The Love Code No One Taught Us

A Journey Into the Hidden Blueprint That Shapes Us

I didn’t expect to learn one of the most important things I know about love in a modest building just two miles from my childhood home—a place I’d passed hundreds of times as a kid, hopping out of my dad’s car to grab Variety and The Hollywood Reporter from the newsstand across the street. But that unassuming non-profit counseling center in Sherman Oaks, where I was training to become a therapist close to 20 years after leaving that neighborhood, is where I first encountered Attachment Theory and when I began to understand what it means to carry a blueprint inside you that quietly shapes everything.

I entered the counseling psychology program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2007. The school’s focus on depth psychology, mythology, symbolism, and the archetypal journey taught me to revere the human psyche and to refrain from pathologizing pain. From the moment I stepped onto Pacifica’s campus—tucked into the hills above the California coastline—my curiosity was set alight and hasn’t dimmed since.

But Attachment Theory wasn’t part of the curriculum at Pacifica, where Freud, Jung, and the mysteries of soul took precedence. I first came across it at Counseling West, where I was collecting service hours and learning how to practice therapy in real time. Under the guidance of skilled and wise supervisors and clinicians, I was introduced to something that should be common knowledge, but isn’t: the way you were loved as a small child shapes nearly everything that follows.

Attachment Theory, developed by John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, explores how early bonds with caregivers create internal templates for connection. Secure, avoidant, and ambivalent attachment styles were named as survival strategies that our nervous systems internalize. Mary Main, Ainsworth’s student, took it further by studying how trauma and inconsistency can fracture a child’s sense of safety—leading to disorganized attachment, where a caregiver becomes both the source of comfort and fear. Main’s students, June and Allen Shroufe, taught one of my supervisors, Joni Lavick.

Joni taught us that attachment style shapes our self-concept, impulse control, emotional regulation, and even our thinking. She trained us in how to administer the Adult Attachment Interview—a diagnostic tool that uncovers attachment style—and how to use the theory to support clients. Basically, how to guide a client from an insecure to a secure attachment strategy.

I was using everything I was learning from school and the training at the clinic to understand and work with my clients. Most of them were suffering from attachment wounds: deep emotional injuries formed when early needs for safety, love, attunement, or consistency weren’t met—especially by primary caregivers, typically the parents. These wounds aren’t always caused by overt abuse or neglect. Often, it’s the absence of something essential that leaves the mark. At the time, I wouldn’t have identified myself as insecurely attached—but I was.

One of my earliest memories of feeling insecure was around age five or six, in the modest one-story house just down the street from Counseling West. Thanks to the legendary radio station KROQ and my older brother, to whom music was oxygen, I was growing fond of new wave and post-punk. I choreographed a dance routine to “Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode and practiced it endlessly, hoping to perform it for my family. My brother was going to lip-sync to a song of his own. My sister, always a bit more reserved, had opted out—but when the moment came, so did I. I froze. I wanted to perform, but something in me locked up. I couldn’t let myself be seen that way—not even by my own family.

In junior high and high school, the term “insecure” got tossed around a lot, but no one really knew what it meant. Looking back, I think I would have said it had something to do with self-doubt or lack of confidence—but that was about it. I’m sure the word came up even more in the years that followed, but I never really stopped to consider what it actually meant. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that.

Something about attachment theory cracked something open in me. I became obsessed with the patterns, the missing pieces, the somatic echoes, the internalized roles, and the emotional dysregulation. It felt like a hidden code—not just in my clients, but in me. It felt like a map I’d been living inside without ever having seen it.

And honestly? It enraged me that something so fundamental to being human was not part of public knowledge. I was over thirty when I first heard the term. Recently, a highly educated friend—a mother—asked me, “Wait, what is attachment?” And I thought: why don’t we know this?

Perhaps it makes sense why. In a world built on patriarchy, capitalism, and perfection culture, it doesn’t make sense for people to actually understand how ancient, maternal, and deep their need for connection runs. Connection—safe, steady love isn’t optional—it’s in many ways the antithesis to the modern world we live in. Without it, we chase validation while we disconnect, dissociate, and destroy—all supported, if not sold to us, in a modern world.

But what if we’d learned about attachment instead of D.A.R.E. in elementary school? What if we’d studied it in health class in junior high or high school? What if it were a required life science course in college curriculums? Why wasn’t it even a glimmer for me, even after studying biology for my undergrad degree? Attachment lives in our nervous systems, hormones, and brain wiring—it is biology. What if we actually understood how to raise secure humans from the start? How different might our stories be?

Attachment theory explains why love feels easy for some and like an endless battle for others. It’s not a personality flaw, it’s a blueprint. And while blueprints can be revised, first we have to see them for what they are. So that’s where we begin.

Next time, I’ll take you into the womb because that’s where attachment begins—in the dark.

This is the beginning of a series exploring the blueprints that shape our love—what breaks it, what rebuilds it, and how we begin again.