Attachment-Based Therapy in Encino, CA

Understand the patterns that shape how you connect, protect yourself, and respond in relationships.

In-person in Encino and online therapy across California

Two women walk hand in hand through a serene forest, surrounded by tall trees and dappled sunlight.

What Is Attachment-Based Therapy?

Attachment-based therapy draws on attachment theory to understand how your earliest relationships may continue to shape the way you relate to others as an adult. The ways you learned to seek closeness, respond to distance, or protect yourself in important relationships can continue long after the circumstances that shaped them have changed.

For some people, fear of abandonment can show up as anxiety and a strong need for reassurance when a partner feels distant.

For others, emotional closeness can feel overwhelming, and they may withdraw or need more distance as a relationship becomes closer.

Attachment-based therapy helps you understand where these patterns came from and what happens when they are activated in your relationships today.

These early experiences do not determine what your relationships will be like as an adult. But they can influence what you come to expect from other people, how you respond when someone feels distant, and what happens when closeness begins to feel vulnerable.

You may understand intellectually that a current relationship is different from relationships you have had in the past, while still finding yourself reacting in familiar ways. Attachment-based therapy can help us understand what is happening in those moments and begin to respond differently.

How Childhood Attachment Can Shape Adult Relationships

Many people grew up in homes that looked stable, even successful from the outside. Their practical needs may have been met.

But somewhere along the way, they may have learned to carefully monitor what they said or needed, worried that getting it wrong could lead to conflict, withdrawal, or distance.

Others learned a different lesson: that reaching for comfort did not reliably lead to care, that asking for help could end in disappointment, or that needing less made it easier to stay connected.

For some people, closeness can feel both deeply important and painfully uncertain. A delayed text, a shift in tone, or a partner needing space can feel much bigger than the moment itself, bringing up fears that something is wrong or that the relationship is changing.

For others, closeness can begin to feel like pressure. A partner’s needs, disappointment, or emotional intensity may bring up the urge to pull away, go quiet, or create more distance.

You may experience these patterns as anxiety, self-doubt, fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting someone who is consistent, or repeatedly choosing partners who are unavailable. Or you may find yourself shutting down during conflict, minimizing what you need, or creating distance when a relationship becomes emotionally important.

How Attachment-Based Therapy Helps You Understand Your Reactions

In attachment-based therapy, we look at what you came to expect in important relationships: what happened when you needed comfort, expressed a feeling, reached for closeness, or tried to repair a disconnection.

Attachment-based therapy is not about blaming your parents or assuming that your childhood explains everything.

It is about understanding what those early relationships taught you about yourself and other people, including whether you could depend on someone, whether your needs mattered, and what happened when you became emotionally close. What you learned in those relationships can continue to influence your self-worth, boundaries, and how you relate to others as an adult.

Healing Through the Therapeutic Relationship

In attachment-based therapy, we pay attention not only to what you talk about, but also to what happens in the therapeutic relationship itself. You may notice that it is difficult to express a need, trust that I will understand, bring up disappointment, or stay connected when something feels uncomfortable.

The therapeutic relationship can give us opportunities to notice these reactions as they arise. You can practice opening up about what you feel and need, including when something between us does not feel right, and experience what happens when we talk about it rather than leaving it unspoken.

Over time, experiences like these can challenge familiar expectations about how others will respond when you depend on them, express a need, or let them know how you really feel.

Understanding why you react a certain way can be an important part of therapy, but insight does not always make it easier to do something differently in the moment. Paying attention to these reactions within therapy can help you recognize them more clearly in your relationships outside of therapy and give you more room to choose what you do next.

Who Can Benefit From Attachment-Based Therapy?

Attachment-based therapy may be helpful if relationships are a significant source of anxiety, selfdoubt, or confusion, or if you find yourself repeating ways of relating that have been difficult to change.

You may already have read about secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment and recognize some of your own experiences in these patterns. Learning about attachment styles can offer a useful starting point, but you may recognize parts of yourself in more than one pattern or still wonder how to shift the ways you relate to others.

This work can also be helpful if early relationships taught you to manage other people’s emotions, hide your needs, feel that you have to handle everything on your own, or work hard to keep relationships from falling apart. For some people, these patterns developed in the context of childhood trauma or neglect. For others, there may not have been an obvious trauma, but important relationships may still have been inconsistent, emotionally distant, or difficult to rely on.

Anxious Attachment Therapy

Anxious attachment therapy may be helpful if closeness feels deeply important but hard to trust.

You may scan for small signs that something has changed: a stretch of silence, a shift in tone, a partner becoming harder to read, or the feeling that someone is pulling away.

In those moments, you may become anxious, over-explain, look for reassurance, or brace yourself for rejection.

Therapy for anxious attachment can help you understand why closeness feels so important and why distance or not knowing where you stand can be so difficult. Therapy can also help you notice what happens when fears of rejection or abandonment are activated and begin to respond in ways that feel less driven by anxiety.

If these patterns are especially painful in dating, you can also learn more about therapy for dating and relationships.

The goal is not to stop wanting closeness or reassurance. It is to better understand what happens when uncertainty feels threatening, so you have more room to decide how you want to respond rather than reacting from fear.

Avoidant Attachment Therapy

Avoidant attachment therapy may be helpful if closeness feels intrusive, demanding, or overwhelming.

You may care deeply about someone but still pull away when emotions become intense, expectations increase, or they want more closeness than you feel able to offer.

You may find yourself minimizing what you need, keeping difficult feelings to yourself, or relying on yourself rather than risking being disappointed by someone else.

Therapy can help you notice your needs earlier, including when you need space, and find ways to communicate them before closeness, conflict, or another person’s needs begin to feel overwhelming.

The goal is not to make you want more closeness than feels right for you. Therapy can help you explore ways of staying connected without feeling that you have to give up your independence or ignore your own limits.

When You Want Closeness and Fear It at the Same Time

Fearful-avoidant attachment, sometimes called disorganized attachment, can involve wanting closeness while also finding it difficult to trust or tolerate. You may move toward someone when you are afraid of losing them, then want distance when the relationship begins to feel too close.

For some people, these patterns are connected to early relationships that were unpredictable, frightening, intrusive, or unavailable. The person you depended on may also have been someone you could not consistently rely on for comfort or understanding.

Turning Understanding Into Choice

Attachment-based therapy can also be part of therapy for parents who recognize patterns from their own upbringing that they do not want to repeat with their children. Therapy can help you notice when familiar reactions are being stirred up and respond in ways that are more consistent with the parent you want to be.

Attachment-based therapy is about more than identifying an attachment style. The goal is not to fit yourself into a category, but to have more flexibility in how you relate to others, especially when closeness, conflict, or vulnerability brings up familiar reactions.

Why Attachment-Based Therapy Became Central to My Work

When I began practicing in 2007, I became increasingly interested in what helps us understand not only what someone is struggling with, but how their experiences and relationships have shaped the way they see themselves and relate to others.

Attachment-based therapy gave me a way to understand those connections without reducing people to a diagnosis or an attachment style. It allows us to look at a person’s current struggles in the context of the relationships and experiences that helped shape them.

Over the years, attachment has remained at the center of my work while I have also incorporated trauma-informed and somatic approaches, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and parts work when they are useful. These approaches give me different ways of understanding what may be happening for each person while keeping the work grounded in their individual experiences and relationships.

Developing Earned Secure Attachment

Attachment patterns are not fixed. Over time, new experiences in therapy and in your relationships can influence what you expect from other people and how you respond to closeness, conflict, and uncertainty.

In attachment theory, the term “earned secure attachment” describes the capacity to develop a more secure way of relating even when your earliest relationships did not provide that foundation. This does not mean never feeling anxious, needing space, or becoming upset in relationships.

It can mean becoming better able to recognize what you are feeling, communicate what you need, trust relationships that are consistent, and work through difficult moments without automatically expecting the relationship to fall apart.

How Attachment-Based Therapy Can Support Different Areas of Your Life

In Trauma Therapy, we may explore how early relationships and traumatic experiences continue to affect your self-worth, emotional reactions, and relationships.
In Dating and Relationship Therapy, we may look at patterns such as choosing emotionally unavailable partners, fearing abandonment, having difficulty trusting consistency, or becoming anxious when someone feels distant.
In Therapy for Parents, we may explore how patterns from your own upbringing show up in parenting and how you can respond to your child in ways that are more consistent with the parent you want to be.
In Couples Therapy, we may look at the cycle that develops between you and your partner and what each of you is feeling or needing underneath reactions such as criticism, defensiveness, or withdrawal.

You Don’t Need to Know Your Attachment Style to Begin

You do not need to arrive with a clear label or a complete understanding of where your patterns came from. Therapy can begin with the relationships, reactions, or questions that are most important to you now.

As we work together, we can make sense of what you notice and explore what you would like to be different in your relationships.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is attachment-based therapy?

Attachment-based therapy is a way of understanding how early experiences shape adult relationships, especially experiences with closeness, comfort, conflict, and whether difficult moments could be worked through. If you have wondered what attachment-based therapy is, what attachment therapy means, or how attachment-based therapy works, the simplest explanation is this: we look at how you learned to seek connection, protect yourself, manage emotions, and what you came to expect from closeness, including whether it felt dependable, conditional, or unpredictable.

Can adults change their attachment style?

Secure attachment therapy for adults is not about becoming perfectly calm or never getting triggered. Earned secure attachment develops through nervous-system regulation, attachment repair, and corrective relational experiences. Many people ask how to earn secure attachment or whether developing secure attachment in adulthood is possible. I believe becoming securely attached can happen over time, when therapy helps you build a coherent narrative and practice new ways of relating.

What are the four attachment styles?

The four attachment styles are secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized or fearful-avoidant. Anxious attachment therapy focuses on abandonment fear, reassurance seeking, hyperactivation, protest behavior, and emotional flooding. Avoidant attachment therapy may focus on deactivation strategies, emotional withdrawal, emotional suppression, intimacy avoidance, dismissive-avoidant patterns, and fear of engulfment. Therapy for anxious attachment and therapy for avoidant attachment begin with understanding why these patterns developed.

How do I know if my problems are attachment-related?

Attachment issues often show up most clearly in the relationships that matter most. You may feel anxious when someone pulls away, shut down during conflict, over-explain, people-please, choose unavailable partners, or have difficulty trusting that someone’s care, interest, or closeness will still be there after conflict or distance. If you are searching for an attachment style therapist near me, attachment therapy nearby, a local attachment therapist, or trying to find an attachment therapist, you may be looking for help understanding why closeness, uncertainty, silence, or emotional distance can bring up such strong reactions.

Is attachment-based therapy the same as trauma therapy?

Attachment-based therapy and trauma therapy overlap, but they are not the same. Attachment vs trauma therapy depends on what is central: trauma therapy often focuses on what overwhelmed your nervous system, while attachment-based therapy focuses on how early relationships shaped closeness, trust, needs, and repair. For many people, relational trauma and attachment patterns are connected.

How long does attachment-based therapy take?

How long attachment therapy takes depends on your history, your goals, and how strongly your old attachment patterns show up around closeness, conflict, distance, needs, and trust. Some people want anxious attachment treatment, avoidant attachment treatment, or dismissive attachment therapy. Others want help for anxious attachment, help for avoidant attachment, or earned secure attachment therapy. Attachment work unfolds gradually because the nervous system changes through repeated experience, not intellectual understanding.

Do you work with individuals or couples for attachment issues?

I work with individuals and couples on attachment patterns. Individual work may focus on dating, abandonment fear, shutdown, self-protection, or becoming more securely attached; learn more about individual therapy for relationship issues. In couples work, we look at the cycle between partners and the fears or vulnerable emotions each person may be protecting underneath criticism, withdrawal, guardedness, or the fear of not being understood. Learn more about couples therapy Encino. I offer in-person sessions in Encino, online therapy across California, and a free 30-minute phone consultation.

Ready to Take the Next Step? Let’s Talk.

Schedule a free 30-minute phone consultation to talk about what brings you to therapy, ask any questions you may have, and see whether working together feels right.