ATTACHMENT MATTERS

Since I was a girl, growing up with a dad who was a therapist specializing in family systems, I knew I had something special and unique in my relationship with him, unlike my friends. I could talk about my feelings with my dad. I could be emotional with my dad. And my dad, with open arms and an always-available seat close by his side, never undervalued my feelings. He connected to them, and like magic, my feelings would calm, and I would move along, empowered, calm, or feeling loved.

When in my early adulthood, when trying to figure out what being a therapist meant to me, Attachment Theory landed in my lap when I was looking into internships to complete graduate school. I landed a practicum and then worked for an organization specializing in training parents who adopted children who were eventually diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). These children were desperate for closeness but unable to attain it due to a lack of healthy connection regulation. The adoptive parent did not know how to soothe their child. Of course, these cases were extreme, but I recognized these same patterns in relationships all around me. The more I educated myself on Attachment, the more I learned various attachment models; it all came down to the same thing that I knew so intrinsically as a child.

Having one's feelings valued by someone important, and having a safe place to be held, heard, and valued allowed for a calm and discerning mind to connect deeply, which was regulating and securing.

I have built a career with Attachment theory as my guide, with lifelong knowledge and later education, that humans respond best when they are loved, heard, and cherished. Over the last decade of study and practice, I have seen Attachment as a powerful tool to create fundamental change in relationships and old wounds. Supported by current science and it is becoming a staple theory in education in most graduate programs.

It's an honor to understand such a deep, primal, and fundamental need to connect and understand the brain-science on how to wire it more securely. Many individuals rely on their defense blockades that are wired into their brains during early childhood and impact their current modes of connection, for better or worse. Watching couples, child and parent, and individual recognize the patterns of their own attachment experience and be empowered to fundamentally changed them, to achieve more profound connection and greater calm, is forever inspiring (and after a decade of practice and study, trustworthy). That's why I love Attachment.