Articles Tagged "attachment"

For more than 20 years, our attachment research teams at Western Michigan University (WMU) have been using Bowlby’s attachment theory to examine important psychotherapy process and outcome variables. What have we found? Generally speaking, client and therapist attachment do matter in psychotherapy—often times, in many of the same ways that John Bowlby would have predicted. […]

Animals, varying in breeds, have been shown to be effective in helping a multitude of differing mental health problems, including trauma (Hunt & Chizkov, 2014), autism (Berry, Borgi, Francia, Alleva, & Cirulli, 2013), anxiety (Cortes, 2018), depression (Souter & Miller, 2007), chronic pain (Bradley & Bennett, 2015), and aphasia (Macauley, 2006). While many people may […]

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Mar 12, 2017

Abstract Therapists often struggle to determine the most important things to focus on during termination. Reviewing the treatment, identifying plans for the future, summarizing positive gains, and saying goodbye receive the most attention. Despite our best intentions, termination can end up becoming intellectualized. Attachment theory and recent developments in neuroscience offer us a road map […]

It is ironic that while most therapists champion the role of the therapeutic relationship in the success of therapy, there has been little research on how the transfer process and prior therapy relationships may have an impact on the therapeutic relationship. Clients are often transferred from one therapist to another in clinics when therapists-in-training leave […]

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Aug 2, 2016

Currently, there is a paradigm clash between different visions of the nature of psychotherapy. The clash is not merely about what psychotherapy is, how it helps, and how it should be practiced. It is also about the nature of scientific evidence and what the evidence shows about effective practice. In the forward to this book […]

Theory, research, and clinical experience have led us to believe that attachment patterns and processes are highly relevant to the treatment of eating disorders – a point that has also been argued persuasively by colleagues in the field (Tasca & Balfour, 2014; Tasca, Ritchie, & Balfour, 2011). Thus, in the design of the Copenhagen Bulimia […]

Abstract In the context of a randomized clinical trial of psychoanalytic psychotherapy (PPT) versus cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for bulimia nervosa (BN), this study performed secondary analyses of (a) the relation between attachment and pretreatment symptom levels, (b) whether client pretreatment attachment moderated treatment outcome, (c) whether change in client attachment was associated with symptomatic change, and (d) whether […]

Childhood sexual abuse survivors frequently present with ruptures in attachment, myriad mental health stressors, as well as histories of subsequent victimization in adulthood (e.g., Marx, Heidt, & Gold, 2005). The Contextual Model of trauma posits that survivors of CSA largely have an ineffective family of origin; this maladaptive family environment, in conjunction with the effects […]

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Oct 13, 2015

Lately I’ve been thinking about therapist authenticity. Since moving to private practice three years ago I have worked primarily with adult survivors of childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Due to years of chronic violence during developmentally important periods, clients’ life experiences are typically characterized by an insecure (often disorganized) attachment style, a chronically activated […]

Jeremy Holmes (2014) offers here a book, rich with the wisdom of an experienced clinician, that celebrates the imagination as an essential component of the psychotherapeutic process, using examples from literature to provide insight into important aspects of clinical work. He argues that literature and psychodynamic therapy share an “aesthetics” based upon a “paradoxical combination […]