Attachment Styles: Understanding Your Relationship Patterns - by Karelin Wadkins

COURSE

Attachment Styles: Understanding Your Relationship Patterns

With Karelin Wadkins

Why do some relationships leave us overthinking, pulling away, seeking reassurance, or feeling overwhelmed by closeness? Attachment styles can help us understand the patterns underneath those reactions. In this six-part course, you’ll explore how attachment develops, how anxious, avoidant, fearful-avoidant, and secure attachment can show up in adult relationships, and why certain patterns can feel so automatic. We’ll look at how attachment can influence trust, conflict, communication, boundaries, reassurance, independence, and emotional safety. Each lesson also includes a practical reflection or skill to help you pause, understand what is happening, and respond with more intention. This course is not about putting yourself in a box or blaming yourself for relationship struggles. It is about learning to recognize your patterns while also paying attention to the quality of the relationships you are in. By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of your attachment tendencies, more language for your needs, and practical tools for building greater self-trust, healthier communication, stronger boundaries, and more secure connection.


Meet your Teacher

Karelin Wadkins is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with over 15 years of experience supporting individuals and couples with relationship patterns, trauma, anxiety, communication, boundaries, and emotional regulation. Her work draws from attachment-informed therapy, mindfulness, Internal Family Systems, cognitive behavioral approaches, and nervous system education. She brings a warm, practical, and compassionate approach to helping people better understand the patterns that shape how they connect with others.

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6 Days

0 students

No ratings

11 min / day

Anxiety

English


Lesson 1

Attachment Styles: How Our Relationship Patterns Begin

Learn what attachment styles are, how they develop, and how early experiences of connection can shape the way we respond to closeness, conflict, and uncertainty in adult relationships. You’ll also explore the difference between understanding your own attachment patterns and taking responsibility for someone else’s unhealthy behavior. Journal prompts: When I feel secure in a relationship, what do I notice in my thoughts, body, and behavior? When connection feels uncertain, what do I tend to do? What does my nervous system seem to expect from close relationships? What’s happening inside of me—and what’s actually happening in the relationship?

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Lesson 2

Anxious Attachment: When Connection Feels Uncertain

Explore how anxious attachment can develop and why uncertainty, distance, or changes in connection can feel so activating. You’ll learn how reassurance-seeking, overthinking, and protest behaviors can show up in relationships—and how to pause before reacting. Reflection prompts: What actually happened? What story is my attachment system telling me? What am I needing right now? Can I support some of that need myself before I ask someone else to respond? What would a direct, secure request sound like?

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Lesson 3

Avoidant Attachment: When Independence Feels Safer

Explore how avoidant attachment can develop and why emotional distance, self-reliance, or needing space can become protective strategies. You’ll learn how avoidant patterns can show up in adult relationships and how to practice small acts of interdependence without giving up your independence. Reflection prompts: What am I protecting myself from right now? When do I tend to become more self-reliant or pull away? Is there one degree more honesty available to me? What would one small act of connection look like without abandoning my need for space? How can I communicate a need for space without creating unnecessary disconnection?

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Lesson 4

Fearful-Avoidant Attachment: When Closeness Feels Complicated

Explore how fearful-avoidant attachment can develop when closeness feels both comforting and threatening. You’ll learn how this push-pull pattern can show up in adult relationships and how to create enough space to respond with clarity instead of reacting from overwhelm. Reflection prompts: What happened right before my feelings about the relationship shifted? What am I afraid might happen if I move closer? What am I afraid might happen if I move away? Am I moving toward what I truly want, or trying to make this feeling stop? What do I need right now: reassurance, space, clarity, a boundary, repair, or time?

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Lesson 5

Secure Attachment: What Healthy Connection Looks Like

Explore what secure attachment actually looks like in everyday relationships. You’ll learn how security can include both closeness and independence, direct communication, boundaries, self-trust, and the ability to repair after conflict. Reflection prompts: When I feel activated, what is my automatic response? What might a more secure response look like? Do I need reassurance, space, clarity, repair, or a boundary? How can I communicate that need directly? What helps me stay connected to myself during conflict?

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Lesson 6

Building Earned Security: Creating New Relationship Patterns

Bring the course together by exploring how attachment patterns can change over time. You’ll learn how self-trust, healthier communication, boundaries, repair, and safe relationships can help build greater security and create more choice in how you respond. Reflection prompts: When my attachment system gets activated, I tend to… Underneath that reaction, I am usually needing… What would one more secure response look like? What patterns help me recognize a safe relationship? What does a healthy, secure relationship look like to me?

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