Authorship
About the Author
Book Coming Soon
The Six Attachment Needs
For most of my early life, I didn’t know I had attachment needs.
I knew I had drive. I knew I could perform. I knew how to adapt.
But something nagged me.
Even when life looked successful on the outside, something inside still felt unsettled. I could check the boxes. I could meet expectations. I could be the strong one.
And yet, there was a quiet ache I didn’t have language for.
That persistent tension, between looking fine on the outside and feeling off on the inside, is what eventually shaped my life’s work.
Over the past two decades, I’ve sat with people navigating trauma, high achievement, betrayal, addiction, loneliness, grief, and a quiet dissatisfaction that makes no sense on paper. Women who “have it all” but feel empty. Men who are competent at work but lost at home. Partners stuck in the same fight for years. Parents who love deeply but feel chronically overwhelmed.
Different stories with different symptoms, yet underneath them, I kept hearing the same emotional questions:
Am I safe? Do I matter?
Does anyone really understand me?
Will someone stay steady when I’m not?
What’s happening here?
Can I be fully myself and still belong?
The Six Attachment Needs
The Six Attachment Needs
Those questions became the foundation of what I now call The Six Attachment Needs:
Safety - to feel secure in your body and relationships
Acknowledgment - to know you matter
Understanding - to feel known and make sense
Comfort - to be soothed when life hurts
Clarity - to know where you stand
Space - to be yourself without losing connection
These needs are
not weaknesses.
They are not “too much.”
They are not signs of
fragility or dependency.
These needs are the architecture of secure connection.
When they are met, the nervous system settles. We feel more grounded. More confident. More ourselves.
When they are not, we adapt. Sometimes brilliantly.
We become achievers. Caretakers. Avoiders. Performers. Intellectualizers. Rescuers. The independent one. The strong one. The agreeable one.
The adaptation works… until it doesn’t.
Until the marriage feels lonely.
Until success feels hollow.
Until anxiety won’t quiet down.
Until resentment builds.
Until you realize you don’t actually know what you need anymore.
The Six Attachment Needs framework emerged from thousands of clinical conversations, years of research in neuroscience and attachment, and from my own lived reckoning.
It’s a map for understanding your patterns and the origins in your past.
It’s about returning to who you were before you had to adapt.
It’s about knowing there is nothing wrong with you, but there may simply be a need that went unnamed for too long.
Blog Posts
Your Inner World: Understanding Your Parts and Unmet Attachment Needs
Reimagining Your Mind
