Jessica Baum’s SAFE: How Attachment and Relationships Transform Your Neurobiology offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding and healing the wounds that shape our most intimate relationships. Drawing on interpersonal neuroscience, attachment theory, and polyvagal theory, Baum—a licensed psychotherapist specializing in trauma and relationships—provides both the scientific foundation and practical pathways for transforming insecure attachment into earned security.
For anyone struggling with anxiety in relationships, repeatedly choosing unavailable partners, or feeling stuck in painful patterns despite years of traditional therapy, SAFE offers a revolutionary insight: your wounds live in your body, not just your mind, and healing requires safe relationships, not just self-understanding. Below are 25 essential takeaways from this transformative book, each supported by direct quotes from Baum’s work.
1. Connection Is Not Optional—It’s Biological
The foundation of Baum’s entire approach rests on understanding that humans are fundamentally wired for relationship. We don’t just prefer connection; we require it for survival and wellbeing.
Quote: “We are literally built to be in warm, receptive relationships—it is rooted in our DNA. And yet, so much in our culture and our personal history can pull us away from this ever-present possibility.”
This biological imperative means that the cultural emphasis on independence and self-sufficiency actually works against our nature. When we struggle with relationships, it’s not a personal failure—it’s often the result of early experiences that disrupted our natural capacity for connection.
2. Your Earliest Attachments Create Your Relationship Blueprint
The way your parents or caregivers related to you in your first two years of life created neural patterns that continue to shape how you expect all relationships to unfold.
Quote: “Our earliest connections, beginning even in the womb, teach us what to expect from those who are closest to us. These lessons run deep, forming a strong felt sense of whether people will be safe for us or whether they will be distant, aloof, anxious, upset, or downright dangerous.”
These patterns operate below conscious awareness, which is why you can intellectually know what you want in a relationship yet consistently choose partners who recreate childhood pain.
3. Most Memory Is Stored in Your Body, Not Your Mind
Baum introduces the crucial distinction between explicit memory (narrative stories) and implicit memory (bodily sensations and patterns). Most of what shapes your behavior comes from implicit memory.
Quote: “Our memories are held in multiple systems in our bodies. With each new experience in our lives, we sometimes encode the narrative memory of ‘what happened,’ but we always encode the sensations we felt in our bellies, hearts, muscles, skin, autonomic nervous systems, and more when we first had the experience.”
This is why traditional talk therapy often provides understanding without producing behavioral change. You can’t think your way out of wounds stored in your belly, heart, and nervous system.
4. Implicit Memories Feel Like They’re Happening Right Now
Perhaps the most important characteristic of implicit memory: it has no time stamp. When these memories wake up, your body experiences them as current reality, not past history.
Quote: “The most important thing about this kind of remembering is that these old experiences arise in our bodies and are experienced as if they are happening right now, shaping our perception of the present moment.”
This explains why you can have a disproportionate emotional reaction to something minor your partner does—you’re not just responding to the present moment but to decades of accumulated similar experiences stored in your body.
5. Your Nervous System Decides Who’s Safe Before You Do
Baum draws extensively on Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory to explain neuroception—your autonomic nervous system’s continuous, unconscious assessment of safety and danger.
Quote: “According to the polyvagal theory, our ANS constantly scans our internal and external environment to rapidly sense risk and safety, causing shifts in our autonomic state without our conscious awareness.”
Your nervous system makes decisions about whether someone is safe or dangerous approximately 100 times faster than conscious thought, based on past experiences rather than present reality.
6. You Don’t Have One Attachment Style—You Have a Wheel
Rather than being simply “anxious” or “avoidant,” most people have different attachment patterns that emerged from different relationships in their family system.
Quote: “Rather than asking you to identify your attachment style, we’re going to explore how we develop what we might call a wheel of attachment. Mine includes experiences of security and anxiety with my mother, avoidance and anxiety with my father, security with my grandmother, and moments of such profound abandonment that I sometimes became disorganized.”
This complexity explains why you might be secure with friends but anxious in romantic relationships, or calm with colleagues but avoidant with family.
7. Anxious and Avoidant People Attract Each Other
One of the most common and painful relationship dynamics occurs when someone with anxious attachment pairs with someone who has avoidant attachment.
Quote: “People with anxious attachment are drawn to those with avoidant attachment, and vice versa, in a dance that satisfies neither person but feels impossible to escape.”
The anxious person pursues reassurance and connection; the avoidant person withdraws to protect themselves from emotional overwhelm. Each person’s coping strategy triggers the other’s core wound, creating an escalating cycle of pain.
8. Your “Type” Is Actually Your Trauma
Many people notice they’re consistently attracted to people who are wrong for them. This isn’t bad judgment—it’s your implicit memory recognizing familiar patterns.
Quote: “If my earliest times included a sense that my closest people turned their backs on me, I will feel both agitated by and drawn toward people who ignore me. Both the pattern and the pain are familiar, and what’s even more powerful is that this is all my system knows to expect.”
Your body is drawn to what feels like “home,” even when home was painful. Healing changes who you’re attracted to by changing your internal landscape.
9. Your Protectors Aren’t the Problem—They’re Your Survival Strategy
The behaviors you judge yourself most harshly for—overworking, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, addiction—are actually brilliant adaptations that helped you survive childhood.
Quote: “Our protectors are actually our system’s attempt to shield us from emotional pain and uncertainty. Many of them, including avoidance and those critical internal voices in our heads telling us to move quickly and do what society or family expects of us, operate out of our left hemisphere.”
Battling these protectors never works. Welcoming them and understanding their purpose allows them to soften so you can access the wounds they’re protecting.
10. You Can’t Heal What You Can’t Feel
This is perhaps the central challenge in healing work: the wounds that need healing live in bodily sensations you’ve spent your life learning not to feel.
Quote: “What we can’t consciously feel, we tend to act out. And what we don’t feel safe to act out, we try to suppress. In the end, though, our wounds must go somewhere.”
The path to healing requires developing interoception—the ability to sense what’s happening in your body—and then staying with those sensations rather than immediately trying to escape them.
11. Healing Happens in Relationship, Not in Isolation
Western culture promotes self-reliance, but attachment wounds can only heal through experiencing safe connection with others.
Quote: “What was wounded in relationship can now start to heal in relationship. None of us can just go to the supermarket and buy anchors, but we can begin to get a sense of what we need and want.”
The wound itself is often the absence of safe accompaniment. You can’t heal aloneness by being more alone. You need “anchors”—people who can be truly present without judgment or agenda.
12. Your Body Has Three Brains, All Storing Memory
Baum details how your heart (with 40,000 neurons), your gut (with 100-500 million neurons), and your brain work together to encode and remember your relational experiences.
Quote: “The sensations we experience in our hearts are spread out across our chest because there are rosette-like neural centers in our thoracic cavity that are intertwined with the forty thousand or so neurons that make up our heart brain. We might call them roses of attachment, since our heart brains are dedicated to remembering experiences of connection.”
Learning to listen to sensations in your heart, belly, and muscles provides access to the implicit memories that need healing.
13. “Triggered” Is Too Harsh—You’re Being “Awakened”
Baum reframes the common language around emotional activation with more compassion and accuracy.
Quote: “When these old traumatic memories wake up, they do not come alive in order to injure us. They arise so that we may seek healing.”
Rather than seeing emotional activation as a problem or failure, recognize it as your inner world’s way of bringing forward what needs attention and care.
14. Disconfirming Experiences Change Neural Networks
Drawing on Bruce Ecker’s memory reconsolidation research, Baum explains how healing actually occurs at the neural level.
Quote: “When an old implicit memory is awake in the body (you’re feeling the sensations) and someone safe is present to offer what you needed at the time but didn’t get (the disconfirming experience), the neural network holding that memory literally opens and changes.”
This is why the presence of safe others is essential—their accompaniment provides the neurobiological conditions for the memory to be reconsolidated with safety rather than danger.
15. Co-Regulation Is More Powerful Than Self-Regulation
Your nervous system literally becomes entangled with the nervous systems of those around you. A calm person can help regulate your dysregulated state.
Quote: “When we are able to truly be with one another, our nervous systems engage in what is referred to as co-regulation. As Dan was embraced by the members of our group, our autonomic nervous systems came together to provide a net of safety that allowed Dan’s painful and fearful experiences to emerge.”
This is why trying to “just calm down” alone often fails. You need another regulated nervous system to help pull yours into safety.
16. Listening Is the Healing, Not Fixing
One of the most common mistakes in supporting someone is trying to solve their problems rather than simply being present with their pain.
Quote: “The magic in having space held is that the safer you feel in the presence of another person, the more your body’s inherent wisdom allows for memories to start to surface. The more we can be with what is happening inside us, and allow another to help hold space for us, the less we will need the behaviors and protections we’ve been relying on to avoid our pain.”
True anchors offer presence, not solutions. They stay connected even when they can’t fix anything.
17. Your Inner World Houses Everyone You’ve Ever Known
Through the process of internalization via mirror neurons and resonance circuits, you literally carry the presence of significant people inside you.
Quote: “We have the ability to actually feel them with us as a living part of our inner world. Let’s pause and really get a sense of that. Science now shows that we take each other in and actually do live within each other.”
This means healing can happen with your internalized parents even if the actual relationship remains unchanged. You can offer care to the wounded parts of them that live within you.
18. The Left-Hemisphere Hideout
Many people with attachment wounds protect themselves by shifting into left-hemisphere dominance—focusing on tasks, achievement, and logic while disconnecting from right-hemisphere emotions and relationships.
Quote: “Our left hemispheres will tell us we aren’t doing enough if we ‘just’ listen, but it turns out that the best doing is being fully present, creating an oasis of safety so that the other person can hear themselves more deeply, feel the healing wash of warm comfort, and then come into contact with their own inner wisdom.”
Western culture reinforces this protective strategy by valorizing independence and success over emotional connection, making the left-hemisphere hideout socially rewarded even as it prevents healing.
19. Your Little Me Is Still Inside You
Baum introduces the concept of “Little Me”—the younger versions of yourself that carry implicit wounds and are still waiting for the care they needed.
Quote: “When you feel a sensation in your body connected to an old wound—that knot in your belly, that tightness in your chest—you can ask gently: ‘I wonder when my body felt just like this before?’ Then wait. Not digging, not forcing, just listening.”
These aren’t metaphors. These young parts genuinely live on in your neurobiology, continuing to experience unresolved pain until they receive what they needed.
20. You Process 11 Million Bits Implicitly vs. 50 Explicitly
Research reveals the vast disparity between what you process consciously versus unconsciously, explaining why insight alone rarely produces change.
Quote: “Because we need to be paying conscious attention to encode an explicit memory, we will make exponentially more implicit memories than explicit ones, which do require conscious attention. Researcher Andreas Riener estimates that we are taking in about eleven million bits of implicit information each second while processing only about forty to fifty bits of information explicitly.”
This massive imbalance means your behavior is driven far more by what you don’t consciously know than by what you do know.
21. Love Isn’t Always Enough
Perhaps the most painful lesson: sometimes you must leave someone you genuinely love because they’re not willing or able to engage in healing work.
Quote: “When I approached him about doing this work together, he told me that he wanted a fantasy relationship, to stay in the early stage that felt like magic, not in the real one that required intense work. I knew there was no going back to the early times when we were simply lost in each other.”
The key question isn’t “Do I love them?” but “Are both of us willing to do the work of healing?” If only one person is willing, staying prevents both people from healing.
22. The Pause Between Stimulus and Response Is Everything
As you heal, new neural pathways develop between your emotional centers and prefrontal cortex, creating what Baum calls “response flexibility.”
Quote: “The more our amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex work in partnership, the more we can pause when something happens that wakes up a traumatic implicit memory in us. Instead of immediately responding with feelings and behaviors coming from the wound and from the way we have learned to protect ourselves from this kind of pain, we develop inner space to reflect.”
This pause—just a few seconds—is the difference between unconsciously repeating painful patterns and consciously choosing different responses.
23. Rupture and Repair Builds Security
Perfect relationships don’t exist, but relationships where both people can repair after conflict build trust and safety.
Quote: “In fact, research by neuroscientist Ed Tronick tells us that we offer the accurate empathic relational response about 33 percent of the time, and the other 67 percent is what he calls ‘rupture and repair’ referring to those moments in our relationships when conflict might arise but we are, eventually, able to come back together.”
The ability to repair—to acknowledge mistakes, take responsibility, and reconnect—matters far more than never having conflicts.
24. Healing Is a Spiral, Not a Linear Path
The journey doesn’t move steadily forward. You drop into old wounds repeatedly, each time with more support and resources.
Quote: “Recovery never moves in a straight line, as much as our left hemispheres would like that to be the path. Instead, it is more like a wave as we drop down into the painful places over and over. As we touch the deep places inside, we plunge into the sensations again and again. Then we come back up to daily life, allowing the newly met parts of ourselves to integrate before we enter this world of implicit pain and fear again.”
Understanding this pattern helps prevent discouragement when old wounds resurface. It doesn’t mean you’re backsliding—it means you’re healing.
25. You Can Develop Earned Security at Any Age
The most hopeful message in SAFE: history isn’t destiny. Even if you didn’t receive secure attachment as a child, you can develop it as an adult.
Quote: “When we make the journey toward healing together, both people have to be willing. One of my clients yearned to reconcile with her mother, but years of alcoholism had rendered her mom unable to even consider trying to mend the broken bond. Something similar happened with my partner. When I approached him about doing this work together, he told me that he wanted a fantasy relationship, to stay in the early stage that felt like magic, not in the real one that required intense work.”
Through consistent work with safe anchors—therapists, friends, listening partners—you can build new neural pathways that create a genuine felt sense of safety. This “earned security” is just as valid and powerful as the security that comes from early secure attachment.
The Path Forward: Practical Implementation
SAFE isn’t just theory—it’s a practical roadmap. Throughout the book, Baum offers specific practices:
- Interoception exercises for developing body awareness
- Meditation scripts for meeting your Little Me (available at jessicabaumlmhc.com/safe-meditations)
- Journaling prompts for exploring your wheel of attachment
- Nondominant hand drawing for accessing implicit memories
- Listening partnership guidelines for creating healing relationships
- Practices for welcoming protectors rather than battling them
The book is designed to be worked through slowly, with a journal and ideally with one or more anchoring companions. Baum emphasizes that this is lifelong work, not a quick fix.
Who This Book Is For
SAFE is essential reading for:
- Anyone struggling with anxious or avoidant attachment patterns
- People who keep choosing the “wrong” partners despite knowing better
- Those for whom traditional talk therapy provided insight without behavioral change
- Individuals in the anxious-avoidant trap with their partner
- Anyone wanting to understand the neuroscience of relationships
- Therapists seeking a comprehensive, body-based approach to attachment healing
- People ready to do deep work rather than seeking quick techniques
The Bottom Line
Jessica Baum’s SAFE represents a paradigm shift in how we understand and heal attachment wounds. By integrating cutting-edge neuroscience with compassionate clinical wisdom, she offers both explanation and pathway forward.
The core message is both challenging and hopeful: your wounds live in your body, not just your mind; healing requires safe relationships, not just self-understanding; the work is slow and difficult, but genuine transformation is possible at any age.
For anyone tired of understanding their patterns intellectually without being able to change them behaviorally, SAFE provides the missing piece: practices for feeling and healing the implicit memories that have been running your relationships on autopilot.
As Baum concludes: “Connection is a biological imperative. It is a reminder for me that we are meant to receive others and to be received. And reminding ourselves that we do need the warm sanctuary of our relationships is especially important now, as our collective traumatic experiences are all around us.”
The path from insecure attachment to earned security requires courage, support, and patience. But it’s a journey worth taking—for yourself, for your relationships, and for the generations that follow.