Treatment area
Attachment patterns
Attachment patterns are not a verdict on your love life. They are a description of what you learned about closeness before you could remember learning it.
What a pattern is
As a child, you learn what works when you need someone. Did help come when you cried? Were you met, or was it too much for the adult? The answer becomes a strategy — and the strategy stays put, long after it has stopped being necessary.
The patterns that most often make themselves felt
- Avoidant — you manage on your own, feel uncomfortable with too much closeness, pull back when things get serious. Often experienced by others as aloof; often experienced from the inside as something else entirely.
- Ambivalent — you need a lot of reassurance, read signals as rejection, become frightened when the distance grows.
- Disorganised — where the person you turned to for safety was also the person you were afraid of. That leaves a pattern in which closeness and danger are tied together. Often seen with complex PTSD.
Can patterns be changed?
Yes — but not by understanding them. Insight alone rarely shifts anything here, because the pattern does not live in your thoughts. It changes through new experiences of being close to someone where things do not go wrong.
That is one of the reasons we work with ISTDP, where the relationship in the therapy room is an active part of the treatment — not just the frame around it.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Can you 'test' my attachment type?
We do not run a test that gives you a label. We look at what actually happens in your relationships — and in our conversation — which is more precise.
Does insecure attachment mean my parents did something wrong?
No, not necessarily. Attachment is shaped by many things, including temperament, circumstances and what the parents themselves were carrying.
There is no waiting list to join first
Book directly in the calendar, or call if you would rather talk to a person.