If you’ve spent any time in the world of personal growth or relationships lately, you’ve probably heard people talking about attachment theory. It’s everywhere — on social media, in therapy rooms, in dating conversations — and for good reason. It’s an incredibly helpful framework for understanding ourselves and the ways we show up in relationships. But with its growing popularity, attachment theory also gets misused, oversimplified, and sometimes treated as the only explanation for why we are the way we are. So today, I want to take it back to basics and talk about what attachment theory is actually designed to do — and just as importantly, what it isn’t.

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