Attachment Issues Therapy
When every relationship follows the same script
You know your attachment style. You've taken the quizzes, read the Instagram posts, can explain exactly why you chase people who pull away or why intimacy makes you want to run. You understand the theory perfectly.
But you're still doing it. Still picking the same unavailable people. Still sabotaging when things get good. Still feeling that familiar panic when someone gets too close or that crushing rejection when they pull back. Understanding hasn't changed anything.
Attachment theory has become pop psychology. Everyone knows if they're anxious, avoidant, disorganised. You can spot the patterns, predict the outcome, explain to friends exactly why your relationship is doomed. But knowing your attachment style doesn't stop you living it.
That's because attachment isn't intellectual. It's pre-verbal, visceral, wired into your nervous system before you had words for it. You learned how relationships work in the first years of life - whether people are reliable, whether your needs matter, whether closeness is safe or dangerous.
Maybe your caregivers were inconsistent. Sometimes there, sometimes gone, and you never knew which version you'd get. So you learned to be hypervigilant, to cling, to panic at any sign of distance. Anxious attachment isn't neediness - it's a nervous system that learned love is unpredictable and you have to work constantly to keep it.
Or maybe closeness came with conditions, intrusion, or danger. So you learned to be self-sufficient, to keep people at arm's length, to leave before you can be left. Avoidant attachment isn't coldness - it's a system that learned intimacy isn't safe.
Or maybe both things were true at once. Neglect and engulfment. Abandonment and intrusion. So you developed disorganised attachment - simultaneously desperate for connection and terrified of it, pushing and pulling in the same breath.
Attachment theory isn't a modern add-on to psychodynamic therapy - it's in its DNA. John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory, was a psychoanalyst. The entire framework grew out of psychodynamic thinking about early relationships and how they shape us. Pop psychology has popularised the categories, but the depth work has always been psychodynamic.
So this isn't about learning attachment theory in therapy. It's about working with the actual attachment patterns as they show up, in real time, in a relationship designed to help you experience something different.
We meet weekly or twice-weekly, same time each week. This consistency matters. Your attachment patterns will show up here too - in how you relate to me, the therapy, the space between sessions.
If you're anxiously attached, you'll probably worry about what I think of you, scan for signs I'm losing interest, panic if we have to reschedule. If you're avoidant, you might find reasons to miss sessions, intellectualise everything, keep me at a careful distance. If you're disorganised, you might oscillate between both.
This isn't a problem - it's the work. We'll notice these patterns together. We'll explore what they're protecting you from. And gradually, in a relationship where someone actually shows up reliably and doesn't disappear when you're difficult or needy or distant, something shifts.
You can't think your way to secure attachment. You have to experience it. Experience that someone can be consistently present. That ruptures can be repaired. That you don't have to be perfect or independent to be kept. That closeness doesn't have to mean losing yourself.
This work is slow. Attachment patterns were formed over years in your earliest relationships. They won't dissolve in six sessions. But over time, the script starts to loosen. You begin catching yourself mid-pattern. The old responses don't feel as inevitable.