Therapy for Attachment Issues with Berkhamsted therapist Sean Heneghan
Summary:
Attachment patterns formed in early childhood profoundly shape how we approach love, trust, and closeness. They determine a large part of the powerful feelings we feel in close relationships, but they're not fixed, and therapy can help change them.
The way our earliest caregivers responded to us gradually shapes the expectations we carry into relationships throughout life. Understanding this can make the seemingly nonsensical begin to make sense, and help us better understand why we repeat the same patterns, even when we'd rather not.
Main Points:
- Attachment theory was developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, based on the insight that humans are biologically wired to seek safety in relationship
- Most people develop one of four broad attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganised
- Attachment patterns can change. Through therapy and meaningful relationships, a more secure way of relating can be learned
Why Attachment Patterns Matter
Attachment theory is one of the most insightful discoveries we've made about the nature of being human. It's also one that's likely to prove illuminating if you're interested in why you have the experiences you have with those closest in your life.
Developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, the theory offers a simple but profound insight: the way our earliest caregivers responded to us gradually shapes the expectations we carry into relationships throughout life.
Attachment theory helps explain why love (or its lack) is often the most central theme of our lives. It can help elucidate why love on one day is euphoric, and on another a source of unimaginable pain. It helps us understand why separation can feel like falling off a cliff, why closeness is riddled with ambiguity, and why we often seem compelled to repeat the same mistakes as if living the same stuck patterns on loop.
Often people recognise themselves in the varying descriptions of attachment theory before they fully understand the details. Something about the emotional descriptions around closeness, distance, reassurance, or withdrawal feels intuitive. Attachment theory offers a language and a map for noticing our own private emotional experiences, ones that can be both overwhelming and confusing without a map with which to understand them.
The Origins of Attachment
At the centre of Bowlby's thinking was the idea that human beings are biologically wired to seek safety in relationship with others.
For an infant, the presence of a responsive caregiver is not simply comforting, it's essential for survival. Throughout our evolutionary history, a child who lost proximity to those who protected them was in real danger of perishing. It's therefore not surprising that infants are born with a powerful instinct to seek closeness to caregivers, particularly in moments of distress.
This simple observation has enormous implications.
The emotional bond between a child and caregiver becomes the foundation upon which later expectations about relationships are built. Through thousands of small interactions — being comforted, ignored, soothed, misunderstood, held, or abandoned, we all develop a sense of what relationships are like, how the world is, and who we are within it. These expectations become internalised as what therapists call our internal working models of self and others.
In simple terms, we begin to draw conclusions about the world and about ourselves:
Are people reliable or unpredictable?
Are my needs welcome or burdensome?
Am I lovable?
Will people stay?
These assumptions often operate quietly in the background of our lives, shaping how we approach closeness, conflict, trust, and dependence.
Four Patterns of Attachment
Over time, our early relational experiences tend to crystallise into patterns that therapists refer to as attachment styles.
Researchers describe four broad patterns: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised. Most people recognise elements of themselves across more than one, but usually one style tends to dominate.
Secure attachment
Secure attachment does not mean a perfect childhood or a life free from relational difficulty. Securely attached people still experience conflict, jealousy, grief, and heartbreak. What they tend to carry, however, is a kind of internal balance. When caregivers were reasonably consistent, not perfect, but responsive enough, the child develops a sense that relationships are broadly reliable and that their needs matter.
Bowlby described this as the secure base: the experience of knowing that there is somewhere safe to return to. Paradoxically, this sense of safety often allows a person to move out into the world with greater confidence and independence.
Avoidant attachment
When a child grows up with caregivers who are emotionally mis attuned or overwhelmed in such a way that consistently misses their child's needs, that child can come to a fateful conclusion: depending on others is risky, and self-reliance is the solution.
Avoidantly attached people frequently appear highly self-sufficient — capable, independent, and emotionally contained. In many areas of life these qualities serve them well. Yet beneath this independence there is often a quiet tension around emotional closeness. As relationships deepen, something inside may begin to pull away. Intimacy can feel suffocating, and emotional demands from others may feel overwhelming.
The painful irony is that avoidant individuals often do want closeness. They simply learned very early that reaching for it did not reliably bring comfort.
Anxious attachment
Anxious attachment tends to emerge in a different emotional environment. In this pattern, a caregiver may sometimes be loving and attentive, but at other times distracted, inconsistent, or emotionally unavailable. The child experiences connection, but it arrives unpredictably.
Faced with this uncertainty, the child adapts by increasing their efforts to maintain closeness. As adults, this can show up as a strong focus on the relationship itself - monitoring a partner's availability, mood, or commitment. Small shifts in distance can feel surprisingly painful. Reassurance may help briefly, but the underlying anxiety tends to return, because the insecurity lies deeper than the immediate situation.
Disorganised attachment
Disorganised attachment tends to arise from the most difficult early circumstances of all: those in which the caregiver was simultaneously the source of comfort and the source of fear. This might have been through abuse, neglect, or a caregiver who was themselves so frightened or chaotic that they became frightening to be around. The child is left in an impossible bind, driven towards the caregiver for safety while simultaneously being pushed away by fear or confusion. The result is highly conflicting emotions around closeness, being both pulled toward and pushed away from intimacy all at once.
What kind of problems do the different attachment styles create?
The life problems for the avoidantly attached
For the avoidantly attached, the difficulty isn't a lack of wanting connection, it's that connection, when it gets close enough, starts to feel like a threat. Deep intimacy can produce a creeping anxiety, a sense of being hemmed in or overwhelmed. A partner's emotional needs, perfectly reasonable ones, can feel like more than can be borne.
What others experience as closeness, the avoidantly attached person may experience as pressure.
This often creates a painful internal conflict. They may genuinely want a relationship, but find that as it deepens, something in them begins to pull away. Long-term commitment can feel suffocating rather than reassuring. Closeness that is occasional, or held at a certain distance, feels manageable but sustained intimacy, the daily texture of being truly known by another person, can trigger the need to escape.
The cost of this, over time, can be considerable. Relationships may be repeatedly ended just as they become serious. Partners feel the withdrawal but can't understand it. And beneath the self-sufficiency, there is often a quiet, accumulating loneliness because the arrangement that keeps anxiety at bay is also the one that keeps love at arm's length. Without help, the avoidantly attached person is at real risk of finding themselves chronically alone, not because they chose solitude, but because the closeness they needed never felt safe enough to stay in.
The life problems for the anxiously attached
Where the avoidantly attached person fears too much closeness, the anxiously attached person fears its absence. The prospect of emotional aloneness, of being a separate, individual self, unmerged and uncontained by another can feel genuinely intolerable. There is often a deep, persistent longing for union, a wish to dissolve the boundary between self and partner into a permanent and reassuring we. The ordinary separateness of two people in a relationship, the fact that another person has their own inner life, their own needs, their own moments of distance can register not as normal but as threatening.
This preoccupation with closeness can become all-consuming. Love and the state of the relationship occupy a disproportionate amount of mental and emotional space. When anxiety rises, as it often does, the urge is to seek reassurance, more contact, more proof of the bond. In this way, the anxiously attached person can sometimes overwhelm the very connection they are trying to protect, placing more weight on a relationship than most relationships can comfortably carry.
Underneath this is a real struggle with emotional regulation and with the ordinary demands of independence. Standing alone inside oneself, even briefly, can feel precarious rather than natural. The irony is that this difficulty with being a me— a settled, separate individual s precisely what makes the longed-for we so hard to sustain. The security they are searching for in another person is something that, in part, can only ever be found inside themselves. That is painful work, but it is also where the possibility of change lives.
The life problems for those with disorganised attachment
In adult life, the irresolvable bind of disorganised attachment tends to produce the most turbulent relational experience of all. Relationships can be intensely connected but volatile, a deep fear of abandonment sitting alongside a terror of engulfment. The urge to pull people close and the urge to push them away can exist simultaneously, leaving both parties confused and exhausted. Emotional regulation is often genuinely difficult; feelings can arrive fast and hard, and be slow to settle.
Many people with disorganised attachment carry a sense of being fundamentally too much for others, or alternatively, of never quite being able to trust that anyone is safe. The very thing they most need, a reliable, present, non-threatening connection, is also the thing that their earliest experience taught them to fear. Therapy, particularly trauma-informed work, can offer something genuinely different here: not just insight, but the experience of a relationship that holds without demanding, and is present without being overwhelming.
Can Attachment Change?
One of the most hopeful findings in attachment research is the concept of learned security.
Attachment patterns are not fixed. Through meaningful relationships and therapeutic work, people who began life with insecure attachment can gradually develop a more secure orientation. People with avoidant attachment can begin to rewire their internal working models so that intimacy becomes more achievable.
Insight plays a role in this process, but the deeper change often emerges through repeated experiences of being understood, responded to, and taken seriously within a relationship. Therapy can provide one of the environments in which this becomes possible.
When to Seek Help
If you recognise aspects of yourself in these patterns, if relationships often feel confusing, intense, or exhausting it may be worth exploring this in therapy.
You do not need to be in crisis. Often the most meaningful therapeutic work begins with simple curiosity about the relational patterns that seem to repeat themselves.
Attachment-informed therapy can help you:
Understand where these patterns came from
Experience something different within the therapeutic relationship itself
Grow your ability to cope with intense and difficult feelings
Gradually carry that difference into the rest of your life
In this sense, understanding attachment is not simply about explaining our past, but about discovering that our ways of relating, however fixed they may once have felt, can slowly become more flexible, more forgiving, and easier to be in.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is attachment theory in simple terms?
Attachment theory explains how the emotional bond between a child and their early caregivers shapes the expectations and behaviours they carry into adult relationships. It was developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and is now central to many forms of modern psychotherapy.
Can attachment issues be treated with therapy?
Yes. Attachment-informed therapy can help you understand and gradually shift deeply ingrained relational patterns. The process takes time, but meaningful change is genuinely possible.
How do I know which attachment style I have?
Most people begin to recognise their attachment style through reflection on recurring patterns in their relationships, whether they tend to pull away from closeness, seek constant reassurance, or feel broadly comfortable with intimacy. A therapist can help you explore this in a way that goes beyond labels.
If you'd like support with relationship patterns or attachment difficulties, I'd be glad to hear from you. Phone: 07717 515 013 · Email: sean@seanheneghan.com · Berkhamsted Chiropractic Clinic, 69 High St, HP4 2DE.
Suggested Reading
If you'd like to explore attachment theory further, these are three books I'd recommend to clients:
Attachment Across the Lifecourse by David Howe — a clear, clinically grounded introduction to how attachment patterns develop and persist across a whole life. Accessible without being superficial.
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller — a practical and readable guide to recognising attachment styles in adult relationships. A good starting point for anyone new to the subject.
The Power of Attachment by Diane Poole Heller — a more body-oriented approach, drawing on somatic and trauma-informed perspectives to explore how attachment wounds can be healed.
About Sean Heneghan Sean Heneghan is a BACP registered counsellor and traditional acupuncturist with over 20 years of experience practicing in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Combining gestalt therapy, cognitive hypnotherapy, and traditional acupuncture, Sean offers an integrative approach to relationships, emotional wellbeing, and mental health.
Services include:
Attachment-informed counselling and therapy
Gestalt counselling
Cognitive hypnotherapy
Traditional acupuncture
Integrative therapy for anxiety, relationship difficulties, and trauma
Location: Berkhamsted Chiropractic Clinic, 69 High Street, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire HP4 2DE
Contact for Appointments: 07717 515 013 | email: sean@seanheneghan.com
Serving Berkhamsted, Tring, Hemel Hempstead, St Albans, and the wider Hertfordshire area.