Treating Attachment Trauma
Healing from attachment trauma requires a comprehensive and developmental approach that addresses the deep attachment wounds. Integrating Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Somatic Experiencing (SE) amongst the backdrop of Attachment Theoryprovides a powerful framework for recovery.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for Attachment Trauma
DBT provides essential, practical skills for managing the intense emotional and relational dysregulation that often stems from attachment trauma. DBT’s focus on mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness directly targets the symptoms that make daily life challenging for individuals with attachment trauma.
DBT skills help individuals:
- Improve Emotion Regulation: Learn to identify, understand, and effectively manage intense mood swings, chronic emptiness, anxiety, or anger that often arise from early emotional neglect or invalidation.
- Increase Distress Tolerance: Develop healthy coping mechanisms for weathering overwhelming emotional storms and difficult situations without resorting to self-destructive behaviors, which are often strategies learned to cope with an unbearable early environment.
- Enhance Interpersonal Effectiveness: Learn to communicate needs clearly, set healthy boundaries, navigate conflicts, and build more stable and satisfying relationships, directly addressing the relational wounds of attachment trauma.
- Cultivate Mindfulness: Develop the capacity to be present with difficult emotions and thoughts without being overwhelmed, fostering greater self-awareness and reducing reactivity.
By teaching concrete, actionable skills, DBT helps individuals stabilize their lives, reduce impulsive behaviors, and build a foundation of emotional resilience necessary for deeper healing work.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) for Attachment Trauma
IFS is particularly well-suited for treating attachment trauma because it acknowledges the multiplicity of individuals that develops from relational wounds. When a person experiences attachment trauma, parts of their personality often take on extreme roles to protect them from further pain.
In the context of attachment trauma, IFS explores:
- Manager parts: These protectors develop strategies to prevent and protect from vulnerability in relationships. Examples include people-pleasing, perfectionism, self-criticism, control, intellectualizing, or emotional shutdown.
- Firefighter parts: These protectors react impulsively when activated, using immediate, often destructive, behaviors to numb pain or distract from distress (e.g., substance use, self-harm, binge eating, rage).
- Exiled parts: These parts often carry the core pain of the trauma – the feelings of being unloved, unwanted, unsafe, invisible, or abandoned. They are often pushed away because their pain is too overwhelming.
IFS therapy helps individuals access Self-energy – their innate core of calm, curiosity, compassion, and courage. From this Self-led place, clients can gently approach their protective parts, understand their positive intentions, and ultimately unburden the parts of the pain and limiting beliefs they hold. This process allows for genuine internal healing, helping to heal the internalized wounds caused by attachment trauma and integrate a more resilient sense of self.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) for Attachment Trauma
Somatic Experiencing is a body-based approach that gently addresses the nervous system dysregulation and stored survival responses that often result from attachment trauma. When past relationships were marked by fear, inconsistency, neglect, or abuse, the body may remain stuck in patterns of hyperarousal, collapse, or numbness. SE supports healing by helping individuals reconnect with their bodies, re-establish safety, and develop a felt sense of internal stability and connection.
SE supports individuals in healing attachment trauma by helping them:
Regulate the Nervous System: SE helps clients recognize and shift out of chronic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn states that developed as adaptive responses to unsafe early relationships. As regulation increases, individuals experience fewer emotional hijackings and more internal steadiness.
Restore a Felt Sense of Safety: Many with attachment trauma feel unsafe in their own bodies or in connection with others. SE works to rebuild a basic sense of safety, both internally and in the therapeutic relationship, allowing trust and connection to emerge at a pace the body can tolerate.
Release Stored Survival Energy: Trauma often leaves incomplete defensive responses trapped in the body — impulses to run, protest, collapse, or shut down. SE offers a way to gently discharge this energy, helping individuals move from survival mode into more flexible, adaptive responses.
Reconnect with the Body: Disconnection from bodily sensation is a common legacy of attachment trauma. SE helps clients rebuild an attuned relationship with their bodies, fostering presence, aliveness, and a greater ability to feel and respond to needs without overwhelm.
Develop Somatic Boundaries: SE supports the development of embodied boundaries — the ability to feel where one ends and another begins. This is essential for forming secure, differentiated relationships after histories of enmeshment, neglect, or violation.
Through slow, attuned, and body-centered work, Somatic Experiencing helps individuals heal the physiological imprint of attachment trauma, creating the conditions for more regulated emotions, safer relationships, and a deeper sense of wholeness.
Attachment Trauma Recovery
Attachment work directly addresses the core relational and developmental wounds that define attachment trauma. It involves understanding how early caregiving experiences shaped an individual’s “internal working model” – unconscious blueprints for relationships and self-worth.
Key aspects of attachment work include:
- Understanding Attachment Styles: Exploring how early interactions with past primary attachment figures led to specific attachment patterns (secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized) and how these patterns manifest in current relationships.
- Processing Relational Wounds: Grieving the loss of secure attachment, acknowledging the pain of neglect, abandonment, or abuse, and validating the person’s unmet needs.
- Corrective Emotional Experiences: The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a vital tool. A consistent, attuned, and validating therapist provides a “secure base” – a safe haven from which the client can explore their deepest fears and vulnerabilities without fear of judgment or abandonment. This positive relational experience can help to “re-wire” old attachment patterns.
- Developing Earned Security: Through consistent effort and new relational experiences, individuals can develop an “earned secure attachment,” meaning they can regulate their emotions and form healthier, more fulfilling relationships, even if their past experiences were insecure.
By integrating DBT’s practical skills, IFS’s internal healing, and the direct focus on relational wounds through Attachment Work, individuals can systematically dismantle the impact of attachment trauma, build a more secure sense of self, and cultivate the capacity for healthy, fulfilling relationships.
Understanding Attachment Trauma
Attachment trauma develops when a person’s experiences of connection are disrupted by emotional inconsistency, misattunement, or disconnection. This doesn’t always stem from overt neglect or abuse. Often, it occurs in relationships where primary attachment figures were loving but under-resourced, managing their own stressors, trauma, or emotional limitations. Over time, these subtle but repeated relational disruptions shape how a person comes to understand safety, connection, and their own worth.
Rather than being caused by one defining event, attachment trauma is cumulative. A person may not know why they feel unsafe, unseen, or chronically alone, but their nervous system remembers. The brain and body adapt in order to survive, building protective strategies that eventually shape emotional regulation, identity development, and how a person navigates current relationships.
When left unprocessed, attachment trauma can contribute to:
- Fear of abandonment or emotional closeness
- Difficulty trusting others or establishing boundaries
- Identity confusion or low self-worth
- Emotional dysregulation and chronic shame
- Persistent feelings of emptiness or emotional numbness
- Patterns of people-pleasing, avoidance, or relational volatility
- Dissociation or detachment from one’s body or emotions
- A sense of being “too much” or “not enough”
- Chronic relationship instability or attraction to unavailable partners
At The Annex, we work with individuals who have developed creative but exhausting ways to manage attachment trauma: overfunctioning, perfectionism, emotional shutdown, self-criticism, or impulsive behaviors. These are not character flaws. They are adaptations born from a nervous system doing its best to survive inconsistent connections.
How We Treat Attachment Trauma at The Annex
Healing attachment trauma requires more than insight or short-term support. It requires consistent, relationally attuned care over time. At The Annex, our treatment model integrates Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Somatic Experiencing (SE) within an Attachment-based Theory of Therapy to support deep and lasting change.
Clients move through a structured but flexible level system designed to meet their individual needs and pace of healing. Each level provides increasing opportunities for autonomy, relational growth, and internal integration. The therapeutic process is highly personalized and delivered by an experienced, emotionally present clinical team that provides the stable scaffolding required to begin rewiring the nervous system and reshaping relational templates.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
Many individuals with attachment trauma struggle with intense emotions, relational sensitivity, and difficulty navigating conflict or closeness. DBT offers a structured, skills-based framework to stabilize the nervous system and build resilience.
At The Annex, DBT is woven into both individual and group work, offering clients tools to:
- Regulate overwhelming emotions and reduce impulsivity
- Tolerating distress without resorting to harmful behaviors
- Develop mindful awareness of internal states
- Communicate needs clearly and set appropriate relational boundaries
These skills provide the foundation needed to move from survival-based coping to intentional, connected living.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS is a powerful modality for treating attachment trauma because it honors the inner world that forms in response to early relational pain. At The Annex, clients learn to identify and connect with “parts” of themselves that developed to survive disconnection—parts that protect, manage, or numb in the face of vulnerability.
With the support of a trained IFS clinician, clients gradually access Self energy—the calm, compassionate, curious core of who they are—and begin to unburden these wounded parts. This internal healing process fosters lasting integration and a more stable, coherent sense of identity.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Many individuals with attachment trauma carry unresolved survival responses in their nervous systems, leading to chronic dysregulation, shutdown, hypervigilance, or difficulty feeling safe in connection. SE offers a gentle, body-based approach to help stabilize the nervous system and restore a felt sense of safety and presence.
At The Annex, SE is integrated into both individual and group work, guiding clients to:
- Track and regulate internal physiological states with greater awareness
- Release stored trauma responses such as freeze, collapse, or hyperarousal
- Rebuild a felt sense of safety in the body and in relationships
- Develop somatic boundaries and increase embodied resilience
This work creates the groundwork for healing attachment trauma from the inside out, allowing clients to move from reactive survival patterns to grounded, relationally secure living.
Attachment-Based Therapy
While insight into attachment styles can be helpful, true healing happens through lived relational experience. At The Annex, our therapeutic relationships are intentionally designed to offer a new model of connection: consistent, attuned, and non-shaming. Over time, clients begin to internalize this sense of safety and carry it with them.
We support clients in:
- Exploring and understanding their attachment style (anxious, avoidant, disorganized, or secure)
- Processing the grief, confusion, and longing left by early relational wounds
- Engaging in corrective emotional experiences that challenge old narratives about worth, love, and safety
- Learning to care for their own emotional needs with compassion and clarity, developing a sense of earned secure attachment
Our treatment is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about restoring what was always there: the capacity for trust, connection, and wholeness. Through sustained, relationally rich work, clients at The Annex begin to feel safe in their own skin and in the world around them.
HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?
Our dedicated team is committed to supporting clients and their families throughout their therapeutic journey.