Attachment Worksheets for Teens

Before you start

Attachment patterns are habits your nervous system learned about closeness, mostly before you could vote on it. They are not a diagnosis, a personality type, or a prediction of how your life goes. At your age the honest word is "developing": the pattern you spot this year is a draft, and drafts get edited. That is the actual point of doing this now rather than at thirty.

Do the exercises in order the first time, one per day rather than all at once. Use a pen and the printed sheet if you can. A worksheet on paper cannot be screenshotted by accident, and writing by hand slows you down at the moments where slowing down is the exercise.

1. Where closeness sits with you

A first pass at your pattern, using your week rather than a quiz.

Think about the last seven days across four places: home, school, your closest friendship, and whoever you are (or want to be) involved with. For each one, mark where you sat between two poles: "I wanted more from them than I let on" and "I wanted more space than I let on". Most people are not in the same place in all four. That unevenness is information -- patterns are strongest where the stakes feel highest, and noticing where yours switches on is worth more than any label.

2. The group-chat autopsy

Take one moment your phone made worse and slow it down.

Pick one recent moment involving a screen: left on read, seeing a story of a hangout you were not at, a message that read colder than it was meant, being removed from or added to something. Write the timeline in three rows -- what actually appeared on the screen, what you decided it meant, and what you did in the following hour. The screen row must contain only things a camera would also have recorded. Almost everyone finds the meaning row is doing the damage, not the screen row.

3. Home patterns vs friend patterns

Map where you learned the habit, without blaming anyone for it.

You did not invent your pattern; you learned it somewhere, usually at home, usually from people doing their best with their own patterns. This is a mapping exercise, not a trial. For each question, answer twice: how it works at home, and how it works with friends. The gaps between the two columns show you which habits are the house rules you grew up inside and which ones are actually yours. You can leave home one day; the habits come with you unless you spot them.

4. The reassurance budget

Work out what checking and asking actually buys you.

Asking for reassurance is not a flaw -- everyone runs on some of it. The question is the exchange rate. For three days, tally every time you seek a signal that things are okay: asking directly, testing ("you okay? you seem off"), checking someone's activity status, re-reading messages, asking a friend what another friend meant. Next to each tally, note how long the settled feeling lasted. Most people discover the expensive kinds buy about ten minutes. The point is not to stop; it is to know the price list before you spend.

5. Your trusted-adult plan

Decide in advance who you would actually tell, and what the opening sentence is.

Every pattern gets more manageable with one adult who knows. Not every adult -- one. This exercise is deciding who that is before you need them, because choosing during a crisis is how people end up choosing nobody. The adult does not have to be a parent. A form tutor, an aunt, a coach, a school counsellor all count. Write the actual opening sentence you would use, because "I would talk to them" without a first sentence is a plan that stalls at the door.

What to do with what you found

If the exercises pointed one direction -- mostly wanting more closeness than you show, or mostly wanting more space than you show -- the style worksheets on this site go deeper on each, and they are free too. Read them as descriptions of habits, not verdicts. At your age the research is genuinely on your side: patterns measured in adolescence shift more than patterns measured at any later point.

And if exercise five was the hard one -- if the honest answer was that there is no adult you would tell -- that finding matters more than anything else on the sheet. Start there. A school counsellor is a legitimate first pick precisely because they are not tangled up in your life.