Attachment, in its most basic sense, refers to our drive to seek and maintain contact with a significant other. It is an innate, motivating force throughout the human lifespan. As infants, our survival is dependent on our parents. Our brains are formed through eye-to- eye and face-to-face contact with our caretakers. We develop a template for understanding how the world and relationships with others work that stays with us throughout our lives. This template may or may not give us that most basic experience of feeling safe, welcomed, and loved in the world. It lays the foundation from which the mind develops and influences our future sense of self and our relationships with others. Through these first primary relationships we learn that we are valued or not. We learn that intimacy is safe and feels good, or that it is unreliable and possibly even frightening. From this first relationship we learn whether it is safe to reach out to others for help and connection or whether we must remain isolated and alone in order to avoid pain and rejection. Did caretakers come when you cried to soothe and bring comfort or did they leave you to cry it out alone? These experiences leave deep imprints. They have a direct effect and underlie much of what brings people to therapy. These repeated experiences become encoded in our implicit memory as expectations. Troubling relationship issues, depression, and anxiety often stem from these earliest experiences.

The impulse to reach for another is so basic that it exists even from those first moments outside the womb. We are wired to look to another, our attachment figure, for comfort in stressful or anxiety provoking moments. We feel the impulse to reach for the presence of that bigger, kinder, wiser, stronger “other” to guide or reassure us. Though attachment behavior is seen primarily in children, adults continue to manifest attachment behavior throughout the lifespan. This impulse and our patterning around it becomes evident with our partners, friends, and even relationships at work. Working from an attachment model we are able to get at the roots of these patterns.

Some of us have been fortunate and had a consistent, loving figure who was well attuned to our needs. Someone who protected and guided us and who apologized or made a repair when they realized they had been mis-attuned to us or had hurt our feelings. We call this a secure attachment. It leaves one with a sense of well-being and resiliency. Unfortunately many of us did not have this optimal experience and, as a result, life can be much more challenging.

With discoveries in the field of affective neuroscience we now know that our brains can change. As with those first, primary relationships, our relationship with an attachment-oriented therapist involves eye-to-eye, face-to-face, attuned contact. In the presence of a safe “other” we are able to move beyond our wounding and old ways of relating. Many of our experiences in childhood were traumatic because of the absence of a safe attachment figure who could bring comfort or help us process a frightening or overwhelming experience. As we build this new, more secure base together, it becomes possible to revisit these wounds, allowing them to heal and transform. As an attachment therapist, I am working to build this secure sense of safety from the very first moments of our work together. It is from this place of safety that we are able to soften old defenses, allowing healthy new impulses and patterns of relating and being in the world to emerge.