Summer is the perfect time to reflect on your dating patterns and set intentions for healthier relationships. Understanding why you’re drawn to certain types of people, recognizing repeating cycles, and learning your attachment style can help you make conscious choices and create more fulfilling connections. Take a moment to notice your patterns this season and start building relationships that truly align with your needs.

Attachment styles shape how we relate to others and are formed early in life based on the strength of our bond with a caregiver, which can create either a secure or insecure sense of safety. Secure attachment is associated with trust, connection, and relationship success, while insecure attachment often leads to fear, communication difficulties, and challenges in forming and maintaining relationships.

Anger is a complex and often misunderstood emotion that can be both destructive and protective, shaped by how we learned to express or suppress it early in life. Though sometimes labeled a secondary emotion, anger is valid and can serve as a source of control, self-worth, and insight into deeper feelings like hurt or sadness.

Anxiety. It can keep us alive, keep us responsible, keeps us from danger and keep our loved ones safe. However, it can also keep us on an emotional roller-coaster for long periods of time, get in the way of our day-to-day activities, and can easily get blown out of proportion to the actual facts of a situation.

The inner child represents a younger, childlike part of yourself that can hold wounds and unmet needs, as described by Carl Jung’s child archetype. These early experiences strongly influence adult life, and unresolved negative experiences can continue to impact you until they are acknowledged and healed.

Self-Trust can only happen if you have a relationship with yourself. A positive relationship. The opposite is true -you can easily erode your trust in self if you are in a cycle of self-sabotage. Basically means that you are making choices that go directly against your personal goals and values.

I want to invite you to think of these few words and notice what emotions come up for you: rent, groceries, gas, inflation, bills. What did you notice? Did you feel your heart quicken, or that sensation of wanting to distance yourself from what these words represent for you? 

Love can be both powerful and complicated, shaped by our personal history and experiences. Gary Chapman’s "The 5 Love Languages" helps us understand how we give and receive love, but learning to love ourselves first is essential.