Attachment Worksheets for Adults: The Four-Domain Audit

How the audit works

Exercises one to four are the same five questions asked of four different domains. Answer from the last three months only -- the audit measures your current arrangements, not your history. If a domain is empty right now (no partner, parents gone, between jobs), answer for the most recent version of it and mark the answers with an asterisk; patterns persist across vacancies.

Exercise five is where the audit pays off, so do not stop at four. Reading the four columns side by side is the entire point of the sheet.

1. Domain one: partner (or the search)

The five audit questions, asked of your closest romantic tie.

Answer the five for your partner, or -- if single -- for how you run the search (apps, dates, the talking stage). The questions are the same in every domain, and their sameness is deliberate: Who reaches out first, and is that stable or scorekept? What happens to complaints -- said straight, hinted, or swallowed? When you need help, do you ask, manage alone, or test whether it is offered? After friction, who repairs and how long does it take? And the cost question: what does this domain's current arrangement cost you per month, in worry, resentment or performance? Answer with recent events attached, not adjectives.

2. Domain two: family of origin

The same five, asked of parents and siblings as they are today.

Not your childhood -- there is a dedicated family-of-origin worksheet for the archaeology. This is about the adults you visit, ring dutifully, or avoid ringing now. The same five questions apply, and one addition earns its place here: the version question. Which version of you walks into that house -- the current one, or a reissued teenager? Most adults find their attachment pattern runs five to ten years older in this domain than anywhere else, and knowing that stops you reading a Sunday-lunch regression as your true self.

3. Domain three: work

The same five, asked of the place that gets most of your waking hours.

Attachment runs at work wearing professional clothes: reassurance-seeking becomes over-checking before sending; avoidance becomes never asking for help until the deadline is already lost; protest becomes the resignation fantasy rehearsed weekly. Ask the five of your manager and closest colleagues. The translation table for this domain: "who reaches first" is who flags problems early; "complaints" are feedback you give upward or sideways; "asking for help" is literal; "repair" is what happens after a tense meeting; "cost" is the performance tax -- the hours spent managing appearances rather than doing the work.

4. Domain four: friendships

The same five, asked of the friends of your adult years.

Adult friendship is the domain with no contract -- no ring, no payroll, no blood -- which makes it the purest reading of your pattern: everything that happens here, both of you chose. Ask the five of your two or three closest friendships. Watch for the two adult-specific distortions: the anxious version, where you are the group's unpaid social secretary and quietly billing everyone for it; and the avoidant version, where you are genuinely liked and nobody has seen the inside of your life for years. The dedicated friendships worksheet goes deeper if this column turns out to be the loud one.

5. Read the audit: unevenness, then one lever

Compare the four columns and choose the single cheapest intervention.

Lay the four domains side by side and read across. First finding: your loudest domain -- highest cost, oldest pattern -- and your quietest, because the quiet one proves the capacity exists; you already run a healthier arrangement somewhere, which converts "I am like this" into "I do this here, and not there". Second finding: the export question -- name one concrete habit from your quietest domain (how you repair at work, how you ask friends for help) and design its import into the loudest one. That import is your lever. One domain, one habit, four weeks. The audit's whole yield is that single, cheap, well-aimed move -- resist the renovation fantasy of fixing all four at once.

Why breadth first, depth second

Every other worksheet on this site goes deep on one context -- one style, one situation, one relationship. This one stays shallow on purpose and goes wide, because adults routinely aim their effort at the wrong domain: the partner relationship gets the books and the therapy while the actual bleeding is happening at work, or vice versa. An hour of audit before a month of depth is cheap targeting.

And the audit's most reliable gift is the quiet column. Nearly everyone has one domain that basically works, and it is the standing rebuttal to the pattern's favourite lie -- that this is just what you are like. You are not. You are like this here, with these people, under these conditions. Conditions can be worked.