Attachment-Based Therapy

Long before anyone can talk, they are learning something about relationships: whether distress brings comfort, whether closeness is safe, whether needing someone is reasonable or risky. Those early answers become expectations, and expectations become the way a person approaches closeness for a long time afterwards.

Attachment-based therapy works with that layer directly.

What it notices

Attachment patterns tend to show up at the edges of relationships — the moment someone pulls away, the moment someone gets close. One person’s instinct is to pursue and make sure things are all right. Another’s is to go quiet and wait for it to pass. Both are strategies that once made sense.

In therapy these patterns are not just discussed but observed as they happen, including in the relationship with your therapist, which is often where they become easiest to see.

What the work involves

The pace is usually slower than in more structured approaches, because the mechanism is partly the relationship itself. A therapist who stays steady, is not thrown by your distress, and does not withdraw when things get difficult is offering something corrective rather than only explanatory.

Alongside that sits the understanding: where the pattern came from, what it protected you from, and whether it is still earning its place.

Where it is useful

Attachment work is used with developmental trauma, adoption and fostering, grief and loss, difficulty trusting, and parenting — particularly where someone is trying not to repeat what they grew up with.

Noelle brings specialised training in developmental trauma and family systems to this work, and integrates it with EFT, somatic approaches and EMDR. Her clinical perspective is also informed by lived experience as an adoptee and as the parent of a grown son.