Free take-home handout
Attachment Injury Repair
A printable EFT-informed guide to repairing a specific attachment injury — a moment when one partner needed the other and got abandonment, dismissal, or attack instead. Regular repair does not reach these. This one does.
Free to download and share with your therapist. Educational, not a substitute for therapy.
What's inside
- How to tell an attachment injury from a regular fight (four markers)
- Why cognitive apologies do not reach injuries stored in the attachment system
- The six-step repair sequence mapped to Johnson, Makinen, and Furrow's AIRM stages: Marker → Differentiation → Congruent Expression → Attunement → Bonding → Consolidation
- A full sample dialogue showing what each of the six AIRM stages sounds like as actual conversation, with clinical notes on each move
- Six apply-it-this-week prompts (four for the injured partner, two for the other partner) to journal privately before the repair conversation
Who it's for
Couples where a specific moment (a hospital, a phone call, a night after a fight, a loss) keeps coming back in unrelated fights and regular apologies have not moved it.
Adapted from Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Attachment Injury Resolution Model (Makinen and Johnson, 2006).
Easier with someone in your corner.
A worksheet gets you started. If this is a pattern that keeps coming back, a free 15-minute consult with our intake coordinator is a low-pressure way to talk through it and get matched with the right clinician on our team.
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FAQ
What is an attachment injury?
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An attachment injury is a specific moment when one partner needed the other in a way that mattered deeply and received abandonment, dismissal, or attack instead. It is coded by the attachment system as evidence that this partner is not safe with this particular vulnerability. Unlike ordinary conflict, attachment injuries do not resolve with time or standard apologies.
How is this different from a regular fight?
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A fight argues about content. An attachment injury argues about whether you are safe with each other. Fights end and get forgiven; injuries keep surfacing in unrelated contexts because the attachment system has flagged that vulnerability as unsafe until proven otherwise.
Do we need a therapist for this?
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Strongly recommended, especially for the first few passes. Attachment injury repair activates the exact vulnerability that got wounded, and having a trained couples therapist in the room keeps the process from re-injuring instead of repairing.
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