Wired for Love
Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship is Stan Tatkin's 2011 book for general readers, distilling the clinical model he developed at his Southern California practice and at the institute he co-founded with his wife Tracey Boldemann-Tatkin. Tatkin draws on three streams of research: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's attachment theory, with its categories of secure, anxious, and avoidant adults; Allan Schore and Daniel Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology, which describes how nervous systems regulate one another in close relationships; and his own clinical work observing couples in real time. The book argues that most adult relationship trouble is not a failure of love but a failure of secure functioning, and that partners can learn, with practice, to recognize when one another's primitive threat systems have taken over and to bring the prefrontal cortex back online together. Each chapter ends with concrete partner exercises.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Wired for Love
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Couples therapist Stan Tatkin lays out a Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy across ten short chapters on attachment, fight responses, and quick repair.
Yes. Stan Tatkin's book applies attachment theory and neuroscience to couples therapy, with practical exercises for partners. It is widely recommended in couples counseling.
He is a clinical psychologist and the developer of the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT).
Wired for Love was written by Stan Tatkin, published in 2011 by New Harbinger Publications.
Wired for Love is 190 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Wired for Love takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Wired for Love is a standalone novel by Stan Tatkin, not part of a series.
Wired for Love is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.