Attachment therapy is a form of therapy that helps you understand why relationships can feel so difficult, why you might cling too tightly, over think about small interactions, push people away, or fear opening up. These patterns often trace back to your earliest relationships, and the ways those early experiences shaped how you connect, trust, and feel safe with others today.
Rather than treating anxiety, relationship struggles, or emotionally shutting down as isolated problems, attachment therapy looks at where those patterns actually came from. The good news is that these patterns are not permanent. With support, you can build healthier, more secure ways of connecting, with yourself and the relationships that matter most.
What is Attachment?
Attachment is the emotional bond we form with our caregivers in childhood. When our needs for love, safety, and consistency are met, we develop a secure attachment, a foundation that helps us feel safe in the world and in relationships. But when those needs aren't met, through emotional unavailability, inconsistency, neglect, or conflict, we may develop insecure attachment styles that follow us into adulthood.
The Four Attachment Styles
Attachment doesn't fit neatly into one label, but most people find themselves somewhere in these four patterns. Understanding which one (or ones) resonate with you is often the first step toward making sense of why your relationships feel the way they do.
If you have an anxious attachment style, you might:
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Worry about being abandoned or unloved
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Overthink text messages, calls, or small changes in tone
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Feel like you're "too much" or "not enough" for others
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Struggle to trust that people will stay consistent
This often comes from growing up with inconsistent caregiving, when love, attention, or safety felt unpredictable. As an adult, this can show up as clinging to relationships out of fear of losing them, even if they're not meeting your needs.
Avoidant Attachment
If you have an avoidant attachment style, you might:
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Feel uncomfortable depending on others
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Struggle to open up emotionally
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Pull away when relationships get too close
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Value independence but secretly long for connection
This often develops when caregivers were emotionally unavailable or dismissive. As an adult, you may protect yourself by keeping others at a distance, but inside, you may still crave closeness and safety.
Disorganized Attachment
If you have a disorganized attachment style, you might:
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Want closeness but feel afraid of it at the same time
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Send mixed signals in relationships, pulling people in and then pushing them away
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Struggle to trust others, even when they've done nothing wrong
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Feel confused by your own reactions in close relationships
This often develops when a caregiver was both a source of comfort and a source of fear, sometimes loving and sometimes frightening, unpredictable, or overwhelming. Disorganized attachment is also frequently connected to a childhood experience with significant stress in the home growing up, such as trauma, substance use, or financial insecurity, that made caregiving inconsistent or unsafe. As an adult, this can leave you caught between wanting connection and feeling unsafe within it, so relationships can feel like something to both long for and brace against.
Secure Attachment
If you have a secure attachment style, you might:
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Feel comfortable being close to others without losing yourself
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Trust that people can be depended on, even when things get hard
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Communicate your needs directly instead of guessing or withdrawing
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Handle conflict without fearing it will end the relationship
Secure attachment develops when you had adults in your life who were attuned and emotionally present. When you experienced challenges or difficult moments in relationships, they were met with support and curiosity, not dismissal or shutdown. As an adult now, this shows up as feeling comfortable expressing concerns in your relationships without fear of the other person pulling away, being too much, or the relationship ending.
How Attachment Patterns Develop
Attachment patterns form early, often before we have language to describe what we're experiencing. As infants and young children, we depend entirely on our parents or caregivers for safety, comfort, and connection. The way those needs were met, consistently or inconsistently, warmly or coldly, predictably or unpredictably, becomes the blueprint our nervous system uses to understand what relationships are supposed to feel like.
This isn't about blame. Most parents or caregivers are doing the best they can with what they know, and many attachment wounds form even in loving homes, through stress, grief, mental health struggles, or simply not knowing how to be emotionally present. What matters now isn't why it happened. It's that these early patterns don't have to be permanent. With the right support, they can be understood, and changed.
How Attachment Therapy Works
Attachment therapy doesn't start with fixing symptoms. It starts with understanding them, why they developed, what they're protecting you from, and what they've been trying to communicate all along.
In our work together, we'll explore the patterns that shape your relationships now and trace them back to where they began. From there, we focus on helping your nervous system experience something different: consistency, safety, and connection that doesn't disappear when things get hard. Over time, this is what allows old patterns to loosen their grip, not because you've willed them away, but because you've built something more secure to replace them.
I specialize in attachment therapy for adults who are ready to stop surviving relationships and start feeling secure in them. Whether that shows up as anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, or something in between, the goal is the same: helping you feel safe, connected, and grounded in the relationships that matter most.
Using EMDR, IFS (Parts Work), and EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy), I help you release old wounds, connect with your true self, and create healthier, more secure connections with others.
You don't have to stay stuck in old patterns. Attachment therapy can help you move from anxiety, fear and disconnection toward trust, intimacy, and resilience.
EMDR
EMDR helps you process the memories and experiences your mind is still holding onto, the ones that keep showing up in how you react, protect yourself, or shut down in relationships today. Rather than just talking through what happened, EMDR helps your nervous system finally let go of the emotional charge attached to those experiences.
Internal Family Systems & Parts Work
Internal Family Systems helps you understand the different "parts" of yourself that developed to keep you safe, the part that people-pleases, the part that shuts down, the part that pushes people away before they can leave first. IFS helps you build a relationship with these parts instead of fighting them, so you can lead from a calmer, more grounded place.
Emotionally Focused Therapy
EFT focuses on the emotional bond between you and the people closest to you.
EFT helps you recognize the patterns, or "cycle," that creates distance or conflict. It helps you slow down to notice the deeper meaning or need behind behaviors, allowing you and the people closest to you to communicate in a new way, which builds trust and closeness never experienced before. It allows you to show up fully, without fear of losing yourself or the relationship.
For some people, attachment wounds go deeper than difficulty trusting or fear of closeness. When early relationships involved significant stress, trauma, or unpredictability, the nervous system sometimes learns to cope by disconnecting, from emotions, from memories, or even from a felt sense of being present in your own body.
If you find yourself feeling numb, foggy, or disconnected from yourself, especially in moments of stress or conflict, this may be part of what's happening. I have specialized training in working with dissociation, and I treat it specifically through IFS and Parts Work, which helps you build a relationship with the parts of yourself that learned to disconnect as a way to stay safe. I bring this experience into sessions with care, at a pace that never asks you to go further than feels safe.
Frequently Asked Questions
You Don't Have to Keep Feeling This Way
Whatever pattern you recognized yourself in, anxious, avoidant, disorganized, or somewhere in between, it developed for a reason, and it can change. You don't have to keep bracing for disappointment, keeping people at arm's length, or wondering if you're too much. Secure, connected relationships are possible, starting with the one you have with yourself.