Cultivating Secure Functioning: Tailoring Psychotherapy to Attachment Patterns

Early attachment experiences shape our relationships with ourselves and with others.  When they go well, they nourish felt security and our capacity for connection.  When they go awry, they give rise to attachment trauma and insecure patterns that challenge our capacity to feel safe and trusting in the relationships we crave the most. By employing an attachment-based therapeutic stance, psychotherapists can fortify experiential and relational psychotherapies to foster corrective and transformational, emotional, and relational experiences for our patients.

Yet to enter this terrain can be daunting for patients with insecure attachment patterns and can stir overwhelming emotions, defenses, and anxiety, which interfere with the flow of treatment. Additionally, therapists may encounter common reactivities to their patients’ presentation, which directly link to their attachment patterns and restrict therapeutic effectiveness.

To help therapists organize their treatment approach, this course offers a comprehensive picture of both secure and insecure attachment. This framework comes to life with the first two of three grids developed by Pando-Mars (2025): i) the configuration of the secure attachment pattern and ii) the configurations of insecure attachment patterns: avoidant, ambivalent/resistant, and disorganized. The third grid, iii) clinical markers and interventions to treat avoidant, ambivalent/resistant, and disorganized patterns, will guide therapists in how to translate attachment theory into clinical practice to mobilize transformational outcomes.

Using clinical video footage, we will examine how avoidant, ambivalent/resistant, and disorganized attachment patterns present in therapy—and how each pattern calls for a specific, tailored approach. After this presentation, participants will be able to:

• Identify markers of each insecure attachment pattern.

• Recognize metaskills therapists can draw upon to counter the characteristic behavioral hallmarks of caregivers and common therapist reactivities to each pattern.

• Evaluate how to intervene with specificity to avoidant, ambivalent/resistant and disorganized attachment patterns.

Video illustrations of particular interventions will show how therapists can meet patients where they are and help them to deepen trust and expand their capacity for regulation, connection, and relatedness.  Grounded in AEDP® theory and interventions, with foundations in attachment research and neuroscience, and sprinkled with clinical wisdom, this presentation invites therapists to fine-tune their effectiveness and engage more precisely and confidently to help clients heal relational/attachment trauma.