See the hidden pattern in every relationship that matters to you.
A free 5-minute assessment, built on decades of attachment research, that maps how you actually show up in love, friendship, family, and with yourself.
How safe does love
actually feel?
A relationship-by-relationship map of your attachment patterns, across every bond that matters.
"You weren't given secure attachment. You can build it now, at any age, in any attuned relationship. The SECURE Methodβ’ is how."
A few quick questions about you.
The SECURE Methodβ’ is Dr Lisa's 6-step, attachment trauma framework for healing attachment patterns. It's taught inside Secure Love Lab, a global community of people learning to change patterns, not partners.
- Your free personalised attachment map. Your patterns across every relationship that matters.
- The latest innovations in attachment science, including nervous-system regulation and the neuroscience of how secure love is built.
- The live research dashboard. See in real time where you score on the attachment spectrum in relation to others who completed this questionnaire.
Tell me who you're mapping.
Your attachment can look different in different relationships. You might feel secure with a close friend, anxious with a partner, and avoidant with a parent, all at the same time. Pick one specific person to start with: a child, a parent, a lover, a friend, a mentor, or even yourself. Then see exactly where that bond lands on the map.
Answer each question as it appears. Your answers move you to the next one automatically.
Your Attachment Map
Each relationship is plotted by your level of anxiety (worry about the bond) and avoidance (discomfort with closeness). Where the dot lands is your attachment pattern in that relationship.
How your patterns compare to every relationship mapped in the study so far.
Get your personalised attachment results.
- A personalised read on every relationship you mapped
- The attachment science behind your specific patterns
- A 6 and 12-month check-in to track how your patterns shift
No spam, just your map and the occasional research finding or new resource from Dr Lisa. Unsubscribe any time.
What each style means.
Attachment isn't a fixed personality trait. It's relationship-specific, and it can change. Here's what each combination of anxiety and avoidance reveals.
Secure
You're comfortable with both intimacy and independence in this relationship. You can lean in close without losing yourself, and step away without losing the bond. This is the felt experience of earned secure attachment, and it's what every relationship inside Secure Love Lab is being rebuilt toward.
Anxious
You feel deeply connected to this person, and you also carry the worry that the connection might slip. The closeness is real, but the bond doesn't always feel held. Often called anxious-preoccupied attachment, it's the pattern of loving with one hand on the door, watching for signs they might leave.
Avoidant
You value your independence highly here, and the relationship works partly because you don't ask too much of it. You stay self-contained, keeping the deepest parts of you out of the room. Often called dismissive-avoidant attachment. Closeness has costs you've learned to manage by keeping a quiet distance.
Fearful Avoidant
You want closeness and you want to protect yourself, often in the same breath. The bond is high-stakes: both source of comfort and source of fear. Often called fearful-avoidant or disorganized attachment, it's almost always rooted in early experience where the same person you needed was also the one you couldn't predict.
The SECURE Methodβ’
A 6-step, attachment trauma system you can use in real time. Not just in therapy, but in the actual moments that matter.
Tap each letter to explore.
Sense the Signal Early.
"Catch the wave before it crashes."
Your body knows before your mind does. In the 200-400 milliseconds before words form, your heart speeds up, your chest tightens, your breath gets shallow. By the time you can name what's happening, your body has already chosen a defense. Catching the signal that early is what makes a different response possible.
Externalize the Pattern.
"It's not me. It's not you. It's the pattern between us."
What feels like your reaction or their reaction is actually a co-created loop, learned over hundreds of micro-exchanges. The same trigger produces the same response from each side. Naming the cycle as the third thing in the room is what allows two nervous systems to stop fighting each other and start facing the dynamic together.
Picture the relationship you mapped. Put yourself on one side, the other person on the other. Now put the pattern in front of you both, facing it together. That shift, from opponents to allies against the dynamic, is where Step 2 begins.
Co-Regulate Before You Talk.
"Your nervous system goes first."
Two nervous systems in proximity sync. A dysregulated body sends threat cues: micro-expression, vocal tone, breathing rate. The other body reads them in milliseconds, often before conscious awareness. Settling your own physiology first, or borrowing a steadier nervous system's calm, isn't optional preparation. It's what determines whether the next sentence lands as connection or as attack.
Unblend from the Reactive Part.
"Step back into your wise self."
A trigger activates one part of you, usually the youngest, most protective one. When that part fully takes over, perspective collapses and the older relational memory drives the present moment. Stepping back, naming what's online without becoming it, restores access to the broader self, where curiosity and choice live. This is where reactive cycles end.
Repair with Intention.
"Rupture isn't fatal here."
Across decades of longitudinal research, one variable predicts which couples stay together: whether they can repair after rupture. Not whether they fight. Whether they come back. Each successful repair rewires the implicit memory of the bond. The brain learns this rupture didn't end us, and the next rupture costs less.
Earn Security Over Time.
"Worn-in pathways, not personality switches."
Attachment patterns aren't fixed traits. They're prediction systems, built from accumulated experiences of being met or not met. Earned security develops through repeated, embodied evidence that closeness is safe. Each successful co-regulation, each repaired rupture, each named pattern compounds. The neural pathway widens with use.
Ready to learn the SECURE Methodβ’ in your own relationships?
Join Secure Love Lab Today βAnxiety and avoidance are where the wound lives. The SECURE Methodβ’ is how it heals, taught and practiced inside Secure Love Lab, where the science of attachment becomes something you can feel in your body.
What attachment research is finally telling us.
Attachment isn't a personality trait. It's a biological bonding system: encoded in the nervous system, shaped by every relationship you've ever had, and rewritable through relationship itself. Tap any heading to read the science.
Long before words form, the body learns who is safe and who isn't. Decades of autonomic nervous system research show that what we experience as love, distance, or danger registers in the body in milliseconds, beneath conscious thought. This is why insecure attachment feels physical: the chest tightening, the breath shortening, the urge to flee or fix.
The precise neural pathways are still being actively mapped, with rigorous debate in the 2025-2026 literature about which mechanisms are best supported (Porges, 2025; Grossman et al., 2026). What is not in dispute: the lived experience of attachment lives in the body, not only in the thoughts.
Porges (2025), Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience Β· Grossman et al. (2026), Clinical Neuropsychiatry
The same person can be secure with one partner and anxious with another. Avoidant with a parent and tender with a friend. The Experiences in Close Relationships β Relationship Structures questionnaire (Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary & Brumbaugh, 2011) was built around exactly this finding. Recent work confirms substantial within-person variation in attachment security across different relationships, even within the same individual at the same point in life (Dugan, Fraley, Gillath & Deboeck, 2024).
Dr Lisa's doctoral research extends this: the quality of your entire web of bonds, not just one relationship, predicts how secure you feel in any single one of them.
Fraley et al. (2011), Psychological Assessment Β· Dugan, Fraley, Gillath & Deboeck (2024), Journal of Personality & Social Psychology Β· Kleyn, doctoral research
Decades of clinical research on shame, trauma, and attachment converge on one finding above all others: shame cannot survive being seen with care. When someone witnesses pain without flinching, judging, or fixing, the nervous system registers safety, and the shame that was holding the wound in place loosens.
This is the operating principle behind every effective trauma therapy: EMDR, Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy. Recent work (Davies et al., 2024; Spring, 2024) maps the somatic and relational dimensions of shame and shows that relational witnessing is what allows shame-bound material to be metabolized rather than re-encoded.
Spring (2024), Unshame Β· Davies et al. (2024), Schizophrenia Bulletin Β· DeYoung (2015), Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame
Holding the hand of a regulated, attuned other measurably reduces the brain's response to threat. In Coan, Schaefer & Davidson's seminal 2006 fMRI study, women under threat of mild electric shock showed pervasive attenuation of neural threat activation when holding their husband's hand. A large 2017 replication (Coan et al., 110 dyads) confirmed the effect across genders, racial backgrounds, and relationship types.
A 2024 longitudinal follow-up by Lin, Stern, Allen & Coan tracked 85 participants from age 14 to 24 and found that secure attachment in adolescence predicted stronger neural co-regulation a decade later: holding a partner's hand under threat lit up reward-processing regions of the brain in ways insecurely attached adolescents' brains didn't.
Co-regulation is not a metaphor. It is a measurable mechanism by which one nervous system regulates another.
Coan, Schaefer & Davidson (2006), Psychological Science Β· Coan et al. (2017), Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience Β· Lin, Stern, Allen & Coan (2024), Journal of Social & Personal Relationships
You weren't given secure attachment in childhood. Research on earned secure attachment shows you can build it now. Roisman, Booth-LaForce, Saunders and others identified a distinct category in longitudinal data: adults from difficult childhood attachment histories who, through later experiences, developed secure functioning indistinguishable from those who had been secure their whole lives.
Adults can develop secure attachment at any age, in any sufficiently attuned relationship. This is the finding that changes everything: secure love is not just inherited. It's earned.
The current state of the field.
The 2024 scoping review by Filosa, Sharp, Gori & Musetti synthesizes 24 empirical studies on earned secure attachment. Their conclusion: the category is real, replicable, and clinically important. The exact rate at which adults transition to earned secure varies across studies (from 14% in JaΕczak's 2024 sample to higher rates in older AAI-based research). But the existence of the pathway is well-established.
The mechanism: your nervous system learns.
Earned secure isn't talked into being. It's experienced into being. The nervous system updates its predictions through repeated, consistent attunement: a partner who stays, a therapist who holds, a community that doesn't flinch. Recent work shows secure-base script knowledge in late adolescence predicts fewer depressive symptoms in adulthood (Dagan, Nivison, Booth-LaForce, Bleil, Roisman & Waters, 2024).
Where it happens: in relationship.
Wherever a person repeatedly feels seen, safe, and soothed. With a consistent romantic partner. With a skilled therapist. In a community trained in attachment-trauma work. Even with a friend or mentor whose presence reliably regulates your nervous system. JaΕczak's 2024 study found earned-secure adults frequently named secondary attachment figures outside their parents, grandparents, mentors, therapists, partners, as the source of the pattern shift.
The implication: you are not your past.
Attachment patterns are not personality traits. They are nervous-system predictions, and predictions can be updated. Adults change when they do this work in therapy, in committed partnership, or in community. Not all of them. But enough that the field has reorganized its language to make room for them.
Filosa, Sharp, Gori & Musetti (2024), scoping review Β· JaΕczak (2024), earned secure clusters Β· Dagan et al. (2024), longitudinal Β· Roisman et al. (foundational)
"You weren't broken. You were just never taught this."
adults with insecure childhood attachment build earned secure attachment by chance. In a community like the Secure Love Lab that figure can be closer to 1 in 3. Security gets built. At any age. In safe & attuned relationships. That's what Secure Love Lab is for.
JaΕczak (2024). The most recent empirical study to quantify earned-secure prevalence (14% of sample).
The SECURE Methodβ’ is how.
Change Patterns,Not Partners.
Inside Secure Love Lab, the SECURE Methodβ’ becomes something you can actually feel in your body. Live workshops, somatic practices, and a global community doing the same work, testing the hypothesis that you can rewire how love feels, one bond at a time.
Join Secure Love Lab β