ATTACHMENT & RELATIONSHIPS
Understand Your Patterns & Create Healthier Bonds
Attachment is the science of how human beings bond and form relationships. It describes how we sought out love and protection from our parents in infancy, how we built friendships as children and teens, and what we look for in a romantic partner as adults. Understanding how your earliest experiences shape your implicit biases and needs in relationships can help you to build more secure, satisfying relationships – with yourself and with others.
Attachment Patterns Shape Our Relationships
In many ways, our earliest experiences with our parents and caregivers shape the expectations we carry into relationships throughout our lives. These experiences influence how we connect, cope with conflict, and seek love and affection. Some of us were lucky enough to have parents who reliably met our needs and protected us from harm, helping us develop into capable, flexible, and confident people. But many of us grew up in environments where our caregivers' best efforts fell short in ways that continue to haunt us into our adult lives. Therapy is a wonderful place to unpack these patterns and understand how they inform our current-day relationships with a goal of creating new ways of relating that enhance our personal security and relational fulfillment.
Common Areas of Focus
Anxious Attachment
Avoidant Attachment
Fear of Intimacy
Difficulties Trusting & Feeling Safe
Emotional Unavailability
Healing From
Past Hurts
Recurring Relationship Patterns
Building More Secure Connections
Attachment Patterns Are Adaptations
Attachment patterns are not personality types—they are implicit beliefs and habits we learned early in life that helped us seek safety and connection when we needed them most. Nevertheless, some of these habits can become overly rigid and less suited for the relationships we develop later in life, contributing to interpersonal friction, dependency, or isolation. By learning to understand how we learned to adapt to our earliest relationships and how that impacts how we show up in relationships today, we can start to build more flexible approaches that allow for more adaptive responses to our current social environments.