Establishing Hope and Relational Safety – Preoccupied Attachment

This webinar is the first 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: Stephanie Davis

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
Khalil Gibran

Stephanie will outline how preoccupied or ambivalent attachment typically develops from the infant’s experience of inconsistent caregiving in childhood. This experience of inconsistency can arise from caregivers who may have been sometimes close and sometimes distant, or those whose emotional presence was inconsistently available to the child. Such experiences can leave a child unsure as to whether their emotional needs will be met.

This unpredictability can lead the child to experience waves of amplified distress which they, then, need to manage in relation to a caregiver who cannot be consistently relied upon for comfort/soothing. Such patterns often endure and shape ways of relating in adulthood. Stephanie will also touch upon the social and how it can influence and shape attachment experiences for some children, often those from global majority cultural backgrounds who live as a minority group, or those who experience migration. In such cases the social can play a role in the exhibition of an attachment style that may be described as preoccupied. Clinically, the therapist’s experience can include significant body countertransference, embodied regressed states and the need to tolerate strong ambivalence in the work.

Stephanie will then discuss her work with Louise. Louise came to therapy experiencing frequent periods of heightened and overwhelming emotion, significant anxiety and struggles regulating and managing her emotions in relationships. Louise’s early experience of an inconsistently available main caregiver was in contrast to that of a younger sibling whose early childhood was shaped in a different cultural context, where the same main caregiver was more settled and available. Thus, Louise’s preoccupied attachment style was shaped by matters both internal and external to the family environment.

Through a process of imbibing the therapist’s reliable presence and physicality, comparable to Bion’s T(K) in relation to O, and creating an awareness of the inner and outer layers of experience that pervaded the present day, the work enabled Louise to find a greater capacity to tolerate her own emotions and to be more visible and present in her life and in relation to close and intimate others.