Attachment Work
At Monarch, our attachments are a primary focus. Whether that's reflecting on your family of origin and your own childhood, or the attachments that are forming between you and your child or partner in the present. In individual work, focusing on childhood experiences and relationships with early caregivers can be a way to gain understanding, insight, and compassion for ourselves in the present. Our troublesome feelings or actions that may bring us distress are often indicative of unmet needs, needs that may go back to childhood when our response wiring was adapted. Our response wiring developed through attachment, and if we had difficulty as a child (as most children do in some way or another), our early histories may have left us with a feeling of shame or not being enough. Or they may have left us with coping mechanisms that served to keep us safe as children, but that are actually holding us back as adults in our present relationships. When we can reflect on our history with a safe, neutral, nonjudgmental observer, we can often gain clarity and an ability to look at our past through a new lens. We can find forgiveness for ourselves or our parents, and also learn new wiring that better meets our needs in the present. We can move from a place of scarcity, a place where we feel like we or the world we live in is not enough....to a place where we are growing and expanding, a place of abundance.
We also focus on attachment in family work. Family therapy can be used as a primary modality or in conjunction with individual therapy to better assist clients and families in building stronger relationships and learning more appropriate responses to their children's emotional needs and sometimes challenging behaviors. The Circle of Security Parenting Program is utilized throughout family work to better illustrate the attachment needs that are constantly in motion during interactions between children and their caregivers. All children and parents inherently long for secure attachment with one another, and to have a close and loving bond that provides for security and emotional safety. Sometimes history can stand in the way of building that bond (especially if we as parents have had difficult upbringings). Learning how to reflect, use insight, and respond in a new way can take practice and sometimes an outside observer to offer coaching and encouragement. That's where the family therapist comes in. We will work together to build those bonds and reflect on how the parent's or child's developmental history may play a part in the current ability to connect with one another. We will look at current strengths within each family member and build upon those strengths to promote better family functioning. We will review progress regularly and celebrate successes as a family team. We will also spend time developing self-care regimens for the caregivers involved and look to find ways to create a sense of balance between the multiple responsibilities most caregivers face each day.