Attachment Theory

Healing attachment and relational trauma from childhood is a process. A critical part of that process is grieving the fact that you didn’t have a parent who was able to meet your needs in the healthy way you deserved. While this can be painful to acknowledge, it’s also empowering to realize that you are now the best person to reparent yourself.

I specialize in Attachment Theory, helping clients understand how early relationships shape emotional patterns and connection styles. Whether struggling with insecurity, fear of abandonment, or difficulty trusting others, I guide clients in recognizing and healing attachment wounds. Using evidence-based approaches, I help build secure attachment within, fostering self-trust, emotional resilience, and the ability to form deeper, healthier relationships with oneself and others.

If you find yourself struggling with fear and reactivity in your relationships, you might be suffering from an attachment issue. If you grew up with inconsistent, unreliable, fearful or frightening parents, you might find intimacy uncomfortable, or never feel like you can never get as close to your partner as you would like to be. You might become fearful or angry at your partner in ways that don't seem to make sense. It does make sense, though, truly... please reach out and I'll tell you more!

Attachment theory has been a very useful tool in describing the interactions in all relationships, especially those that involve behavioral difficulties between parents and children. Having worked in children's mental health for over 11 years, Attachment Theory has been the main foundation for my work during this time.

I work collaboratively with partners, families and individuals who want to foster connection and form deeper, more loving relationships. I also work with parents to identify their struggles with parenting (be it a one time issue or an on going parenting struggle) and develop a plan to support the entire family system.

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.

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.

Working with attachment theory means I pay close attention to how a person shows up in relationships which includes strangers.

I work collaboratively with partners, families and individuals who want to foster connection and form deeper, more loving relationships. I also work with parents to identify their struggles with parenting (be it a one time issue or an on going parenting struggle) and develop a plan to support the entire family system.

Shaped by both nature and nurture, we seek connection across a wide social landscape. In therapy, safety and empathy guide us through our earliest experiences. Gently, we unravel the layers, fostering self-compassion, insight, and acceptance of our authentic selves. Over time, this process builds trust in who we are and reaffirms our right to simply exist.

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.

My approach is kind and thoughtful, but I am relentless in seeking to understand how a client's attachment patterns hold sway over their relational life. The words I use with clients are intentionally attuned to give voice to their deepest longings. When clients express these needs and experience validation is when the deep healing begins. Hidden push-pull forces of anxiety and disconnection give way to vulnerable requests and acceptance.

Understanding attachment and how it has played out in our life assists us in developing a greater understanding of how we act in relationships, whether platonic, professional, or emotional. Utilizing attachment theory we work through breaking down unhealthy attachment patterns and developing healthier views of attachment to others.

I have trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) as well as studied other sources of attachment theory, and ways that this shows up in our individual patterns as well as relationship dynamics.

The attachment work I do is deep and transformative and sometimes escapes words. I have received specialized Somatic training with Kathy Kain and Stephen J. Terrell which approaches attachment theory work from the bottom up versus the top down. This means bringing my attention to healing the early age physiology first before approaching the adult cognitive brain, which comes second. I also include consciousness and intention around my own attachment style when working on this deep level with clients.

Our attachment styles with original caretakers inform the way we relate to others as adults, including partners, friends, and even coworkers. I help patients untangle their feelings and experiences located in the past from their present relational patterns, decide what’s still needed and useful, and what they can let go of.