How to become securely attached

Kasia Staniaszek, Psy.D. · August 9, 2026

People ask me a version of this in a first session, usually with a small apology attached. They’ve read about their attachment style, they recognized themselves in it, and now they want to know whether there’s a way out. Put more bluntly: can a person just decide to be secure?

The honest answer is yes, and almost none of it happens by deciding.

Earned secure attachment, and where it gets oversold

The phrase you’ll meet everywhere online is earned secure attachment. It describes someone who didn’t grow up with security and has it now, built later and from scratch. The term comes from real research. The internet has turned it into a trophy: proof that a bad childhood can be transcended by anyone willing to work hard enough on themselves.

The most careful test of the idea is worth knowing about, because it doesn’t say what you’d expect. A team at the University of Minnesota followed people for 23 years, infancy into adulthood, and then compared the adults who described a difficult childhood coherently, the classic earned-secure profile, against those who described a good one. The assumption under test was that the earned group had actually lived through worse. They hadn’t. They were no more likely to have been anxiously attached as babies, and in childhood they’d received some of the more supportive parenting in the sample. What they did carry into adulthood was a heavier load of depressive symptoms.

A review published in 2024 went looking at the whole literature and found the same softness underneath: two dozen studies, and no real agreement on what earned security is or how to measure it.

I’m not raising this to take the hope away. Attachment security genuinely moves over a life. It just doesn’t move because someone learned to narrate their childhood well.

What actually moves it

The findings that hold up are less flattering and more useful. Two things recur. One is a secondary attachment figure: somebody other than the original caregiver who was reliably, boringly there. A grandmother, a coach, an aunt, the friend’s family whose kitchen you sat in after school. The other is the capacity to think about what’s going on inside your own mind and inside someone else’s while it’s happening.

A longitudinal study following people to age 21 found security still shifting with adolescent relationships and with care that arrived late. Security isn’t installed in infancy and then defended for sixty years. It keeps getting built by whoever shows up next.

In practice this is unglamorous work. You say the needy thing out loud instead of managing it privately, and the other person doesn’t leave, get bored, or file it away to use later. Once is an anomaly your pattern can explain away. Fifty times across two years is a nervous system quietly revising its forecast.

So the conditions matter more than the effort: relationships that last long enough to get tested, conflict that ends in repair rather than in silence, and at least one person who stays steady when you’re not at your best.

Where therapy comes in

Therapy is one of those relationships, with one strange feature. It’s the only one where examining it while it’s happening is the entire point. Six guarded, polite weeks isn’t a failure of the treatment. It’s the material. If you start bracing for me to get tired of you, we get to look at that in the room, rather than three years later when another relationship has already ended over it.

That’s what people are looking for when they search for earned secure attachment therapy. Not a technique, and not a curriculum you complete. A relationship steady enough to argue with, and held long enough for the old prediction to come out wrong a hundred times.

It’s slow. Months, often longer, which is the least marketable sentence on this page. And it doesn’t finish with a personality transplant. The old reflex still turns up when you’re tired or frightened. What changes is the distance between the reflex and what you do next, and a whole life fits inside that distance.

Not sure which pattern is yours? Start with what your attachment style is, and what it isn’t.