While we only offer individual counseling, we can still do a lot to help you with your relationship.

Maybe you’re reading this because another new relationship with someone you really liked just ended, or perhaps you are worried it’s ending. You feel confused as to what went wrong because you thought you had such great chemistry.

Maybe you’re reading this because you keep ending up in relationships that are toxic or don’t work. You tolerate things in relationships that you know you shouldn’t. Maybe he cheated on you, and you forgave him and tried to just move on. Maybe he makes you feel stupid and defensive, and you keep on hoping you can make him happy.

You promise yourself that the next guy will be different, but at the end of the day it seems like you’re always dating the same type of guy. The worst part is that when the relationship ends you feel crushed and terrible about yourself. You tell yourself that there’s something wrong with you, and that you’re the reason why the relationship didn’t work out. Maybe you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to just give up on dating and relationships.

You may already be in a relationship, but it doesn’t feel as good as you expected. You feel heavy, and your mind is often filled with thoughts about if your partner truly loves you, and why you don’t feel confident in your relationship. You find yourself overanalyzing what he does and says, as you try to figure out how he really feels about you. You may even wonder if he’s cheating on you, or if he’s looking for someone “better”.

It’s Hard to Feel Genuine And Relaxed in Your Relationship

Maybe you find yourself on constant alert looking for signs that something is wrong and that he’s pulling away. Maybe he doesn’t text as often, plan dates, or he seems distant. Your worst fear is that he’ll leave you, and you’ll feel abandoned and alone.

You struggle with how to be around your partner. Sometimes you pretend to be confident and not show your feelings or worry, but sometimes you call and text more than you should to get reassurance from him. You hate that you do this but you can’t stop yourself.

Worst of all is the confusion. You can’t understand what’s not working. Everyone else around you seems to have figured it out and has a boyfriend or husband, while you keep on getting knocked back to square one. You tell yourself that it must be something that you are doing or how you are acting around people. but you have no idea what you’re doing wrong. You feel like there’s something deeply wrong with you, and that you’ll never be able to be in a healthy relationship.

Looking for answers and clarity about why you’re feeling this way? Let’s start from the beginning.

What is Attachment?

Attachment is a term that describes several similar things: How securely you connect with others, the level of closeness you feel with others, and also how you interpret or understand others’ affection towards you. The degree to which you feel comfortable being vulnerable with others is strongly determined by attachment.

In a nutshell, you can think of it as how you interact and connect with the people around you, especially those whom you love.

Have you ever worried about your partner leaving you for someone else, or how your friends and family truly feel about you? Have you struggled with feeling that you are a burden or annoying to other people? Is it hard to feel close to others? These are likely influenced by your attachment style.

What are Attachment Styles?

Attachment styles are the pattern of traits or behaviors that you have developed that come out when dealing with people — particularly those with whom you share a deep emotional bond. These attachments styles aren’t random – they are the result of years and years of connecting to others and how we felt about our relationships. And they are deeply impacted by how we interacted with our parents or caregivers when we were children.

Although it’s called “attachment styles”, they’re actually more like “attachment states” - meaning you can’t just change them according to you how you feel. Your attachment style will remain how it is, likely for the rest of your life, unless you actively work on changing it.

There are 4 primary attachment styles:

1. Secure attachment 

2. Anxious-preoccupied attachment (sometimes referred to as ambivalent attachment)

3. Avoidant-dismissive attachment 

4. Disorganized attachment

It's important to note that you don’t need to grow up in a perfect environment in order to form a secure attachment. As long as you can trust your parents or guardians to tend to your needs both physically and emotionally, it’s possible to develop a secure attachment.

As you grow older, this secure attachment style can be seen in how you feel about yourself and how you connect to others. Since you grew up feeling secure emotionally and physically, you are able to engage and relate with others in a healthy way as an adult.

Some signs of a secure attachment style include:

• Easily trusting others

• Being easy to connect with

• You are not afraid of intimacy

• Being emotionally available

• Having high self-esteem

• Being able to manage conflict in a healthy manner

• Having the ability to get emotional support if needed

• Feeling confident in your relationships with others

• Being comfortable with being alone

• You feel comfortable depending on others and being relied on by your partner

What is an Anxious Attachment Style?

Also referred to as anxious-preoccupied or anxious-ambivalent, this is the most common attachment state of those who need a lot of reassurance to feel safe in their relationships. As the name suggests, people with this style often experience heightened anxiety about being abandoned.

Anxious attachment is often formed when the support, love, and care your parents or caregivers provided were inconsistent. Sometimes, a parent or caregiver will pay attention to the child’s needs, while at other times the child’s needs may be ignored. When you don’t know when your needs will be met, you feel as if you need to worry, strongly hold on to, or get attention in order to be noticed by your parent or caregiver.

An anxious attachment style can also be produced if your parents were often easily overwhelmed, made you feel responsible for their feelings, were sometimes attentive and then abruptly pushed you away, or often switched from being overly-loving to being detached.

This results in you as an adult constantly craving emotional intimacy and validation, and this can look like acting “needy” or clingy in your relationships with others. As a child this strategy worked - it forced the adults in your life to attend to your needs. In adult relationships however, it can make maintaining a relationship much harder.

Some signs of an anxious attachment style as an adult include:

• You feel anxious when your partner is away

• You become too fixated with your partner

• You want to be close with others but at the same time are scared to do so

• You constantly worry about what your others really think about you

• You feel undeserving of love

• You are constantly seeking the approval of others

• You struggle to maintain other close relationships, outside of your partner

• You feel as if you won’t survive without your relationship and fear that you’ll end up by yourself forever

People with an anxious attachment style often feel undeserving of love, so they seek constant validation from their partners. If you identify with this attachment style, you may blame yourself for any obstacles in the relationship. You may feel intense jealousy of others and may not fully trust your partner due to low self-esteem. The deep-seated fear of being rejected, abandoned, and alone can keep you feeling this way.

Avoidant-Insecure Attachment

People with an avoidant attachment style, also known as dismissive-avoidant and anxious-avoidant, are similar to people with an anxious-ambivalent attachment style. They too often struggle with feeling safe in relationships, and worry about being abandoned.

However, instead of clinging to others, people with an avoidant attachment style feel wary of others, don’t want to form connections with other people, and definitely don’t want to rely on others. As a result, they do the complete opposite and simply avoid connecting to people, or they push them away first. To put it in a different way, avoidant attachment people avoid letting people get close to them so they can avoid the risk of being hurt if someone were to leave.

Adults with an avoidant attachment style often struggle with letting down their guard around people, and they have a hard time with emotional and physical intimacy.

Avoidant attachment usually develops if you were left to fend for yourself at a young age. You learn early on that it’s hard to trust and depend on others — and that it’s ultimately easier and safer to simply do everything yourself. People with avoidant attachment tend to become extremely independent and rely on themselves a lot.

Avoidant attachment may also come from parents or caregivers who were strict or emotionally distant and absent. You may have reprimanded or even rejected by your parents or primary caregivers for showing emotions, expressing your needs, or depending on them.

It’s important to note that while some parents of avoidant children are neglectful, others are simply busy, not interested in their children or the things that they love, or they are concerned with other things, like their next vacation or bonus instead of the hobbies that their children love. This too can lead an someone developing an avoidant attachment style.

You may have an anxious-avoidant attachment style if you experience the following:

• Feel threatened when someone tries to get close to you

• Believe you do not need close relationships in your life

• Avoid emotional or physical intimacy 

• Strongly identify as being completely self-sufficient 

• Feel uncomfortable when you express your feelings

• Find it hard to trust others, even without any reason to distrust them.

• When in a relationship, keep your partner at arm’s length

• The romantic relationships you form feel shallow or lacking deep emotion

• Spend most of your time alone instead of interacting with others

Anxious-avoidant people try to keep relationships at an arm’s length. Relationships cannot gain any depth because there is a lack of emotional intimacy. When you engage with others in a romantic way, you avoid getting emotionally close. Your partner may feel like you have a wall up.

Disorganized Attachment

Disorganized attachment — also called fearful-avoidant attachment — is usually formed when children grow up in unpredictable, highly chaotic, or even risky environments. If your parent or primary caregiver was baffling, scary, or confusing, you have a higher chance of developing a disorganized attachment style. In general, disorganized attachment often is connected with experiencing some sort of childhood trauma or abuse.

As a result of growing up in this kind of environment, you may not have learned how to trust and rely on others, or even yourself. You may want to love and be loved, but you don’t know how to show and accept love that is offered to you in a safe or healthy way.

You may have a lot of anxiety about being abandoned, and your behavior may be unpredictable and confusing in romantic relationships. You may go from being cold to being clingy and emotional. You may really want love, but you push it away at the same time since you have a fear of love. You might really struggle with setting boundaries.

You may have a disorganized attachment style if you experience the following:

• You find yourself emotionally shutting down and pushing your partner away.

• You tend to not take responsibility for your actions.

• You often blame yourself when fights happen.

• You have a highly negative view of both yourself and your future.

• You can become overly involved in your partner’s life.

• You find it hard to depend on others.

• You struggle with independence due to a lack of skills or self-esteem.

• You struggle with regulating your emotions and can be volatile.

• You find it hard to communicate, or you have unhealthy communication behaviors.

• You can be insensitive or unnecessarily hard on your partner.

• You’re prone to dangerous or risky behaviors when under extreme stress, such as violence, self-harm, or substance abuse.

How Attachment Based Therapy in Cincinnati Can Help You

With a local Cincinnati based therapist that specializes in attachment-based therapy, you will first get to know your attachment styles, how that impacts who you are today, and how it affects the relationships that you have. You will also understand some of the symptoms that you may be struggling with. Then, your therapist will use your attachment style and gently weave his/her knowledge of specialized therapy methods to help you heal and strengthen your ability to feel safe in relationships, and in the world. This may be done by processing specific times or events that impacted who you are today, or it may be more subtle interventions that shift the way that you think about yourself or people that impact your daily life.

If you are looking to understand your attachment style, and if you want to address anxiety, fear or worries that you have, or if you want to feel more secure in your relationships overall, attachment-based therapy may be for you. At Therapy Cincinnati, our therapists who treat attachment issues are trained in the latest methods of attachment-based approaches, and have a deep understanding of how we heal in relationships.

You may be thinking about seeking attachment-based therapy, but still have some questions or concerns….

Is this marriage or couples counseling?

No, we only offer individual counseling, and currently do not offer marriage counseling. If you are dealing with attachment issues, you often need to do your own work first anyway and heal before you can work on your relationship.

How do I know if I can benefit from Attachment Based Therapy?

If you struggle with feeling close to people, worry about people abandoning you, or if you can’t seem to find a healthy romantic relationship that lasts for more than a few months, attachment-based therapy may be helpful for you. In all honesty, if you’ve read until this point and can resonate with some of what has been described so far, there’s a good chance that attachment-based therapy could be something you can benefit from.

How long does Attachment Based Therapy take?

The number of appointments needed to address issues related to attachment styles can vary a lot. Attachment styles are usually heavily impacted by experiences early in life and reinforced by relationship choices that extend into adulthood. During your initial appointment, we’ll go over your history and by the end of the appointment you will have an estimate of how much time therapy may take, based on your background and experiences. We’ll work together to identify clear measurable goals in order to help stay on track and monitor progress.

You’re going to think I’m crazy.

We understand why you might be hesitant to share some of the thoughts that you have - people with attachment issues often struggle with shameful thoughts like “I’m broken, I’m annoying, I’m too much, no one likes me, everyone leaves me” and many similar thoughts. We talk to countless people a day who have similar, if not the same thoughts, so you’re not going to surprise us. And we offer unconditional support and acceptance.

Can’t I just go to any therapist?

In short, no. Because attachment-based therapy involves some of the most sensitive pieces of who we are - how we connect to people and our ability to be vulnerable and trust others - it must be done by a highly trained professional who has the right training. While there are plenty of licensed therapists in the Cincinnati area, there are only a handful who have this specialized training and can truly help you. Going to a therapist who doesn’t have this training would at best result in you not getting the help that you need, and at worst, it may make things worse.

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