Attachment Based Therapy
What is Attachment Based Therapy?
Early childhood relationships form the foundation for how you relate to others later in life. Attachment-based therapy focuses on the effects of these early relationships on our ability to lead healthy adult relationships, as well as their influence on our motivation and goal orientation. When these early bonds are strong and secure, they lead to safety, security and support healthy, secure connections with others in adulthood. When those bonds are unstable, future relationships often become more difficult.
Attachment-based therapy stems from the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, who emphasised that a secure early bond with at least one primary caregiver is essential for a child’s sense of safety and for developing the confidence to explore, learn, and engage with others. They identified four main attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised.
The benefits of attachment-based therapy include helping people with insecure early attachments learn how to trust others, regulate their emotions effectively, and meet their own emotional needs as adults. These skills can then be transferred to other areas, such as socialising and goal orientation, leading to better self-esteem, confidence, and overall quality of life.
Most often people with anxious attachment seek therapy due to difficulties in connections with themselves or others. However, anyone struggling to foster deep, meaningful connections with others can benefit from attachment based therapy. In particular, it can be helpful to support those who find it difficult to be emotionally vulnerable, leave relationships early due to fear, have difficulty trusting or worry that they may be alone or abandoned in their relationships.
How Does Attachment Based Therapy Work?
Attachment based therapy typically involves
- Deep exploration of early relationships with parents or caregivers, childhood family dynamics and experiences.
- Re-parenting the inner child, responding with compassion to early needs that went unfulfilled and still shape adult behaviour.
- Drawing attention to your strengths and abilities, helping you see that you do not require external approval to feel secure.
- Reflecting on adult interpersonal relationships such as romantic partners, friends and co-workers which helps to understand connections to early relationships and how the past may have influenced the present.
- Learning skills to improve current relationships, emotions, and behaviours.
- Working together with partners and other family members to enhance connection if the client wishes to.
Attachment-based therapy can be a very effective and powerful modality. Much of its success depends on the therapeutic relationship, the client’s unique needs, ability to be vulnerable, and readiness for change.
Our Approach at The Therapy Collective
At the Therapy Collective, we are able to take an attachment-based approach in individual, couple, family and group therapy with both teens and adults, helping clients to mend or recover from fractured relationships.
In our work with individuals, we strive to establish a secure bond between client and therapist. We prioritise felt safety, a sense of being seen, known and valued, a relational experience of compassion, nurture and comfort, and support for empowerment, growth, and independence. Through this corrective emotional experience, clients can feel safe and secure, build trust to be vulnerable, communicate more openly and better understand how their current emotions, behaviours and patterns of relating might be associated with earlier childhood experiences. Through our attachment based therapy, clients can learn skills such as self compassion, self soothing and emotional regulation. increasing self esteem and self confidence.
Through our attachment based couple therapy, we create a safe and supportive environment where both partners can feel seen and heard and develop a deeper understanding of each others needs. We support couples experiencing challenges related to trust, communication and unresolved emotional wounds from their past to cultivate a more secure connection, greater trust, intimacy, and a stronger foundation for navigating challenges.
With family therapy, we work both with teen and adult children alone and with the family as a group to help parent and child repair ruptures in their relationship and work to develop, rebuild and strengthen an emotionally secure relationship.