How Attachment Therapy Helps Change Our Relationships

A lot of people come to my practice wanting to work on their relationships. This is often the heartbeat of so much therapeutic work. Which makes sense, our relationships are pretty central to our lives. What does it look like to address our relational concerns in therapy? How can therapy be a catalyst for change in our primary attachment relationships?

Drawing connections to deepen understanding

When doing attachment work in therapy, this often starts with understanding the nature of your childhood experiences, how you were parented, nurtured, cared for, or what was missing. We might draw connections between your family of origin and your adult relationships. Are there unmet needs from childhood that you’re still trying to get met in an adult relationship? Or perhaps a dynamic from childhood that you’re recreating in a romantic relationship? 

The role of consistency and availability in secure attachment

Part of attachment therapy is also doing a bit of psychoeducation and deepening understanding of what constitutes a secure attachment relationship. Two key features of secure attachment are consistency and availability. How emotionally available is the attachment figure? Are they around, do they show up when you need them? How consistent are they in how they show up? Do they, in general, try to listen, understand, empathize, support, show care, etc? It’s also worth noting that in secure attachment relationships, we also need to miss it sometimes. We need to bumble our way through times where we haven’t quite met each other well. This is about rupture and repair. Our attachment systems respond to the missing and the reconnecting that happens by building a sense of security, trust, and rapport. This is one of reasons why in parenting we’re aiming for “good enough parenting,” and why that’s actually healthier.

Safety and emotional expression in therapy

In all of this attachment work, as you’re telling the story of your relationships, it’s important that the therapeutic space is one where you feel safe, where you can really express how you feel about what’s happened to you. It’s within the relative safety and trust of the therapeutic relationship where healing can happen through the nurturing, care, and attunement of a therapist, while you are processing any hurt, harm, or disappointment about other relationships. This in and of itself can be healing. To have someone listening and being with, as you share and express. This is the basis of good therapy.

Learning to tolerate new experiences

As odd as it may sound, when you start to change your relationships, your attachment system will need to adjust. When we develop an attachment system in a less than optimal environment or have had some disruptions to the availability or consistency of our primary caregivers, our systems adapt. Unconsciously, we develop strategies for how to survive and be ok. Which means in adulthood, we might be habituated to a certain way of being close (or not close) to people. When we start to consciously change this in therapy, it takes some getting used to. It may at first feel strange, uncomfortable, and we may even mix up what feels safe with what’s actually familiar. It’s a process of lingering in these new experiences long enough to learn to tolerate them, giving our system a chance to orient to what’s new and less familiar, a chance to look around and say, “Oh yes! This. This is what I’ve been hoping for, this is what I’ve been practicing toward.” This is why sometimes in therapy it’s good to reflect on what’s different, what’s changed, notice growth and development and give the new goods a chance to integrate into the human ecosystem.

Relational change is some of the hardest and most rewarding work I’ve seen occur in therapy. It’s not without focus, hard work, repetition, perhaps pushing through some initial discomfort, and deepening understanding of why we are the way we are and feel the way we do. This is just a snapshot of what that work can look like in attachment therapy. If you’re curious about this deep, life-altering work, I hope you’ll reach out about how attachment therapy can jumpstart change to your relationships.