Attachment-Based Therapy
for Family-of-Origin Patterns
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
The way you learned to connect — or not connect — shapes everything. It can also be changed.
Most of the patterns people bring to therapy aren’t really about what’s happening now. They’re about what happened early — in the relationships where you first learned whether the world was safe, whether people could be trusted, and whether you were worthy of love and care.
Attachment theory gives us a framework for understanding those early lessons and the lasting ways they shape how we relate to ourselves and others. Attachment-based therapy uses that framework to help you identify the patterns driving your current struggles — and to do the deeper work of actually changing them, not just understanding them intellectually.
What Attachment Wounds Look Like
Attachment injuries don’t always look like obvious trauma. They can show up as:
- Difficulty trusting others or letting people close
- Fear of abandonment or chronic anxiety in relationships
- Emotional numbness or disconnection from yourself
- A persistent sense that something is wrong with you
- Cycles of self-sabotage or relationships that repeat the same painful patterns
- Shame that feels bone-deep and hard to explain
- Substance use or other coping strategies that helped you survive but now hold you back
If any of these feel familiar, the roots are often relational — and that’s exactly where attachment-based therapy works.
What the Work Looks Like
Attachment-based therapy is not primarily about talking through what happened to you. It’s about understanding how those experiences shaped your nervous system, your beliefs about yourself, and your ways of being in relationship — and then doing the experiential work of building something different.
In our sessions, we pay attention to what happens in the room — to the moments of connection, disconnection, and emotional activation that mirror the patterns we’re trying to understand. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the healing.
I often integrate EMDR into attachment-based work, which allows us to process the specific memories and beliefs at the root of these patterns rather than just working around them.
Who This Work Is For
This approach is well suited for adults who:
- Sense that their current struggles are rooted in earlier relational experiences
- Want more than symptom relief — they want to understand themselves at a deeper level
- Are ready to do substantive, honest work rather than look for quick fixes
- Have tried other approaches and felt like something important was still being missed
Why Work With Me
I have worked from an attachment framework for my entire clinical career. Over 20 years of practice — including years of intensive work with addiction, where attachment disruption is almost universally present — have deepened my understanding of how early relational experiences shape the whole of a person’s life. My work integrates attachment theory with EMDR and somatic awareness, addressing not just the story of what happened but how it lives in the body and drives behavior today.
I see individual adults in person in Coeur d’Alene and via telehealth across Idaho and California.
If you’re ready to understand the roots of your pain — not just manage it — I’d like to talk.