One of the best things you can do with your partners is be playful, and appropriately playful with your clients. That’s a really big nourishment for the attachment bond. You tilt everything in your favor by keeping the attachment bond going.

I call the attachment gaze the gleam beam. This is a skill you can teach your clients or do yourself. If you are at a party, and your partner, kid, friend, or even your dog is in another part of the room, you send them a loving look that takes two seconds, and it inflates the attachment bond. Just shoot somebody a look. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but it’s food for the attachment bond. Practice skills to feed it. Then, if you have a partner who’s willing to feeding you back, you can teach each other how to stack the cards in your favor to have a nourishing attachment bond.

The importance of play in daily life 

Play is a really big one. In United States, we’re big on entertainment—movies, football games, things like that—but we don’t do a lot of relaxing and hanging out. We could do more of that. We could probably play better.

Want to do something between now and the next training that could be really fun? Try to do more play-zone things. Make your play zone three times as big with your partner, your kid,

your neighbor, or whomever those people are that you want to strengthen an attachment bond with.

We work a lot in this culture. Europeans normally have five to six weeks off a year. We may get two. We can kind of manage, but we don’t play a lot. Play does a ton for your attachment bond. You can play on your own (I can play by going to an art gallery by myself), but it’s nice to have shared play, too. Enjoy things together, and if you have kids, make sure you are having good quality play time.

We tend to task our marriages or partnerships. You’re with somebody long enough and you end up tasking each other, or if you work together, then you say, “Taxes need to get done, the garbage needs to go out, we need to cook dinner, go to the grocery store, pick up the kids…” It becomes too much of that and not enough “let’s have a date night,” or “let’s go on a cool vacation.”

This blog was originally written from Module 1.3:  Hallmarks of Secure Attachment.