Attachment Styles Therapist
Are you terrified at the thought of having a personality disorder? It does feel scary to be told that there is something fundamentally wrong with your personality as a whole. That’s why I find it helpful to identify and work with your attachment style as the focus.
Working with your attachment style is a lot less threatening and a lot more actionable than diagnosing you with a personality disorder that makes you doubt yourself even more than you already do.
Think of it as Venn diagrams. If you have an insecure attachment style, you don’t need to have a personality disorder, but if you have a personality disorder, your attachment style could use some work.
What is an attachment style?
It is the quality of our bond to our primary caregiver (usually the mother) that forms between the ages of 0 and 1.5 years. If we feel safe and secure in this attachment, we are able to distinguish between our feelings and those of people around us. We know not to take everything personally; we know our boundaries and are able to use our words to assert them.
Instead, if we have a preoccupied, anxious attachment style, we go through life feeling like we’re always in the wrong, never good enough, and other people’s feelings are our responsibility. This makes us panicky about abandonment and leads to clinging behaviour that drives people away, creating a painful self-fulfilling prophecy.
Someone with a fearful, avoidant attachment style will want to experience emotional intimacy but feel as though they will be consumed if they get close to someone else. This will result in a pattern of approach avoidance or push-pull as they alternately get close to and run away from another person.
Lastly, a dismissive, avoidant attachment style will show up as withdrawing from intimacy altogether, thinking you don’t need it and are better off without it. This attachment style can keep you from seeking and experiencing real closeness altogether.
Types of attachment styles
How we can help?
In therapy, we will work together to identify your attachment style, your triggers for fight, flight or freeze behaviour, and how you can self-soothe when you feel yourself getting triggered. We will also work on your communication skills, so you can use your words instead of acting-out and getting carried away into repetitive patterns of self-sabotaging behaviour that make healthy relationships impossible for you.
Learn more about therapy
How we can help?
Set up a 45 minute-session with me
Depression is a debilitating mental illness that feels like a fog you cannot see the way out of. It is not sadness, though grief, if unprocessed, can be a contributing factor to depression. The worst possible scenario is if you have been ill for long enough that suicide seems like the only way out. If you are suicidal, please know that you will not feel like this forever, and get emergency help via suicide helplines, or better yet, ask a friend to take you to the psychiatrist now.
Even if you are not suicidal, you will probably require medication to help get you to your baseline functionality so you can make it to therapy and start to work on healing your psychological wounds. These could be severe blows to the self-esteem arising from life circumstances, trauma that was never acknowledged or processed, or even an existential crisis that you have not had the time to work through.