Anxiously Attached

Becoming More Secure in Life and Love

By: Jessica Baum LMHC

Narrated by: Jessica Baum LMHC

A road map for building strong and secure relationships for those who struggle with anxiety in their romantic connections.

An estimated 47 million Americans identify as having an anxious attachment style, which can make being in relationships turbulent and emotionally taxing for them. According to groundbreaking research in the field of attachment, anxious types are more prone to insecurity, jealousy, codependency, and other behaviors that get in the way of finding and sustaining love. In Anxiously Attached, seasoned psychotherapist and couples counselor Jessica Baum guides readers through understanding their attachment style at its core and building the inner strength and self-love that will lead them to more secure and satisfying relationships.

Developed over ten years in private practice, Baum’s signature Self-full® Method has helped her clients get off the toxic roller coaster of anxious attachment and discover the secure and mutually supportive relationships they deserve. In this book readers will learn how to:

Create boundaries to safeguard their sense of self-sovereignty in relationships

Communicate to their partners what they need to feel safe and secure in the relationship

Develop a secure sense of self-worth and emotional stability

Learn the true meaning of a healthy/interdependent relationship and how to establish one with their partner or future partner.

Discover a compassionate path towards healing through experiences like mediation practices where they can start to develop more insight into their internal landscape.

Attain a deep understanding of the anxious-avoidant dance that is extremely common in intimacy struggles.

Anxiously Attached offers a practical and holistic approach for overcoming anxious attachment issues to discover happier, more fulfilling relationships.

Attachment theory casserole

Overall good book. Style is good and speaks to the heart of the issue where many other books skirt around the edges.

There are many lines of thinking that she is borrowing from to write this book. It is a lot of Dan Siegel, a whole lot of internal family systems by Richard Swartz, and a good bit of Stephen Porges poly vagal theory. And a good bit of body keeps the score. as an academic, it bothers me that she does not cite these frameworks from the outset, but rather name drops every now and again. She is obviously well read in the many different approaches and synthesizes it to write this book. I just wish she had been clear in what she was doing, and who she was borrowing from.

This book essentially distilled a lot of these theories, and puts it into an attachment theory/ emotionally focused therapy lens. 

One slight criticism I had while reading was that it seemed to be slanted toward a female orientation. As a male with an anxious attachment style, many of the examples, she uses, were obviously given with a female, anxious attachment in mind. As these attachment styles affect, both genders, I would have appreciated a little more balanced treatment.

Another slight critique is that the Examples she uses also highly focuses on the late 20s and early 30s patients. It’s lacks more mature clients who struggle with these attachment styles even in into their older years with 30 year marriages behind them. There are just entirely different gears turning in people in their 50s and 60s than those in their 20s and 30s. Perhaps this book is written with that target audience in mind. As someone in their 40s, I did feel a slight gap. Not huge… but still there.

The line of the book is fairly straightforward with most of the jewels, appearing in the first half. Her perspective and familiarity with anxious attachment is very thorough and nuanced..

You can tell that she is also very experienced with avoidant attachment styles, and I could have benefited from hearing how these two styles play off of and mirror each other in their myriad of ways. There were parts of this book that did bring this into play, but I could’ve used more. :-) overall good book.

So intelligent profound and transformative

And it came at the perfect time. I was really struggling, trying to figure out these crazy strong feelings that I was having in this relationship, where I never had quite experience something like this before. And I’ve gone through many different relationships that have been somewhat more secure attachment wise. Learning about the avoidant,/anxious dance that goes on, suddenly everything made sense. It gave me the clarity to be able to now start the hard work of unraveling it all. Thank you so much Jessica!

Understanding myself

I loved the information and healing that I have gained from this book. I have the audio version and was a little disappointed with the reading, sounding like a robot reading. I tried different speeds, but it just didn’t sound smooth.

An extremely helpful and well written book

Let me state first and foremost that I really loved this book. It was insightful and helpful. It is so well written and has helped me a lot on my journey to heal my anxious attachment style. HOWEVER, I could not get through the audio book 😭 As much as I respect the author, I really wished that she had hired someone to do the audio book record. She had a very monotone voice that sounded more like she was trying to perform a hypnosis. There was no flexion in her voice so it was hard to really HEAR the points she was making. I had to rewind the same part so many times until I finally gave up. I was so disappointed because I wanted to finish the book faster with the help of the audiobook but it was just unusable.

Incredibly helpful

This was a great book. Very informative and easy to absorb. I’ll be going back and re listening to chapters as I look to apply some of its concepts in my life.