Part 4 of the Love Styles series (series overview). If you just identified your pattern in Part 3, this is the hopeful turn.
Everything so far has been building to this: you are not stuck with the way you learned to love. Psychologists call the way out earned secure attachment (some call it learned security), the process by which someone who didn’t grow up with consistent emotional safety learns, over time, to relate securely. In a sense, you reparent yourself.
Why change is even possible
Every Friday my son and I drive to Raising Cane’s, same interstate, same first exit. For a while, when I’d head to preach at a church campus a couple of exits farther down, I’d catch myself automatically taking the Cane’s exit, because that groove was worn into my brain. As Dan Siegel puts it, what fires together wires together. Non-secure patterns are just deep grooves. The work of attachment change is to take what’s unconscious and make it conscious, choose differently on purpose, and repeat it until the new choice becomes the automatic one. I don’t miss that turn anymore. The old pattern was replaced.
Six marks of earned security
What does it look like when it’s working? Six things. Your past informs you but no longer owns you. You pause before you react, responding on purpose instead of reacting on autopilot. You get curious instead of critical, about yourself and others (remembering that everyone’s behavior is logical to them, given their story). You take the risk to be real. You can both settle yourself and be settled by others. And you know how to repair after conflict, because ruptures happen in every relationship; secure people just mend them well.
The practical path
Grow your self-awareness. Look for patterns, not single events. When someone tells me their last three relationships each lasted about five months, they usually haven’t noticed the pattern, that they bail right at the point where deeper vulnerability is required. Ask yourself: What do I feel when someone gets emotionally close? How do I react when I feel hurt or unseen? What does safety even look like to me?
Widen your window of tolerance. Too much energy and you blow up (hyperarousal); too little and you shut down (hypoarousal). Learn which way you tend to go, and give yourself permission to take a break and return when you’re both calm.
Speak from your heart, not your hurt. This one changes marriages. “You never listen to me” is speaking from the hurt, and it puts your spouse on defense. “I feel alone and afraid that I don’t matter” is speaking from the heart. “Why do I always have to ask for help?” becomes “It would mean a lot to me if you noticed what I needed and offered without me having to ask.” One launches an arrow; the other lays your heart on the table and invites your spouse to do the same.
Nourish safe relationships. You cannot learn secure attachment in isolation, you can study it alone, but you can only heal it in relationship. A secure spouse, a wise therapist, a faithful friend, or a healthy mentor can become the safe base that rewires your brain through consistent love. One of the most beautiful things about marriage is the way God often pours his love through another person to change us: when a securely attached spouse loves a non-secure spouse well, the non-secure spouse can actually become secure.
A safe base and a safe haven
In a secure marriage, each person is both a safe base (stability to launch from and grow) and a safe haven (a place to return for comfort). Imagine hearing your spouse say: “You’re safe here. You don’t have to hold it all together with me. Take the space you need, I’m not going anywhere.” And when your partner gets triggered, the goal is to stay present without personalizing their dysregulation, because one non-secure reaction met with another never adds up to security. Anxious plus avoidant doesn’t balance out; they’re just two versions of the same wound.
Two guardrails
Name the pattern, not the person. “That felt like an anxious moment” is fine; “I’m just an anxious person” turns a pattern into an identity and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And celebrate all progress instead of expecting perfection. Even the most secure person still slips into old patterns sometimes. Growth looks like catching yourself midway, or naming it afterward: “I got outside my window of tolerance there, I’m sorry.” That’s a win worth celebrating.
You don’t have to stay where you started. Whatever your primary pattern is today, you can learn security, and become the architect of how you’ll love going forward. Go deeper with Love Styles or the free Love Styles assessment.
Finally in the series: how attachment theory connects to the Bible and to real healing. That’s where all of this comes home, and where you truly change the odds.