Attachment Coaching
Struggling with Unresolved Attachment Issues?
As an attachment coach, I offer a safe and trusting working relationship, creating a secure base for you to explore and heal your attachment conditioning.
What Makes My Approach Unique?
Consistent Attunement & Reliability: Through attunement, reliability, and unconditional positive regard, we will uncover your attachment patterns and how they influence your current relationships.
Exploring Your Past: We’ll delve into your early childhood experiences to understand how they’ve shaped patterns that persist into adulthood.
Emotional Regulation: I provide clients with a robust suite of emotional regulation skills, effective in managing overwhelm.
Healthy Coping Mechanisms: With my help as your attachment coach, we'll identify maladaptive coping strategies and replace them with healthier, more effective ones.
Developing Collaborative Secure Relationships
Insecure attachment often leads to underdeveloped interpersonal skills. I work collaboratively and dynamically with you to develop secure communication and interpersonal skills that enhance your relationships.
Fostering Self-Reflectivity
In the Third Pillar, we focus on developing self-reflectivity, also known as mentalizing, so you can better identify and articulate your wishes and desires.
Individualized Psychoeducation
To support your healing as your attachment coach, I provide individualized, evidence-based psychoeducation that aligns with your unique experiences and behaviors.
The Power of the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (IPF)
The Ideal Parent Figure Protocol is the most innovative part of the Three Pillars approach and my specialty. It’s at the core of providing corrective experiences that can reshape your attachment patterns positively. Addressing attachment injuries requires us to confront any underlying wounds that may have contributed to attachment disturbances, setting the stage for genuine, lasting healing.
Coaching Session Core Components
We explore your Attachment History: The client shares their early attachment experiences, making sense of how these experiences shape their current relationships.
Developing positive and effective Regulation Techniques: attachment style coach covers practical emotional regulation strategies, such as mindfulness, grounding, and distress tolerance, so you can settle.
Interpersonal Skills Development: we focuses on improving communication and relationship skills through role-playing and empathetic feedback.
Restructuring Negative Beliefs: attachment coach challenge and uproot core limiting beliefs about your sense of self and others, to develop more positive and realistic perspectives.
Specialized Techniques
Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) Protocol: This involves imagining an ideal parent figure and engaging in mental imagery exercises to re-experience early attachment needs in a safe and supportive context.
Metacognitive Skills Training: Have you ever had an “Aha!” moment and insight into your life allowed you to make sense of what is happening in a new and different way? We’ll use specific mindfulness and interpersonal practices to develop self-awareness in order to track thoughts, feelings and more without judgment.
Collaborative Nonverbal and Verbal Behavior: We work together to develop a shared understanding of nonverbal communication and inner expression, resulting (building up to) in clear effective expression.
Gold standard assessments for determining your attachment style:
Expert reliable scoring: Correctly identifying your attachment strategy is pivotal to tailoring the therapeutic treatment approach. The results can often be surprising and not at all what you may expect.
For this reason, I recommend completing the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP) in lieu of self-report measures, as these are administered and scored by independent trained specialists, limiting bias and increasing reliability.
Benefits of Working with an Attachment Coach
Working with an attachment style coach can offer significant benefits in repairing attachment disturbances and help you avoid common pitfalls:
Improved Emotional Regulation
Understanding and managing emotions: A skilled facilitator can help clients recognize, understand, and regulate affective experience.
Reducing emotional reactivity: By developing healthier coping mechanisms, clients can decrease overwhelming emotional responses.
Stronger Relationships
Building trust and intimacy: An attachment coach can guide clients in developing secure attachment bonds and fostering healthier relationships.
Improving communication skills: Clients learn effective communication strategies to express their needs and boundaries.
Resolving relationship conflicts: An attachment style coach provides tools to navigate and resolve interpersonal challenges.
Enhanced Self-Esteem and Self-Worth
Challenging negative beliefs: An attachment coach helps clients identify and modify self-critical thoughts and beliefs.
Developing a positive self-image: By fostering self-compassion and acceptance, clients can enhance their self-worth.
Increased Resilience
Building coping skills: Attachment coaches equip clients with strategies to handle stress and adversity.
Overcoming challenges: With increased resilience, clients can navigate life's difficulties with greater ease.
Personal Growth and Fulfillment
Exploring personal values and goals: through attachment coaching we support clients in discovering their passions and aspirations.
Achieving life satisfaction: By addressing attachment-related issues, clients can unlock their full potential and experience greater life satisfaction.
Ultimately, working with a skilled and experienced attachment coach can lead to a profound transformation, allowing individuals to heal from past attachment injuries, building stronger connections, and living more fulfilling lives.
Overview of Adult Attachment Styles
From Secure to Insecure Organized and Complex Disorganization
Secure Attachment
Secure Adults have a strong belief in the reliability and trustworthiness of other people. Because secure children experienced reliable and predictable caregivers that were trustworthy, as adults they can select for people matching this template. In this way, they are able to recreate a sense of reliability and mutuality in adulthood as they surround themselves with other secure people.
Comfortable with intimacy: They can form deep, emotional connections without fear of abandonment or engulfment.
Effective communication: They express their needs and feelings openly and honestly.
Strong sense of self: They have a positive self-image and are comfortable with independence.
Resilience: They can cope with stress and challenges effectively, leaning into their own emotional regulation toolbox and their vast social support network.
Healthy boundaries: They can set and maintain appropriate boundaries in relationships.
Individuals with secure attachment styles often report higher levels of life satisfaction, relationship fulfillment, and overall well-being. Their childhood experiences involved caregivers who were consistently responsive, available, and emotionally supportive, fostering a sense of safety and security.
Avoidant-Dismissive
Avoidant dismissive attachers overvalue independence, appearing self-reliant and resisting emotional closeness. They struggle to identify and express their feelings, particularly vulnerability. Even though avoidant dismissive adults don’t share or “feel” their own feelings, they do have feelings that affect their behavior, but they cannot tolerate this experience consciously so these feelings are suppressed or outright denied.
Fear of intimacy: They often avoid deep connections due to a fear of being engulfed or controlled.
Difficulty trusting others: They may have a history of feeling betrayed or let down, leading to mistrust.
Self-sufficiency: They often present as strong and independent, but may struggle with loneliness underneath.
Emotional detachment: They may appear aloof or distant, as a defense mechanism to protect themselves from emotional pain.
The root of this attachment style often lies in childhood experiences where caregivers were consistently unavailable or rejecting. As adults, they may have learned to suppress their emotional needs to cope with a perceived lack of support.
Anxious-Preoccupied
Anxious preoccupied attachers overvalue relationships. They place an excessive emphasis on romantic partnerships, often feeling incomplete and unsettled without one.
Fear abandonment: They have a pervasive fear of being left or rejected, leading to clingy or needy behaviors.
Low self-esteem: They often have a negative self-image and seek validation and reassurance from others.
Difficulty with emotional regulation: They may struggle to manage intense emotions, such as anxiety and jealousy.
Intrusive thoughts about relationships: They frequently find themselves preoccupied with their partner's behavior and intentions.
Desire for closeness and intimacy: They crave deep connections but often struggle to maintain healthy boundaries.
The root of this attachment style often lies in childhood experiences where caregivers were inconsistently available or emotionally unavailable. As adults, they may recreate these patterns in their relationships, seeking the love and attention they felt deprived of as children.
Fearful-Avoidant Attachment
Fearful-Avoidant Attachment in Adults is characterized by fear of intimacy and rejection. Unlike the organized Avoidant-Dismissive Attachment counterpart to this attachment style where they also experience fear in relationship, fearful avoidant adults have a chronic sense of terror, a kind of panic about being in relationship and may paranoid-like thoughts anticipating being hurt. The dilemma of fearful avoidance is the simultaneous Fear of intimacy and rejection: They crave close relationships but simultaneously fear the vulnerability and potential rejection that comes with them.
Inconsistent behavior: They may vacillate between seeking closeness and pushing people away.
Low self-esteem: They often have a negative self-image and believe they are unworthy of love.
Difficulty trusting others: They find it challenging to trust others, due to past experiences of betrayal or abandonment.
Emotional volatility: They may experience intense emotions, such as anxiety, anger, and sadness, which can be difficult to regulate.
Difficulty with self-soothing: They may struggle to manage their own emotional states without relying on others.
The root of this attachment style often lies in childhood experiences characterized by inconsistent caregiving, where the child experienced neglect, intrusive care, serious attachment injuries and adverse childhood experiences. This inconsistency can lead to confusion and difficulty forming secure attachment bonds or any attachment in a relationship.
Disorganized Attachment
Disorganized attachment stems from traumatic, frightening, or absent caregiving environments. It's a complex and challenging attachment style characterized by inconsistent and contradictory behaviors arising from conflicting feelings around fear, often triggering the fight, flight, or freeze response. Individuals with this pattern frequently grapple with a tumultuous internal landscape, making it difficult to navigate relationships and life experiences.
Inability to rely on others: A core feature of disorganized attachment is the inability to consistently rely on others for comfort or protection. This often manifests as a perplexing blend of seeking closeness while simultaneously withdrawing, creating a sense of instability in relationships.
Challenges with emotional regulation: The underlying fear and confusion stemming from early experiences can be overwhelming, making emotional regulation a significant challenge.
Difficulty with trust: Trust, a cornerstone of healthy relationships, is particularly elusive for individuals with disorganized attachment. The inconsistent caregiving they experienced as children has made it difficult to form secure bonds, leading to a perpetual state of hypervigilance.
Compromised self-soothing: Self-soothing, a crucial skill for emotional regulation, is often compromised. These individuals may lack the internal resources to manage overwhelming emotions independently, instead resorting to self-isolation and withdrawal to regulate.
Difficulty setting boundaries: The impact of disorganized attachment can be far-reaching. Difficulty setting and maintaining healthy boundaries is common.
Dissociation as a coping mechanism: Dissociation, a psychological defense mechanism, can emerge as a way to cope with the overwhelming emotions associated with this attachment style.
Given the complex nature of disorganized attachment, seeking professional help is essential for repairing this type of attachment injury.
