Within the context of a safe relationship, people can begin healing from attachment trauma. The good news is–within the therapeutic relationship, we can begin healing our insecure attachment patterns. For me, the therapeutic relationship has the potential to be the very best part of therapy.
If you’d like to learn more about your own attachment style, take the Attachment Style quiz. This quiz will offer information about your parents, your partner, and your overall attachment style. A couple of my therapists recommended the quiz for me.
Contrary to popular belief, attachment styles affect more than just your romantic relationships. Insecure attachment can affect your friendships, your emotional regulation, your mood, your self-worth, and your decisions. Insecure attachment filters into many parts of your life and well-being and can contribute to anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
If you suspect you have a client with attachment trauma, I recommend first reading this excellent NICABM article–Treating Attachment Trauma–to gain a solid foundation of understanding of attachment trauma.
Podcast Episodes
Podcasts on this topic have helped me better understand therapeutic relationships and relational trauma.
One of my favorite podcasts has been Complex Trauma Recovery. Her episode Can You Self Heal? really speaks to the therapeutic relationship and how we can’t fully heal alone. She often says, “What’s hurt in relationship is healed in relationship.”
On the Being Well podcast, an episode called Healing Your Attachment Wounds features Dr. Diane Poole Heller in a relevant conversation about insecure attachment patterns, attachment wounds, and secure connection.
In addition, Therapy Chat features Rebecca Kase taking a deep-dive into the therapeutic relationship in Polyvagal-Informed EMDR, including co-regulation, vicarious trauma, hypervigilance, and building a foundation of safety.
The Can Clients Become Too Dependent on Therapy? episode from Edge of the Couch is an insightful conversation about closeness, boundaries, dependence, misogyny, countertransference, loneliness, connection, healing, pathology, safety, and vulnerability.
For more incredible podcast episodes about therapy, attachment, and the therapeutic relationship, please see this page.
Below, I have compiled quotes from the experts. You can find these books and more here.
What the Experts Say About Attachment Trauma, Healing, and the Therapeutic Relationship
“Being comfortable in your own skin and having tools that help you relax is a really big deal, but learning how to feel safe with others is revolutionary. When your nervous system can co-regulate with other people, and you feel safe and playful and relaxed, you can develop a stronger sense of secure attachment and enjoy its profound rewards, no matter what environment you grew up in.”
Dr. Diane Poole Heller
“Interpersonal problems: Attachment issues tend to interfere with your ability to form healthy relationships in adulthood. It can be difficult to trust or feel close to others. You might feel overly dependent and have difficulty asserting yourself in relationships. Or you might have developed an opposite pattern of becoming overly self-reliant, whereby you falsely believe you cannot depend upon anyone and, as a result, you push loved ones away unnecessarily.”
Dr. Arielle Schwartz
“Many traumatologists see attachment disorder as one of the key symptoms of Complex PTSD.”
Pete Walker
“While we may give up the active search for people to connect with, our nervous system never stops looking for, waiting for, and longing for connection. Until the day we die, we long for safe and reliable connections. Co-regulation is essential; first for survival and then for living a life of well-being.”
Deb Dana
“Optimal sculpting of key neural networks through healthy early relationships allows us to think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in moment-to-moment.”
Dr. Louis Cozolino
“Collaborative rapport repair is the process by which relationships recover and grow closer from successful conflict resolution. Misattunements and periods of disaffection are existential to every relationship of substance. We all need to learn a process for restoring intimacy when a disagreement temporarily disrupts our feeling of being safely connected.”
Pete Walker
“Because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.”
Stephanie Foo
“Belonging is not just a psychological state, it’s a biological need. Social connection is a necessary ingredient for a life of well-being.”
Deb Dana
“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
Dr. Carl Rogers
“Clients with painful experiences and frightening symptoms are accustomed to living in a world where others avoid and reject them. Our ability to remain empathically connected to them through the expression of their suffering sets the stage for therapy to be a qualitatively different relationship experience–one where they are accepted, pain and all.”
Dr. Louis Cozolino
“Complex PTSD, in its most basic form, is a relational violation that disrupts our sense of trust and safety in the world and limits access to our Self-energy. Healing relational trauma puts us back in touch with our natural core and permits us to love and connect again with others.”
Dr. Frank Anderson
“In my mind, the most helpful thing for you is to be reconnected with another person. Self-regulation is a very insular thing. That’s just survival. Like, ‘I’m not going to actually learn how to be connected to you, but at least I’m going to be able to regulate how upset I get from you.’ And I don’t want you to just be self-regulating in a corner by yourself. Shame makes you want to hide and tuck away. But what if instead you were in this state where you could ask, ‘Who are you? What do you need from me right now? And what do I need from you?’”
Dr. Jacob Ham as quoted by Stephanie Foo
“The things most people need to learn in therapy are related to attachment, abandonment, love, and fear. We are trying to access basic emotional processes that are organized in primitive and early-developing parts of the brain. The language of these emotions is also very basic; it is the language of childhood. The more complex the language and ideas you bring into therapy, the more likely you are to stimulate your clients’ intellectualizing defenses.”
Dr. Louis Cozolino
“Instead, it suggests that human beings can transform the implicit memories and explicit narrative of the past by internalizing healthy adult attachment experiences until they achieve the benefits conferred by secure attachment. The fact that earned secure attachment transmits the ability to offer the same to the next generation is a hopeful sign. It implies that we can help our clients bring a stop to the intergenerational legacy of trauma in their families and create a new legacy through the intergenerational transmission of secure attachment.”
Dr. Janina Fisher
Books to Consider
- A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD: Compassionate Strategies to Begin Healing from Childhood Trauma by Dr. Arielle Schwartz
- What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
- The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients by Dr. Irvin Yalom
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
- Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Journeys to Emotional Recovery by Catherine Gildiner
- Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory by Deb Dana