Guides
Attachment-Focused Therapy
How you learned to reach for people and manage distance—and how that early template still shapes closeness with partners, family, and colleagues.
Approaches I draw on
Attachment theory is foundational to how I work, and it’s especially useful when the question you keep asking is some version of “why do I keep doing this with people?” It goes back to the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who argued that a young child’s bond with their caregivers isn’t a nicety—it’s a matter of survival.
The idea at its center is that our earliest experiences of being met, or not met, become a template we carry into later relationships. It quietly shapes who you’re drawn to, what you do when you feel exposed, and what you expect if you let someone matter. The relationship & attachment patterns page covers the patterns themselves, and this guide is about how we work with them.
Patterns that once made sense
If you take one thing from attachment theory, I’d want it to be this: the patterns it describes are intelligent adaptations. Long before you had words for any of it, you were working out what brought comfort and what put it at risk. If comfort was unpredictable, you might have learned to watch closely for any shift; if having needs caused trouble, you might have learned to have fewer of them, or to meet them all yourself.
Those strategies worked, which is exactly why they’re so hard to put down. Years later, one can still be guarding you against something that isn’t happening anymore—and costing you the closeness you actually want.
Where it shows up now
Attachment patterns don’t stay politely inside romantic relationships. They tend to turn up wherever closeness, dependence, or being evaluated is involved, which covers a surprising amount of adult life:
- With partners: the argument that seems to be about the dishes but is really about whether you matter
- With family: how one phone call with a parent can leave you feeling about nine years old
- With colleagues: a curt email from your manager that takes over your afternoon, or how hard it is to ask for help
- With friends: always being the one who checks in, and wondering what would happen if you stopped
- In dating: the pull of someone who’s hard to read, which is a big part of why a situationship can feel so intense
What the work looks like in session
A lot of attachment-focused work happens in real time. When you talk about someone who matters to you, I’m paying attention to what happens as you do—whether you speed up, go vague, crack a joke, or start defending them. We’ll notice the pattern while it’s live, then trace it back to where it made sense. Seeing the original logic can take some of the shame out of a pattern, which tends to make it easier to work with.
The relationship with me is part of this too. If you find yourself waiting for me to get tired of you, feeling uneasy after a session where you felt understood, or wanting to need nothing from me at all, that isn’t something to hide. It’s the pattern showing up somewhere we can both see it, which gives us a chance to look at it gently and try something different.
Attachment work sits close to psychodynamic therapy, and I often bring in Internal Family Systems too, to meet the part of you that reaches, the part that pulls back, and the younger part they’re both protecting.
On your own or with a partner
You don’t need a partner to do attachment work. In individual therapy, we can explore how you reach and brace across dating, friendships, family, and work, in 45-minute video sessions while you’re in California or Massachusetts. Your patterns travel with you, so you can work on them even if nobody else ever joins a session.
If you’re in a relationship and you both want to understand what keeps happening between you, couples therapy makes room for each partner’s attachment pattern, in 60-minute sessions. Torn between the two? The guide to individual or couples therapy walks through the choice.
Either way, the first step is a brief note through the contact form to set up a free 15-minute video consultation about what you’re hoping for and whether I’m the right fit.
A few common questions
Is attachment work about blaming my parents?
No. Understanding where a pattern came from isn’t the same as putting anyone on trial. You can hold real compassion for the people who raised you and still be honest about what you needed and didn’t get. The point is to understand the strategy you built and decide what you’d like to keep.
What are attachment styles?
They’re a shorthand that grew out of attachment theory: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized, sometimes called fearful-avoidant. The categories came from watching how young children respond when a caregiver leaves and comes back, and were later applied to adult relationships.
They can be a helpful starting point, but they’re not the whole story. A style describes a strategy you learned, not a verdict on who you are, and in our work we’ll look at what actually happens in your relationships rather than settle for a quiz result.
Can attachment patterns change?
They can shift, usually gradually. Change tends to come from many small experiences of closeness going differently than you expected, and therapy is one place to have them on purpose. There’s no set timeline, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but your pattern will be taken seriously and met with respect.