Attachment Approaches To Adult Therapy

According to the founder of attachment theory John Bowlby, the task of the attachment focused therapist is to create the conditions under which  clients can explore their internal working models of self and relationships, and in the context of the therapeutic relationship as secure base, gain new understandings and experience a new kind of relationship.

The therapist’s role can be described under 5 headings:

1. To provide a secure base in which the person can explore difficult parts of his/her past.  These painful explorations may not be possible without the guidance and support of a trusted therapist.

2. To help the client explore ways in which he engages in relationships with significant figures in his current life.  What are his expectations for his own feelings and behavior and for those of other people?  What unconscious biases may he bring to selecting a person he might make an intimate relationship with

3. To assist the client in examining the relationship between the two of them.  “Into this the client will import all those perceptions, constructions, and expectations of how an attachment figure is likely to feel and behave towards him that his working models of parents and self dictate.”

4. To encourage the client to consider the way his feelings, beliefs about self and others may have arisen from his experiences in childhood and adolescence especially those with his parents, or else what he may have repeatedly been told by them.  Bowlby indicates that this may induce strong feelings toward the parents, and the author would suggest that anger and rage may be prevalent as well as feelings of being disloyal.  Alternately the client may have anger toward the therapist for bringing up these hitherto buried events and feelings from the past. 

5. To help the client begin to explore alternate ways of viewing himself and others and of different ways he might behave in relationships.  “By these means the therapist hopes to enable his client to cease being a slave to old and unconscious stereotypes and to feel, to think, and to act in new ways.”

Many of these ideas have also been explicated by other writers such as Peterfreund (1983),Casement (1985), Pine (1985), and Strupp and Binder (1984), Milan,(1973 and Horowitz et al. (1984).

These 5 therapeutic tasks are taken from: A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development by John Bowlby, pgs 138-139. Basic Books 1988.

Last modified: 05/09/06