Do you...
- Alternate between having deep emotions and feeling "empty"?
- Frequently seek assurance that others care about you, even after they tell you they do?
- Constantly find yourself in intense relationships that leave you feeling drained and abandoned?
- Feel that your loved ones never listen to you and that nobody understands you?
- Have powerful emotions that people say are unpredictable and which you struggle to understand?
Attachment styles and wounds
Attachment wounds are the result of early relationships and experiences where our emotional needs were not met. This affects how we experience feelings of rejection, loneliness, and fear. Conversely, it also affects how we experience emotions like love, trust, and hope.
There are four attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Most people have one attachment style, but people with attachment wounds may have several that only appear during certain situations, usually involving people who are close to us, like friends, family, and romantic partners—people with whom we have emotional attachments. These are people that we should feel safe with and when we feel betrayed or unfilled in our relationships with them, very intense emotions can come out.
The goal of attachment-based therapy (ABT) is to heal attachment wounds by identifying and understanding them. Self-compassion and understanding underlying emotions is fundamental to this type of therapy. It is not like dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), which focuses on reducing behaviors but not the feelings behind the behaviors.
The goal of attachment-based therapy (ABT) is to heal attachment wounds by identifying and understanding them. Self-compassion and understanding underlying emotions is fundamental to this type of therapy. It is not like dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), which focuses on reducing behaviors but not the feelings behind the behaviors.
