism that’s happening underneath, which is that your nervous system is subconsciously reading other people’s nervous systems for cues of safety, and it updates based on what it finds. Which is very good news, because it means somebody else’s steadiness isn’t wasted on you. It’s data that can help you heal.
And this is also why the people who had very few positive childhood experiences, or a whole pile of adverse ones, can still get there. Your template updates on evidence, and that evidence can be given twenty years after your initial hard wiring.
Route 3: You practice on purpose
Researchers Richard Davidson and Bruce McEwen have shown that the social and emotional experiences you repeat actually change the structure of your brain. This is the magic of neuroplasticity, so every single time you catch the old pattern firing and you choose the return instead, you’re creating new wiring. You’re not erasing the old neuropathy, but you’re building an alternate route that, over time, eventually gets faster than the old one.
And I’m going to get a little woo on you here, because you know I like to blend a little woo with my science. There’s a part of you that already knows how to do this! You can call it your Inner Being or your higher self, but there’s a voice inside you telling you to go find them and say you’re sorry even while that other voice is mad or hurt and wanting to lash out. You already know. The practice is choosing the “knowing voice” more often so it gets louder.
Five Tools to Start Building Earned Security This Week
Tool 1: Time your repair
I mean this literally. The next time you have a bad moment with someone, note when it started and note when you genuinely came back, and write that number down. Do it for a month. You’re not trying to have fewer ruptures necessarily; you’re trying to watch the recovery time come down, and it’ll start coming down long before the arguments do. To me, this is the most motivating thing you can possibly track, because it’s the number that moves first.
Tool 2: Tell the whole story out loud, all the way through, one time
And I don’t mean the highlight reel you’ve already told forty times. I mean the whole thing, in order, with the feelings still attached to it, to one person who can hold it. A therapist, your partner, or a healthy friend. And if there’s nobody available to you yet, then tell it to a voice memo. Coherence gets built by narrating, and you can’t narrate silently, so the story isn’t going to become coherent in your head. It becomes coherent with words spoken out loud.
Tool 3: Borrow a nervous system on purpose
You have to stop treating this like a solo assignment. Once a week, put yourself in the actual physical presence of the steadiest person you know, and don’t turn it into a therapy session while you’re there. Take a walk with them. Fold laundry. Sit in the same room and say almost nothing. Your nervous system is doing the download whether or not the two of you ever discuss your mother. And if you’re sitting there realizing you don’t have that person in your life yet, then finding them is your work this year, and it’s worth more than any book you’re going to read, including mine.
Tool 4: Catch the prediction before you act on it
You’ve got to be mindful if you want any other tool on this list to work. Your attachment system is a prediction engine, so when your partner goes quiet at dinner, your brain doesn’t report back they’re being quiet. It reports back, they’re leaving. Mindfulness is that half-second where you notice that your brain is lying to you. That prediction isn’t a real thing. Being mindful in that moment and noticing your reaction is the difference between acting and reacting, between automatic and choice. If you don’t have a practice yet, grab my free Mindfulness Starter Kit and start there.
Tool 5: Make the miss the practice
When you blow it (notice it said when, not if), your only job is the next sentence, and the next sentence to yourself has to be a kind one. Researchers Juliana Breines and Serena Chen ran a series of studies on this and found the exact opposite of what everybody assumes. We all think that being hard on ourselves is what makes us try harder, and it turns out that’s backwards. The people who met their own failures with self-compassion were more likely to work at doing better next time, not less. Self-criticism makes you quit, and self-compassion makes you keep going.
So, the sentence sounds something like, of course I missed, that was a brutal day, this is brand new to me, and I’m still here trying. The wiring never gets built on the days you nail it; it gets built on the days you miss and return and go again.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle:
- Your Repair Speed Baseline: How long does it take you to come back?
- What Earned Security Actually Looks Like: A check on where you are right now
- Your Coherence Draft Worksheet: Getting the events and the feelings lined up
- Your Co-Regulation Map: Who in your life is actually steady?
- Catch the Prediction: The half second between what happened and what you decided it meant
- The Return Script: What to actually say when you go back
- The Story You Tell About Coming Back: Journaling prompts
Resources
How Attached Are You in Your Relationship
How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Personal Relationships
How to Love an Anxiously Attached Partner
Avoidant Attachment in Relationships
How Do You Know If You’re Making the Right Decision/Following Your Gut
Emotional Healing Techniques: Mastering Mindfulness and Self-Acceptance/Compassion
References
- Pearson, J. L., Cohn, D. A., Cowan, P. A., & Cowan, C. P. (1994). Earned- and continuous-security in adult attachment: Relation to depressive symptomatology and parenting style. Development and Psychopathology, 6(2), 359–373.
- Filosa, M., Sharp, C., Gori, A., & Musetti, A. (2024). A comprehensive scoping review of empirical studies on earned secure attachment. Psychological Reports, 129(3), 1807–1832.
- Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1/2), 66–104.
- Siegel, D. J., & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. Tarcher/Penguin. See also: Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Beijersbergen, M. D., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2006). The concept of coherence in attachment interviews: Comparing attachment experts, linguists, and non-experts. Attachment & Human Development, 8(4), 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616730601048175
- Lundahl, Brad. (2009). D. J. Siegel, M. Hartzell: Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. Clinical Social Work Journal – CLIN SOC WORK J. 37. 262-263. 10.1007/s10615-009-0226-0.
- Phelps, J. L., Belsky, J., & Crnic, K. (1998). Earned security, daily stress, and parenting: A comparison of five alternative models. Development and Psychopathology, 10(1), 21–38.
- Tronick, E. Z., & Gianino, A. F. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair: Challenges to the coping infant. Zero to Three, 6(3), 1–6. See also: Tronick, E. Z., & Cohn, J. F. (1989). Infant-mother face-to-face interaction: Age and gender differences in coordination and the occurrence of miscoordination. Child Development, 60(1), 85–92.
- Saunders, R., Jacobvitz, D., Zaccagnino, M., Beverung, L. M., & Hazen, N. (2011). Pathways to earned-security: The role of alternative support figures. Attachment & Human Development, 13(4), 403–420.
- Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227.
- Davidson, R. J., & McEwen, B. S. (2012). Social influences on neuroplasticity: Stress and interventions to promote well-being. Nature Neuroscience, 15(5), 689–695.
- Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.
