Attachment Theory

I help individuals who struggle maintaining secure and healthy relationships by providing them with an understanding of how their attachment style can influence cognitive distortions and behavior.

Some of the best research in the psychological field was able to help understand what we all now is crucial to our lives - connection. Understanding how we connect to others and ourselves helps us have the kind of healthy relationships we all want to have.

I see people from the perspective of how they form attachments to others and help them see the root cause and to heal from past attachment trauma. Most often this happens with our parents.

An attachment-based approach to therapy looks at the connection between an client's early attachment experiences with primary caregivers and the client's ability to form healthy emotional and physical relationships as an adult. Attachment-based therapy aims to build a trusting, supportive client-counselor relationship that will serve as a blueprint for other relationships and help alleviate mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.

My treatment modalities are rooted in attachment theory and the idea that early life experiences do impact us as we move through life

Our earliest relationships with caregivers and the ways we learned to get our needs met often manifest in our adult relationships. We'll examine your attachment style, whether it's anxious, avoidant, disorganized, or a combination, and explore ways to heal your attachment wounds.

The journey to healing is so much about relationship, and the "theory of attachment" is a wonderful way to put into words how we relate to everything in our world. I use the language of attachment alongside the other modalities in order for couples, individuals, groups to understand how and why they relate they way they do. This awareness allows us to adjust how we relate, and in doing so, move towards healing and health.

In examining how your past has impacted the way in which you view others and how you interact in relationships, I use the relationship between you and I as a vehicle for change. My aim is to create a corrective experience for you and create a space where you can try out different ways of being and interacting with others, if you so choose.

Attachment therapy submits that the bonds between caregivers and children in early life significantly influence emotional and relational patterns throughout an individual's life. This approach aims to address and repair disruptions in these early attachment relationships. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship as a secure base from which clients can explore & understand their attachment patterns. This trusting relationship with the therapist helps clients heal past attachment disruptions.

We’ll explore where you learned to protect yourself emotionally and how those early experiences shape current relationships. By understanding these protective strategies, we'll shift old patterns and create healthier, more secure connections. This process builds emotional resilience, deepens trust, and opens the door to richer, more fulfilling relationships. You’ll learn to navigate relationships with more clarity, safety, and confidence, leading to deeper and more meaningful bonds.

Attachment theory suggests that infants form bonds with their caretakers instinctively to ensure safety and survival. These early bonds, known as attachment styles, continue to impact a person's relationships throughout their life. By understanding attachment theory, we can gain insight into a person's emotional and physiological bonds when it comes to forming relationships, particularly with romantic partners.

I work from an attachment perspective to de-escalate the problematic interactional cycle maintaining attachment insecurity and relationship distress by creating a therapeutic alliance and accessing unacknowledged primary emotions. Working from an attachment perspective allows individuals and couples access in underlying attachment-related emotions and the needs associated with these emotions opens the individual, couple, and/or family to address needs in new ways.

I believe our early attachment relationships inform our adult relationships and view of the world.

How we show up in relationships can be greatly impacted by how we were treated and cared for as young children. Attachment theory teaches that how we participate in relationships, both romantic and platonic, is affected by how we were treated as children. I help clients learn how to be in relationships that are both healthy and honoring to who they are. As humans, we are created to be in deep and meaningful relationships and I can help clients have them.

Recognizing the significance of interpersonal relationships in fostering healing and resilience, I use an integrative approach that is grounded in attachment theory and draws from a variety of clinical and therapeutic modalities to provide personalized, trauma-informed care.

How we are tended to as children greatly impacts us as adults. As a child, if all our needs are met we are more comfortable being ourselves and interacting in the world. But say we were not really tended to when we were upset as a child, this teaches us that we can't rely on others to help us in hard times and that we have to figure things out on our own. Understanding where our attachments are and how they started can help us to work towards creating healthier and happier connections.

My career has been focused on understanding & working from an attachment-based perspective. My trainings, my research, & my readings are generally related to attachment (& trauma). It's challenging for me NOT to view the struggles that clients experience as being mostly relational & rooted in attachment in one way or another. As they say, "Before labeling yourself with depression, make sure you're not just surrounded by a**holes," (it's not quite so simple, but there's some truth to it).

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.

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.

I use an attachment theory framework in my work and have experience working with anxious, avoidant and disorganized attachment styles in adults and children. Part of my goal as a therapist is to help people become more securely attached and increase relational security.