Secure Love

Create a Relationship That Lasts a Lifetime
By Julie Menanno

Grounded in attachment theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy, Julie Menanno explains why couples get stuck in repetitive conflict cycles and how to break free from them. The book covers the three main attachment styles — anxious, avoidant, and fearful — and shows how each shapes behavior during conflict. Readers learn to identify their negative cycle, interrupt it in the moment, and repair after ruptures, with dedicated chapters on creating an attachment-friendly environment and navigating real-world complications like trauma, mental health challenges, and intimacy.

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Concepts
  • Four Cs of Attachment
    Comfort; how well you and your oartner comfort each other during times of disress?, Connection; So you and your partner feel emotionally connected?, Cooperation; how you and your partner live your lives as a team, Conflict; how couples manage when things aren't going well.
  • Secure Attachment
    feel confident, felt sense of security, responsive in comforting manner, deep emotional bond, able to find repair and resolution, set gentle and healthy boundaries
  • Insecure Avoidant (Dismissive Avoidant)
    Disconnected from their own emotions, difficult time responding to partner's emotions, handle relationship stress with disconnection, self-protecting strategies to withdraw, tend to become defensive in conflict, often feel their efforts are never enough
  • Insecure Anxious (Anxious Preoccupied)
    Difficult being emotionally or physically separate from their partner, deeply crave love and attention, respond tp conflict with reactive blame, clinging, criticism
  • Disorganized Attachment (Fearful Avoidant)
    Experience emotional turmoil, fewer coping strategies, less ability to trust themselves or others, highly associatedd with childhood trauma, experience intense emotions or unstable moods, swing between seeking closeness and disengagement, often have extreme fears of rejection, tend to turn off feelings to go numb
  • Earned Attachment Style
    When adults work on themselves to develop skills and traits of those who had secure childhoods
Chapters
  • Introduction
  • Part 1. Understanding Your Attachment Needs
  • Chapter 1. The Problem Beneath the Problem
  • Chapter 2. Understanding Attachment Theory
  • Chapter 3. Identifying Your Attachment Style
  • Part 2. Understanding How You Conflict and How to Repair
  • Chapter 4. What Is Your Negative Cycle?
  • Chapter 5. Interrupting Your Negative Cycle
  • Chapter 6. Preventing the Negative Cycle - The Attachment Friendly Environment
  • Chapter 7. Reaching and Responding
  • Chapter 8. Repairing After the Cycle
  • Chapter 9. Attachment Injuries and Repair
  • Part 3. Real World Considerations
  • Chapter 10. Workable Intruders - Mental Disorders, Trauma, and Addictions
  • Chapter 11. The Sex Factor
  • Chapter 12. When You Aren't Seeing Results
  • Chapter 13. Instead Of This, Do This
  • Conclusion. Going Forward in the World with Secure Love
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Published
  • January 30, 2024
Publisher
  • Simon and Schuster
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