Attachment Trauma Therapy
Did you experience attachment trauma?
What this is…
Attachment trauma comes from the cumulative experience of growing up in relationships that couldn't offer what every child needs: consistent safety, atunement, emotional presence, and the reliable sense that your inner world mattered to someone else. When those things were absent — or present only unpredictably — your developing mind and nervous system adapted. They built a set of strategies for getting through and surviving relationships that felt both necessary and unsafe.
Those strategies were intelligent. But at a certain point they stop working. In adulthood in your significant relationships they can show up as patterns that feel difficult to change.
Attachment trauma often is invisible, even to the people who carry it. It rarely announces itself as trauma. It reveals itself as difficulty trusting, an inability to ask for help, a pattern of choosing people who can't really show up, or a body that tenses when someone gets too close.
Who this is for…You might be in the right place if:
Your early relationships were marked by emotional unpredictability, absence, or inconsistency — not necessarily abuse, but something was missing or unreliable
Intimacy can feel threatening even when you want it — closeness triggers anxiety, withdrawal, or a need to push people away before they leave
You find yourself cycling through the same relational patterns across different relationships
You're hypervigilant in relationships — scanning for signs of rejection, abandonment, or withdrawal before they happen
Asking for help or expressing needs feels dangerous or simply impossible
You shut down emotionally under stress, or find yourself overwhelmed by emotions you can't regulate
You've done talk therapy, made real intellectual progress, and something still hasn't shifted at the level where it lives
You're drawn to people who are unavailable, and you already know this about yourself
What we work on…
Attachment patterns are not character flaws — they are relational templates encoded in the body and the nervous system as deeply as anything can be. Understanding them intellectually is a start. But the work of actually changing them happens in relationship — including the therapeutic relationship itself.
Using a psychodynamic approach, we pay close attention to what unfolds between us in the room: where trust is easy and where it isn't, what happens when you feel misunderstood or when something lands right, how closeness and distance operate in real time. The therapy relationship becomes a place to experience something different — not perfectly but with enough consistency and repair that new relational templates can begin to form. We also look at the early relationships that built the original templates: what was present, what was absent, what you needed and learned not to ask for, and how you've been carrying that ever since.
Where it's useful, I draw on attachment-focused EMDR to work with the body-level material that talk therapy alone can't always reach — the nervous system responses, the somatic memories and the implicit relational knowing that lives below conscious awareness.
How to get started…
Working together starts with a complimentary consultation call that lasts about fifteen minutes. It helps me to hear briefly what’s bringing you into therapy at this time. I can then answer any questions you may have and share more about how I work. From there you might decide to schedule a session. The best way to tell if we are a fit is to have a session or few. My wish is for you to find the best therapist for your needs, whether that’s me or someone else and we can discover that together by beginning the process and seeing what unfolds.