Establishing Hope and Relational Safety – Disorganised Attachment

This webinar is the second in a 3-part live series exploring insecure attachment patterns — preoccupied, disorganised, and avoidant — as defined by Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Main.

Clinicians Linda Cundy, Sarah Benamer, and Stephanie Davis will discuss the relevance of these patterns in clinical work through case studies, while also examining the risks of reducing human relationships to fixed categories.

The series highlights the importance of mutuality, recognition, affective attunement, transference, and cycles of rupture and repair, with space for questions and discussion in each session to support your clinical practice.

Seminar Content

Speaker: Sarah Benamer

“In the world before words, where felt sensation and emotion may be undifferentiated, infants rely on caregivers to contain, intuit, and metabolise these. Imagine parents themselves born of trauma, met by an infant’s body that does not correspond with expectation. With a child with a disability where the touch or proximity increases upset. How do they reconcile the baby of their fantasies and the baby that they have? In turn, how does a child make sense of the parents’ perhaps less than raptured responses and attachment messages in addition to pain and medical intervention?”

Sarah will discuss how disorganised attachment may manifest when the conflict between safety and proximity in early life for whatever reason means that no consistent attachment strategy is possible –such as when there is trauma, neglect, and physical, emotional or sexual abuse. The child may be caught in an impossible situation of attempting to maintain closeness to a caregiver who is a ‘scaregiver’, or to go on being through abandonment.

They are managing overwhelming feeling with the most rudimentary psychological structures by whatever means are available without the scaffold of a containing and sustaining other. These often confusing, incoherent, or disorganised patterns shape adult attachment states of mind and intimate relating fully or in part. This may emerge clinically through a tapestry of projections, embodied communications, in addition to what can be put into words.

Sarah will discuss Raven. Raven is a client whose body narrative is formative in the shaping of her sense of self. Her early attachment relationships came with their own traumatic payload, and the experience of the very skin she inhabits is fundamental to her identity and relational patterns. These factors mediate the therapeutic relationship and the shape of the transference.

Work with Raven illustrates how early attachment experience might re-emerge through both what is said and non verbal body narrative in therapy when there are disorganised aspects of experiencce. Relational risks taken in the space between therapist and client traverse both the creative adaptations made to the original socio-cultural and attachment circumstance and offer new possibility, ultimately of the move from insecure state of mind to earned security.