Written by: Rachel Forbes
Understanding Attachment-Based Therapy Through Safety, Connection, and Repair
How Early Relationships Shape the Way We Feel Safe With Others
Whew, attachment! Attachment-Based Therapy acknowledges that our felt sense of safety and security, both within ourselves and with others, begins to form through our earliest relationships, particularly with our primary caregiver. This perspective places a lot of emphasis on the quality of connection and responsiveness a primary caregiver provides to a child in infancy through toddlerhood. It posits that without attuned, safe, and responsive early connection, a child may develop self-protective behaviors due to feeling insecure and unsafe when in relationship with others. A therapist, then, who works through an attachment-based lens, sensitively considers a person’s history of attachment to more deeply understand current relational patterns. As much as our early attachment may inform us about our current barriers in relationships, it also beautifully humanizes our needs and deepens our understanding of how we can bring healing to ourselves and our relationships.
Where Attachment Theory Comes From
Attachment-Based Therapy is inspired by John Bowlby’s attachment theory, which proposes that early life bonding with one’s primary caregiver is both natural and essential for a child to feel secure and thrive. The belief is that infants and toddlers need to trust that the primary caregiver is a “safe home base,” a concept developed by Bowlby, in order to explore the rest of the world with confidence and security. Both Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth identified together two important parts of a safe home base: providing comfort when in distress and also encouraging exploration.
What a Safe Home Base Can Look Like
What does this actually look like? When a baby cries, the caregiver responds by holding the baby, soothing the baby, and responding with nurturing and loving energy and words. When a toddler is experiencing a big emotion, an age during which they’re still learning and do not have the brain development to process or regulate independently, the parent helps the child name the emotion and models regulation alongside them through physical and emotional presence and guidance.
When a Safe Home Base Is Not Fully Established
What happens when nurturing responsiveness or regulated guidance does not happen between a caregiver and child, when a “safe home base” is not well established? Attachment theory provides four different styles of attachment that can form, dependent upon the primary caregiver’s capacity and availability in early life:
Secure:
A person with secure attachment feels comfortable both in relationship with others and in relationship with themselves. They are openly communicative and feel capable and resourced in conflict with others. They present as both confident in their individuality and also invested in communal connection.
Anxious (Preoccupied):
A person with anxious attachment seeks closeness, greatly fearing abandonment or rejection. They feel insecure and fearful in relationships, often overly dependent on other peoples’ assurance and acceptance for a felt sense of safety. A famous example of a tendency that might show up is people-pleasing.
Avoidant (Dismissive):
A person with avoidant or dismissive attachment distrusts the safety of intimacy and closeness. They feel uncomfortable with emotional or physical closeness and minimize the significance of relationships, often presenting as hyper-independent and self-sufficient. “I don’t need anyone else,” which also translates as, “I don’t know if I can trust that my needs can be met by another person,” or “I don’t know if I can trust the safety of closeness with another person.”
Disorganized (Fearful-Avoidant):
A person with disorganized attachment simultaneously strongly desires closeness in a relationship, while also fearing it - potentially fearing abandonment, harm, or betrayal. They tend to show up in relationships with push-pull tendencies, pulling people close to then push them away out of fear. They often experience chaotic, roller-coaster-esque relationship patterns.
How Attachment Patterns Can Inform Our Felt Sense of Safety
The belief within these patterns is that our early childhood caregivers’ attachment capacities inform our felt sense of safety. So, if our primary caregiver is emotionally and physically present and available, as well as lovingly responsive, we are more likely to develop a secure attachment style. If our primary caregiver is distant, emotionally or physically unavailable, non-responsive, or reactive and physically or emotionally harmful, we are more likely to develop an anxious or avoidant attachment style. If our primary caregiver was a combination of present, loving, though also fearsome, harmful, or dysfunctional we are more likely to develop a disorganized attachment style.
Why Attachment Patterns Are Not About Blame
Now, this is really important to note throughout all of this, especially if you are a parent reading this and feeling ridden with guilt: attachment history is not the only part of a person’s experience that fully determines how they show up in the world, nor is it reflective of a parent’s personhood or “goodness.” Rather, attachment in early childhood is reflective of so much more: a parent’s physical and emotional capacity, financial circumstances (i.e., working multiple jobs to make sure all basic needs are met), a parent’s own early childhood experiences and relationship with themselves (generational trauma), a parent’s access to emotionally supportive resources, a parent’s physical health, and the list could go on. In addition to considering what the parents’ circumstances might have been, a child’s natural temperament also plays a significant role that often gets overlooked. Temperament is not only determined by early life experience, but also genetics and brain development.
Attachment Theory as a Path Toward Compassion
So please know that understanding attachment theory and how it informs Attachment-Based Therapy is not intended to shame, but rather to inform so that healing can be met with more resources and greater depth. From the perspective of recognizing the gifts, understanding attachment theory also helps us to humanize our behavior in adulthood, recognizing and acknowledging that how we show up in relationships, at its deepest core, is actually about finding a way to remain connected in a way that feels safe for our nervous system.
What does Attachment-Based Therapy look like in therapy, and how does it help?
Moving From “What’s Wrong With Me?” to “What Happened to Me?”
Attachment-Based Therapy means that the therapist seeks to understand your childhood experiences to address symptoms you’ve brought to therapy through a what’s happened to you lens, rather than through a what’s wrong with you lens. The intention is to humanize why you might be showing up in the world as you are now, recognizing that there is often greater depth to how we feel than just “dysfunctional symptoms.” The therapist may try to deepen understanding about how you have felt within significant relationships throughout your life, to then make sense of what makes you feel safe or unsafe in current relationships. For example, if you find yourself fleeing at any semblance of conflict, we might get curious about why. “Tell me about the part of you who flees. What’s happened to you to feel the need to do that?” The process is both about gaining clarity and identifying possibilities for change, developing a felt sense of safety within oneself and with others.
Repairing the Relationship With Yourself and Others
The beauty of Attachment-Based Therapy is that it also recognizes our capacity for repair. This can mean repair within relationships with others and repair within ourselves. We hold the ability to give ourselves that which we never received in painful relationships. If that sounds totally wild and foreign to you, I understand. The process through which we understand this and gain the tools to do so is through therapy. If this is something you’ve been seeking, I’m so glad you are here, and I am honored to share that the therapists here at Root & Return Wellness are attachment theory informed and incorporate Attachment-Based Therapy in their therapeutic work. We really approach this work through a compassionate and curious lens, welcoming all parts of you.
H5: CULTIVATING CURIOSITY: What do I know about my own early childhood experiences? Did any of the attachment styles mentioned resonate with me? What makes me feel safe and connected in relationship with others?
Related Resources:
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth Attachment Theory Overview
https://psychology.psy.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins%20DP1992.pdf
NIH: Contributions of Attachment Theory and Research
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4085672/
Adult Attachment Theory and Research
https://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
ABFT International: What Is Attachment Based Family Therapy?
https://abftinternational.com/what-is-abft/
Terms Defined
Attachment-Based Therapy
Attachment-Based Therapy is a therapeutic approach that looks at how a person’s earliest relationships may inform the way they experience safety, closeness, trust, and connection later in life. Within this lens, present-day relationship patterns are explored with curiosity and compassion, not as something “wrong” with a person, but as something that may have developed as a way to stay emotionally safe.
Attachment Theory
Attachment Theory is the framework behind Attachment-Based Therapy. It was developed through the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and suggests that early bonding with a primary caregiver helps shape a child’s felt sense of security. In the context of this article, attachment theory helps explain why early experiences of comfort, responsiveness, and guidance can influence how someone relates to themselves and others in adulthood.
Safe Home Base
A safe home base refers to the caregiver’s role as a source of comfort, protection, and encouragement. When a child feels that their caregiver is available and responsive, they are often better able to explore the world with confidence. In Attachment-Based Therapy, this concept helps us understand how early experiences of support, or the lack of it, may shape a person’s sense of safety in relationships.
Felt Sense of Safety
A felt sense of safety is the internal experience of feeling secure, grounded, and able to remain connected with oneself or another person. It is not only a thought or belief. It is something the nervous system experiences. Within the article, this term helps explain why relationship patterns are often rooted in the body’s attempt to feel safe, connected, and protected.
Attachment Style
An attachment style is a pattern of relating that may develop from early experiences with caregivers. The article describes secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles. These patterns are not fixed labels or personal flaws. They are ways of understanding how someone may seek closeness, protect themselves, respond to conflict, or manage fear in relationships.
