Learn to feel connected and at ease in your relationships.
Therapy for anxious and avoidant attachment styles in Seattle.
What is attachment?
Attachment refers to the deep emotional bond that forms between a child and their caregivers in the earliest years of life. It’s the process through which children learn whether the world is safe, other people can be trusted, and whether they are worthy of care and connection.
When caregivers are consistently warm, attuned, and responsive, children learn they’ll be supported through hardship and that having needs is okay, and they develop a sense of safety that they take with them into adulthood.
But when caregivers are inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, or actively harmful, children can develop insecure attachment, and learn that love is conditional, people are unreliable, and relationships are sources of pain.
Three types of insecure attachment.
Generally speaking, there are three categories of insecure attachment.
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Develops when caregiving is sometimes present and warm, and other times distracted or unavailable. Children in these environments learn that connection is possible but not reliable, and they respond by turning up the volume on their attachment needs. In adulthood, this often looks like a constant, low-grade fear of abandonment, a tendency to seek constant reassurance from partners, and difficulty feeling settled in relationships even when things are going well.
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Develops when caregivers are consistently emotionally unavailable or dismissive of emotional needs. Children learn that reaching out for connection doesn’t work, and they adapt by becoming self-reliant and minimizing their emotional needs. In adulthood, this can look like discomfort with closeness, difficulty depending on others, and a tendency to pull away when relationships start to feel intense or demanding.
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Develops when a caregiver is a source of fear. This leaves the child in an impossible bind: the person who is supposed to be the source of safety is also the source of danger. In adulthood, fearful-avoidant attachment often shows up as a deep longing for connection alongside a deep terror of it.
Living with insecure attachment.
Insecure attachment tends to shape the nature of your relationships and emotional life. And because these patterns form so early, they can often feel like “who you are” rather than symptoms of something that happened to you.
For many people, the most painful part isn’t any single symptom. It’s the gap between what you want—intimacy, connection, feeling at ease with people you love—and what keeps showing up, no matter how much you want things to be different.
Symptoms of anxious attachment
- Relationships might feel like a constant low-grade emergency, even when nothing is wrong
- You may need a lot of reassurance, but when you get it, it’s difficult to trust
- A delayed text or a shift in someone’s mood can send you into a spiral
- You give a lot in relationships, and often feel like the effort isn’t reciprocated
- Deep down, there’s a persistent fear that the people you love will eventually leave
Symptoms of avoidant attachment
- Closeness feels uncomfortable, even with people you care about
- When relationships start to feel intense or demanding, you feel an urge to pull back
- You’re more comfortable being self-reliant than asking for help
- You might feel fine when a relationship ends, but feel like you shouldn’t
- There’s a wall between you and other people that you can’t seem to take down
Why are attachment patterns so hard to change?
The tricky thing about attachment patterns is that they’re difficult to see. As adults, we may be aware of the symptoms—anxiety that spikes when a partner goes quiet, a wall that goes up when someone gets too close. But the why behind these symptoms is typically invisible to us.
This is partly because the foundations of attachment are laid in the first 12 to 18 months of life, long before we have words or conscious memory. The conclusions we drew about the world back then—I’m not worthy of love, people can’t be trusted, needing others is dangerous—become “facts of life.” And they shape how we perceive ourselves and our relationships into adulthood.
Because of this, changing attachment patterns requires a specific kind of work. Metaphorically speaking, it requires going back in time to those early relational experiences and helping you feel, at a deep level, what you needed but never received.
Why heal attachment wounds?
Attachment wounds touch everything. They shape how you feel about yourself, how safe you feel with other people, and what you expect from relationships. When they go unaddressed, the same patterns tend to show up again and again throughout your relationships.
But when attachment wounds heal, the changes tend to be far-reaching. People often describe feeling more settled in themselves, safer in the world, less reactive in their relationships, and more capable of the kind of relationships they’ve always wanted but couldn’t quite get to.
IFS and EMDR therapy for anxious and avoidant attachment.
The two approaches I use—Internal Family Systems (IFS) and EMDR—are particularly well suited for attachment work, because they are both capable of working with the vague, often pre-verbal memories associated with attachment wounds.
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Attachment-focused IFS serves as a kind of map. Starting from your present-day symptoms—like relationship anxiety, withdrawal, or a persistent sense of unworthiness—it guides us gently backward to the wounds underneath. Along the way, it helps ease internal protection mechanisms that have been keeping these wounds locked away, making it possible to approach them safely and effectively.
IFS also plays a key role in the preparation for deeper healing work. It helps us understand exactly what your younger self needed but never received, and helps us use this understanding to build the internal resources that will make healing attachment wounds possible.
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Where IFS maps the terrain and prepares the ground, EMDR does the deeper reparative work.
The first part of this involves building and strengthening internal resources—real or imagined representations of protection, comfort, and care. Using EMDR, we make these resources vivid and emotionally real, so that your nervous system can begin to experience, on a deep level, what it’s like to be safe, valued, and cared for.
From there, we use EMDR to target the attachment wounds, helping your nervous system process and update the early experiences that shaped them. This helps what once felt like an immovable truth about yourself and the world finally shift.
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Neither approach does this work as well alone as they do together. IFS brings understanding, safety, and builds the roadmap. EMDR brings the reparative experiences needed to heal deep, even pre-verbal attachment wounds. Together, they make it possible to heal in ways that go beyond insight and understanding.
Frequently asked questions
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Insecure attachment is often a symptom of what therapists call “little-t trauma.” This is trauma that is easy to overlook, because it’s not big and loud like other forms of trauma. But early relational experiences that leave a child feeling chronically unsafe, unwanted, or unworthy of love absolutely have a traumatic impact on the developing nervous system.
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That’s totally ok, and isn’t necessary for healing. Attachment styles are useful as a framework for understanding patterns, but they don’t always match up with lived experience. A lot of people have traits of more than one style, or find that their patterns shift depending on the relationship. If you feel negatively impacted by your earliest relationships and home environment, then you likely can benefit from attachment-focused therapy.
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Talk therapy primarily works through insight, understanding, and a strong therapeutic relationship. A skilled, emotionally attuned talk therapist can help heal attachment wounds by consistently showing up in ways that are connecting and that contradict what you learned to expect from people.
The approach I take is more structured and targeted. Rather than waiting for healing to emerge gradually through the relationship, we use IFS and EMDR to go directly to the attachment wounds and facilitate the precise experiences you need to heal. This approach focuses more on direct experience rather than insight, and can often be quicker to bring about change.
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No. Using IFS and EMDR, we’ll follow the trail from your present-day symptoms back to your core attachment wounds. You may not have concrete memories of how these wounds came to be, and that’s not a problem. Instead, we’ll often work with vague impressions and sensations.
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To some degree, yes—or whoever your primary caregivers were. Your early relationships with your primary caregivers are the source of your attachment wounds, so exploring those relationships is an inevitable part of the work. Early on, we’ll talk about what life was like for you as a child to get a sense of what happened and what you needed. And as we move into processing attachment wounds, memories of your early relationships will naturally arise.
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Attachment wounds tend to be some of the deepest and most pervasive wounds a person can carry, so this is usually longer-term work. Most people focusing on attachment wounds are in therapy for at least a year, and often longer.
That said, you won’t have to wait until the end to notice changes. The stabilization work we do early on tends to bring relief on its own. And as the deeper work progresses, most people notice gradual but meaningful shifts, like feeling a bit more settled in relationships, a bit less reactive, a bit more able to access connection. The changes tend to accumulate over time rather than arriving all at once.
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It’s really common to have spent significant time in therapy and to still find that your attachment patterns haven’t budged. This isn’t a sign you did something wrong or that change isn’t possible for you. It usually just means that a more targeted approach is required. The approach I take is very different than traditional talk therapy, and is specifically designed to work at the experiential, body-level depth that attachment healing requires.
You can feel good in your relationships. Let’s figure out how.
I see clients in person in Seattle’s U-District and online throughout Washington state. I offer a free 20-minute introductory call, where we can get to know each other, talk about what’s bringing you to therapy, and see if working together feels like a good fit. If it does, we’ll schedule your first session before we hang up.