Attachment Theory

Everyone has strategies to get their needs met. Often times these once essential strategies become patterns in our life that keep us from connecting and turning toward one another. Attachment and emotion-focused therapy invites us to understand and build compassion for our old patterns, while building new, healthier strategies for connection by identifying our emotions and giving voice to our needs.

All people want to feel connected to and valued by others. Attachment therapy recognizes that we cannot heal in isolation and honors the profound difficulties that can arise when we feel disconnected from those we rely on for support. I completed a one-year internship in my graduate program focused on attachment-based therapy and use this theory as the bedrock for my work. Working from this lens, I work to build secure and authentic relationships with my clients so they can feel safe and valued.

Attachment-based therapy is an approach aimed at helping people develop secure attachments. This is done in several ways, one of which includes helping the client understand how early in life experiences with attachment figures affected them. As a therapist, my aim is to cultivate a relationship that feels safe, and where the client can be honest and open without judgment. The basic idea is that a safe relationship with a therapist can help you start to feel safe in other relationships.

All of us have relational blueprints that we learned in childhood. Its these blueprints that are often responsible for sucking us back into repeating old patterns. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--although I know it can feel like it! Instead, this experience of stuckness and repetition can be a clue that there's something unresolved from the past that we need to work through.

I am a Certified Becoming Safely Embodied practitioner, taught by Deirdre Fay. It is a program that is grounded in attachment theory research. Brainspotting is also a powerful modality in supporting clients who struggle with attachment and relationship challenges and wounds.

I believe that so much of who you are comes from the coding that you have built and developed starting from the first day you were born. I provide a space that helps you understand what makes you tick and inspires you to shift unhelpful relationship and behavioral patterns into ones that work for you.

Attachment-Based Family works by rebuilding trust within the parent-child relationship—providing a solid foundation that promotes authentic connection and enhances teen mental health. This type of family counseling provides a clear path to achieving what both parents and children want most: closer, more meaningful relationships with one another. As a result, teens feel safe turning to their parents for support—and that leads to improvements in teen mental health and reductions in suicide risk.

Attachment theory, in developmental psychology, is the theory that humans are born with a need to form a close emotional bond with a caregiver and that such a bond will develop during the first six months of a child’s life if the caregiver is appropriately responsive. The British psychologist John Bowlby developed the theory focused on the experience, expression, and regulation of emotions at both species (normative) and individual (person-specific) levels of analysis.

I have extensive experience in working with parents and families through an attachment lens. I understand that a strong, safe relationship, rooted in connection, is the key to lasting change, and emboldens you to build the life you want.

Attachment theory focuses on the how we have learned to experience ourselves and others through the relationships that we were raised in, and can help to inform who some people struggle with trust, intimacy and communication in intimate partner relationships as well as how these struggles may be improved through therapy and couples therapy. Attachment theory is closely related to both family systems and object relations models of psychotherapy.

From a young age, all of us are taught ways of relating to others - these strategies are often messages or ways of relating that friends, family & community pass down. If the adults around us didn't know how to relate in healthy ways, we often carry some of that programming with us into adulthood. In our work together, we will explore this old programming and help you build a style of relating and communicating that feels authentic and true to you.

Attachment-based therapy is a brief, process-oriented form of psychological counseling. The client-therapist relationship is based on developing or rebuilding trust and centers on expressing emotions. An attachment-based approach to therapy looks at the connection between an infant’s early attachment experiences with primary caregivers. Attachment-based therapy aims to build or rebuild a trusting, supportive relationship that will help prevent or treat anxiety or depression.

Attachment theory is one of the bedrocks upon which I have built my own approach and skill set. Just as we can be grievously injured in relationship, we can grow and heal in one too. I know that our earliest experiences are the legs upon which our more mature lives stand on and sometimes we need a helping hand to explore areas of life that remain untested or parts of ourselves that we’d prefer not to know about.

Attachment is a fancy therapy-word for important relationships. Our earliest relationships with our primary caregivers become the foundation for how we relate to others throughout our lives. But attachment is fluid, so later relationships still affect us such as with friends or mentors. If there were wounds in early relationships, then our self-esteem, romantic/platonic relationships can also be impacted later. I will help you heal old wounds and foster new, healthy relationships.

I use attachment theory to understand and support the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, particularly the influence of early attachment experiences on an individual's emotional and relational well-being. In doing so, I focus on exploration of early attachment experiences, building a secure therapeutic relationship, mindfully exploring current relationships and employing interventions aimed at improving attachment security.