Therapy for Attachment & Relationship wounds NYC & Nearby Areas | Somatic Work

Attachment wounds aren’t signs of weakness; they reflect the relational strategies you learned in early or formative relationships. You may appear strong and independent, yet struggle to trust closeness. Or you may feel deeply connected to others while carrying anxiety about being left or misunderstood. These patterns often show up across romantic relationships, friendships, and even your relationship with work or responsibility.

Attachment Therapy focuses on understanding and reshaping these relational blueprints. While early experiences and trauma history are honored as part of the context, the work centers on how your attachment style shows up now in intimacy, conflict, trust, autonomy, and belonging. Through an attuned, relational, and embodied therapeutic process, we work toward earned security: the ability to stay connected to yourself and others without bracing for loss, collapse, or control.

Attachment therapy helps you explore how early and formative relationships shaped your default ways of connecting, protecting yourself, and staying close to others. These patterns are often described as attachment styles developed as intelligent strategies for maintaining connection, safety, or autonomy. Rather than focusing only on behavior or insight, attachment therapy works with the emotional, relational, and body-based layers that influence how you give and receive love.

In attachment therapy, we gently explore things like:

• How your nervous system responds to closeness, intimacy, or dependence
• What triggers anxiety, shutdown, distance, or self-protection in relationships
• How early relationships shaped your expectations of trust, reliability, and care
• What boundaries feel supportive versus overwhelming
• How connection, disconnection, and repair are experienced in your body
• The goal isn’t to “fix” you or force yourself into a different attachment style. Instead, the work supports earned security helping your body and relational system learn what safe, mutual connection feels like over time. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of this process, offering a lived experience of attunement, consistency, rupture, and repair so new relational patterns can be practiced, not just understood.

While attachment is often discussed in the context of romantic relationships, these patterns also shape how you experience friendships, group belonging, and your relationship with work or responsibility. You may notice yourself over-functioning in professional roles, struggling to ask for support, feeling easily excluded in friendships, or relying on productivity, competence, or independence as a substitute for connection. Attachment therapy helps you explore where and how you seek safety, worth, and belonging so connection doesn’t have to come only through performance, caretaking, or self-reliance.

People often seek attachment therapy when they begin noticing recurring patterns in how they relate to others especially under stress or in moments of closeness. Common experiences include:

• Fear of intimacy: closeness feels overwhelming, intrusive, or unsafe, even when you want connection
• Emotional shutdown or withdrawal: pulling away, going quiet, or disconnecting when things become vulnerable or intense
• Avoidance or disappearance: not responding to texts or emails, procrastinating communication, or feeling the urge to hide, run, or disappear when connection feels activating
• People-pleasing: prioritizing others’ needs to avoid conflict, disapproval, or loss of connection
• Relationship anxiety: persistent worry about abandonment, rejection, or being “too much” for others
• Difficulty naming needs: uncertainty about what you want, need, or how to ask for it without guilt
• Overthinking in relationships: replaying conversations, reading between the lines, or scanning for signs something is wrong
• Patterns of unavailable relationships: repeatedly choosing partners or dynamics that recreate familiar emotional distance
• Difficulty trusting support: longing for closeness while fearing dependency, obligation, or loss of autonomy

These patterns aren’t flaws or failures. They’re learned relational strategies ways your system adapted to manage closeness, protect autonomy, or stay connected. Attachment therapy helps you understand these patterns with compassion and gradually reshape them so relationships can feel more secure, responsive, and sustainable.

You may benefit from attachment therapy if:

• You cycle between wanting closeness and pushing people away
• You feel anxious, uneasy, shut down, or detached in relationships
• You repeat the same relational patterns, even when you genuinely want something different
• You avoid or delay connection putting off texts, emails, or conversations, or feeling the urge to hide or disappear when closeness or expectation increases
• You struggle to express needs, set boundaries, or receive care without guilt or fear
• You feel disconnected from your emotions, or overwhelmed by them once they surface
• You notice fear, tightness, or bracing in your body as intimacy grows
• You want relationships that feel more stable, mutual, and easeful

Attachment therapy helps you understand these patterns with compassion rather than shame and supports you in learning new ways of staying connected without losing yourself.

I use a somatic and relational approach to help you feel safer in connection so you can show up more fully in relationships with others and in your relationship with yourself. Together, we work gently and intentionally with your body, emotions, and lived relational history, at a pace that supports trust and integration.

In attachment therapy, we focus on:

• Somatic awareness to understand how your body responds to closeness, distance, conflict, and repair
• Embodiment practices to build capacity for vulnerability, intimacy, and emotional presence without overwhelm
• Boundary work so you can communicate needs, limits, and desires without guilt, fear, or withdrawal
• Inner child and parts work to tend to younger layers of attachment that learned to protect through closeness, distance, or control
• Relational repair through a grounded, attuned therapeutic relationship that models consistency, responsiveness, and repair when misattunements occur
• Support for attachment-related nervous system patterns such as shutdown, anxiety, or bracing so connection feels more tolerable and choiceful
• Pattern clarity to understand why certain relational dynamics repeat and how new responses can emerge over time

This work is slow, intentional, and deeply relational. Attachment therapy supports earned security which means helping your system learn, through lived experience, that connection can be safe, mutual, and sustaining. Change happens one moment of attunement and repair at a time.

Attachment therapy can support you with:

• Understanding your attachment style: exploring anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment patterns and how they developed
• Changing relationship patterns: recognizing why certain relationships feel triggering, intense, or emotionally destabilizing
• Healing anxious or avoidant attachment dynamics: reducing cycles of pursuit, withdrawal, or emotional shutdown
• Releasing shame around needs and vulnerability: learning that wanting closeness, reassurance, or space isn’t “too much” or wrong
• Building secure relationships: developing trust, emotional safety, and mutual connection over time
• Strengthening communication and boundaries: expressing needs, limits, and feelings more clearly and confidently
• Unlearning people-pleasing or codependent patterns: shifting over-responsibility and fear-based caretaking in relationships
• Processing relational hurt or abandonment: gently working with past relationship wounds without reliving them
• Reconnecting with your emotional world: becoming more comfortable with feelings, intimacy, and emotional expression
• Feeling more grounded and present in partnership: supporting romantic and sexual intimacy that feels safer, more connected, and more choiceful

Attachment therapy offers a space to understand how you relate and to practice new ways of connecting that feel steadier, more authentic, and more secure.