What is Developmental Trauma?

 

What are Attachment Styles?

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Our relationship with our caregivers effects our ability to feel manage our emotions and solve problems. 

 

As children we form attachment with caregivers in the early years of our lives. These early attachment

bonds often inform our coping strategies, communication styles, and interpersonal perspectives. Attachment analysis involves identifying our defenses and discovering their functions and consequences. It allows us to resolve underlying tensions and old wounds to make us more flexible and adaptable in life. 

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The work of Karen Horney, D.W. Winicott and Fritz Perl's  have been instrumental to my understanding and work with attachment. 

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How do "Parts Based" Therapies, Like IFS Work?​

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We all have different parts of our personality that we must learn to heal and understand. ​

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Voice Dialogue and Internal Family Systems are therapies that separate and explore the unconscious as a series of parts. Exploring the semi-autonomous parts or "sub-personalities" allows patients to understand their development, personality, motivations, and wounds in a different way. 

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For example, we all have an "inner critic" that tells us that our joke was stupid when we leave a party. Each part is necessary, but when we do not recognize and understand our parts, then our thinking becomes rigid and inflexible. Parts therapies help patients connect with young, exiled, fragmented, and wounded parts of the self in order to help them heal. For more info on the subpersonalities check out some of our resources for patients.