Counseling Rooted in Attachment Therapy
Therapy for anxious attachment
People-pleasing and perfectionism can have you feeling like you’re never good enough. Seeking a sense of achievement through school, careers, money, or our personal relationships can contribute to feelings of overwhelm, stress, anxiety, and burnout. Saying yes to everything because you want to be liked, approved, and loved is exhausting. You’re doing everything you can, so why do you feel this way?
Feelings of anxiety can be painful, uncomfortable, and persistent. If you’re feeling anxious, you may be constantly battling a sense of inadequacy or telling yourself—and believing—narratives that plunge you deeper into feelings of low self-worth.
We can pause this cycle.
Understanding attachment styles
Anxiety and persistent internal narratives often exist for a purpose. When we work together, we can embrace the protective role that these thoughts are playing and change the story.
I devote much of my practice to thinking about relational challenges and helping people through them, both in couples counseling and individually.
I’m an attachment therapist in Portland, Maine
In therapy, we can get in touch with your feelings and take a beat.
Using the tools of Emotionally Focused Therapy and Internal Family Systems, we can better understand the cycles and patterns in your life that result from your past relational wounds and attachment traumas.
Patterns of anxious thinking, overthinking, self-doubt, self-criticism, people-pleasing, perfectionism—these are all protective strategies to ward off or avoid more painful beliefs or feelings underneath the surface—feelings of unlovability, unworthiness, or inadequacy.
We begin by developing insight, awareness, appreciation, curiosity, and compassion towards these protective strategies. Your anxiety has some important information it’s trying to tell you. Strategies like perfectionism and people-pleasing have likely helped you get by, if not succeed, in your life through this point.
By approaching these feelings from a place of understanding and curiosity, you can learn more about what role they play in your life and transform your relationship to them. Then we can access some of the deeper feelings and experiences underneath what those parts have been protecting .
Together, we work through those core wounds of self-worth and self-esteem so that these protective strategies don’t need to show up in the same way to protect you, doing the same things they have always done. By healing attachment wounds, we can show up in adult relationships with clarity and wisdom.