Attachment

You want connection, and yet it's terrifying. Humans are wired for relationships. Our caregivers, friends, families, and partners are essential to our well-being and yet can be very challenging when those relationships also involve pain or abuse. My training is rooted in attachment theory and the ways in which a trusted therapeutic relationship can build towards secure, nourishing, and joyful relationships.

Our early formative experiences create a blueprint for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors later in life. Experiencing rejection, neglect, trauma, or other relational injuries impacts our sense of safety and distorts our core beliefs about belonging, worth, and lovability. This, in turn, hinders our ability to show up authentically and experience genuine connection with others, ultimately creating a repetitive cycle of painful disconnection—but therapy can help break this cycle!

My practice is based in attachment science and theory. I started my career with a focus on attachment-based modalities and have continued to receive specialized, on-going training rooted in attachment theory. I am heavily influenced, personally and professionally, by the work of Jude Cassidy, Phillip Shaver, Sue Johnson, Kent Hoffman & the Circle of Security founders, Dan Siegel, Mary Ainsworth, and John Bowlby.

I work from an attachment lens.

Attachment shows up in the families we grew up in, how we connect with friends and partners, how we handle our own families of creation, and more. I draw from attachment theory whether working with individuals, couples, or families, to support people in creating strong and secure connections with self, others, and the world.

Healthy Attachment to self, family, community, and the world can all be in need of support and counseling. I am able to support you in your work to build healthy attachment rooted in your unique wholeness

I believe that attachment is the foundation for all relationships. I help my clients to understand their attachment style and how this may be preventing them from living the life that they want/.

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!

I use a psychodynamic and trauma focused approach grounded in Attachment Theory developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in 1958. I believe our childhood relationships have a direct impact on adulthood relations. The core of amalgamation in therapy is open curiosity and synergy to cultivate a trust-based relationship. These same values can be translated into having healthy adulthood relationships.

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.

No matter what type of therapy we are doing, the through line is our own attachment relationship; in the therapeutic relationship, we build safety and trust, understanding your past relationships in new ways and building new experiences in our own relationship, so that you can reshape your current and future relationships outside of therapy into secure, authentic connections.

Do you have difficulty being vulnerable in your relationships? Do you find yourself unable to reach the level of closeness or emotional depth you desire? I would love to help. I deeply enjoy helping people connect with others in their lives in ways they never thought possible. This usually entails giving yourself a chance to explore what has been getting in the way, which often means taking a compassionate look at the first relationships you developed in your life.

As an adopted person I have personal experience with primal attachment trauma and have worked through these issues myself through therapy, meditation, movement, yoga, and creative arts. I provide clients with a stable, reliable, safe therapeutic relationship to model healthy attachment, boundaries, and connection.

Maybe you've heard of attachment theory, or maybe this is all new to you. The ways we connect in relationships matters, and I can help you experience your connections in more secure healthy ways.

A key task of infancy and childhood -- an essential element in growing up to feel secure, confident, with high self-esteem -- is the formation of secure attachments to reliable, loving caregivers. I work with those who didn't have this experience growing up, to build what is called "earned secure attachment" -- the work of building those same internal circuits in adulthood, which were not adequately built in childhood.

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.

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.