From Avoidant to Awake: 20 Books That Rewired My Insecure Attachment
Want to learn more about Attachment theory, attachment trauma, and how to have better relationships? Here are 20 of my best book recommendations!
In my adult life, every time I tried to form and stay in a romantic relationship, something felt really wrong, but I had no idea what it was. Other interpersonal relationships were like this, too. If I was in a group setting, I often felt like an outsider looking in. Work conflicts seemed to be on a hell repeat loop that took up so much of my mental energy.
For a long time, I couldn’t name what was missing—I just knew that forming close relationships with others felt confusing and overwhelming, and I often felt like too much and not enough at the same time. It wasn’t until my late 20s and early 30s that I started to put the pieces together: our childhoods shape us to the core, and we adapt to normalize our childhoods no matter what we’re given. It takes some serious effort to pull back and evaluate what we’ve normalized and say, “Oh…so I can see now that that wasn’t good for my developing brain. Welp, that’s painful!” For most of us, and I was no exception, we will have to abandon the delusional worlds we built in our heads to survive the hardest parts of childhood. This break from my delusions happened to me very suddenly at age 31 upon suffering a traumatic incident, visiting a new therapist, and having her recommend the book Running on Empty: Overcoming Childhood Emotional Neglect by Dr. Jonice Webb. I listened to the book in its entirety in 24 hours and immediately called every close friend and asked them about their childhoods.
“Oh sweet Jesus, I self-selected most of my good friends through similar childhood trauma!” I realized. I heard two stories about molesty babysitters. I heard a harrowing story of extreme bullying in high school. Parents who were too drunk to parent. Parents who were too young and immature to practice emotional boundaries. For the first time I could feel the pain of it all—I wasn’t just intellectualizing cause and effect. “These experiences were painful to the kids who experienced them.”
I accidentally opened the feeling valve too much, and the pressure of 31 years of holding back feeling came gushing through. Pat, the therapist I eventually found to help me process everything said, “You don’t have to feel everything all at once, you know,” but I couldn’t seem to close the gates! I cried and cried and cried and got on some Wellbutrin, and that helped, and then I could titrate the feeling and healing a little better.
I started devouring as many books on childhood development and the brain as I could find, reading and listening to many on Audible. It’s not that I had an unusually traumatic childhood, really—I had a pretty normal American childhood. But factors such as inherited trauma, hyper-individualism, two-parent working households, and socio-economic hardships were contributing factors to a stressful childhood. In many ways, I had a lot more Positive Childhood Experiences than other kids in my neighborhood growing up. I’ve had a lot of family warmth, love, and support. But I needed to explore the needs that weren’t met before I could heal my attachment wounds and figure out why I was so bad at relationships.
I still remember every single thing about reading Attached for the first time and talking about it with my then-boyfriend, back in 2017, using every last drop of willpower to get the words out, “I think…umm…I think I’m really bad at…uhh…knowing what my needs are…and like, asking for what I need. I think…I think I need to try it. I think I need help with it. Could you…umm…support me while I learn how to do this?” I remember the pit in my stomach. I’d never thought about having relationship needs before, and I was quite embarrassed to have them and ask for things. One thing I learned was that not knowing and stating our needs keeps avoidants avoidant because we disappear or feel smothered in a relationship without needs.
On our 2nd date, I still remember saying, “I’m feeling nervous.” It was a hard thing to say! But it also seemed important to name after reading several books about emotionally reparenting ourselves. “I’m a feeling human!” This was a revelation, and suddenly I started to feel so alive!
Now, 9 years after my breakdown and breakthrough, after countless hours of hard work, a hefty therapy investment, and reading these books, I’m fluent in relational language: needs, wants, boundaries, emotions, hurts, repairs…but it has been HARD. I still mess up a lot, and there are quite a few things I wish I had understood in my most recent long-term romantic relationship that may have prevented it from falling apart after 2ish years.
These books gave language to what I now know as childhood emotional neglect, attachment trauma, and the quiet grief of unmet needs. They offer empathy and strategy that our brains can change, our patterns aren’t permanent, and we can learn to feel safe in love. If you’ve ever felt emotionally lost or relationally stuck, I hope these books offer you the same clarity, comfort, and healing they gave me.
The reason relationships never felt okay is because I had childhood relational wounds—the people I attached with, my parents, were sometimes the cause of my stress, and not always the ones to soothe my stress. There was often so little soothing happening that my nervous system eventually shut down, creating my depression.
I had to learn how to:
be present in my body
label my emotions
self-soothe
stay present with the emotions of others
learn what basic relational needs are reasonable
practice asking for what I need
practice not feeling ashamed for having needs
learn to bring up conflict in the moment
learn to spot patterns in choosing dysfunctional partnerships or social situations
tolerate discomfort
not catastrophize (take the present moment’s intense feeling and apply it to everything)
trust
recognize my adaptations to control uncertainty as a trauma response
stop talking so much and let things be
find my voice even in moments of shut-down
If you need help integrating the teachings, you can work with me 1:1. Click here to learn more.
We are wired for connection—literally. I always say, “There was never a time on Earth when there was just one human.” We evolved together, with other primates and homo sapiens. Our brains are wired to attune to others—humans and other sentient beings we share the Earth with. When we have early relational trauma, meaning, a parent can’t attune to us in all the ways we need or can’t do it consistently or is actively harming us, the wiring gets all mixed up. But we can heal and rewire!
Over the past few years, I’ve been on a deep dive into attachment theory and the neuroscience of relationships to better understand my own patterns, wounds, and longings. Along the way, these 20 books became my emotional survival kit. They helped me name what I didn’t get in childhood, why certain relationship dynamics feel so familiar, and how to begin the slow, beautiful work of healing. Whether you're brand new to attachment theory or well-versed in the language of trauma, I hope this list offers insight, validation, and a few life-changing aha moments.
I’ve included some other resources as well.
Some Background Info
Attachment Theory
Attachment theory was first developed by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who proposed that a child’s early relationship with their primary caregiver serves as the blueprint for how they relate to others later in life—especially in intimate relationships.
“The propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals is a basic component of human nature.”
— John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (1969)
Working with Mary Ainsworth, who conducted the Strange Situation study in the 1970s, Bowlby’s work led to the identification of different attachment styles in children:
Secure: Comfort with intimacy and independence
Avoidant (Dismissive): Downplays the importance of relationships, often suppresses emotion
Anxious (Preoccupied): Craves closeness but fears abandonment
Disorganized (added later by Main & Solomon, 1990): A mix of fear and longing; often associated with unresolved trauma
As adults, we tend to replicate these attachment patterns in romantic relationships—unless we become aware of them and intentionally work to “repattern” our responses.
Researchers like Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987) later extended attachment theory to adult romantic bonds, showing how early relational dynamics persist into adulthood. More recently, clinicians like Dr. Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused Therapy) and Dr. Dan Siegel (Interpersonal Neurobiology) have built on Bowlby’s foundation to create healing frameworks for individuals and couples.
What the Still Face Experiment Taught Us About Connection
If Bowlby gave us the blueprint for how attachment develops, Dr. Ed Tronick showed us, in haunting real time, how quickly things go wrong when that connection is interrupted.
In the 1970s, Tronick and his colleagues developed the Still Face Experiment to study how infants respond to sudden breaks in emotional attunement. In the experiment, a mother interacts with her baby—cooing, smiling, responding—until, on cue, she suddenly stops and holds a neutral, unresponsive face for a short period.
The baby quickly becomes distressed: they try to engage her, wave their arms, point, smile, cry, arch away—doing everything they can to reestablish connection. When the mother resumes interaction, the baby often needs a moment to regulate and recover.
“When the parent doesn’t respond, the infant tries to get the parent to respond again. And when they fail, they withdraw—they lose the vitality that they showed before.”
— Ed Tronick, Harvard University, on the Still Face Experiment
The implications are profound: even in very short moments, ruptures in emotional connection impact a child’s nervous system, stress regulation, and emerging sense of self. But just as important, repair after rupture is possible—and essential. Healthy attachment isn’t about perfect attunement, but about misattunement followed by repair.
This experiment validated the emotional intelligence of infants and the importance of caregivers being emotionally present—not just physically there. It reinforced Bowlby’s theory that early caregiving experiences wire us for how we relate to others later in life: whether we expect warmth and responsiveness, or rejection and emotional absence.
Tronick’s work also influenced later models of co-regulation, the idea that nervous systems sync up in relationship, and that early attachment is formed through a dance of serve-and-return interactions—where small moments of connection (or disconnection) shape a child’s internal world.
What We’ve Lost: Dr. Darcia Narvaez and the “Evolved Nest”
While Bowlby and Tronick helped us understand how early disruptions shape attachment, Dr. Darcia Narvaez zooms out even further—asking what kind of environment human beings were actually designed to develop in.
Narvaez, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, studies moral development, neurobiology, and indigenous wisdom traditions. Her concept of the “Evolved Nest” refers to the caregiving environment that our species evolved within for 99% of human history—one that met our core needs for safety, connection, and community in ways that modern society largely doesn’t.
The Evolved Nest includes:
Soothing touch and physical closeness
Responsive, emotionally attuned caregivers
Breastfeeding on demand
Multi-age, alloparenting support (i.e., care from more than just one or two adults)
Free play in nature
A sense of belonging to a group, not isolation in nuclear families
A deep connection to the natural world
In traditional small-band hunter-gatherer societies—our biological norm—babies were rarely left to cry alone, rarely placed in containers or isolated cribs, and always held, responded to, and embedded in a web of emotional and physical care.
“When you don’t get the nest, systems are dysregulated. Brain development is affected. Stress response is heightened. The sense of trust in the world is diminished.”
— Darcia Narvaez, EvolvedNest.org
Narvaez’s work helps explain why so many of us feel anxious, emotionally dysregulated, or deeply lonely—our nervous systems weren’t designed for fragmented modern life. Many of us are walking around with subtle forms of developmental trauma—not from blatant abuse, but from what was missing: attunement, touch, tribe.
This lens doesn’t pathologize individual parents—it challenges the broader culture that isolates caregivers, downplays emotional needs, and prioritizes productivity over presence. In her words, we are raising children in an environment we are not adapted to, and then wondering why things feel off.
Narvaez’s research pairs beautifully with the language of attachment repair, because it points not just to what went wrong, but to what’s possible when we re-nest ourselves in community, embodiment, nature, and true relational safety.The
My Book Recommendations
Start Here
If you just read two books about attachment, read these ones.
📚 Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
This is the book that brought attachment theory into the dating world. Using clear examples, it categorizes adults into secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment styles and offers practical advice on how to recognize your own style (and your partner’s). While it simplifies a complex theory, it’s an invaluable entry point for anyone stuck in confusing relationship dynamics. Attached helps people identify patterns that sabotage closeness—and shows that healthy love is both possible and learnable.
📚 Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship by Stan Tatkin
Stan Tatkin brings in neuroscience to explain how attachment plays out in long-term partnerships. He encourages couples to become a "couple bubble"—a secure, safe base where both people feel protected. With an emphasis on nervous system regulation and practical strategies, this book helps readers understand why their partner’s behavior may trigger them—and how to stop reenacting old attachment wounds. It’s compassionate, accessible, and deeply focused on building lasting security in love. Wired for Dating is also great!
Then Add These
📚 The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller
This one I have written in every margin and underlined practically every sentence. I’ve read it so many times. Alice Miller’s classic explores how sensitive, intuitive children often adapt to emotionally unavailable parents by becoming hyper-attuned to others’ needs—and disconnecting from their own. These children grow up successful on the outside but emotionally empty on the inside. Miller argues that healing begins with reclaiming your emotional truth and mourning what you didn’t receive. This book is a cornerstone for understanding the cost of emotional suppression and the journey toward authentic selfhood.
📚 Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb, PhD, with Christine Musello, PsyD
Jonice Webb coined the term Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) to describe what happens when your emotional needs weren't met—not because something bad happened, but because something essential didn’t. This book gently guides readers through recognizing the invisible wounds of neglect and learning how to meet their own emotional needs as adults. It's especially helpful for people who grew up in "good families" but still feel emotionally disconnected or chronically unfulfilled.
📚 Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson
This book is a game-changer for those who didn’t experience overt abuse, but felt emotionally unsupported or unseen. Gibson introduces four types of emotionally immature parents and outlines how their behavior shapes our adult relationships. Readers learn how to spot manipulation, develop boundaries, and reclaim their own emotional reality. It's essential for understanding how early emotional neglect warps our sense of self and connection.
📚 The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC
This book gently but directly names the profound impact of growing up with a mother who was physically present but emotionally unavailable. Jasmin Lee Cori offers compassionate guidance for recognizing the invisible wounds that come from not being seen, soothed, or supported as a child. She explores how emotional neglect affects self-worth, boundaries, identity, and our ability to trust or feel safe in relationships. With practical exercises and validating insights, the book helps readers grieve what they didn’t receive, reclaim their emotional lives, and begin reparenting themselves with care. It’s especially powerful for those who have long sensed that “something was missing” but couldn’t quite articulate what or why.
📚 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, MD
The most widely read book on this list by far. Everyone should read it! A landmark text in trauma research, this book explains how trauma—especially relational trauma—lives in the body. Van der Kolk details how early experiences of disconnection or harm alter brain circuits and nervous system function, leading to chronic dysregulation, flashbacks, or shutdown. He makes a compelling case for body-based healing modalities like yoga, EMDR, and neurofeedback. This is essential reading for anyone trying to understand why talk therapy alone may not be enough. I first learned about Adverse Childhood Experiences when I heard Bessel on NPR’s On Being podcast.
I worked with Bessel many times on the Cracked Up: The Evolving Conversation series I produced. He’s wonderful—deeply caring and feeling.
If You’re Avoidant and Rationalizing Your Avoidance, Read This One:
📚 The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships by Neil Strauss
The Truth was a vulnerable journey of healing by Neil Strauss that helped me feel the consequences of being asleep to the influence of our childhood on our adult relationships. It’s good to read the informational books by therapists, but then we have to read people’s stories of actually doing the work. In this brutally honest memoir, Neil Strauss—former pickup artist and author of The Game—confronts the emotional wreckage behind his compulsive pursuit of sex and novelty. What begins as a search for ethical non-monogamy becomes a deep exploration of childhood wounds, intimacy fears, and attachment dysfunction. Through rehab, therapy, and raw self-inquiry, Strauss uncovers how early relational trauma shaped his avoidance and fear of true closeness. This book is especially powerful for those who’ve chased intensity or freedom at the expense of emotional safety—and who are ready to rewrite their story of love.
If You’re Not Sure What Healthy Relational Needs Are, These Authors Provide a Helpful List:
📚 An Adult Child’s Guide to What’s ‘Normal’ by John Friel, PhD, and Linda D. Friel, MA
This straightforward and compassionate book offers a lifeline to adults who grew up in families where emotional dysfunction—whether through addiction, neglect, enmeshment, or chaos—was the norm. The Friels outline what healthy emotional functioning actually looks like, offering a baseline for people who never had one. Through practical checklists and accessible language, they describe the traits of emotionally mature adults and functional families, helping readers identify areas of growth and repair. It’s especially helpful for those navigating boundaries, emotional regulation, and self-worth after growing up in environments where “normal” was anything but. This book gently reorients the reader toward a grounded, realistic sense of what emotional health can feel like.
Go Deeper:
📚 Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine, PhD
I read several of his books and then did the practices he suggests and they created big change for me! Big leap in the ability to recognize and release trauma stored in my body. Peter Levine offers a somatic (body-based) approach to trauma, rooted in the idea that animals in the wild shake off traumatic stress, but humans often don’t. Instead, we freeze, dissociate, or carry the stress in our bodies for years. This book helps readers understand the physiological effects of trauma and how to gently release it. It’s foundational for anyone working to heal attachment trauma through nervous system regulation and embodiment. I can’t believe this one was published in 1997, a year before the Adverse Childhood Experiences study was published! Ahead of the movement!
📚 Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
Pete Walker writes directly to those who grew up in chronically unsafe or emotionally abusive environments—what he calls “relational trauma.” With incredible clarity and compassion, he explains how Complex PTSD manifests: people-pleasing, self-blame, emotional flashbacks, and attachment wounds that don't quite fit a “PTSD” mold. He offers practical tools for healing, including re-parenting and inner child work. This book is especially validating for readers who always felt “too sensitive” or “too much.”
📚 Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It by Gabor Maté, MD
In Scattered, Gabor Maté reframes ADHD not as a genetic deficit, but as a response to early emotional stress and attachment disruptions. He explores how a child’s developing brain is shaped by the emotional availability of caregivers—and how disconnection in early life can lead to inattention, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation. This book helps readers see ADHD as a trauma-related condition and offers compassion-based strategies for healing. Maté's lens is particularly powerful for adults with scattered focus and a deep hunger for connection.
📚 The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook—What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz
I had significant questions about how brains can form without empathy, as is the case with sociopaths and narcissists. This book answered these questions for me! This heartbreaking and hopeful book shares case studies of children who have experienced extreme trauma, including neglect and abuse. Dr. Perry, a leading child trauma expert, explains how trauma affects the developing brain—and how healing happens in safe, attuned relationships. The stories are intense but illuminate the deep truth that love and safety literally change the brain. It’s a sobering reminder of the stakes of early attachment, and the profound potential for repair.
Internal Family Systems is THE Framework for Maximum Healing. Don’t Sleep on It!
📚 No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
The IFS model is powerful! Read about how it leveled up my healing in this blog. In this powerful and gentle guide, Dr. Richard Schwartz introduces Internal Family Systems (IFS)—a model that views the psyche as made up of “parts,” each with its own role, emotions, and protective function. Rather than pathologizing inner conflict, IFS teaches that all parts of us—including those that sabotage, numb, rage, or isolate—are trying to protect us from pain. Healing comes from reconnecting with the Self: a calm, curious, compassionate presence within each of us. No Bad Parts is a deeply affirming read for anyone working with shame, inner criticism, or emotional fragmentation, and it offers a clear pathway toward internal safety and integration—key ingredients for secure attachment.
📚 You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
This book builds on No Bad Parts and helps us see how we often demand that our partner heal us when we have to do that work for ourselves. In this powerful extension of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, Dr. Richard Schwartz explores how our “parts”—especially exiles and protectors formed in childhood—play out in adult romantic relationships. He challenges the cultural myth that our partner should meet all our emotional needs, and instead invites us to become the secure, compassionate presence our inner parts have always longed for. The book shows how most conflict in relationships comes not from our core selves, but from wounded parts trying to protect us from pain. With practical tools and deeply affirming wisdom, Schwartz guides readers toward more self-led, conscious, and connected love. It’s a transformative read for anyone seeking intimacy without losing themselves—or reenacting old wounds.
These Ones are Heady! Serious Nerds Only:
📚 A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, MDs
This one is so beautifully written! The most enchanting on this list! The blend of poetry and neuroscience explores how our brains are wired for love and limbic resonance. The authors argue that emotional connection is not a luxury, but a biological necessity: our nervous systems co-regulate with the people around us. Without attuned, loving relationships in early life, our ability to self-regulate and connect can be disrupted. This book makes the case for why emotional attunement in relationships is essential for mental health and even identity formation. These authors are from the psychiatry department at UCSF Medical School.
📚 Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind by Daniel J. Siegel, MD
This compact yet rich guide distills the complex ideas of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) into digestible, integrative insights about how the mind, brain, and relationships shape one another. Dr. Dan Siegel offers a model of mental health rooted in integration—the linking of differentiated parts within the brain and between people. He explains how secure attachment, emotional regulation, and resilience are not just psychological goals but neurobiological processes we can intentionally support. This book is ideal for both clinicians and curious readers seeking a deeper, science-based understanding of healing and connection. While compact, it offers a powerful framework for viewing attachment, trauma, and personal transformation through a unified lens.
Serious Relationship Skills Practice:
📚 The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships Are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust by Ed Tronick and Claudia M. Gold
Co-written by the creator of the Still Face Experiment, this book unpacks the central truth of attachment: it’s not about perfect harmony, but rupture and repair. Tronick and Gold show that mismatches are inevitable in relationships—but what matters is how we respond. This book invites readers to release perfectionism and embrace emotional messiness as the actual source of deep intimacy. It’s a refreshing, reality-based guide to secure relating.
Check out the conversation with the authors I produced and facilitated here:
📚 Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships by David Schnarch, PhD
This was the book I read right at the end of my last significant breakup that I wish I’d read earlier. I’d gotten myself un-avoidant, but unfortunately, I was totally enmeshed with my partner. We thought of ourselves as one unit a lot of the time, instead of two separate people coming together. Unlike many books that focus on emotional closeness as the key to intimacy, Passionate Marriage introduces the idea that true erotic connection requires differentiation—the ability to stay connected to your partner while remaining fully yourself. Dr. David Schnarch challenges the myth that security and passion are opposites, arguing instead that real intimacy is forged when we face ourselves in the presence of another. Through powerful case studies and bold insights, he shows how couples can grow through their conflicts, not avoid them. This book is essential for anyone looking to understand how attachment patterns play out in sex, commitment, and emotional self-expression.
Additionally, talking to a few thought leaders on my podcast Latchkey Urchins & Friends helped me understand my habit of avoiding uncomfortable conversations and conflict, and that I needed to practice saying how I feel in the moment instead of keeping quiet and building resentment. Those episodes with Jayson Gaddis and Elizabeth Gillette are here:
Bigger Picture Look at Societal Factors:
📚 The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities by Darcia Narvaez, PhD
This is a great macro look at the societal factors that have got us to a point where most children in the US are not getting their nurturance needs met. This book brings evolutionary psychology and indigenous wisdom together to show what human children actually need to develop secure, emotionally healthy brains. Narvaez outlines nine components of the "evolved nest," from physical closeness to communal caregiving, and contrasts them with the isolating norms of modern life. She reveals how disconnection from these primal nurturing systems affects not just individuals, but whole cultures. It's a powerful call to reimagine family, parenting, and community care through the lens of what we are biologically designed for.
Check out my interview with Dr. Narvaez on my podcast here:
