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In the world according to Bowlby, our lives, from the cradle to the grave, revolve around intimate attachments. Although our stance toward such attachments is shaped most influentially by our first relationships, we are also mallable. If our early involvements have been problematic, then subsequent relationships can offer second chances, perhaps affording us the potential to love, feel, and reflect with the freedom that flows from secure attachment. Psychotherapy, at its best, provides just such a healing relationship. Pg. 1

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Pg 2 - 3. The same three themes organize the model of therapy as transformation though relationship. In this model, the patient's attachment relationship to the therapist is foundational and primary. It supplies the secure base that is the sine qua non for exploration, development, and change. This sense of a secure base arises from the attuned therapist's effectiveness in helping the patient to tolerate, modulate, and communicate difficult feelings. By virtue of the felt security generated through such affect-regulating interactions, the therapeutic relationship can provide a context for accessing disavowed or dissocaited experiences within the patient that have not--and perhaps cannot--be put into words. the relationship is also a context within which the therapist and patient, havingmade room for these experiences, can attempt to make sense of them. Acessing, articulating, and reflecting ypon dissociated and unverbalized feelings, thoughts, and impulses strengthen the patient's "narrative competence" (Holmes, 1996) and help to shift in a more reflective direction the patients' stance toward experience. Overall, the relational/emotional/reflective process at the heart of an attachment-focused therapy facilitates the integration of disowned experience, thus fostering in the patient a more coherent and secure sense of self.

Very much as the original attachment relationsip(s) allowed the child to develop, it it ultimately the new relationship of attachment with the therapist that allows the patient to change [Emphasis mine]. To paraphrase Bowlby (1988), such a relationship provides a secure base that enables the patient both to deconstruct the attachment patterns of the past and to construct new ones in the present. As we have seen, the patterns played out in our first attachments are reflected subsequently not only in the ways we relate to others, but also in your habits of feeling and thinking. Correspondingly, the patient's relationship with the therapist has the potential to generate fresh patterns of affect regulation and thought, as well as attachment. Put differently, the theraputic relationship is a developmental crucible within which the patient's relation to his own experience of internal and external reality can be fundamentally transformed.

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Secure attachment relationships in childhood and psychotherapy help develop this reassuring internal presence by presence by providing us with experiences of being recognized, understood, and cared for that can subsequently be internalized.

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Secure attachment relationships in childhood and psychotherapy help develop this reassuring internal presence by presence by providing us with experiences of being recognized, understood, and cared for that can subsequently be internalized.