The Attachment Workbook (Practical Exercises to Understand Your Patterns, Strengthen Connection, and Build Secure Relationships)

A highly-interactive guide to explore your attachment style, understand your internal patterns, and build lasting, secure relationships, from the esteemed author of The Power of Attachment.

“At our core, every one of us is designed for secure connection,” writes attachment theory expert Diane Poole Heller, PhD. We all have the capacity to build deep and lasting relationships. But the trauma of early childhood experiences, especially from parents and caregivers, can challenge our ability to build healthy connections. The same skills we develop to cope as children can become the patterns that haunt our relationships as adults. In The Attachment Workbook, Dr. Heller offers a hands-on resource to create the secure relationships that are possible for each one of us.

Dr. Heller offers an assessment to understand your attachment style—secure, avoidant, anxious/ambivalent, disorganized—and shares that many of us have more than one style or different styles for different relationships. More than 50 highly interactive exercises and reflections help us explore the superpowers of each style, the challenges, and strategies to build secure attachment. Dr. Heller writes, “It’s not enough to simply understand attachment in our minds. Our nervous system learns by doing, by feeling, by practicing.” This workbook helps us embody what we learn.

“You’re not broken or missing a piece,” writes Dr. Heller. “You don’t need to ‘become’ someone else. This is the good news about healing our attachment adaptations. Secure attachment is part of your biology.” This workbook helps us uncover and strengthen our capacity for secure connection.