Becoming Attached

Why do we so often lose ourselves in love, clinging harder the more afraid we feel? In Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love, therapist Jessica Baum explores how early attachment wounds shape our adult relationships—and how we can rewire those patterns by learning to nurture the parts of ourselves that once went unseen. Drawing from attachment theory, relational neuroscience, and her own healing journey, Baum argues that lasting love starts with a secure relationship with yourself. She calls this transformation becoming self-full.

The Pain Behind Anxious Attachment

Baum begins by illuminating what it means to be anxiously attached. From infancy, many of us developed our attachment blueprint in response to inconsistent caregiving—moments when our needs were met sometimes, but not consistently enough. As adults, that blueprint drives feelings of fear, abandonment, and overfunctioning in relationships. We may text repeatedly when our partner pulls away, panic when they seem distracted, or sacrifice our boundaries to keep the connection alive.

This style, while painful, isn’t a character flaw—it’s the body’s survival mechanism replaying the past. Using polyvagal theory (from Stephen Porges), Baum explains that our autonomic nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety. When we sense disconnection, our sympathetic system activates, flooding us with panic and triggering our old compulsion to seek closeness at any cost. The result is not love, but what she calls a co-dysregulated dance—especially common when the anxious person partners with someone avoidant.

The Anxious-Avoidant Dance

Baum calls the pairing between an anxious person and an avoidant one a “magnet from opposite ends.” Both are doing the only thing they learned to do for safety: one clings, the other withdraws. In the case story of Lauren and Peter, we see this pattern vividly. Lauren, raised by a volatile mother, equated emotional intensity with love, while Peter, taught to suppress feelings by his father, avoided any hint of vulnerability. Their bond triggered every old wound; when Lauren pursued closeness, Peter recoiled. Their love was real—but their nervous systems were at war.

For the anxious partner, every withdrawal confirms the fear of being unlovable. For the avoidant one, every plea for closeness threatens emotional overwhelm. Baum highlights how both are, unconsciously, trying to find safety from danger that no longer exists. Until each can self-soothe and make peace with their inner child—their “Little Me”—connection remains impossible.

Meeting Little Me

The book’s emotional centerpiece is the concept of Little Me—the inner child still carrying unmet needs for comfort, validation, and safety. When those needs are triggered in adult relationships, they flood the body with panic. Most of us respond by criticizing or abandoning ourselves, perpetuating the same neglect we endured from caregivers. Baum’s remedy is to build a relationship with Little Me through an inner team of parts: Inner Nurturers (loving internalized voices that soothe), and Inner Protectors (critical or controlling parts that try to prevent pain). Healing begins when we can understand and integrate all these voices with compassion.

Instead of expecting our partners to heal the wounds of neglect, Baum guides us to become the steady, loving presence our nervous system never had. Readers practice visualization exercises—imagining a “Safe Place” for Little Me, dialoguing with inner voices, and even re-parenting through daily affirmations such as “You are not alone” and “You are enough just as you are.” These rituals strengthen the brain’s ventral vagal system and cultivate a bodily sense of safety.

From Selfless to Self-Full

At the heart of the book is Baum’s antidote to codependent love: the self-full life. In contrast to being “selfless,” where we lose ourselves trying to be worthy of love, or “selfish,” where we ignore others’ needs entirely, self-fullness means loving others from a place of inner wholeness. This transformation requires grieving the past—allowing buried anger, shame, and grief to surface—and re-establishing boundaries that honor both self and other. Baum argues that only by facing and holding our pain can we finally experience joy and intimacy that is real, not rooted in survival.

Once grounded in self-fullness, relationships shift. You stop mistaking anxiety for chemistry and realize that safety—not chaos—is the new definition of passion. Instead of chasing unavailable partners or falling for narcissists (a dynamic Baum calls “the empath-narcissist trap”), you’re drawn to people who offer consistent presence. As she writes, “With healing, what once felt boring begins to feel peaceful.”

Rewiring Love and Security

Through her Self-Full Method, Baum integrates mindfulness, body awareness, and relational neuroscience. By soothing the autonomic nervous system and internalizing voices of care, you can achieve what psychologists call earned secure attachment—the capacity to feel safe and connected even if you didn’t grow up that way. This allows you to rewrite love’s script: not “I need you to make me safe,” but “I am safe enough to love you.”

By the end of the book, Baum invites readers to view relationships as spiritual evolution. Partners are “cosmic teachers,” reflecting back where our healing remains incomplete. In her words, “Love is not something to find. It’s something you practice by coming home to yourself.” If you’ve ever felt addicted to love, trapped in anxious patterns, or exhausted by caring too much, Anxiously Attached offers both scientific understanding and a compassionate roadmap back to authenticity. Once Little Me feels safe, your adult self can at last love—and be loved—without fear.

Baum begins with attachment theory—the idea, first proposed by John Bowlby, that our earliest caregiving experiences shape how we relate as adults. As infants, we rely entirely on parents to regulate our emotional states. When caregivers consistently respond with warmth and curiosity, we develop secure attachment—a bodily sense of safety that says, “I am seen and supported.” But when love is inconsistent or absent, our nervous system adapts in one of two ways: becoming anxiously hypervigilant to others’ moods or avoidantly distant from emotions altogether.

How the Nervous System Learns Connection

Baum uses Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory to translate attachment patterns into body terms. Secure bonding creates what she calls the ventral state—a calm physiology that supports openness, empathy, and play. When connection feels threatened, the sympathetic state activates, launching us into fight-or-flight. With chronic neglect, we may even collapse into the dorsal state—numbness and emotional shutdown. Anxious people, she explains, live on high alert: scanning for signs of disconnection, interpreting every unread text as rejection. Avoidant types, by contrast, learned to regulate by turning off feeling. Both are adaptive responses to early environments.

The Myth of Independence

Western culture idealizes self-reliance, but Baum reminds us that “connection is a biological imperative.” We evolved to co-regulate; safety grows in mutual responsiveness, not isolation. When parents fail to mirror emotions, children internalize a sense of “wrongness” and grow into adults who either chase connection (anxious) or deny the need for it (avoidant). This explains why “falling in love” can feel like life or death—our bodies are literally reliving those early moments of holding or abandonment.

Chemistry Isn’t Compatibility

One of Baum’s most startling observations is that we mistake anxiety for chemistry. The racing heart, obsession, and euphoria of new love are often signals of an activated attachment system, not true intimacy. Just as a child clings harder when a caregiver is unpredictable, adults overlay passion with panic. This cycle draws anxious and avoidant partners toward each other, a pattern Baum calls the Little Me Pact—a subconscious agreement between inner children trying to heal unfinished relationships. Recognizing this pattern helps you step off the roller coaster and begin to replace fear with awareness, paving the way for healthy interdependence rather than emotional dependence.

One of Baum’s central insights is the Little Me Pact—the unspoken contract between two people’s wounded inner children. These pacts form automatically when our emotional histories recognize each other: the parts of us that were neglected, shamed, or unseen “sign up” to replay what feels familiar. We think we’ve found a soul mate when, in fact, our nervous systems have found someone who matches our wounds.

Baum describes, for example, “Hunter and Ben,” two children whose friendship demonstrates how attachment wounds begin. Hunter’s anxious caregiving taught her to work hard for love, while Ben’s emotionally reserved mother taught him to avoid feelings. Their bond feels magnetic but ends painfully—foreshadowing adult romantic patterns where the anxious chaser meets the avoidant distancer. The Little Me Pact between them promises, unconsciously: “I’ll be the one who needs you if you’ll be the one who leaves.”

How Core Wounds Drive Connection

Core wounds—beliefs like “I am unlovable,” “People always leave,” or “My needs are too much”—sit at the heart of these pacts. They form when caregivers fail to meet emotional needs for safety and reflection. In adulthood, we magnetize partners who activate the same feelings so that, subconsciously, we can try to fix them. This explains why we keep choosing emotionally unavailable partners even when we know better: part of us hopes that this time, we’ll finally be chosen.

Recognizing the Pact in Action

Baum supplies practical reflection steps: noting repeating partner traits, unmet needs, and recurring emotions. By tracking who we attract and how we relate, patterns emerge. In one example, client Carrie was praised only for her beauty growing up; as an adult she continuously dated men who valued her appearance but ignored her deeper self. Her Little Me learned that attention equals survival, making superficial validation irresistible. Only by naming this pattern could she begin healing her underlying shame and reclaiming her power.

Understanding your own Little Me Pact reveals that relationships aren’t random—they are subconscious classrooms for healing. (Therapists such as Harville Hendrix echo this idea in Getting the Love You Want.) By becoming curious instead of judgmental about your relational patterns, you free yourself from repeating them—and can start forming adult-to-adult bonds rather than child-to-child survival ties.

Baum devotes a major section to what she calls the Anxious–Avoidant Dance—a push-pull dynamic that fuels heartbreak. When an anxious partner seeks reassurance, their energy expands like an octopus—reaching, grasping, and overfunctioning. The avoidant partner’s fear response, by contrast, causes them to turtle in—retreating into their shell to avoid emotional inundation. Neither partner feels safe enough to co-regulate, and both reinforce each other’s fears: the anxious partner confirms “I’m too much,” while the avoidant one confirms “Intimacy is dangerous.”

Activating vs. Deactivating Strategies

Baum outlines typical anxious behaviors—“activating strategies”—like constant texting, keeping score, apologizing for things not done, or using threats to test love. These mirror a child’s attempts to regain a distracted parent’s attention. In turn, avoidant partners use “deactivating strategies”—working late, avoiding physical touch, or going emotionally blank—to protect themselves from engulfment. Their body literally warns, “If you let them in, you’ll drown in pain.” Together these behaviors form a self-reinforcing system of mutual alarm.

A Case Study: Lauren and Peter

Lauren and Peter exemplify this toxic loop. Lauren’s anxious system interprets Peter’s withdrawal as rejection, triggering obsessive thoughts and even physical symptoms like stomach pain. Peter, punished for showing sadness as a child, finds her neediness overwhelming. In therapy, Baum helps them see that both are reenacting childhood conditioning, not responding to each other’s present selves. Despite their caring, the couple’s nervous systems remain locked in survival mode until Lauren chooses to leave for her own healing—a bittersweet but self-full act.

Breaking the Cycle

Healing this dance requires learning to pause the body’s automatic responses. By recognizing that panic or withdrawal are old “wiring and firing,” as Baum phrases it, you can create space for adult choice. The goal isn’t to become perfectly secure, but to respond differently when old pain resurfaces. When both partners cultivate self-awareness and compassion—for themselves and each other—the dance slows, and genuine intimacy can replace fear-based pursuit and retreat.

Chapters five and six form the emotional heart of the book. Baum teaches readers how to reconnect with their inner child, or “Little Me,” through inner attunement—a process of listening with body, breath, and imagination. Because many anxious people learned to stay focused on others’ feelings, they must now relearn how to listen inward. Healing begins by making space for painful emotions rather than bypassing them.

Listening to Little Me

Exercises like the Inner Safe Place visualization and Heart Scan Meditation guide readers to sit quietly, breathe through the heart, and invite the younger self to speak. The goal isn’t to fix feelings but to validate them—“All your feelings are okay.” Over time, the Inner Nurturer voices (modeled after kind caregivers, therapists, or even beloved pets) replace the harsh voices of Inner Protectors that once controlled through criticism. This re-parenting process teaches the body safety from the inside out.

Adopting Every Part of You

Baum introduces an exercise using childhood photos to identify “disowned” parts—versions of yourself shamed or silenced in childhood. By dialoguing with each, you practice unconditional self-acceptance. In one client example, Stacy learns to comfort herself after her partner Olivia invalidates her grief over her dog. By invoking her grandmother’s nurturing voice, she internalizes safety and helps both her relationship and self-esteem heal.

Ultimately, this work builds what psychologists call earned secure attachment. Even if your caregivers failed to meet your needs, new inner experiences—compassion, validation, and calm—create neural pathways of safety. Baum emphasizes that this is lifelong practice, not a quick fix: you become the parent you always needed. Real self-love, she writes, “is showing up for all of your selves, even the messy ones.”

In Chapter 7, Baum reframes boundaries as acts of love. For the anxiously attached, saying “no” feels dangerous because early belonging depended on caretaking others’ emotions. Healing involves reclaiming the right to have needs, feelings, and limits. Boundaries are not walls; they’re the gateways through which mutual respect flows. Without them, intimacy collapses into enmeshment.

Inner vs. Outer Boundaries

Healthy boundaries begin inside. As children, if caregivers validated our emotions (“I see you’re angry—it makes sense”), we learned to trust our feelings. If they dismissed us (“Stop being so sensitive”), we detached from our own experience to maintain closeness. This inner split makes adult boundaries difficult. Baum encourages readers to rebuild trust in their inner world through self-validation and compassionate anger.

Anger as a Messenger

For many, anger feels taboo, especially for women taught to equate niceness with worth. But Baum insists anger is protective energy signaling that a boundary has been crossed. By mapping anger’s bodily sensations—tight chest, heat, restlessness—you can translate it from threat to information. Her client Sasha illustrates this: raised to placate her anxious mother, she learns in therapy to assert small boundaries, such as limiting daily phone calls. Though anxious at first, Sasha experiences liberation as her mom slowly adjusts, proving that clear “no’s” can coexist with love.

Baum contrasts boundarylessness (codependence) with hyper-independence (avoidance). The sweet spot, she says, is interdependence: two whole people choosing connection without losing themselves. Setting limits transforms anxious pleading into mature communication—equal partners teaching each other what safety means.

Once we’ve developed internal safety, Baum shows how to apply it to partnership. The goal isn’t perfection, but conscious relating. All couples experience rupture; what determines longevity is the ability to repair. When partners validate each other’s perspectives instead of proving who’s right, empathy replaces blame. Drawing on Harville Hendrix’s Imago Relationship Therapy, Baum teaches reflective listening—each person paraphrasing what they heard, acknowledging validity, and calming their nervous systems before problem-solving.

Team Us, Not Me vs. You

The transition from codependence to interdependence is embodied in her “Team Building for Team Us” exercise, where partners share appreciations and take turns voicing hurts without interruption. The result is what neuroscientist Dan Siegel calls resonance circuitry—each brain mirroring the other’s empathy. Case examples like Sandy and Kristy show how couples can soothe their fight-or-flight reactions by naming them: “I’m feeling flooded; I need ten minutes.” Over time, these rituals rewire both partners for safety and trust.

Loving the Whole Person

Baum closes with heart-centered meditations that invite you to visualize your partner as a “whole human being”—wounded and worthy, just like you. Through this lens, conflict becomes a teacher rather than a threat. Love is not the erasure of difference, she emphasizes, but the daily choice to see and be seen. When both people can hold their Little Mes with compassion, intimacy evolves into a shared spiritual practice—the art of loving and being loved without losing the self.

In her final chapters, Baum expands healing beyond the couple into the cosmic. She suggests that true love—not just romantic but universal—is a transformative energy accessible when we align with self-fullness. Secure attachment becomes a spiritual path: learning to trust life itself as a safe relationship. Love, she writes, “is not something outside of us. It’s the force that binds the universe together—and we are made of it.”

From Love Addiction to Love Flow

Baum revisits how anxious attachment can slide into love addiction: the biochemical high of infatuation followed by the crash of withdrawal when the partner distances. Through self-full practices—breathwork, self-compassion, community support—you can replace craving with connection. Her client Noelle demonstrates this by turning heartbreak into transformation: rather than clinging to her ex, she reconnects with friends, adopts a dog, and discovers joy in singlehood. As she releases control, synchronicity brings new love that matches her healed state.

Connection with the Larger Whole

Nature itself becomes Baum’s metaphor for secure attachment. Through forest bathing and ocean immersion, she describes how co-regulation isn’t limited to humans—we can synchronize with the heartbeat of the Earth. Feeling the ground beneath your feet or the rhythm of waves regulates the nervous system as surely as affectionate touch. In these moments, you realize: the universe never stopped holding you.

Ultimately, love’s purpose is growth. Secure relationships, whether with partners, friends, or nature, reflect our inherent worth and interdependence. As Baum concludes, becoming self-full means remembering that you are enough—not because someone chose you, but because you are a living expression of love itself.