The Secure Attachment Checklist

Two ways to run it

On yourself: tick against the most recent real instance of each situation -- the last bid, the last conflict, the last stretch of distance, the last heavy month. Same-week events beat memory. Date each section.

On a partner (the checking-them-out use): tick only what you have OBSERVED, never what they report about themselves -- self-report is where the flattering answers live. And give it time; situations two and four cannot be observed until conflict and load have actually happened, which is why "seems secure" at month one is not a finding.

Pressure 1 -- Under bids

Tick what happens when someone reaches for attention or care.

Bids are the small reaches -- the held-up phone, the "listen to this", the sigh that wants asking-about. Secure functioning shows in the response rate and the repair of misses. Tick from the last week of any close relationship. Note the last item especially: making bids yourself, plainly, without testing, is as much the signature as receiving them well.

Pressure 2 -- Under conflict

Tick what you actually did in the last real disagreement.

The secure signature in conflict is neither the anxious system's urgency nor the avoidant system's containment: it is staying in it at size -- the complaint kept specific, the person kept separate from the problem, the repair reached inside days not months. Tick from the most recent genuine disagreement. The hard-to-fake items are the middle ones: conceding a point that was actually right, and holding one that mattered without escalating.

Pressure 3 -- Under distance

Tick what ran while apart, or while they needed space.

Distance is where the two insecure systems declare themselves -- monitoring on one side, relief-and-drift on the other. The secure version is unglamorous: the connection holds its shape without either surveillance or evaporation. Tick from the last stretch of real distance: a trip, a heavy work season, or an explicitly asked-for bit of space.

Pressure 4 -- Under load

Tick what happened to your relational functioning in the last heavy stretch.

Anyone can run secure in a calm month; the pattern is what survives load -- illness, deadlines, family trouble, bad sleep. Secure functioning under load does not mean unchanged: it means degraded gracefully, with notice given. Tick from the most recent genuinely heavy stretch. The notice items are the core: load announced is load shared; load unannounced becomes everyone's weather.

Reading the counts

What the shape says, and what to do with thin sections.

High counts across all four (say 5+, 6+, 4+, 4+) with real dated events behind them: the verification stands -- keep it maintained (the secure attachment worksheet's drills, and the secure journal prompts' weekly log, are the gym). A thin section is not a verdict but a work order, and each maps to a tool: thin under bids -- the relationship-check-in sheet; thin under conflict -- conflict-repair and repair-scripts; thin under distance -- whichever insecure system the distance woke (the ticks will say which); thin under load -- the boundaries and self-soothing-plan sheets, because load-security is mostly resource management. Run the differential below before celebrating a high score.

The differential: secure, or avoidant-calm? (and two other traps)

The checks that catch the three most common false positives.

Three ways this checklist gets passed falsely. AVOIDANT-CALM: distance handled "well" because connection sits shallow -- the tell is pressure three passing while pressure one runs thin (few bids made, few received deeply) and conflict gets contained rather than entered. LOW-STAKES CALM: everything passes because nothing currently matters enough to activate you -- the tell is that your dated events are all trivial; security untested is security unverified, and that is a fact to note, not to fix. PARTNER-SPECIFIC CALM: you run secure with this steady person but ran a full insecure pattern with the last volatile one -- genuinely good news, but it is co-regulation plus a good match, and worth knowing before the next hard season claims otherwise. Answer the checks; downgrade honestly where they bite.

Security verified is security you can spend

A verified pass on this checklist is worth something real: it means your steadiness is load-bearing, and you can invest it -- in a partner's rough season, in harder conversations, in the deliberate deepening the secure journal prompts' commissioning questions ask about. A false pass, meanwhile, costs quietly for years, which is why the differential is the page's most important section. The avoidant-calm misread in particular sends people into relationships advertising a stability that is actually shallowness, and the discovery date is always mid-crisis.

If the verdict came back thin-sectioned or misread: nothing here is bad news. Every thin section mapped to an existing tool, and earned security -- built deliberately, section by section, with relapses that route back -- tests identically on this sheet to the born-lucky kind within a few years. The dated re-runs are how you watch that happen.