Understanding Your Attachment Style

Understand attachment styles and recurring relationship patterns. Explore this book’s approach, table of contents and free sample.

Why do you keep repeating the same romantic patterns, with different partners but identical scenarios? Why do some relationships feel reassuring while others suffocate or unsettle you? This guide explores attachment theory, founded by John Bowlby and developed by Mary Ainsworth, and its four adult styles — secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized. You'll learn to identify your own, understand its roots in early childhood relationships, and above all move it toward lasting emotional security. Drawing on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and Jeffrey Young's schema therapy, every chapter offers concrete exercises to break free of the fear of abandonment, avoidance of intimacy, or your most painful schemas, and to transform your bonds — present and future. One chapter is devoted to passing on a secure attachment to your own children — because understanding your attachment style also means choosing, deliberately, what you pass on to the next generation.