Attachment

An individual with attachment challenges may struggle in relationships ( Maintaining them, trusting other people, feeling safe in a relationship and forming healthy bonds with others. Creating healthy emotional bonds has a tremendous impact on our lives. Let me help you create the sense of belonging with your loves ones!

Our relationship with those closest to us affects how we form our own identities, and impacts how we interact with everyone else around us. Attachment and trauma experiences go hand in hand, and play a huge role in how and why one experiences mental health concerns, including anxiety, depression, low self-worth, anger, dissociation, and so much more. I aim to help you recognize these attachment concerns and how they affect you, and work through them.

I have been trained in attachment theory and utilize it in my work with clients. I believe that the impacts of attachment styles developed in early childhood can show up in relationships through adulthood, and in the importance of working with and challenging them in a compassionate way to ensure healthy relational outcomes.

27 years experience, working with children, diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder.

I offer Experiential Attachment Psychotherapy which is a dynamic, present-moment mindfulness process that supports you in understanding the way you orient toward yourself, others, and the world and offers us the opportunity to heal developmental or transitional attachment wounds and trauma in present-moment processing in our relationship. The goals of this process is you feeling a sense of I AM, I WANT, and I CAN rooted securely within yourself and a solid and strong sense internal goodness.

Attachment theory offers a research-based framework to understand how we experience and respond to closeness, distance, emotional connection, emotional disconnection, and conflict in our relationships. By examining relationships through both trauma-informed and attachment-informed lenses, we can gain deeper insights into our emotional reactions and behaviors. In therapy, we can explore new ways to manage relational triggers, cope with intense emotions, and communicate more effectively.

Through an attachment-based lens, I explore how childhood and early family dynamics have shaped your worldview. This allows us to delve into various life experiences, your perceptions of relationships, and the coping strategies you use to navigate daily challenges. Throughout our time together, you will learn how to boost self-confidence, shift negative internal beliefs, and develop a strong sense of self. Ultimately, my aim is to empower you to lead a more fulfilling and authentic life.

I have specialty training in how trauma suffered during childhood impacts ongoing attachment styles. This is my primary area of expertise.

A healthy attachment is neither forced to be near nor forced to be away. Secure attachment comes from the security and safety to be in relationship and be ourselves in a way that is successful to our lives and honers the life of our relationships. Healthy attachment doesn't ask us to compromise ourselves or our others. It is the ability to hold with others and our selves. Education and knowing your tendencies in attachment will empower productivity in your relationships and avoid your triggers.

As an attachment based therapist, I view the therapy process through a relational lens. I explore how your responses to stress and conflict are influenced by your unmet attachment needs. I utilize attachment theory to help you highlight your vulnerable emotions and relational needs, to guide you in the development of self-advocacy skills.

Attachment is a foundational piece of my work as a therapist. I believe deeply that each of us carries the stories of our family and its history within us. Not only that, but you carry the stories they gave to you *about* you. Most of those stories are false. In our work together, we'll dig out the stories that no longer serve you, and create space for new stories to take root. My hope is that our work will help you reclaim your connection to your body, inner wisdom, and authentic truth.

Couples, as well as parents and their children, work with me to form secure attachments with each other. I help clients experiencing relationship difficulties and those who experience pain from circumstances or losses. While therapy work does not always focus on a client's childhood experiences, those pieces of our lives are always part of the story that makes us who we are. Both suffering and resilience come from our attachment relationships: parents, siblings, partners, children, even friends.

I work with clients to better understand the way your attachment styles impact the significant relationships in your life. I believe that we are all capable of different attachment orientations (sometimes at the same time) and I help clients recognize the way historic relational patterns impact impact them today.

Relational wounds are at the heart of our deepest pain. Using an attachment theory framework and principles of Internal Family Systems, I work with clients to understand their attachment wounds and heal from relational trauma.