Thoughts on Jessica Fern’s Polysecure

If all attachment wounds are interpersonal, how can healing them come from within?

One of the books that kept me company during my week of no posting was Jessica Fern’s Polysecure, a book ostensibly all about building attachment security within polyamorous and non-monogamous relationships. I say ostensibly because while Fern’s book contains several helpful frameworks for understanding attachment threat in non-monogamous relationships, her recommendations for overcoming those threats are frustratingly individualistic and don’t veer far from typical love-yourself-before-you-love-anyone-else self-help territory.

Early in the book, Fern introduces something called the Nested Attachment Model. It holds that attachment is an interpersonal, dynamic phenomenon, rather than a static personality trait that gets locked in during childhood.

For a long time, psychologists believed that a person’s attachment style was cemented in infancy, based on the quality of their relationship with their primary caregiver. Early attachment researchers observed infants interacting with their mothers (and back then, it was always mothers), and based on how they coped with a temporary separation, grouped them into one of three attachment categories: securely attached, avoidantly attached, or anxiously attached.

For the next several decades, psychologists claimed that adults carried their childhood attachment style with them into every subsequent…